EN

A review of literature on evaluating the scientific, social and political impact of social sciences and humanities research

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Emanuela Reale,  Dragana Avramov,  Kubra Canhial,  Claire Donovan,  Ramon Flecha, Poul Holm,  Charles Larkin,  Benedetto Lepori,  Judith Mosoni-Fried,  Esther Oliver, Emilia Primeri,  Lidia Puigvert,  Andrea Scharnhorst,  Andràs Schubert,  Marta Soler Sàndor, Soòs  Teresa, Sordé  Charles, Travis  René Van Horik

Recently, the need to contribute to the evaluation of the scientific, social, and political impact of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) research has become a demand of policy makers and society.

The international scientific community has made significant advances that have transformed the impact of evaluation landscape. This article reviews the existing scientific knowledge on evaluation tools and techniques that are applied to assess the scientific impact of SSH research; the changing structure of social and political impacts of SSH research is investigated based on an overarching research question: to what extent do scholars attempt to apply methods, instruments, and approaches that take into account the distinctive features of SSH?

The review also includes examples of European Union (EU) projects that demonstrate these impacts. This article culminates in a discussion of the development of the assessment of different impacts and identifies limitations, and areas and topics to explore in the future.

URL : A review of literature on evaluating the scientific, social and political impact of social sciences and humanities research

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvx025

EN

Beyond Fact Checking: Reconsidering the Status of Truth of Published Articles

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : David Pontille, Didier Torny

Since the 17th century, scientific knowledge has been produced through a collective process, involving specific technologies used to perform experiments, to regulate modalities for participation of peers or lay people, and to ensure validation of the facts and publication of major results.

In such a world guided by the quest for a new kind of truth against previous beliefs various forms of misconduct – from subtle plagiarism to the entire fabrication of data and results – have largely been considered as minimal, if not inexistent.

Yet, some “betrayers of the truth” have been alleged in many fraudulent cases at least from the 1970s onward and the phenomenon is currently a growing concern in many academic corners. Facing numerous alerts, journals have generalized dedicated editorial formats to notify their readers of the emerging doubts affecting articles they had published.

This short piece is exclusively focused on these formats, which consists in “flagging” some articles to mark their problematic status.The visibility given to these flags and policies undermine the very basic components of the economy of science: How long can we collectively pretend that peer-reviewed knowledge should be the anchor to face a “post-truth” world?

URL : https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01576348

FR

Les classements à l’international des revues en SHS

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Auteurs/Authors : David Pontille, Didier Torny

Bien que plusieurs classements de revues aient été élaborés dès les années 1970, le caractère inédit de ceux qui ont émergé au cours des années 2000 réside dans leur statut d’instrument de politique publique. C’est le cas de l’Australie, du Brésil, de la France, de la Flandre, de la Norvège, et des Pays-Bas où cette technologie d’évaluation est en vigueur pour certains domaines – notamment en sciences humaines et sociales (SHS).

Dans cet article, nous analysons les modes d’existence de cette technologie d’évaluation spécifique. Bien que la formule générique du « classement de revues » se propage au plan international , différentes versions se développent parallèlement : leurs modalités de production, les valeurs défendues par leurs promoteurs et leurs usagers, aussi bien que leurs formes concrètes sont extrêmement variées.

Nous montrons que l’espace de variations des classements de revues en SHS est toujours bordé par deux options : favoriser une « bonne recherche » qui, sous l’effet d’avantages cumulatifs, risque de conduire à une science (hyper)normale soutenant des dispositions de conformité sociale chez les chercheurs ; encourager l’émergence des communautés minoritaires (linguistiques, disciplinaires, interdisciplinaires) et promouvoir la diversité des méthodes, théories et objets, au risque de mener à des formes de relativisme ou d’archipelisation de la recherche.

URL : https://hal-mines-paristech.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01256027

EN

Health sciences libraries’ subscriptions to journals: expectations of general practice departments and collection-based analysis

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : David Barreau, Céline Bouton, Vincent Renard, Jean-Pascal Fournier

Objective

The aims of this study were to (i) assess the expectations of general practice departments regarding health sciences libraries’ subscriptions to journals and (ii) describe the current general practice journal collections of health sciences libraries.

Methods

A cross-sectional survey was distributed electronically to the thirty-five university general practice departments in France. General practice departments were asked to list ten journals to which they expected access via the subscriptions of their health sciences libraries.

A ranked reference list of journals was then developed. Access to these journals was assessed through a survey sent to all health sciences libraries in France. Adequacy ratios (access/need) were calculated for each journal.

