L’effet SIGAPS : La recherche médicale française sous l’emprise de l’évaluation comptable

Auteurs/Authors : Yves Gingras, Mahdi Khelfaoui

Cette recherche a pour but de mettre en évidence les effets pervers générés par l’introduction du système SIGAPS (Système d’interrogation, de gestion, et d’analyse des publications scientifiques) sur la production scientifique française en médecine et en sciences biomédicales.

Cet outil biblio-métrique de gestion et de financement de la recherche présente un exemple emblématique des dé-rives que peuvent générer les méthodes d’évaluation de la recherche reposant sur des critères pu-rement comptables.

Dans cette note, nous présentons d’abord le fonctionnement de SIGAPS, pour ensuite expliquer précisément en quoi les méthodes de calcul des « points SIGAPS », fondés sur les facteurs d’impact des revues et l’ordre des noms des co-auteurs, posent de nombreux problèmes.

Nous identifions notamment les effets du système SIGAPS sur les dynamiques de publications, les choix des lieux de publications, la langue de publication et les critères de recrutement et de promotion des chercheurs.

Finalement, nous montrons que l’utilisation du système SIGAPS ne répond pas bien à tous les critères de ce que l’on pourrait appeler une « éthique de l’évaluation » qui devrait respecter certaines règles, comme la transparence, l’équité et la validité des indicateurs.

URL : https://cirst2.openum.ca/files/sites/179/2020/10/Note_2020-05vf.pdf

A validation of coauthorship credit models with empirical data from the contributions of PhD candidates

Author : Paul Donner

A perennial problem in bibliometrics is the appropriate distribution of authorship credit for coauthored publications. Several credit allocation methods and formulas have been introduced, but there has been little empirical validation as to which method best reflects the typical contributions of coauthors.

This paper presents a validation of credit allocation methods using a new data set of author-provided percentage contribution figures obtained from the coauthored publications in cumulative PhD theses by authors from three countries that contain contribution statements.

The comparison of allocation schemes shows that harmonic counting performs best and arithmetic and geometric counting also perform well, while fractional counting and first author counting perform relatively poorly.

URL : https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/qss_a_00048?af=R

Scopus as a curated, high-quality bibliometric data source for academic research in quantitative science studies

Authors : Jeroen Baas, Michiel Schotten, Andrew Plume, Grégoire Côté, Reza Karimi

Scopus is among the largest curated abstract and citation databases, with a wide global and regional coverage of scientific journals, conference proceedings, and books, while ensuring only the highest quality data are indexed through rigorous content selection and re-evaluation by an independent Content Selection and Advisory Board.

Additionally, extensive quality assurance processes continuously monitor and improve all data elements in Scopus. Besides enriched metadata records of scientific articles, Scopus offers comprehensive author and institution profiles, obtained from advanced profiling algorithms and manual curation, ensuring high precision and recall.

The trustworthiness of Scopus has led to its use as bibliometric data source for large-scale analyses in research assessments, research landscape studies, science policy evaluations, and university rankings.

Scopus data have been offered for free for selected studies by the academic research community, such as through application programming interfaces, which have led to many publications employing Scopus data to investigate topics such as researcher mobility, network visualizations, and spatial bibliometrics.

In June 2019, the International Center for the Study of Research was launched, with an advisory board consisting of bibliometricians, aiming to work with the scientometric research community and offering a virtual laboratory where researchers will be able to utilize Scopus data.

URL : Scopus as a curated, high-quality bibliometric data source for academic research in quantitative science studies

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00019

Competence-Based Management Research in the Web of Science and Scopus Databases: Scientific Production, Collaboration, and Impact

Authors : Vítor Vasata Macchi Silva, José Luis Duarte Ribeiro, Gonzalo Rubén Alvarez, Sonia Elisa Caregnato

This paper presents a bibliometric study, which seeks to characterize papers that address competence-based management and that are indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus databases in terms of scientific production, collaboration, and impact.

All the papers published in journals or in conference proceedings that contained the terms “competenc* management” or “compentenc* based management” in their titles, abstracts, or keywords were analyzed.

The results show that computational sciences, human resources management, strategic management, and industrial relations and labor correspond to the macro-categories that characterize competence-based management.

This paper also indicates that collaborations between authors do not establish strong co-authorship networks. It also shows that the most cited papers were published in journals of different areas.

It concludes that studies conducted in the area of competence-based management can be developed in a more assertive way if they take into consideration the context of the current state of research in this area.

URL : Competence-Based Management Research in the Web of Science and Scopus Databases: Scientific Production, Collaboration, and Impact

Alternative location : https://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/7/4/60

Science and its significant other: Representing the humanities in bibliometric scholarship

Authors : Thomas Franssen, Paul Wouters

The cognitive and social structures, and publication practices, of the humanities have been studied bibliometrically for the past 50 years. This article explores the conceptual frameworks, methods, and data sources used in bibliometrics to study the nature of the humanities, and its differences and similarities in comparison with other scientific domains.

We give a historical overview of bibliometric scholarship between 1965 and 2018 that studies the humanities empirically and distinguishes between two periods in which the configuration of the bibliometric system differs remarkably.

The first period, 1965 to the 1980s, is characterized by bibliometric methods embedded in a sociological theoretical framework, the development and use of the Price Index, and small samples of journal publications from which references are used as data sources.

The second period, the 1980s to the present day, is characterized by a new intellectual hinterland—that of science policy and research evaluation—in which bibliometric methods become embedded.

Here metadata of publications becomes the primary data source with which publication profiles of humanistic scholarly communities are analyzed. We unpack the differences between these two periods and critically discuss the analytical avenues that different approaches offer.

URL : Science and its significant other: Representing the humanities in bibliometric scholarship

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24206

The Two-Way Street of Open Access Journal Publishing: Flip It and Reverse It

Authors : Lisa Matthias, Najko Jahn, Mikael Laakso

As Open access (OA) is often perceived as the end goal of scholarly publishing, much research has focused on flipping subscription journals to an OA model. Focusing on what can happen after the presumed finish line, this study identifies journals that have converted from OA to a subscription model, and places these “reverse flips” within the greater context of scholarly publishing.

In particular, we examine specific journal descriptors, such as access mode, publisher, subject area, society affiliation, article volume, and citation metrics, to deepen our understanding of reverse flips.

Our results show that at least 152 actively publishing journals have reverse-flipped since 2005, suggesting that this phenomenon does not constitute merely a few marginal outliers, but instead a common pattern within scholarly publishing.

Notably, we found that 62% of reverse flips (N = 95) had not been born-OA journals, but had been founded as subscription journals, and hence have experienced a three-stage transformation from closed to open to closed.

We argue that reverse flips present a unique perspective on OA, and that further research would greatly benefit from enhanced data and tools for identifying such cases.

URL : The Two-Way Street of Open Access Journal Publishing: Flip It and Reverse It 

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7020023