Archives des mots-clés : Ariel Rosenfeld

Publishing Instincts: An Exploration-Exploitation Framework for Studying Academic Publishing Behavior and “Home Venues”

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Authors : Teddy Lazebnik, Shir Aviv-Reuven, Ariel Rosenfeld

Scholarly communication is vital to scientific advancement, enabling the exchange of ideas and knowledge. When selecting publication venues, scholars consider various factors, such as journal relevance, reputation, outreach, and editorial standards and practices. However, some of these factors are inconspicuous or inconsistent across venues and individual publications.

This study proposes that scholars’ decision-making process can be conceptualized and explored through the biologically inspired exploration-exploitation (EE) framework, which posits that scholars balance between familiar and under-explored publication venues. Building on the EE framework, we introduce a grounded definition for “Home Venues” (HVs) – an informal concept used to describe the set of venues where a scholar consistently publishes – and investigate their emergence and key characteristics.

Our analysis reveals that the publication patterns of roughly three-quarters of computer science scholars align with the expectations of the EE framework. For these scholars, HVs typically emerge and stabilize after approximately 15-20 publications. Additionally, scholars with higher h-indexes or a greater number of publications, tend to have higher-ranking journals as their HVs.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.12158

Exploring scholarly perceptions of preprint servers

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Authors : Shir Aviv-Reuven, Jenny Bronstein, Ariel Rosenfeld

Introduction

Preprint servers play an important role in scholarly communication.  The study investigates scholars’ engagement, experiences, and perceptions regarding the use of these servers, both as information sources and publishing venues. This qualitative study seeks to extend our understanding of how these servers operate within the academic ecosystem and influence scholarly communication.

Method

Data was collected through 32 semi-structured interviews with scholars from different disciplines, to explore their engagement, experiences and perceptions in using these platforms.

Analysis

The data collected from these interviews underwent thematic content analysis using ATLAS.ti software. This analysis facilitated the organization and thematic examination of the textual narratives derived from the interviews.

Results

In this study, scholars discussed their perceptions about the benefits of using preprint servers in scholarly work such as rapid dissemination of information and open access, but also raised concerns regarding the lack of peer review for the studies uploaded to these servers.

Conclusion

These findings emphasize the growing, yet diverse, role preprint servers play in scholarly communication and their differential impact across academic disciplines.

URL : Exploring scholarly perceptions of preprint servers

DOI : https://doi.org/10.47989/ir292820

Authorship conflicts in academia: an international cross‑discipline survey

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Authors : Elizaveta Savchenko, Ariel Rosenfeld

Collaboration among scholars has emerged as a significant characteristic of contemporary science. As a result, the number of authors listed in publications continues to rise steadily. Unfortunately, determining the authors to be included in the byline and their respective order entails multiple difficulties which often lead to conflicts. Despite the large volume of literature about conflicts in academia, it remains unclear how exactly these are distributed over the main socio-demographic properties, as well as the different types of interactions academics experience.

To address this gap, we conducted an international and cross-disciplinary survey answered by 752 academics from 41 fields of research and 93 countries that statistically well-represent the overall academic workforce. Our findings are concerning and suggest that conflicts over authorship credit arise very early in one’s academic career, even at the level of Master and Ph.D., and become increasingly common over time.

URL : Authorship conflicts in academia: an international cross‑discipline survey

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-04972-x

Publication patterns’ changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic: a longitudinal and short-term scientometric analysis

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Authors : Shir Aviv-Reuven, Ariel Rosenfeld

In recent months the COVID-19 (also known as SARS-CoV-2 and Coronavirus) pandemic has spread throughout the world. In parallel, extensive scholarly research regarding various aspects of the pandemic has been published. In this work, we analyse the changes in biomedical publishing patterns due to the pandemic.

We study the changes in the volume of publications in both peer reviewed journals and preprint servers, average time to acceptance of papers submitted to biomedical journals, international (co-)authorship of these papers (expressed by diversity and volume), and the possible association between journal metrics and said changes.

We study these possible changes using two approaches: a short-term analysis through which changes during the first six months of the outbreak are examined for both COVID-19 related papers and non-COVID-19 related papers; and a longitudinal approach through which changes are examined in comparison to the previous four years.

Our results show that the pandemic has so far had a tremendous effect on all examined accounts of scholarly publications: A sharp increase in publication volume has been witnessed and it can be almost entirely attributed to the pandemic; a significantly faster mean time to acceptance for COVID-19 papers is apparent, and it has (partially) come at the expense of non-COVID-19 papers; and a significant reduction in international collaboration for COVID-19 papers has also been identified.

As the pandemic continues to spread, these changes may cause a slow down in research in non-COVID-19 biomedical fields and bring about a lower rate of international collaboration.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04059-x