Archives des auteurs : Hans Dillaerts

Données de la recherche en SHS. Pratiques, représentations et attentes des chercheurs : une enquête à l’Université Rennes 2

Posté le par

Auteurs/Authors : Alexandre Serres, Marie-Laure Malingre, Morgane Mignon, Cécile Pierre, Didier Collet

Quels sont les types de données de recherche collectées, traitées et produites dans une université de lettres et sciences humaines et sociales ? Quelles sont les pratiques des chercheurs en SHS en matière de stockage, d’archivage, de diffusion, de partage de leurs données de recherche ?

Quelles sont leurs représentations et leurs définitions des données de recherche, leur position par rapport au libre accès ? Quels sont leurs besoins prioritaires en matière de gestion ou de partage des données de recherche ?

Comment perçoivent-ils le bon niveau d’une politique des données ? C’est pour répondre à toutes ces questions qu’une double enquête, statistique et qualitative, a été menée à l’Université Rennes 2 au printemps 2017, enquête portée par l’URFIST (Unité Régionale de Formation à l’Information Scientifique et Technique) de Rennes, la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme en Bretagne et le Service Commun de Documentation Rennes 2, avec le soutien des instances de l’université.

Le rapport et ses annexes en présentent ici tous les résultats, avec un certain nombre de propositions pour une politique des données de recherche.

URL : Données de la recherche en SHS. Pratiques, représentations et attentes des chercheurs : une enquête à l’Université Rennes 2

Alternative location : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01635186

 

Preventing the ends from justifying the means: withholding results to address publication bias in peer-review

Posté le par

Authors : Katherine S. Button, Liz Bal, Anna Clark, Tim Shipley

The evidence that many of the findings in the published literature may be unreliable is compelling. There is an excess of positive results, often from studies with small sample sizes, or other methodological limitations, and the conspicuous absence of null findings from studies of a similar quality.

This distorts the evidence base, leading to false conclusions and undermining scientific progress. Central to this problem is a peer-review system where the decisions of authors, reviewers, and editors are more influenced by impressive results than they are by the validity of the study design.

To address this, BMC Psychology is launching a pilot to trial a new ‘results-free’ peer-review process, whereby editors and reviewers are blinded to the study’s results, initially assessing manuscripts on the scientific merits of the rationale and methods alone.

The aim is to improve the reliability and quality of published research, by focusing editorial decisions on the rigour of the methods, and preventing impressive ends justifying poor means.

URL : Preventing the ends from justifying the means: withholding results to address publication bias in peer-review

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-016-0167-7

arXiv popularity from a citation analysis point of view

Posté le par

Author : Alireza Noruzi

This study aims to provide an overview of the citation rate of arXiv.org since its launch in August 1991, based on the Scopus citation database. The total number of citations to arXiv in Scopus in the 26 year period was 135,782 of which the highest number of citations was 23,288 in 2016.

It is also shown that arXiv-deposited papers are highly cited by physics and astronomy, mathematics, computer science, and engineering. It can be seen that researchers from the United States, Germany, China, United Kingdom, France, and Italy cite arXiv-deposited papers more than others.

The analysis of document types indicates that articles rank first with 69% of all Scopus documents citing arXiv from 1991-2016, followed by conference papers (24.7%), reviews (3.2%), and book chapters (1.5%).

It can be concluded that arXiv is cited increasingly by different subject areas, by different languages (especially English, Chinese and French), and by various countries.

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/31996/

Understanding the Changing Roles of Scientific Publications via Citation Embeddings

Posté le par

Authors : Jiangen He, Chaomei Chen

Researchers may describe different aspects of past scientific publications in their publications and the descriptions may keep changing in the evolution of science. The diverse and changing descriptions (i.e., citation context) on a publication characterize the impact and contributions of the past publication.

In this article, we aim to provide an approach to understanding the changing and complex roles of a publication characterized by its citation context. We described a method to represent the publications’ dynamic roles in science community in different periods as a sequence of vectors by training temporal embedding models.

The temporal representations can be used to quantify how much the roles of publications changed and interpret how they changed.

Our study in the biomedical domain shows that our metric on the changes of publications’ roles is stable over time at the population level but significantly distinguish individuals. We also show the interpretability of our methods by a concrete example.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.05822

Willingness to Engage in Open Educational Practices among Academics in Rwandan Public Higher Education and Responsive Actions

Posté le par

Author : Bernard Nkuyubwatsi

Academics’ engagement in Open Educational Practices (OEPs) is critical for opening up higher education. It is in this perspective that the willingness to engage in such practices among academics in Rwandan public higher education was investigated with an agenda to trigger responsive actions.

Via convenience/availability and volunteer sampling, 170 academics were invited to participate in the study and 85 of them completed and returned an email self-completion questionnaire. The results revealed that the majority of participants were willing to contribute to Open Educational Resources (OER) by publishing their work under an open licence.

Participants were also willing to engage in diverse OEPs including 1) finding OER and evaluating their quality, 2) participating in and evaluating open courses, 3) aggregating OER, 4) adapting OER and open courses, and 5) assessing accomplishment from open learning based on OER and open courses for credit.

National and institutional policies were found to be the potentially most important enablers of academics’ engagement in those practices. In the light of the findings, the researcher argues that the inclusion of more learners in the higher education system would make academics more impactful than simply the citation of their work, a stance that was reflected in subsequent responsive actions.

This study may benefit institutions and policy makers who are interested in opening up higher education, especially the University of Rwanda that is expected to contribute significantly to the transformation of the country into a middle-income, knowledge-based society.

URL : Willingness to Engage in Open Educational Practices among Academics in Rwandan Public Higher Education and Responsive Actions

Alternative location : http://www.jl4d.org/index.php/ejl4d/article/view/223

Turkish Teachers’ Awareness and Perceptions of Open Educational Resources

Posté le par

Authors : Ozgur Ozdemir, Curtis Bonk

The purpose of this study is to explore K-12 teachers’ awareness of open educational resources (OER) as well as their perceptions of its potential opportunities and challenges for teaching practices.

Data were gathered from 99 online survey respondents and six interviewees in this study. Findings showed that teachers are aware of OER to a certain degree; however, a misunderstanding exists between digital educational content on the Internet and openly licensed content compatible with the OER definition.

Lack of knowledge regarding licensing mechanisms of OER is a major issue among teachers. Whereas, teacher perceptions that the use of OER leads to the improvement in student performance is highly beneficial, the time required to search, select, edit, and apply OER was discovered as the greatest challenge to OER utilization.

Results of this study can inform potential OER movement contributors, such as teacher professional development specialists, developers of OER repositories, and academics interested in OER.

URL : Turkish Teachers’ Awareness and Perceptions of Open Educational Resources

Alternative location : http://www.jl4d.org/index.php/ejl4d/article/view/224

 

A review of data sharing statements in observational studies published in the BMJ: A cross-sectional study

Posté le par

Authors : Laura McDonald, Anna Schultze, Alex Simpson, Sophie Graham, Radek Wasiak, Sreeram V. Ramagopalan

In order to understand the current state of data sharing in observational research studies, we reviewed data sharing statements of observational studies published in a general medical journal, the British Medical Journal.

We found that the majority (63%) of observational studies published between 2015 and 2017 included a statement that implied that data used in the study could not be shared. If the findings of our exploratory study are confirmed, room for improvement in the sharing of real-world or observational research data exists.

URL : A review of data sharing statements in observational studies published in the BMJ: A cross-sectional study

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.12673.2