What increases (social) media attention: Research impact, author prominence or title attractiveness?

Authors : Olga Zagovora, Katrin Weller, Milan Janosov, Claudia Wagner, Isabella Peters

Do only major scientific breakthroughs hit the news and social media, or does a ‘catchy’ title help to attract public attention? How strong is the connection between the importance of a scientific paper and the (social) media attention it receives?

In this study we investigate these questions by analysing the relationship between the observed attention and certain characteristics of scientific papers from two major multidisciplinary journals: Nature Communication (NC) and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

We describe papers by features based on the linguistic properties of their titles and centrality measures of their authors in their co-authorship network.

We identify linguistic features and collaboration patterns that might be indicators for future attention, and are characteristic to different journals, research disciplines, and media sources.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.06299

Do all citations value the same? Valuing citations by the value of the citing items

Authors : Cristiano Giuffrida, Giovanni Abramo, Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo

Bibliometricians have long recurred to citation counts to measure the impact of publications on the advancement of science. However, since the earliest days of the field, some scholars have questioned whether all citations should value the same, and have gone on to weight them by a variety of factors.

However sophisticated the operationalization of the measures, the methodologies used in weighting citations still present limits in their underlying assumptions. This work takes an alternate approach to resolving the underlying problem: the proposal is to value citations by the impact of the citing articles.

As well as conceptualizing a new indicator of impact, the work illustrates its application to the 2004-2012 Italian scientific production indexed in the WoS.

The new indicator appears highly correlated to traditional field normalized citations, however the shifts observed between the two measures are frequent and the number of outliers not at all negligible. Moreover, the new indicator seems to show greater « sensitivity » when used in identification of the top-cited papers.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.06088

Nanopublications: A Growing Resource of Provenance-Centric Scientific Linked Data

Authors : Tobias Kuhn, Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Alexander Malic, Jorrit H. Poelen, Allen H. Hurlbert, Emilio Centeno Ortiz, Laura I. Furlong, Núria Queralt-Rosinach, Christine Chichester, Juan M. Banda, Egon Willighagen, Friederike Ehrhart, Chris Evelo, Tareq B. Malas, Michel Dumontier

Nanopublications are a Linked Data format for scholarly data publishing that has received considerable uptake in the last few years. In contrast to the common Linked Data publishing practice, nanopublications work at the granular level of atomic information snippets and provide a consistent container format to attach provenance and metadata at this atomic level.

While the nanopublications format is domain-independent, the datasets that have become available in this format are mostly from Life Science domains, including data about diseases, genes, proteins, drugs, biological pathways, and biotic interactions.

More than 10 million such nanopublications have been published, which now form a valuable resource for studies on the domain level of the given Life Science domains as well as on the more technical levels of provenance modeling and heterogeneous Linked Data.

We provide here an overview of this combined nanopublication dataset, show the results of some overarching analyses, and describe how it can be accessed and queried.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.06532

Agriculture Journals Covered by Directory of Open Access Journals: An Analytical Study

Author : Muruli Acharya

With the advent of open access movement, open access journals (OAJs) being the prodigious source of academic and research information have been gaining significant magnitude.

The electronic age has made it easier and more convenient than ever to break barriers to research information. The present study aims to study and analyse the status of 497 OAJs in Agriculture indexed in Directory of Open Access Journals.

Specified traits such as Geographic and language wise distribution, coverage of Indexing/Abstracting databases, ranking of journals according to Impact Factor (IF), OA licensing model adopted, policy of plagiarism, visibility on social media and related issues of the OAJs in Agriculture are evaluated in the paper.

Results indicated the dominance of De Gruyter Open as a publisher with highest number of OAJs, English as a content language, Indonesia with highest number of OAJs, Google scholar with highest journals indexed.

The study observes the increasing migration of journals from commercial practice to OA. Frontiers in Plant Science found with highest Impact Factor among OAJs in Agriculture.

URL : Agriculture Journals Covered by Directory of Open Access Journals: An Analytical Study

Alternative location : http://publications.drdo.gov.in/ojs/index.php/djlit/article/view/13114

Relationship between Online Journal Usage and their Citations in the Academic Publications: A Case Study

Authors : Jessy Abdul, Mahabaleshwara Rao, Amitha Puranik

The advancement of science and technology has impacted functioning of the libraries of higher educational institutions, and the mode of providing resources for various academic activities.

For many years, libraries attached to educational institutions have been labouring with the question of how to determine the value of journals in their specific library collection. The Health Sciences Library of Manipal Academy of Higher Education at Manipal, subscribed a vast number of online journals for their users.

A relation between the usage and citations of subscribed online journals might provide a basis for the collection management in the libraries of academic and research institutions.

The current study resolved to identify whether relationship exists between usage of subscribed online journals and their citations in the academic publications of the health science professionals from 2010 to 2015.

The study found a statistically significant relationship between subscribed online journal usage and their citations in the publications through the inferential test of Spearman’s rank-order correlation.

For collection development of online journals, libraries can utilise the usage or citation data of journals as a decision making tool.

URL : Relationship between Online Journal Usage and their Citations in the Academic Publications: A Case Study

Alternative location : http://publications.drdo.gov.in/ojs/index.php/djlit/article/view/13114

Is together better? Examining scientific collaborations across multiple authors, institutions, and departments

Authors : Lovenoor Aulck, Kishore Vasan, Jevin West

Collaborations are an integral part of scientific research and publishing. In the past, access to large-scale corpora has limited the ways in which questions about collaborations could be investigated. However, with improvements in data/metadata quality and access, it is possible to explore the idea of research collaboration in ways beyond the traditional definition of multiple authorship.

In this paper, we examine scientific works through three different lenses of collaboration: across multiple authors, multiple institutions, and multiple departments. We believe this to be a first look at multiple departmental collaborations as we employ extensive data curation to disambiguate authors’ departmental affiliations for nearly 70,000 scientific papers.

We then compare citation metrics across the different definitions of collaboration and find that papers defined as being collaborative were more frequently cited than their non-collaborative counterparts, regardless of the definition of collaboration used.

We also share preliminary results from examining the relationship between co-citation and co-authorship by analyzing the extent to which similar fields (as determined by co-citation) are collaborating on works (as determined by co-authorship).

These preliminary results reveal trends of compartmentalization with respect to intra-institutional collaboration and show promise in being expanded.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.04093