EN

Measuring the visibility of the University’s scientific production using GoogleScholar, « Publish or Perish » software and Scientometrics

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Open access to scientific information through institutional digital repositories presents today’s world information environment and the transformations imposed by information society.

The first Romanian institutional repository was implemented at Transilvania University of Brasov. As part of the undertaken research, the visibility and the impact of the university’s scientific production was measured using the scientific methods of scientometry, as a fundamental instrument for determining the international value of an university as well as for the statistical evaluation of scientific research results.

The results showed that an open access institutional repository would significantly add to the visibility of the university’s scientific production.In this article we define the scientific production and productivity and present the main indicators for the measurement of the scientific activity.

The impact of the research is analyzed and measured through scientometric indicators. The analysis of the citations represents a scientometric indicator for the evaluation of the scientific researches.

Through the number of citations we can analyse the quality of the scientific information. Google Scholar was used as a scientometric database which can be consulted free of charge on the Internet and which indexes academic papers from institutional repositories, identifying also the referenced citations.

The free “Publish or Perish” software can be used as an analysis instrument for the impact of the research, by analysing the citations through the h-index.

We present the methodology and the results of an exploratory study made at the Transilvania University of Brasov regarding the h-index of the academic staff. H-index was calculated by using “Publish or Perish” software, comparing the number of ISI indexed published articles and the number of citations from “ISI Web of Science”.

Using “Publish or Perish”, we calculated h-index, g-index, hc-index and HI norm. We analyzed the research performances achieved by Brasov academic community in 2008, as realised in their annual evaluation -number of papers, books, research contracts, etc- by comparing the four indexes of those 60 professors with the best results.

We will present correlation indicators and the importance of open access for increasing the impact of scientific research by using institutional repositories.

URL : https://www.ifla.org/past-wlic/2010/155-repanovici-en.pdf

status

Measuring the visibility of the universi…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Measuring the visibility of the universities’ scientific production using scientometric methods :
Paper presents scientometry as a science and a fundamental instrument for determining the
international value of an university as well as for the statistical evaluation of scientific research results.
The impact of the research measurable through scientometric indicators is analyzed. Promoting the
scientific production of universities through institutional digital repositories deals with the concept of
scientific production of the university and the development of scientific research in information
society. These concepts are approached through the prism of marketing methods and techniques. The
digital repository is analyzed as a PRODUCT, destined for promoting, archieving and preserving
scientific production.
URL : http://www.wseas.us/e-library/conferences/2010/Tunisia/EDUTE/EDUTE-22.pdf

EN

How to assess the impact of an electronic document? And what does impact mean anyway?: Reliable usage statistics in heterogeneous repository communities

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Usually the impact of research and researchers is quantified by using citation data: either by journal-centered citation data as in the case of the journal impact factor (JIF) or by author-centered citation data as in the case of the Hirsch- or h-index.This paper aims to discuss a range of impact measures, especially usage-based metrics, and to report the results of two surveys.

Design/methodology/approach – The first part of the article analyzes both citation-based and usage-based metrics.

The second part is based on the findings of the surveys: one in the form of a brainstorming session with information professionals and scientists at the OAI6 conference in Geneva, the second in the form of expert interviews, mainly with scientists.

Findings – The results of the surveys indicate an interest in the social aspects of science, like visualizations of social graphs both for persons and their publications. Furthermore, usage data are considered an appropriate measure to describe quality and coverage of scientific documents; admittedly, the consistence of usage information among repositories has to be kept in mind. The scientists who took part in the survey also asked for community services, assuming these might help to identify relevant scientific information more easily. Some of the other topics of interest were personalization or easy submission procedures.

Originality/value – This paper delineates current discussions about citation-based and usage-based metrics. Based on the results of the surveys, it depicts which functionalities could enhance repositories, what features are required by scientists and information professionals, and whether usage-based services are considered valuable. These results also outline some elements of future repository research.

