EN

A case study exploring associations between popular media attention of scientific research and scientific citations

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : P. Sage Anderson, Aubrey R. Odom, Hunter M. Gray, Jordan B. Jones, William F. Christensen, Todd Hollingshead, Joseph G. Hadfield, Alyssa Evans-Pickett, Megan Frost, Christopher Wilson, Lance E. Davidson, Matthew K. Seeley

The association between mention of scientific research in popular media (e.g., the mainstream media or social media platforms) and scientific impact (e.g., citations) has yet to be fully explored.

The purpose of this study was to clarify this relationship, while accounting for some other factors that likely influence scientific impact (e.g., the reputations of the scientists conducting the research and academic journal in which the research was published).

To accomplish this purpose, approximately 800 peer-reviewed articles describing original research were evaluated for scientific impact, popular media attention, and reputations of the scientists/authors and publication venue.

A structural equation model was produced describing the relationship between non-scientific impact (popular media) and scientific impact (citations), while accounting for author/scientist and journal reputation.

The resulting model revealed a strong association between the amount of popular media attention given to a scientific research project and corresponding publication and the number of times that publication is cited in peer-reviewed scientific literature.

These results indicate that (1) peer-reviewed scientific publications receiving more attention in non-scientific media are more likely to be cited than scientific publications receiving less popular media attention, and (2) the non-scientific media is associated with the scientific agenda.

These results may inform scientists who increasingly use popular media to inform the general public and scientists concerning their scientific work. These results might also inform administrators of higher education and research funding mechanisms, who base decisions partly on scientific impact.

URL : A case study exploring associations between popular media attention of scientific research and scientific citations

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0234912

EN

Open Access uptake by universities worldwide

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Nicolas Robinson-Garcia​, Rodrigo Costas, Thed N. van Leeuwen

The implementation of policies promoting the adoption of an open science (OS) culture must be accompanied by indicators that allow monitoring the uptake of such policies and their potential effects on research publishing and sharing practices.

This study presents indicators of open access (OA) at the institutional level for universities worldwide. By combining data from Web of Science, Unpaywall and the Leiden Ranking disambiguation of institutions, we track OA coverage of universities’ output for 963 institutions.

This paper presents the methodological challenges, conceptual discrepancies and limitations and discusses further steps needed to move forward the discussion on fostering OA and OS practices and policies.

URL : Open Access uptake by universities worldwide

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.9410

 

EN

Analysing the Usage Data of Open Access Scholarly Books: What Can Data Tell Us?

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Alkim Ozaygen

This study explores data captured on the Internet related to OA scholarly books to provide a detailed overall picture of the dissemination of these books beginning from the point they were made OA.

To uncover the factors that impact on the digital uses of OA books, it explores relationships between book characteristics and the characteristics and motivations of the groups using and sharing books in digital landscapes.

URI : http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/79585

EN

Pandemic Publishing: Medical journals drastically speed up their publication process for Covid-19

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Serge P.J.M. Horbach

In times of public crises, including the current Covid-19 pandemic, rapid dissemination of relevant scientific knowledge is of paramount importance. The duration of scholarly journals’ publication process is one of the main factors hindering quick delivery of new information.

While proper editorial assessment and peer review obviously require some time, turnaround times for medical journals can be up to several months, which is undesirable in the era of a crisis. Following initiatives of medical journals and scholarly publishers to accelerate their publication process, this study assesses whether medical journals have indeed managed to speed up their publication process for Covid-19 related articles.

It studies the duration of 14 medical journals’ publication process both during and prior to the current pandemic. Assessing a total of 669 articles, the study concludes that medical journals have indeed drastically accelerated the publication process for Covid-19 related articles since the outbreak of the pandemic. Compared to articles published in the same journals before the pandemic, turnaround times have decreased on average by 49%.

The largest decrease in number of days between submission and publication of articles was due to a decrease in the number of days required for peer review. For articles not related to Covid-19, no acceleration of the publication process is found.

