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Back to the past: on the shoulders of an academic search engine giant

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A study released by the Google Scholar team found an apparently increasing fraction of citations to old articles from studies published in the last 24 years (1990-2013). To demonstrate this finding we conducted a complementary study using a different data source (Journal Citation Reports), metric (aggregate cited half-life), time spam (2003-2013), and set of categories (53 Social Science subject categories and 167 Science subject categories).

Although the results obtained confirm and reinforce the previous findings, the possible causes of this phenomenon keep unclear. We finally hypothesize that first page results syndrome in conjunction with the fact that Google Scholar favours the most cited documents are suggesting the growing trend of citing old documents is partly caused by Google Scholar.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.09111

Measuring Book Impact Based on the Multi-granularity Online Review Mining

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As with articles and journals, the customary methods for measuring books’ academic impact mainly involve citations, which is easy but limited to interrogating traditional citation databases and scholarly book reviews, Researchers have attempted to use other metrics, such as Google Books, libcitation, and publisher prestige.

However, these approaches lack content-level information and cannot determine the citation intentions of users. Meanwhile, the abundant online review resources concerning academic books can be used to mine deeper information and content utilizing altmetric perspectives.

In this study, we measure the impacts of academic books by multi-granularity mining online reviews, and we identify factors that affect a book’s impact. First, online reviews of a sample of academic books on Amazon.cn are crawled and processed.

Then, multi-granularity review mining is conducted to identify review sentiment polarities and aspects’ sentiment values. Lastly, the numbers of positive reviews and negative reviews, aspect sentiment values, star values, and information regarding helpfulness are integrated via the entropy method, and lead to the calculation of the final book impact scores.

The results of a correlation analysis of book impact scores obtained via our method versus traditional book citations show that, although there are substantial differences between subject areas, online book reviews tend to reflect the academic impact.

Thus, we infer that online reviews represent a promising source for mining book impact within the altmetric perspective and at the multi-granularity content level. Moreover, our proposed method might also be a means by which to measure other books besides academic publications.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.08091

Perish or Publish in China: Pressures on Young Chinese Scholars to Publish in Internationally Indexed Journals

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To boost their research productivities, Chinese universities are putting great pressure on their research-active staff to publish in internationally indexed journals. However, the emerging publish-or-perish culture in China has seen little empirical investigation thus far.

In the research reported in this article, semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven young researchers in science and engineering disciplines at a research-centered university in central China.

The study showed that these young scholars faced great pressure to publish papers in internationally indexed journals. Consequently, the participants were reluctant to spend time on other academic activities, including teaching training.

They also reported considerable work time devoted to writing, which resulted in fatigue and negatively affected family relations. The participants admitted that they had to rush to publish, and therefore were less likely to produce papers of better quality or those with novel discoveries.

The research contributes to our reflection upon Chinese universities’ increasing use of the number of international publications as a major assessment and incentive measurement of their faculties’ academic performance.

URL : Perish or Publish in China: Pressures on Young Chinese Scholars to Publish in Internationally Indexed Journals

Alternative location : http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/4/2/9

Availability of Open Access Books in DOAB: An Analytical Study

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This paper discusses the availability of open access books which are available in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB). The relevant data has been collected from the open access directory from http://www.openbooks.org/ on 25 October 2015.

Among the 3379 books, 1584 (46.88 %) books are published in English which includes 445 books which have no licenses, 83 books have CC BY; 153 books have CC-BY-NC; 814 books have CC-BY-NC-ND; 36 books have CC-BY-NC-SA; 24 books have CC-BY-ND and 29 books have CC-BY-SA licenses.

It is found that 21 books have not mentioned its authors in the directory.

URL : Availability of Open Access Books in DOAB: An Analytical Study

Alternative location : http://publications.drdo.gov.in/ojs/index.php/djlit/article/view/9440

Transparency: the emerging third dimension of Open Science and Open Data

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This paper presents an exploration of the concept of research transparency. The policy context is described and situated within the broader arena of open science. This is followed by commentary on transparency within the research process, which includes a brief overview of the related concept of reproducibility and the associated elements of research integrity, fraud and retractions.

A two-dimensional model or continuum of open science is considered and the paper builds on this foundation by presenting a three-dimensional model, which includes the additional axis of ‘transparency’. The concept is further unpacked and preliminary definitions of key terms are introduced: transparency, transparency action, transparency agent and transparency tool.

An important linkage is made to the research lifecycle as a setting for potential transparency interventions by libraries. Four areas are highlighted as foci for enhanced engagement with transparency goals: Leadership and Policy, Advocacy and Training, Research Infrastructures and Workforce Development.

DOI: https://www.liberquarterly.eu/articles/10.18352/lq.10113/

Transforming Roles: Canadian Academic Librarians Embedded in Faculty Research Projects

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Academic librarians have always played an important role in providing research services and research-skills development to faculty in higher education. But that role is evolving to include the academic librarian as a unique and necessary research partner, practitioner and participant in collaborative, grant-funded research projects.

This article describes how a selected sample of Canadian academic librarians became embedded in faculty research projects and describes their experiences of participating in research teams.

Conducted as a series of semi-structured interviews, this qualitative study illustrates the emerging opportunities and challenges of the librarian-researcher role and how it is transforming the Canadian university library.

URL : http://crl.acrl.org/content/early/2016/03/22/crl16-871.abstract

Achieving human and machine accessibility of cited data in scholarly publications

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Reproducibility and reusability of research results is an important concern in scientific communication and science policy. A foundational element of reproducibility and reusability is the open and persistently available presentation of research data.

However, many common approaches for primary data publication in use today do not achieve sufficient long-term robustness, openness, accessibility or uniformity. Nor do they permit comprehensive exploitation by modern Web technologies.

This has led to several authoritative studies recommending uniform direct citation of data archived in persistent repositories. Data are to be considered as first-class scholarly objects, and treated similarly in many ways to cited and archived scientific and scholarly literature.

Here we briefly review the most current and widely agreed set of principle-based recommendations for scholarly data citation, the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles (JDDCP).

We then present a framework for operationalizing the JDDCP; and a set of initial recommendations on identifier schemes, identifier resolution behavior, required metadata elements, and best practices for realizing programmatic machine actionability of cited data.

The main target audience for the common implementation guidelines in this article consists of publishers, scholarly organizations, and persistent data repositories, including technical staff members in these organizations.

But ordinary researchers can also benefit from these recommendations. The guidance provided here is intended to help achieve widespread, uniform human and machine accessibility of deposited data, in support of significantly improved verification, validation, reproducibility and re-use of scholarly/scientific data.

URL : Achieving human and machine accessibility of cited data in scholarly publications

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.1