Results

All general practice departments completed the survey. The total reference list included 44 journals. This list was heterogeneous in terms of indexation/impact factor, language of publication, and scope (e.g., patient care, research, or medical education).

Among the first 10 journals listed, La Revue Prescrire (96.6%), La Revue du Praticien–Médecine Générale (90.9%), the British Medical Journal (85.0%), Pédagogie Médicale (70.0%), Exercer (69.7%), and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (62.5%) had the highest adequacy ratios, whereas Family Practice (4.2%), the British Journal of General Practice (16.7%), Médecine (29.4%), and theEuropean Journal of General Practice (33.3%) had the lowest adequacy ratios.

Conclusions:

General practice departments have heterogeneous expectations in terms of health sciences libraries’ subscriptions to journals. It is important for librarians to understand the heterogeneity of these expectations, as well as local priorities, so that journal access meets users’ needs.

URL : Health sciences libraries’ subscriptions to journals: expectations of general practice departments and collection-based analysis

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2018.282

EN

Analysing researchers’ outreach efforts and the association with publication metrics: A case study of Kudos

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Mojisola Erdt, Htet Htet Aung, Ashley Sara Aw, Charlie Rapple, Yin-Leng Theng

With the growth of scholarly collaboration networks and social communication platforms, members of the scholarly community are experimenting with their approach to disseminating research outputs, in an effort to increase their audience and outreach.

However, from a researcher’s point of view, it is difficult to determine whether efforts to make work more visible are worthwhile (in terms of the association with publication metrics) and within that, difficult to assess which platform or network is most effective for sharing work and connecting to a wider audience.

We undertook a case study of Kudos (https://www.growkudos.com), a web-based service that claims to help researchers increase the outreach of their publications, to examine the most effective tools for sharing publications online, and to investigate which actions are associated with improved metrics.

We extracted a dataset from Kudos of 830,565 unique publications claimed by authors, for which 20,775 had actions taken to explain or share via Kudos, and for 4,867 of these full text download data from publishers was available.

Findings show that researchers are most likely to share their work on Facebook, but links shared on Twitter are more likely to be clicked on. A Mann-Whitney U test revealed that a treatment group (publications having actions in Kudos) had a significantly higher median average of 149 full text downloads (23.1% more) per publication as compared to a control group (having no actions in Kudos) with a median average of 121 full text downloads per publication.

These findings suggest that performing actions on publications, such as sharing, explaining, or enriching, could help to increase the number of full text downloads of a publication.

URL : Analysing researchers’ outreach efforts and the association with publication metrics: A case study of Kudos

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0183217

FR

Quelles perspectives pour l’Open Access en sciences juridiques après la loi « République numérique » ?

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Auteur/Author : Lionel Maurel

L’Open Access constituait déjà une réalité dans le domaine des sciences juridiques, même si les pratiques des chercheurs pouvaient être moins avancées que dans d’autres disciplines.

La loi République numérique, adoptée en octobre 2016, introduit au bénéfice des chercheurs un nouveau droit au dépôt de leurs publications en archives ouvertes, qui peut contribuer à faire évoluer la situation dans le domaine juridique.

Mais elle poursuit également l’ouverture en Open Data des données juridiques, notamment en ce qui concerne la jurisprudence. Les sciences juridiques se trouvent donc dans la situation originale où leur objet-même sera bientôt quasi-intégralement en Libre accès, ce qui peut favoriser leur cheminement vers l’Open Science (Science Ouverte).

URL : Quelles perspectives pour l’Open Access en sciences juridiques après la loi « République numérique » ?

Alternative location : https://ojs.law.cornell.edu/index.php/joal/article/view/60

EN

Citation Count Analysis for Papers with Preprints

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Sergey Feldman, Kyle Lo, Waleed Ammar

We explore the degree to which papers prepublished on arXiv garner more citations, in an attempt to paint a sharper picture of fairness issues related to prepublishing. A paper’s citation count is estimated using a negative-binomial generalized linear model (GLM) while observing a binary variable which indicates whether the paper has been prepublished.

We control for author influence (via the authors’ h-index at the time of paper writing), publication venue, and overall time that paper has been available on arXiv. Our analysis only includes papers that were eventually accepted for publication at top-tier CS conferences, and were posted on arXiv either before or after the acceptance notification.

We observe that papers submitted to arXiv before acceptance have, on average, 65\% more citations in the following year compared to papers submitted after. We note that this finding is not causal, and discuss possible next steps.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.05238