Archives des mots-clés : bibliometric indicators

The Growing Impact of Open Access Distance Education Journals: A Bibliometric Analysis

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Open access dissemination resonates with many distance education researchers and practitioners because it aligns with their fundmantal mission of extending access to learning opportunity. However, there remains lingering doubt whether this increase in access comes at a cost of reducing prestige, value (often determined in promotion and tenure hearings) or reference of the work by other authors.

In this article, we examine 12 distance education journals (6 open and 6 published in closed format by commercial publishers). Using an online survey completed by members of the editorial boards of these 12 journals and a systematic review of the number of citations per article (N = 1,123) and per journal issue between 2003 and 2008, we examine the impact, and perceived value of the 12 journals.

We then compute differences between open and closed journals. The results reveal that the open access journals are not perceived by distance eductation editors as significantly more or less prestigious than their closed counterparts.

The number of citations per journal and per article also indicates little difference. However we note a trend towards more citations per article in open access journals. Articles in open access journals are cited earlier than in non-open access journals.

URL : http://www.jofde.ca/index.php/jde/article/viewArticle/661/1170

Alternative Impact Measures for Open Acc…

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Alternative Impact Measures for Open Access Documents? An examination how to generate interoperable usage information from distributed open access services :
Publishing and bibliometric indicators are of utmost relevance for scientists and research
institutions as the impact or importance of a publication is mostly regarded to be equivalent
to a citation based indicator, e.g. in form of the Journal Impact Factor or the Hirsch-Index.
Performance measurement both on an individual and institutional level depends strongly on
these impact scores. This contribution shows that most common methods to assess the
impact of scientific publications often discriminate open access publications – and by that
reduce the attractiveness of Open Access for scientists. Assuming that the motivation to use
open access publishing services (e.g. a journal or a repository) would increase if these
services would convey some sort of reputation or impact to the scientists, alternative models
of impact are discussed.
Prevailing research results indicate that alternative metrics based on usage information of
electronic documents are suitable to complement or to relativize citation based indicators.
Furthermore an insight into the project Open Access Statistics OAS is given. OAS
implemented an infrastructure to collect document-related usage information from
distributed open access repositories in an aggregator service in order to generate
interoperable document access information according to three standards (COUNTER, LogEc,
IFABC). The service also guarantees the deduplication of users and identical documents on
different servers. In a second phase it is not only planned to implement added services as
recommender features, but also to evaluate alternative impact metrics based on usage
patterns of electronic documents.
URL : http://www.ifla.org/files/hq/papers/ifla76/72-herb-en.pdf

Challenges in the study of Cuban scienti…

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Challenges in the study of Cuban scientific output :
Cuban scientific output at macro level has not been frequently studied in the literature on scientometrics. The current paper explores the different metric approaches to the Cuban scientific activity carried out by national and international authors. Also, the article develops a scientometric study of the Cuban scientific production as included in Scopus during the period 1996-2007, using socio-economic indicators combined with bibliometric indicators supported by the SCImago Journal & Country Rank. Web of Science and Scopus are compared as information sources. Results confirm the possibility to use Scopus to obtain an objective picture of the Cuban science behaviour during the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the XXI century. The SCImago Journal & Country Rank, in this case, offers an important set of indicators. The combination of these indicators with those related to socio-economic aspects of activities in Science and Technology, allow the authors to show a perspective of the Cuban science system evolution during the period analyzed. The inclusion in Scopus of less-cited journals published in Spanish language and its impact on productivity and citation-based indicators is also discussed. Our investigation found an increasing growth of the Cuban scientific production during the whole period, which is in correspondence to the country efforts and expenditures in Research and Development activities.
URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18598/