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Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus: The Titans of Bibliographic Information in Today’s Academic World

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Raminta Pranckutė

Nowadays, the importance of bibliographic databases (DBs) has increased enormously, as they are the main providers of publication metadata and bibliometric indicators universally used both for research assessment practices and for performing daily tasks. Because the reliability of these tasks firstly depends on the data source, all users of the DBs should be able to choose the most suitable one.

Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus are the two main bibliographic DBs. The comprehensive evaluation of the DBs’ coverage is practically impossible without extensive bibliometric analyses or literature reviews, but most DBs users do not have bibliometric competence and/or are not willing to invest additional time for such evaluations.

Apart from that, the convenience of the DB’s interface, performance, provided impact indicators and additional tools may also influence the users’ choice. The main goal of this work is to provide all of the potential users with an all-inclusive description of the two main bibliographic DBs by gathering the findings that are presented in the most recent literature and information provided by the owners of the DBs at one place.

This overview should aid all stakeholders employing publication and citation data in selecting the most suitable DB.

URL : Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus: The Titans of Bibliographic Information in Today’s Academic World

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications9010012

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Research impact evaluation and academic discourse

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Marta Natalia Wróblewska

The introduction of ‘impact’ as an element of assessment constitutes a major change in the construction of research evaluation systems. While various protocols of impact evaluation exist, the most articulated one was implemented as part of the British Research Excellence Framework (REF).

This paper investigates the nature and consequences of the rise of ‘research impact’ as an element of academic evaluation from the perspective of discourse. Drawing from linguistic pragmatics and Foucauldian discourse analysis, the study discusses shifts related to the so-called Impact Agenda on four stages, in chronological order: (1) the ‘problematization’ of the notion of ‘impact’, (2) the establishment of an ‘impact infrastructure’, (3) the consolidation of a new genre of writing–impact case study, and (4) academics’ positioning practices towards the notion of ‘impact’, theorized here as the triggering of new practices of ‘subjectivation’ of the academic self.

The description of the basic functioning of the ‘discourse of impact’ is based on the analysis of two corpora: case studies submitted by a selected group of academics (linguists) to REF2014 (no = 78) and interviews (n = 25) with their authors.

Linguistic pragmatics is particularly useful in analyzing linguistic aspects of the data, while Foucault’s theory helps draw together findings from two datasets in a broader analysis based on a governmentality framework. This approach allows for more general conclusions on the practices of governing (academic) subjects within evaluation contexts.

URL : Research impact evaluation and academic discourse

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00727-8

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Assessment of gender divide in scientific communities

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Antonio De Nicola, Gregorio D’Agostino

Increasing evidence of women’s under-representation in some scientific disciplines is prompting researchers to expand our understanding of this social phenomenon. Moreover, any countermeasures proposed to eliminate this under-representation should be tailored to the actual reasons for this different participation.

Here, we take a multi-dimensional approach to assessing gender differences in science by representing scientific communities as social networks, and using data analytics, complexity science methods, and semantic methods to measure gender differences in the context, the attitude and the success of scientists.

We apply this approach to four scientific communities in the two fields of computer science and information systems using the network of authors at four different conferences. For each discipline, one conference is based in Italy and attracts mostly Italians, while one conference is international in both location and participants.

The present paper provides evidence against common narratives that women’s under-representation is due to women’s limited skills and/or less social centrality.

URL : Assessment of gender divide in scientific communities

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03885-3

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Accuracy of PubMed-based author lists of publications and use of author identifiers to address author name ambiguity: a cross-sectional study

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Paul Sebo, Sylvain de Lucia, Nathalie Vernaz

Objective

To assess the accuracy of PubMed-based author lists of publications and use of author identifiers to address author name ambiguity.

Methods

In this Swiss study conducted in 2019, 300 hospital-based senior physicians were asked to generate a list of their publications in PubMed and complete a questionnaire (type of query used, number of errors in their list of publications, knowledge and use of ORCID and ResearcherID).

Results

156 physicians (52%) agreed to participate, 145 of whom published at least one article (mean number of publications: 60 (SD 73)). Only 17% used the advanced search option. On average, there were 5 articles in the lists that were not co-authored by participants (advanced search: 1.0 (SD 2.6) vs. 5.9 (SD 13.9), p value 0.02) and 3 articles co-authored by participants that did not appear in the lists (advanced search: 1.5 (SD 2.0) vs. 3.6 (SD 8.4), p-value 0.05). Although 82% were aware of ORCID, only 16% added all their articles (39% and 6% respectively for ResearcherID).

