Archives des mots-clés : research impact

Characterizing Social Media Metrics of Scholarly Papers: The Effect of Document Properties and Collaboration Patterns

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“A number of new metrics based on social media platforms—grouped under the term “altmetrics”—have recently been introduced as potential indicators of research impact. Despite their current popularity, there is a lack of information regarding the determinants of these metrics. Using publication and citation data from 1.3 million papers published in 2012 and covered in Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science as well as social media counts from Altmetric.com, this paper analyses the main patterns of five social media metrics as a function of document characteristics (i.e., discipline, document type, title length, number of pages and references) and collaborative practices and compares them to patterns known for citations. Results show that the presence of papers on social media is low, with 21.5% of papers receiving at least one tweet, 4.7% being shared on Facebook, 1.9% mentioned on blogs, 0.8% found on Google+ and 0.7% discussed in mainstream media. By contrast, 66.8% of papers have received at least one citation. Our findings show that both citations and social media metrics increase with the extent of collaboration and the length of the references list. On the other hand, while editorials and news items are seldom cited, it is these types of document that are the most popular on Twitter. Similarly, while longer papers typically attract more citations, an opposite trend is seen on social media platforms. Finally, contrary to what is observed for citations, it is papers in the Social Sciences and humanities that are the most often found on social media platforms. On the whole, these findings suggest that factors driving social media and citations are different. Therefore, social media metrics cannot actually be seen as alternatives to citations; at most, they may function as complements to other type of indicators.”

URL : Characterizing Social Media Metrics of Scholarly Papers

DOI : 10.1371/journal.pone.0120495

Attention decay in science

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“The exponential growth in the number of scientific papers makes it increasingly difficult for researchers to keep track of all the publications relevant to their work. Consequently, the attention that can be devoted to individual papers, measured by their citation counts, is bound to decay rapidly. In this work we make a thorough study of the life-cycle of papers in different disciplines. Typically, the citation rate of a paper increases up to a few years after its publication, reaches a peak and then decreases rapidly. This decay can be described by an exponential or a power law behavior, as in ultradiffusive processes, with exponential fitting better than power law for the majority of cases. The decay is also becoming faster over the years, signaling that nowadays papers are forgotten more quickly. However, when time is counted in terms of the number of published papers, the rate of decay of citations is fairly independent of the period considered. This indicates that the attention of scholars depends on the number of published items, and not on real time.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.01881

The Open Access Advantage Considering Citation, Article Usage and Social Media Attention

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“In this study, we compare the difference in the impact between open access (OA) and non-open access (non-OA) articles. 1761 Nature Communications articles published from 1 Jan. 2012 to 31 Aug. 2013 are selected as our research objects, including 587 OA articles and 1174 non-OA articles. Citation data and daily updated article-level metrics data are harvested directly from the platform of nature.com. Data is analyzed from the static versus temporal-dynamic perspectives. The OA citation advantage is confirmed, and the OA advantage is also applicable when extending the comparing from citation to article views and social media attention. More important, we find that OA papers not only have the great advantage of total downloads, but also have the feature of keeping sustained and steady downloads for a long time. For article downloads, non-OA papers only have a short period of attention, when the advantage of OA papers exists for a much longer time.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.05702

Availability and accessibility in an open access institutional repository: a case study

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“Introduction. This study explores the extent to which an institutional repository (IR) makes papers available and accessible on the open web by using 170 journal articles housed in DigiNole Commons, the IR at Florida State University.

Method. To analyze the IR’s impact on availability and accessibility, we conducted independent known-item title searches on both Google and Google Scholar (GS) to search for faculty publications housed in DigiNole Commons.

Analysis. The extent to which the IR makes articles available and accessible was measured quantitatively, and the findings that cannot be summarized with numbers were analyzed qualitatively.

Results. Google and GS searches provided links to DigiNole metadata for a total of 145 (85.3%) of 170 items, and to full texts for 96 (96%) of 100 items. With one exception, access to either metadata or full text required no more than three clicks.

Conclusions. Overall, the results confirm the contribution of the IR in making papers available and accessible. The results also reveal some impediments to the success of OA: including impediments linked to contractual arrangements between authors and publishers, impediments linked to policies, practices, and technologies governing the IR itself, and the low level of faculty participation in the IR.”

URL : http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/slis_faculty_publications/27/

Will Open Access Get Me Cited? An Analysis of the Efficacy of Open Access Publishing in Political Science

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“The digital revolution has made it easier for political scientists to share and access high-quality research online. However, many articles are stored in proprietary databases that some institutions cannot afford. High-quality, peer-reviewed, top-tier journal articles that have been made open access (OA) (i.e., freely available online) theoretically should be accessed and cited more easily than articles of similar quality that are available only to paying customers. Research into the efficacy of OA publishing thus far has focused mainly on the natural sciences, and the results have been mixed. Because OA has not been as widely adopted in the social sciences, disciplines such as political science have received little attention in the OA research. In this article, we seek to determine the efficacy of OA in political science. Our primary hypothesis is that OA articles will be cited at higher rates than articles that are toll access (TA), which means available only to paying customers. We test this hypothesis by analyzing the mean citation rates of OA and TA articles from eight top-ranked political science journals. We find that OA publication results in a clear citation advantage in political science publishing.”

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1049096514001668

Return on citation: a consistent metric to evaluate papers, journals and researchers

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“Evaluating and comparing the academic performance of a journal, a researcher or a single paper has long remained a critical, necessary but also controversial issue. Most of existing metrics invalidate comparison across different fields of science or even between different types of papers in the same field. This paper proposes a new metric, called return on citation (ROC), which is simply a citation ratio but applies to evaluating the paper, the journal and the researcher in a consistent way, allowing comparison across different fields of science and between different types of papers and discouraging unnecessary and coercive/self-citation.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.8420

Cartographie des connaissances pour une visibilité scientifique numérique des universités africaines : le cas de l’Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar (Ucad)

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“Cet article présente les enjeux de la visibilité numérique de l’activité scientifique des universités africaines. Il part d’un constat selon lequel celles-ci sous le poids de la massification et du rétrécissement des moyens négligent un pan entier de leur mission : la recherche. Ceci contraste avec ce besoin de visibilité scientifique, gage de reconnaissance internationale. À partir d’une étude bibliométrique, cet article analyse l’état de déliquescence de la recherche à l’UCAD tout en essayant de démontrer l’opportunité qu’offrent l’édition numérique et l’Open Access.”

URL : http://icoa2014.sciencesconf.org/37916