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Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

The emergence of the web has fundamentally affected most aspects of information communication, including scholarly communication. The immediacy that characterizes publishing information to the web, as well as accessing it, allows for a dramatic increase in the speed of dissemination of scholarly knowledge. But, the transition from a paper-based to a web-based scholarly communication system also poses challenges. In this paper, we focus on reference rot, the combination of link rot and content drift to which references to web resources included in Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) articles are subject.

We investigate the extent to which reference rot impacts the ability to revisit the web context that surrounds STM articles some time after their publication. We do so on the basis of a vast collection of articles from three corpora that span publication years 1997 to 2012. For over one million references to web resources extracted from over 3.5 million articles, we determine whether the HTTP URI is still responsive on the live web and whether web archives contain an archived snapshot representative of the state the referenced resource had at the time it was referenced.

We observe that the fraction of articles containing references to web resources is growing steadily over time. We find one out of five STM articles suffering from reference rot, meaning it is impossible to revisit the web context that surrounds them some time after their publication. When only considering STM articles that contain references to web resources, this fraction increases to seven out of ten. We suggest that, in order to safeguard the long-term integrity of the web-based scholarly record, robust solutions to combat the reference rot problem are required. In conclusion, we provide a brief insight into the directions that are explored with this regard in the context of the Hiberlink project.

URL : Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot

DOI : 10.1371/journal.pone.0115253

EN

An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

The choice of an efficient document preparation system is an important decision for any academic researcher. To assist the research community, we report a software usability study in which 40 researchers across different disciplines prepared scholarly texts with either Microsoft Word or LaTeX. The probe texts included simple continuous text, text with tables and subheadings, and complex text with several mathematical equations. We show that LaTeX users were slower than Word users, wrote less text in the same amount of time, and produced more typesetting, orthographical, grammatical, and formatting errors. On most measures, expert LaTeX users performed even worse than novice Word users. LaTeX users, however, more often report enjoying using their respective software. We conclude that even experienced LaTeX users may suffer a loss in productivity when LaTeX is used, relative to other document preparation systems. Individuals, institutions, and journals should carefully consider the ramifications of this finding when choosing document preparation strategies, or requiring them of authors.

URL : https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/journal.pone.0115069.pdf

DOI : 10.1371/journal.pone.0115069

Non classé

Annotation as a New Paradigm in Research Archiving

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

« We outline a paradigm to preserve results of digital scholarship, whether they are query results, feature values, or topic assignments. This paradigm is characterized by using annotations as multifunctional carriers and making them portable. The testing grounds we have chosen are two significant enterprises, one in the history of science, and one in Hebrew scholarship. The first one (CKCC) focuses on the results of a project where a Dutch consortium of universities, research institutes, and cultural heritage institutions experimented for 4 years with language techniques and topic modeling methods with the aim to analyze the emergence of scholarly debates. The data: a complex set of about 20.000 letters. The second one (DTHB) is a multi-year effort to express the linguistic features of the Hebrew bible in a text database, which is still growing in detail and sophistication. Versions of this database are packaged in commercial bible study software. We state that the results of these forms of scholarship require new knowledge management and archive practices. Only when researchers can build efficiently on each other’s (intermediate) results, they can achieve the aggregations of quality data by which new questions can be answered, and hidden patterns visualized. Archives are required to find a balance between preserving authoritative versions of sources and supporting collaborative efforts in digital scholarship. Annotations are promising vehicles for preserving and reusing research results. »

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6069

Non classé

Return on citation: a consistent metric to evaluate papers, journals and researchers

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

« Evaluating and comparing the academic performance of a journal, a researcher or a single paper has long remained a critical, necessary but also controversial issue. Most of existing metrics invalidate comparison across different fields of science or even between different types of papers in the same field. This paper proposes a new metric, called return on citation (ROC), which is simply a citation ratio but applies to evaluating the paper, the journal and the researcher in a consistent way, allowing comparison across different fields of science and between different types of papers and discouraging unnecessary and coercive/self-citation. »

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.8420

Non classé

On the relationship between interdisciplinarity and impact: different modalities of interdisciplinarity lead to different types of impact

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

« There is increasing interest among funding agencies to understand how they can best contribute to enhancing the socio-economic impact of research. Interdisciplinarity is often presented as a research mode that can facilitate impact but there exist a limited number of analytical studies that have attempted to examine whether or how interdisciplinarity can affect the societal relevance of research. We investigate fifteen Social Sciences research investments in the UK to examine how they have achieved impact. We analyse research drivers, cognitive distances, degree of integration, collaborative practices, stakeholder engagement and the type of impact generated. The analysis suggests that interdisciplinarity cannot be associated with a single type of impact mechanism. Also, interdisciplinarity is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for achieving societal relevance and impact. However, we identify a specific modality — « long-range » interdisciplinarity, which appears more likely to be associated with societal impact because of its focused problem-orientation and its strong interaction with stakeholders. »

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6684

Non classé

Patterns of Text Reuse in a Scientific Corpus

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

« We consider the incidence of text « reuse » by researchers, via a systematic pairwise comparison of the text content of all articles deposited to arXiv.org from 1991–2012. We measure the global frequencies of three classes of text reuse, and measure how chronic text reuse is distributed among authors in the dataset. We infer a baseline for accepted practice, perhaps surprisingly permissive compared with other societal contexts, and a clearly delineated set of aberrant authors. We find a negative correlation between the amount of reused text in an article and its influence, as measured by subsequent citations. Finally, we consider the distribution of countries of origin of articles containing large amounts of reused text. »

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.2716

Non classé

Approche anthropologique des usages de tablettes tactiles en formation professionnelle supérieure

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

« Cet article présente une étude exploratoire portant sur les conditions d’adoption de tablettes tactiles en contexte de formation supérieure. Des entretiens et des observations ont été menés auprès d’étudiants en licence professionnelle des métiers des bibliothèques et de la documentation. L’observation porte sur l’évolution des usages personnels, pédagogiques et professionnels et les interactions entre les différents usages. La tablette tactile prend une place particulière dans un écosystème numérique personnel renouvelé. Dans le cadre des activités pédagogiques elle apparaît principalement comme un outil de recherche sur le web. Des tensions ont été caractérisées entre une représentation globalement positive des tablettes et la réalité des situations en stage. Quant aux pratiques de lecture numérique limitées, elles expriment moins une réticence de principe que l’expression d’une difficulté dans un contexte d’évolution à modifier ses habitudes de lecture. »

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_01094808