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Scientific Landscape of Citizen Science Publications: Dynamics, Content and Presence in Social Media

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Authors : Núria Bautista-Puig, Daniela De Filippo, Elba Mauleón, Elías Sanz-Casado

Citizen science (CS) aims primarily to create a new scientific culture able to improve upon the triple interaction between science, society, and policy in the dual pursuit of more democratic research and decision-making informed by sound evidence.

It is both an aim and an enabler of open science (OS), to which it contributes by involving citizens in research and encouraging participation in the generation of new knowledge. This study analyses scientific output on CS using bibliometric techniques and Web of Science (WoS) data.

Co-occurrence maps are formulated to define subject clusters as background for an analysis of the impact of each on social media. Four clusters are identified: HEALTH, BIO, GEO and PUBLIC. The profiles for the four clusters are observed to be fairly similar, although BIO and HEALTH are mentioned more frequently in blogposts and tweets and BIO and PUBLIC in Facebook and newsfeeds.

The findings also show that output in the area has grown since 2010, with a larger proportion of papers (66%) mentioned in social media than reported in other studies. The percentage of open access documents (30.7%) is likewise higher than the overall mean for all areas.

URL : Scientific Landscape of Citizen Science Publications: Dynamics, Content and Presence in Social Media

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7010012

Open-access policy and data-sharing practice in UK academia

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Author : Yimei Zhu

Data sharing can be defined as the release of research data that can be used by others. With the recent open-science movement, there has been a call for free access to data, tools and methods in academia. In recent years, subject-based and institutional repositories and data centres have emerged along with online publishing.

Many scientific records, including published articles and data, have been made available via new platforms. In the United Kingdom, most major research funders had a data policy and require researchers to include a ‘data-sharing plan’ when applying for funding.

However, there are a number of barriers to the full-scale adoption of data sharing. Those barriers are not only technical, but also psychological and social. A survey was conducted with over 1800 UK-based academics to explore the extent of support of data sharing and the characteristics and factors associated with data-sharing practice.

It found that while most academics recognised the importance of sharing research data, most of them had never shared or reused research data. There were differences in the extent of data sharing between different gender, academic disciplines, age and seniority.

It also found that the awareness of Research Council UK’s (RCUK) Open-Access (OA) policy, experience of Gold and Green OA publishing, attitudes towards the importance of data sharing and experience of using secondary data were associated with the practice of data sharing.

A small group of researchers used social media such as Twitter, blogs and Facebook to promote the research data they had shared online. Our findings contribute to the knowledge and understanding of open science and offer recommendations to academic institutions, journals and funding agencies.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551518823174

Open Research Knowledge Graph: Towards Machine Actionability in Scholarly Communication

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Authors : Mohamad Yaser Jaradeh, Sören Auer, Manuel Prinz, Viktor Kovtun, Gábor Kismihók, Markus Stocker

Despite improved digital access to scientific publications in the last decades, the fundamental principles of scholarly communication remain unchanged and continue to be largely document-based.

The document-oriented workflows in science publication have reached the limits of adequacy as highlighted by recent discussions on the increasing proliferation of scientific literature, the deficiency of peer-review and the reproducibility crisis.

In this article, we present first steps towards representing scholarly knowledge semantically with knowledge graphs. We expand the currently popular RDF graph-based knowledge representation formalism to capture annotations, such as provenance information and describe how to manage such knowledge in a graph data base.

We report on the results of a first experimental evaluation of the concept and its implementations with the participants of an international conference.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.10816

A multidimensional perspective on the citation impact of scientific publications

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Authors : Yi Bu, Ludo Waltman, Yong Huang

The citation impact of scientific publications is usually seen as a one-dimensional concept. We introduce a three-dimensional perspective on the citation impact of publications. In addition to the level of citation impact, quantified by the number of citations received by a publication, we also conceptualize and operationalize the depth and dependence of citation impact.

This enables us to make a distinction between publications that have a deep impact concentrated in one specific field of research and publications that have a broad impact scattered over different research fields.

It also allows us to distinguish between publications that are strongly dependent on earlier work and publications that make a more independent scientific contribution.

We present a large-scale empirical analysis of the level, depth, and dependence of the citation impact of publications. In addition, we report a case study focusing on publications in the field of scientometrics.

Our three-dimensional citation impact framework provides a more detailed understanding of the citation impact of a publication than a traditional one-dimensional perspective.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.09663

Methods to Evaluate Lifecycle Models for Research Data Management

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Authors : Tobias Weber, Dieter Kranzlmüller

Lifecycle models for research data are often abstract and simple. This comes at the danger of oversimplifying the complex concepts of research data management.

The analysis of 90 different lifecycle models lead to two approaches to assess the quality of these models. While terminological issues make direct comparisons of models hard, an empirical evaluation seems possible.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.11267

Science on YouTube: Legitimation Strategies of Brazilian Science YouTubers

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Authors : Natália Martins Flore, Priscila Muniz de Medeiros

This study analyzes the legitimation strategies displayed by YouTubers of the 10 most popular science channels regarding YouTube Brazil. Using Discourse Analysis from a French perspective, it unfolds the ethos of the YouTuber, the preferred discursive scenographies, and kinds of contents and discursive approaches of these channels.

The results show the predominant presence of didactic scenography, followed by commentary, scientist-in-action, and journalist scenographies. They unfold themselves in monologue, questions and answers, live experiments, whiteboard videos and short documentary subgenres.

The discursive ethos presents the YouTuber as an informed person who has knowledge on science subjects, teaching them to his audience or commenting on a certain theme or topic. Legitimation strategies come from personal experiences and rarely from a scientist’s identity, despite the YouTuber may use scientific authority in some cases.

The use of humor in enunciations and video editing, the reference to pop culture, and the use of an informal language, show the tendency that these channels have in presenting scientific themes in a soft and interesting way.

URL : https://journals.openedition.org/rfsic/4782

Early career researchers: observing how the new wave of researchers is changing the scholarly communications market

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Authors : David Nicholas, Chérifa Boukacem-Zeghmouri, Blanca Rodríguez-Bravo, Anthony Watkinson, Marzena Świgon, Jie Xu, Abdullah Abrizah, Eti Herman

The paper presents the early findings from the first two years of the Harbingers research project, a 3-year-long study of early career researchers (ECRs), the new wave of researchers, which sought to ascertain their current and changing habits with regard to scholarly communications.

The study recruited a convenience sample of 116 researchers from seven countries (China, France, Malaysia, Poland, Spain, UK and US) who were subject to repeat, in-depth interviews. Interviews were conducted face-to-face or remotely (via Skype).

A major focus of the study was to determine whether ECRs are taking the myriad opportunities proffered by digital innovations, developing within the context Open Science, Open Access and social media to disseminate their research.

The paper provides the highlights of the first-year benchmarking exercise and then investigates the strategic changes one year on.

URL : https://journals.openedition.org/rfsic/4635