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The weakening relationship between the Impact Factor and papers’ citations in the digital age

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Authors : George A. Lozano, Vincent Lariviere, Yves Gingras

Historically, papers have been physically bound to the journal in which they were published but in the electronic age papers are available individually, no longer tied to their respective journals. Hence, papers now can be read and cited based on their own merits, independently of the journal’s physical availability, reputation, or Impact Factor.

We compare the strength of the relationship between journals’ Impact Factors and the actual citations received by their respective papers from 1902 to 2009. Throughout most of the 20th century, papers’ citation rates were increasingly linked to their respective journals’ Impact Factors.

However, since 1990, the advent of the digital age, the strength of the relation between Impact Factors and paper citations has been decreasing. This decrease began sooner in physics, a field that was quicker to make the transition into the electronic domain.

Furthermore, since 1990, the proportion of highly cited papers coming from highly cited journals has been decreasing, and accordingly, the proportion of highly cited papers not coming from highly cited journals has also been increasing.

Should this pattern continue, it might bring an end to the use of the Impact Factor as a way to evaluate the quality of journals, papers and researchers.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.4328

India’s Efforts in Open Access Publishing

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For a long time, India has been generating a great deal of scholarly resources in all disciplines. After independence, there was a lot of investment in science and technology, and S&T were used to leverage development efforts and to improve the standard of living. However, one in four Indians still lives below the poverty line. There is a considerable research effort in a wide variety of areas including science, technology, medicine, humanities and social sciences. Research is performed essentially in three sectors: (1) higher educational institutions, such as universities and deemed universities (2) laboratories under different government agencies such as the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO), Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), and Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), and (3) laboratories in the industrial sector, both public and private.

With difficulties such as lack of funds and infrastructure for good quality research, a very common problem for Indian scientists is access and visibility. The accelerating cost of subscriptions to academic serials has created a serials crisis in almost all libraries around the world, including India. Most Indian libraries cannot afford to subscribe to key journals needed by their users/scientists. As a result, it becomes difficult for researchers to have current knowledge. After spending so much effort on research and getting it published in journals, small or big, from around the world, their work is often not noticed by others elsewhere, even within India, working in the same and related areas. No wonder Indian work is poorly cited due to low visibility or circulation of such journals where their works have been published.

To overcome both these handicaps, one possible solution may be the publishing through Open Access (OA). Open-access publishing is the provision of free online access to quality scholarly material that is available on “open domain,” and not having any restriction of copyright. Although the open access movement began before the advent of the Web, it became more widespread with the adoption of Web access in scholarly activities. The movement spread to all disciplines. There are many different models of open access publishing, for example sponsored OA, OA supported by author fees, and embargoed OA. The intention of all such models is to provide access to scholarly contents to clients. It is, however, assumed as one of the useful media to share research and getting wide visibility from around the world. Some countries like the UK and the US have made better progress, whereas many other countries are lagging behind. The primary goal of this study is to discover the present status of Indian open access ventures and help librarians to understand the opportunities in OA scholarly resources in India.

URL : http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~mbolin/mukherjee-mal.htm

The Anatomy of a Data Citation: Discovery, Reuse, and Credit

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INTRODUCTION

Data citation should be a necessary corollary of data publication and reuse. Many researchers are reluctant to share their data, yet they are increasingly encouraged to do just that.

Reward structures must be in place to encourage data publication, and citation is the appropriate tool for scholarly acknowledgment. Data citation also allows for the identification, retrieval, replication, and verification of data underlying published studies.

METHODS

This study examines author behavior and sources of instruction in disciplinary and cultural norms for writing style and citation via a content analysis of journal articles, author instructions, style manuals, and data publishers. Instances of data citation are benchmarked against a Data Citation Adequacy Index.

RESULTS

Roughly half of journals point toward a style manual that addresses data citation, but the majority of journal articles failed to include an adequate citation to data used in secondary analysis studies.

DISCUSSION

Full citation of data is not currently a normative behavior in scholarly writing. Multiplicity of data types and lack of awareness regarding existing standards contribute to the problem.

CONCLUSION

Citations for data must be promoted as an essential component of data publication, sharing, and reuse. Despite confounding factors, librarians and information professionals are well-positioned and should persist in advancing data citation as a normative practice across domains.

Doing so promotes a value proposition for data sharing and secondary research broadly, thereby accelerating the pace of scientific research.”

URL : http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss1/6/

Open Access Publishing Practices in a Complex Environment: Conditions, Barriers, and Bases of Power

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The system of scholarly communication is a complex environment made up of various stakeholders including not only researchers, librarians, and publishers, but also academic administrators. This paper examines conditions each group faces while also noting barriers preventing movement toward open access.

To further analyze interrelationships and interdependencies among groups, a discussion is presented using French & Raven’s bases of power to describe how members of each stakeholder group exert some degree of power upon all other groups while at the same time being influenced, either directly or indirectly, by external forces.

A better understanding of the many existing interactions and dependencies can help those who work within this system navigate ongoing changes while more successfully positioning their organizations for the future.

URL : http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss1/10/

Lasting Impact: Sustainability of Disciplinary Repositories

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Librarians need to be familiar with the evolving aspects of scholarly communication and the changing scholarly record. One component of that is the role of repositories. It’s crucial for anyone working in a research library to understand the repository landscape, both to advise researchers on where to look for information and how to disseminate their own research articles.

Librarians should appreciate the nature of the leading disciplinary repositories and have a sense of their motivations, their scope, and how they operate. Before getting involved with a disciplinary repository, they should be familiar with the risks and opportunities in depending on the repository and, most importantly, they need to know if the repository has a sustainable model.

For a library considering starting a disciplinary repository or taking on the operation of an existing one, these considerations are essential.

URL : http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2012/2012-03.pdf

Bibliometric methods for detecting and analysing emerging research topics

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This study gives an overview of the process of clustering scientific disciplines using hybrid methods, detecting and labelling emerging topics and analysing the results using bibliometrics methods.

The hybrid clustering techniques are based on biblographic coupling and text-mining and ‘core documents’, and cross-citation links are used to identify emerging fields.

The collaboration network of those countries that proved to be most active in the underlying disciplines, in combination with a set of standard indicators, form the groundwork for the bibliometric analysis of the detected emerging research topics.

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/10760/16947

Intended and Unintended Consequences of a Publish-or-Perish Culture: A Worldwide Survey

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How does publication pressure in modern-day universities affect the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards in science? By using a worldwide survey among demographers in developed and developing countries, we show that the large majority perceive the publication pressure as high, but more so in Anglo-Saxon countries and to a lesser extent in Western Europe. However, scholars see both the pros (upward mobility) and cons (excessive publication and uncitedness, neglect of policy issues, etc.) of the so-called ‘publish-or-perish’ culture.

By measuring behavior in terms of reading and publishing, and perceived extrinsic rewards and stated intrinsic rewards of practicing science, it turns out that publication pressure negatively affects the orientation of demographers towards policy and knowledge of the population facts. There are no signs that the pressure affects reading and publishing outside the core discipline.

URL : http://ssrn.com/abstract=1983205