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Academic Search Engine Spam and Google Scholar’s Resilience Against it

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In a previous paper we provided guidelines for scholars on optimizing research articles for academic search engines such as Google Scholar. Feedback in the academic community to these guidelines was diverse.

Some were concerned researchers could use our guidelines to manipulate rankings of scientific articles and promote what we call ‘academic search engine spam’. To find out whether these concerns are justified, we conducted several tests on Google Scholar.

The results show that academic search engine spam is indeed—and with little effort—possible: We increased rankings of academic articles on Google Scholar by manipulating their citation counts; Google Scholar indexed invisible text we added to some articles, making papers appear for keyword searches the articles were not relevant for; Google Scholar indexed some nonsensical articles we randomly created with the paper generator SciGen; and Google Scholar linked to manipulated versions of research papers that contained a Viagra advertisement.

At the end of this paper, we discuss whether academic search engine spam could become a serious threat to Web-based academic search engines.

URL : http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0013.305

Technical workshop on the goals and requirements for a pan-European data portal

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Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS) is a cost framework that can be used to develop and apply local cost models for research data management and long-term preservation. The exact application may depend on the purpose of the costing, which might include:

  • identifying current costs;
  • identifying former or future costs;
  • comparing costs across different collections and institutions which have used different variables;
  • developing a charging policy or appropriate archiving costs to be charged to projects;
  • focussing in more selectively on particular activities and modelling the effect of changes to specific processes.

The major outputs from KRDS have been the project final reports (KRDS 2008 and KRDS 2010) and the supplementary materials to the KRDS2 final report available from the KRDS2 project website (http://www.beagrie.com/jisc.php). The KRDS final reports have been extremely well received by the community. However the project outcomes such as case studies and guidance are now split over two long reports, appendices and supplementary material.

The KRDS User Guide has been developed to support easier assimilation of the combined work of the KRDS1 and KRDS2 projects by those wishing to implement the tools or key findings.

The User Guide is an edited selection and synthesis of the KRDS reports combined with newly commissioned text and illustrations. It provides a succinct summary of key implementation guidance and tools, links to prepared extracts such as case studies from the reports, and additional guidance on its application.

URL : http://www.beagrie.com/KeepingResearchDataSafe_UserGuide_v1_Dec2010.pdf

Electronic Publishing, Knowledge Sharing and Open Access: A New Environment for Political Science

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In this article, we present an overview of the major changes occurring in electronic publishing, with a focus on open access. We shall argue that the notion itself of publication is undergoing a deep transformation, as it is no longer the monopoly of a limited number of specialised companies and institutions, but, through the web, it has become an option available to an infinite number of collective and individual actors.

URL : http://www.palgrave-journals.com/eps/journal/v9/n1s/abs/eps201035a.html

Global visibility of Asian universities’ Open Access institutional repositories

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This paper highlights the current state of open access repositories of Asian universities. It describes their characteristics in terms of types, contents, disciplines, language, technical and operational issues, and policy.

The web performance of Asian institutional repositories as reflected through global visibility and impact of the repositories in Open Directory of Open Access Repository (OpenDOAR), is also examined; as well as the performance of Asian top-ranked universities in the archiving and sharing their research output through institutional repositories, based on the Ranking Web of World Repositories (RWWR).

Findings signify Japan as the biggest contributor of Asian repositories, followed by India and Taiwan. An investigation of the status of these universities revealed that out of the 191 Asian organizational institutional repositories identified in this study, only 48 are listed in the Top 400 RWWR.

This implies that only 12% of Asian institutional repositories are visible and incorporate good practices in their web publication as extracted from the quantitative webometrics indicators used by the ranking. Out of these 48 institutions, 29 are among the Asian Top 200 universities.

However, only 14 of these 29 universities were ranked top 100 in the RWWR. It is revealed that some of the top ranked universities in Asia are not actively contributing to the open access movement.

It is suggested that if the web performance of an institutional repository of a research institution is below the expected position, the university authorities should reconsider their web policy to increase the volume and quality of their intellectual output / research publications through institutional repositories.

URL : http://majlis.fsktm.um.edu.my/detail.asp?AID=957

Simplifying the Scientific Writing and Review Process with SciFlow

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Scientific writing is an essential part of a student’s and researcher’s everyday life. In this paper we investigate the particularities of scientific writing and explore the features and limitations of existing tools for scientific writing.

Deriving from this analysis and an online survey of the scientific writing processes of students and researchers at the University of Paderborn, we identify key principles to simplify scientific writing and reviewing.

Finally, we introduce a novel approach to support scientific writing with a tool called SciFlow that builds on these principles and state of the art technologies like cloud computing.

URL : http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/2/4/645/

How and why scholars cite on Twitter

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Scholars are increasingly using the microblogging service Twitter as a communication platform. Since citing is a central practice of scholarly communication, we investigated whether and how scholars cite on Twitter.

We conducted interviews and harvested 46,515 tweets from a sample of 28 scholars and found that they do cite on Twitter, though often indirectly. Twitter citations are part of a fast-moving conversation that participants believe reflects scholarly impact. Twitter citation metrics could augment traditional citation analysis, supporting a “scientometrics 2.0”.

URL : http://clintlalonde.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/201_Final_Submission.pdf