While the acceleration of journals’ publication process is laudable from the perspective of quick information dissemination, it also raises concerns relating to the quality of the peer review process and the quality of the resulting publications.

URL : https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.18.045963

EN

Wikipedia Citations: A comprehensive dataset of citations with identifiers extracted from English Wikipedia

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Harshdeep Singh, Robert West, Giovanni Colavizza

Wikipedia’s contents are based on reliable and published sources. To this date, little is known about what sources Wikipedia relies on, in part because extracting citations and identifying cited sources is challenging. To close this gap, we release Wikipedia Citations, a comprehensive dataset of citations extracted from Wikipedia.

A total of 29.3M citations were extracted from 6.1M English Wikipedia articles as of May 2020, and classified as being to books, journal articles or Web contents. We were thus able to extract 4.0M citations to scholarly publications with known identifiers — including DOI, PMC, PMID, and ISBN — and further labeled an extra 261K citations with DOIs from Crossref.

As a result, we find that 6.7% of Wikipedia articles cite at least one journal article with an associated DOI. Scientific articles cited from Wikipedia correspond to 3.5% of all articles with a DOI currently indexed in the Web of Science. We release all our code to allow the community to extend upon our work and update the dataset in the future.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.07022

EN

Open Access of COVID-19-related publications in the first quarter of 2020: a preliminary study based in PubMed

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Olatz Arrizabalaga, David Otaegui, Itziar Vergara, Julio Arrizabalaga, Eva Méndez

Background

The COVID-19 outbreak has made funders, researchers and publishers agree to have research publications, as well as other research outputs, such as data, become openly available.

In this extraordinary research context of the SARS CoV-2 pandemic, publishers are announcing that their coronavirus-related articles will be made immediately accessible in appropriate open repositories, like PubMed Central, agreeing upon funders’ and researchers’ instigation.

Methods

This work uses Unpaywall, OpenRefine and PubMed to analyse the level of openness of articles about COVID-19, published during the first quarter of 2020. It also analyses Open Access (OA) articles published about previous coronavirus (SARS CoV-1 and MERS CoV) as a means of comparison.

Results

A total of 5,611 COVID-19-related articles were analysed from PubMed. This is a much higher amount for a period of 4 months compared to those found for SARS CoV-1 and MERS during the first year of their first outbreaks (335 and 116 articles, respectively).

Regarding the levels of openness, 88.8% of the SARS CoV-2 papers are freely available; similar rates were found for the other coronaviruses. Deeper analysis showed that (i) 67.4% of articles belong to an undefined Bronze category; (ii) 76.4% of all OA papers don’t carry any license, followed by 10.4% which display restricted licensing. These patterns were found to be repeated in the three most frequent publishers: Elsevier, Springer and Wiley.

Conclusions

Our results suggest that, although scientific production is much higher than during previous epidemics and is open, there is a caveat to this opening, characterized by the absence of fundamental elements and values ​​on which Open Science is based, such as licensing.

URL : Open Access of COVID-19-related publications in the first quarter of 2020: a preliminary study based in PubMed

DOI : https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.24136.1

EN

Striving for Modernity: Layout and Abstracts in the Biomedical Literature

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Carlo Galli, Maria Teresa Colangelo, Stefano Guizzardi

Most academic journals have a fairly consistent look: they are structured similarly, their text is divided into similar sections; for example, they have an abstract at the beginning of the manuscript, and their text is usually organized in two columns.

There may be different reasons for this similarity, ranging from the need to contain publication costs by using less page space to conforming to an internationally well-accepted format that may be perceived as the hallmark of academic articles.

We surveyed 35 medical journals founded before 1960 and looked for their change in format over time and how this was experienced by and explained to readers.

We then discussed what recent research has shown about the effects of layout on reading, looking for further explanations as to why this format was so successful.

URL : Striving for Modernity: Layout and Abstracts in the Biomedical Literature

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications8030038