Conclusions

When used by senior physicians, the advanced search in PubMed is accurate for retrieving authors’ publications. Author identifiers are only used by a minority of physicians and are therefore not recommended in this context, as they would lead to inaccurate results.

URL : Accuracy of PubMed-based author lists of publications and use of author identifiers to address author name ambiguity: a cross-sectional study

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03845-3

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The aging effect in evolving scientific citation networks

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Feng Hu, Lin Ma, Xiu-Xiu Zhan, Yinzuo Zhou, Chuang Liu, Haixing Zhao, Zi-Ke Zhang

The study of citation networks is of interest to the scientific community. However, the underlying mechanism driving individual citation behavior remains imperfectly understood, despite the recent proliferation of quantitative research methods.

Traditional network models normally use graph theory to consider articles as nodes and citations as pairwise relationships between them. In this paper, we propose an alternative evolutionary model based on hypergraph theory in which one hyperedge can have an arbitrary number of nodes, combined with an aging effect to reflect the temporal dynamics of scientific citation behavior.

Both theoretical approximate solution and simulation analysis of the model are developed and validated using two benchmark datasets from different disciplines, i.e. publications of the American Physical Society (APS) and the Digital Bibliography & Library Project (DBLP).

Further analysis indicates that the attraction of early publications will decay exponentially. Moreover, the experimental results show that the aging effect indeed has a significant influence on the description of collective citation patterns.

Shedding light on the complex dynamics driving these mechanisms facilitates the understanding of the laws governing scientific evolution and the quantitative evaluation of scientific outputs.

URL : The aging effect in evolving scientific citation networks

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03929-8

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What is the benefit from publishing a working paper in a journal in terms of citations? Evidence from economics

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Klaus Wohlraben, Constantin Bürgi

Many papers in economics that are published in peer reviewed journals are initially released in widely circulated working paper series. This raises the question about the benefit of publishing in a peer-reviewed journal in terms of citations.

Specifically, we address the question: to what extent does the stamp of approval obtained by publishing in a peer-reviewed journal lead to more subsequent citations for papers that are already available in working paper series? Our data set comprises about 28,000 working papers from four major working paper series in economics.

Using panel data methods, we show that the publication in a peer reviewed journal results in around twice the number of yearly citations relative to working papers that never get published in a journal. Our results hold in several robustness checks.

URL : What is the benefit from publishing a working paper in a journal in terms of citations? Evidence from economics

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03942-x

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Evidence for Trusted Digital Repository Reviews: An Analysis of Perspectives

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Jonathan David Crabtree

Building trust in our research infrastructure is important for the future of the academy. Trust in research data repositories is critical as they provide the evidence for past discoveries as well as the input for future discoveries.

Archives and repositories are examining their options for trustworthy review, audit, and certification as a means to build trust within their content creator and user communities. One option these institutions have is to increase and demonstrate their trustworthiness is to apply for the CoreTrustSeal.

Applicants for the CoreTrustSeal are becoming more numerous and diverse, ranging general purpose repositories, preservation infrastructure providers, and domain repositories. This demand for certification and the subjective nature of decisions around levels of CORETrustSeal compliance drives this dissertation.

It is a study of the review process and its veracity and consistency in determining the trustworthiness of applicant repositories. Several assumptions underlie this work. First, audits and reviews must be based on evidence supplied by the repository under scrutiny; second, and not all reviewers will approach a piece of evidence in the same fashion or give it the same weight. Third, the value and veracity of required evidence may be subject to reviewers’ diverse perspectives and diverse repository community norms.

This research used a thematic qualitative analysis approach to identify similarities and differences in CoreTrustSeal reviewers’ responses during semi-structured interviews in order to better understand potential subjective differences among respondents. The participants’ non-probabilistic sample represented a balance in perspectives across three anticipated categories: administrator, archivist, and technologist.

Themes converged around several key concepts. Nearly all participants felt they were performing a peer review process and working to help the repository community and the research enterprise.

Reviewers were questioned about the various CoreTrustSeal application requirements and which ones they felt were the most important. No clear evidence emerged to indicate that variations in perspectives affected the subjective review of application evidence. The same categories of evidence were often selected and identified as being critical across all three categories (i.e., administrator, archivist, and technologist).

Many valuable suggestions from participants were recorded and can be implemented to ensure the consistency and sustainability of this trusted repository review process.

These suggestions and concepts were also very evenly distributed across the three perspectives. The balance in perspectives is potentially due to participants’ experience levels and their years of experience in various positions, holding many responsibilities, within the organizations they represented.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.17615/npck-km73