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A Multi-dimensional Investigation of the Effects of Publication Retraction on Scholarly Impact

Posté le 26 avril 2017 par Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Xin Shuai, Isabelle Moulinier, Jason Rollins, Tonya Custis, Frank Schilder, Mathilda Edmunds

Over the past few decades, the rate of publication retractions has increased dramatically in academia. In this study, we investigate retractions from a quantitative perspective, aiming to answer two fundamental questions.

One, how do retractions influence the scholarly impact of retracted papers, authors, and institutions? Two, does this influence propagate to the wider academic community through scholarly associations?

Specifically, we analyzed a set of retracted articles indexed in Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WoS), and ran multiple experiments to compare changes in scholarly impact against a control set of non-retracted articles, authors, and institutions.

We further applied the Granger Causality test to investigate whether different scientific topics are dynamically affected by retracted papers occurring within those topics.

Our results show two key findings: first, the scholarly impact of retracted papers and authors significantly decreases after retraction, and the most severe impact decrease correlates to retractions based on proven purposeful scientific misconduct; second, this retraction penalty does not seem to spread through the broader scholarly social graph, but instead has a limited and localized effect.

Our findings may provide useful insights for scholars or science committees to evaluate the scholarly value of papers, authors, or institutions related to retractions.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.09123

A Century of Science: Globalization of Scientific Collaborations, Citations, and Innovations

Posté le 23 avril 2017 par Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Yuxiao Dong, Hao Ma, Zhihong Shen, Kuansan Wang

Progress in science has advanced the development of human society across history, with dramatic revolutions shaped by information theory, genetic cloning, and artificial intelligence, among the many scientific achievements produced in the 20th century. However, the way that science advances itself is much less well-understood.

In this work, we study the evolution of scientific development over the past century by presenting an anatomy of 89 million digitalized papers published between 1900 and 2015.

We find that science has benefited from the shift from individual work to collaborative effort, with over 90% of the world-leading innovations generated by collaborations in this century, nearly four times higher than they were in the 1900s.

We discover that rather than the frequent myopic- and self-referencing that was common in the early 20th century, modern scientists instead tend to look for literature further back and farther around.

Finally, we also observe the globalization of scientific development from 1900 to 2015, including 25-fold and 7-fold increases in international collaborations and citations, respectively, as well as a dramatic decline in the dominant accumulation of citations by the US, the UK, and Germany, from 95% to 50% over the same period.

Our discoveries are meant to serve as a starter for exploring the visionary ways in which science has developed throughout the past century, generating insight into and an impact upon the current scientific innovations and funding policies.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.05150

Should biomedical research be like Airbnb?

Posté le 23 avril 2017 par Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Vivien R. Bonazzi, Philip E. Bourne

The thesis presented here is that biomedical research is based on the trusted exchange of services. That exchange would be conducted more efficiently if the trusted software platforms to exchange those services, if they exist, were more integrated.

While simpler and narrower in scope than the services governing biomedical research, comparison to existing internet-based platforms, like Airbnb, can be informative.

We illustrate how the analogy to internet-based platforms works and does not work and introduce The Commons, under active development at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and elsewhere, as an example of the move towards platforms for research.

URL : Should biomedical research be like Airbnb?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2001818

An Interactive Map for Showcasing Repository Impacts

Posté le 20 avril 2017 par Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Hui Zhang, Camden Lopez

Digital repository managers rely on usage metrics such as the number of downloads to demonstrate research visibility and impacts of the repositories. Increasingly, they find that current tools such as spreadsheets and charts are ineffective for revealing important elements of usage, including reader locations, and for attracting the targeted audiences.

This article describes the design and development of a readership map that provides an interactive, near-real-time visualization of actual visits to an institutional repository using data from Google Analytics.

The readership map exhibits the global impacts of a repository by displaying the city of every view or download together with the title of the scholarship being read and a hyperlink to its page in the repository.

We will discuss project motivation and development issues such as authentication with Google API, metadata integration, performance tuning, and data privacy.

URL : http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/12349

Linked Data is People: Building a Knowledge Graph to Reshape the Library Staff Directory

Posté le 20 avril 2017 par Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Jason A. Clark, Scott W. H. Young

One of our greatest library resources is people. Most libraries have staff directory information published on the web, yet most of this data is trapped in local silos, PDFs, or unstructured HTML markup.

With this in mind, the library informatics team at Montana State University (MSU) Library set a goal of remaking our people pages by connecting the local staff database to the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud.

In pursuing linked data integration for library staff profiles, we have realized two primary use cases: improving the search engine optimization (SEO) for people pages and creating network graph visualizations.

In this article, we will focus on the code to build this library graph model as well as the linked data workflows and ontology expressions developed to support it. Existing linked data work has largely centered around machine-actionable data and improvements for bots or intelligent software agents.

Our work demonstrates that connecting your staff directory to the LOD cloud can reveal relationships among people in dynamic ways, thereby raising staff visibility and bringing an increased level of understanding and collaboration potential for one of our primary assets: the people that make the library happen.

URL : http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/12320

Anticipated effects of an open access policy at a private foundation

Posté le 20 avril 2017 par Hans Dillaerts

Author : Eesha Khare, Carly Strasser

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF) was interested in understanding the potential effects of a policy requiring open access to peer-reviewed publications resulting from the research the foundation funds.

To explore this question, we collected data on more than 2000 publications in over 500 journals that were generated by GBMF grantees since 2001. We then examined the journal policies to establish how two possible open access policies might have affected grantee publishing habits.

We found that 99.3% of the articles published by grantees would have complied with a policy that requires open access within 12 months of publication. We also estimated the annual costs to GBMF for covering fees associated with “gold open access” to be between $250,000 and $2,500,000 annually.

URL : http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/04/18/128413