EN

A Multi-dimensional Investigation of the Effects of Publication Retraction on Scholarly Impact

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Xin Shuai, Isabelle Moulinier, Jason Rollins, Tonya Custis, Frank Schilder, Mathilda Edmunds

Over the past few decades, the rate of publication retractions has increased dramatically in academia. In this study, we investigate retractions from a quantitative perspective, aiming to answer two fundamental questions.

One, how do retractions influence the scholarly impact of retracted papers, authors, and institutions? Two, does this influence propagate to the wider academic community through scholarly associations?

Specifically, we analyzed a set of retracted articles indexed in Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WoS), and ran multiple experiments to compare changes in scholarly impact against a control set of non-retracted articles, authors, and institutions.

We further applied the Granger Causality test to investigate whether different scientific topics are dynamically affected by retracted papers occurring within those topics.

Our results show two key findings: first, the scholarly impact of retracted papers and authors significantly decreases after retraction, and the most severe impact decrease correlates to retractions based on proven purposeful scientific misconduct; second, this retraction penalty does not seem to spread through the broader scholarly social graph, but instead has a limited and localized effect.

Our findings may provide useful insights for scholars or science committees to evaluate the scholarly value of papers, authors, or institutions related to retractions.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.09123

FR

La Data au service de l’innovation dans les Services d’Information Documentaires (SID) universitaires nationaux

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Auteur/Author : Sennouni Amine

Appréhender la place de la Data dans les services d’information documentaires (SID) a été abordé en portant un aperçu sur la littérature traitant de la question.

Toutefois l’usage de la data dans les SID doit aussi être ancré dans la pratique quotidienne des structures info-documentaires dans le contexte marocain, en tentant de mettre à la loupe l’usage que fait les services d’information documentaires des données qu’ils produisent ou ils reçoivent dans leur fonctionnement et l’accomplissement de leur mission.

Ainsi, quatre responsables de bibliothèques et de centres de documentation ont été interrogés sur ces éléments à travers un questionnaire qui leur a été acheminé (un centre de documentation spécialisé, une bibliothèque publique, et deux bibliothèques universitaires).

URL : http://rfsic.revues.org/2759

FR

Wikiconflits : un corpus de discussions éditoriales conflictuelles du Wikipédia francophone

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Auteurs/Authors : Celine Poudat, Natalia Grabar, Camille Paloque-Berges, Thierry Chanier, Jin Kun

Si Wikipédia (WP), qui fête aujourd’hui ses quinze ans, a donné lieu à de nombreuses études et projets de recherche qui ont permis de saisir différents aspects de son fonctionnement, de sa gouvernance ou encore des processus de réécriture à l’œuvre dans les articles, le projet encyclopédique a surtout été observé par les sciences sociales, et la question de l’écriture collaborative a été plutôt abordée du point de vue de la coopération (e.g. Viegas et al. 2004, Brandes & Lemer 2007, Kittur & Kraut 2008, Stvilia et al. 2008) que de celui de l’écriture, et des caractéristiques linguistiques et discursives particulières que le projet encyclopédique et son dispositif induisent.

Le corpus Wikiconflits, qui est l’objet du présent article, a été développé pour pallier cette situation et encourager les études linguistiques sur le projet encyclopédique, du moins est­ ce l’une de nos ambitions.

Wikiconflits s’articule ainsi autour des pages de discussion éditoriale associées aux articles encyclopédiques. Si le processus normal d’une édition d’article sur WP est collaboratif et constructif – c’est le cas de la grande majorité du WP anglophone, la coopération peut être plus ardue et entraîner des conflits éditoriaux.

En tant que frontières de la discussion et la collaboration, les conflits nous semblent des objets particulièrement intéressants à aborder pour caractériser ce nouveau genre discursif de la page de discussion éditoriale et collaborative.