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18620/

status

Dazzling technologies’: Addressing the d…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Dazzling technologies’: Addressing the digital divide in the Southern African universities :
The ‘digital divide’ is both an infrastructural reality and a metaphor for Africa’s position in the global economy. We live in an era that defines itself by the extent to which it interacts, creates and shares knowledge globally, using the network of advanced telecommunications, the Internet. Southern African countries, their universities and research communities, are recognising that focusing purely on basic network infrastructure is inadequate to the needs of scholarly research and higher education in the 21st century. Southern African universities must acquire the means to participate effectively in global knowledge production. In particular, they must adopt and use advanced telecommunications infrastructure in the form of National Research and Education Networks or NRENs and a regional REN to connect students and researchers across national borders.
Yet the means to share knowledge is not sufficient to bring about a healthy knowledge economy. A paradigm shift has to be made from a purely technological view of the issues, to a full recognition of the interplay between technological infrastructure and the developmental and knowledge purposes to which it is put.
This article provides an overview of the emerging NREN landscape, noting developments under way that are intended to promote and facilitate excellence in scientific networking in the region. It discusses the constraints and enabling conditions for overcoming the digital divide in the Southern African higher education context. Finally, it proposes a rudimentary performance indicator framework for assessing progress.

URL : http://link.wits.ac.za/journal/AJIC10-Kotecha.pdf

status

Copyright and education in Africa: Lesso…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Copyright and education in Africa: Lessons on African copyright and access to knowledge
The African Copyright and Access to Knowledge (ACA2K) project is a pan-African research network of academics and researchers from law, economics and the information sciences, spanning Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa and Uganda. Research conducted by the project was designed to investigate the extent to which copyright is fulfilling its objective of facilitating access to knowledge, and learning materials in particular, in the study countries. The hypotheses tested
during the course of research were that: (a) the copyright environments in study countries are not maximising access to learning materials, and (b) the copyright environments in study countries can be changed to increase access to learning materials. The hypotheses were tested through both doctrinal legal analysis and qualitative interview-based analysis of practices and perceptions among relevant stakeholders. This paper is a comparative review of some of the key findings across the eight
countries.
URL : http://link.wits.ac.za/journal/AJIC10-Schonwetter.pdf

EN

Research productivity-visibility-accessibility and scholarly communication in Southern African universities

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

The project for the revitalisation of Southern Africa’s higher education sector is dependent on, among other things, the capacity of the region’s universities to produce research, to communicate that research to a broad public audience and to use the research output in the process of educating future generations of graduates. Given this context, research output in the great majority of Southern African universities is barely visible.

While the introduction of new digital media may offer greater accessibility and expanded opportunities for the visibility of scholarly communication, this may be insufficient to meet the needs of the many scholars and other actors who seek to build on existing bodies of knowledge, whether to advance society or in order to create knowledge for its own sake.

This article reports the findings of two 2008 studies – The state of public science in the SADC region and Opening access to knowledge in Southern African universities. Working within a frame which understands knowledge produced in universities as a public good, this article examines the issues at play in terms of the productivity-visibility-accessibility of scholarly communications in regional higher education.

The conclusion discusses a possible approach to improve such productivity-visibility-accessibility, through the adoption of a strategic vision of open access to knowledge and through consideration of two breakthroughs pertinent to achieving a vision of revitalised higher education in the region.

URL : http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/19768?show=full

status

Access to Africa’s knowledge: Publishing…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Access to Africa’s knowledge: Publishing development research and measuring value :
This paper reviews, critically, the discourse of research publication policy and the directives of the regional and global organisations that advise African countries with respect to their relevance to African scholarly communication. What emerges is a readiness to use the concepts and language of the public good, making claims for the power of technology to resolve issues of African development. However, when it comes to implementing scholarly publication policies, this vision of technological
power and development-focused scientific output is undermined by a reversion to a conservative research culture that relies on competitive systems for valuing and accrediting scholarship, predicated upon the systems and values managed by powerful global commercial publishing consortia.
The result is that the policies put in place to advance African research effectively act as an impediment to ambitions for a revival of a form of scholarship that could drive continental growth. While open access publishing models offer solutions to the marginalisation of African research, the paper argues that what is also needed is a re-evaluation of the values that underpin the recognition of scholarly publishing, to better align with the continent’s articulated research goals.
URL : http://link.wits.ac.za/journal/AJIC10-Gray.pdf