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

Branding Scholarly Journals: Transmuting Symbolic Capital into Economic Capital

Auteurs/Authors : Mahdi Khelfaoui, Yves Gingras

In this paper, we analyze a relatively recent commercial strategy devised by large academic publishers, consisting in the branding of their most prestigious scientific journals. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s model of capital conversion, we show how publishers transfer the symbolic capital of an already prestigious journal to derivative journals that capture part of the prestige of the original brand and transform it into new economic capital.

As shown by their high impact factors, these new journals, bearing the mark of the original journal in their titles, are rapidly adopted by researchers. Through manuscript transfer mechanisms, publishers also use part of the papers rejected by their flagship and highly selective jour-nals to recycle and monetize them inlower impactor open access derivativejournals of their lists.

URL : https://cirst2.openum.ca/files/sites/179/2020/08/Note_2020-03-branding.pdf

Intellectual and social similarity among scholarly journals: An exploratory comparison of the networks of editors, authors and co-citations

Authors : Alberto Baccini, Lucio Barabesi, Mahdi Khelfaoui, Yves Gingras

This paper explores, by using suitable quantitative techniques, to what extent the intellectual proximity among scholarly journals is also proximity in terms of social communities gathered around the journals.

Three fields are considered: statistics, economics and information and library sciences. Co-citation networks represent intellectual proximity among journals. The academic communities around the journals are represented by considering the networks of journals generated by authors writing in more than one journal (interlocking authorship: IA), and the networks generated by scholars sitting on the editorial board of more than one journal (interlocking editorship: IE).

Dissimilarity matrices are considered to compare the whole structure of the networks. The CC, IE, and IA networks appear to be correlated for the three fields. The strongest correlation is between CC and IA for the three fields.

Lower and similar correlations are obtained for CC and IE, and for IE and IA. The CC, IE, and IA networks are then partitioned in communities. Information and library sciences is the field in which communities are more easily detectable, whereas the most difficult field is economics.

The degrees of association among the detected communities show that they are not independent. For all the fields, the strongest association is between CC and IA networks; the minimum level of association is between IE and CC.

Overall, these results indicate that intellectual proximity is also proximity among authors and among editors of the journals. Thus, the three maps of editorial power, intellectual proximity, and authors communities tell similar stories.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00006