Nous avons ainsi choisi de nous concentrer sur les articles ayant été le lieu de conflits, voire de guerres éditoriales. L’objectif du présent article est de présenter le corpus Wikiconflits, de ses principes de constitution à sa construction, en explicitant également les perspectives de recherche dans lesquelles nous souhaitons le mobiliser.

URL : https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01485427

EN

A Century of Science: Globalization of Scientific Collaborations, Citations, and Innovations

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Yuxiao Dong, Hao Ma, Zhihong Shen, Kuansan Wang

Progress in science has advanced the development of human society across history, with dramatic revolutions shaped by information theory, genetic cloning, and artificial intelligence, among the many scientific achievements produced in the 20th century. However, the way that science advances itself is much less well-understood.

In this work, we study the evolution of scientific development over the past century by presenting an anatomy of 89 million digitalized papers published between 1900 and 2015.

We find that science has benefited from the shift from individual work to collaborative effort, with over 90% of the world-leading innovations generated by collaborations in this century, nearly four times higher than they were in the 1900s.

We discover that rather than the frequent myopic- and self-referencing that was common in the early 20th century, modern scientists instead tend to look for literature further back and farther around.

Finally, we also observe the globalization of scientific development from 1900 to 2015, including 25-fold and 7-fold increases in international collaborations and citations, respectively, as well as a dramatic decline in the dominant accumulation of citations by the US, the UK, and Germany, from 95% to 50% over the same period.

Our discoveries are meant to serve as a starter for exploring the visionary ways in which science has developed throughout the past century, generating insight into and an impact upon the current scientific innovations and funding policies.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.05150

EN

Should biomedical research be like Airbnb?

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Vivien R. Bonazzi, Philip E. Bourne

The thesis presented here is that biomedical research is based on the trusted exchange of services. That exchange would be conducted more efficiently if the trusted software platforms to exchange those services, if they exist, were more integrated.

While simpler and narrower in scope than the services governing biomedical research, comparison to existing internet-based platforms, like Airbnb, can be informative.

We illustrate how the analogy to internet-based platforms works and does not work and introduce The Commons, under active development at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and elsewhere, as an example of the move towards platforms for research.

URL : Should biomedical research be like Airbnb?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2001818

EN

An Interactive Map for Showcasing Repository Impacts

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Hui Zhang, Camden Lopez

Digital repository managers rely on usage metrics such as the number of downloads to demonstrate research visibility and impacts of the repositories. Increasingly, they find that current tools such as spreadsheets and charts are ineffective for revealing important elements of usage, including reader locations, and for attracting the targeted audiences.

This article describes the design and development of a readership map that provides an interactive, near-real-time visualization of actual visits to an institutional repository using data from Google Analytics.

The readership map exhibits the global impacts of a repository by displaying the city of every view or download together with the title of the scholarship being read and a hyperlink to its page in the repository.

We will discuss project motivation and development issues such as authentication with Google API, metadata integration, performance tuning, and data privacy.

URL : http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/12349

EN

Linked Data is People: Building a Knowledge Graph to Reshape the Library Staff Directory

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Jason A. Clark, Scott W. H. Young

One of our greatest library resources is people. Most libraries have staff directory information published on the web, yet most of this data is trapped in local silos, PDFs, or unstructured HTML markup.

With this in mind, the library informatics team at Montana State University (MSU) Library set a goal of remaking our people pages by connecting the local staff database to the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud.

In pursuing linked data integration for library staff profiles, we have realized two primary use cases: improving the search engine optimization (SEO) for people pages and creating network graph visualizations.

In this article, we will focus on the code to build this library graph model as well as the linked data workflows and ontology expressions developed to support it. Existing linked data work has largely centered around machine-actionable data and improvements for bots or intelligent software agents.

Our work demonstrates that connecting your staff directory to the LOD cloud can reveal relationships among people in dynamic ways, thereby raising staff visibility and bringing an increased level of understanding and collaboration potential for one of our primary assets: the people that make the library happen.

URL : http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/12320