Archives des mots-clés : Bibliometrics

Using bibliometrics to detect questionable authorship and affiliation practices and their impact on global research metrics: A case study of 14 universities

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Authors : Lokman I. Meho, Elie A. Akl

From 2019 to 2023, a subset of 80 highly published universities demonstrated research output increases exceeding 100%, compared to the global average of 20%. Among these, 14 institutions showed significant declines in first authorship rates, raising questions about their authorship and affiliation practices.

This study employed bibliometric analysis to examine shifts in authorship and affiliation dynamics at these universities. Key findings include a 234% rise in total publications, a 23 percentage point drop in first authorship rates, and an increase in hyper-prolific authors from 23 to 177. International collaborations surged, and several universities exhibited sharp rises in multiaffiliated publications. Additionally, the proportion of articles published in top 10% journals increased by 11 percentage points, and the proportion of articles ranked among the world’s top 10% most cited grew by 12 percentage points.

These trends raise concerns about the integrity of authorship and affiliation practices as they deviate from normative behavior, far exceeding those observed nationally and at top-ranked universities—Caltech, MIT, Princeton, and UC Berkeley.

The study emphasizes the need for collaborative reforms by universities, ranking agencies, publishers, and other entities, highlighting the importance of each entity’s role in preserving academic integrity and ensuring the reliability of global research metrics.

URL : Using bibliometrics to detect questionable authorship and affiliation practices and their impact on global research metrics: A case study of 14 universities

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00339

Patent research in academic literature. Landscape and trends with a focus on patent analytics

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Authors : Cristian Mejia, Yuya Kajikawa

Patent analytics is crucial for understanding innovation dynamics and technological trends. However, a comprehensive overview of this rapidly evolving field is lacking. This study presents a data-driven analysis of patent research, employing citation network analysis to categorize and examine research clusters. Here, we show that patent research is characterized by interconnected themes spanning fundamental patent systems, indicator development, methodological advancements, intellectual property management practices, and diverse applications.

We reveal central research areas in patent strategies, technological impact, and patent citation research while identifying emerging focuses on environmental sustainability and corporate innovation. The integration of advanced analytical techniques, including AI and machine learning, is observed across various domains. This study provides insights for researchers and practitioners, highlighting opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration and future research directions.

URL : Patent research in academic literature. Landscape and trends with a focus on patent analytics

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2024.1484685

The use of ChatGPT for identifying disruptive papers in science: a first exploration

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Authors : Lutz Bornmann, Lingfei Wu, Christoph Ettl

ChatGPT has arrived in quantitative research evaluation. With the exploration in this Letter to the Editor, we would like to widen the spectrum of the possible use of ChatGPT in bibliometrics by applying it to identify disruptive papers.

The identification of disruptive papers using publication and citation counts has become a popular topic in scientometrics. The disadvantage of the quantitative approach is its complexity in the computation. The use of ChatGPT might be an easy to use alternative.

URL : The use of ChatGPT for identifying disruptive papers in science: a first exploration

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-05176-z

On The Peer Review Reports: Does Size Matter?

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Authors : Abdelghani Maddi, Luis Miotti

Amidst the ever-expanding realm of scientific production and the proliferation of predatory journals, the focus on peer review remains paramount for scientometricians and sociologists of science. Despite this attention, there is a notable scarcity of empirical investigations into the tangible impact of peer review on publication quality.

This study aims to address this gap by conducting a comprehensive analysis of how peer review contributes to the quality of scholarly publications, as measured by the citations they receive. Utilizing an adjusted dataset comprising 57,482 publications from Publons to Web of Science and employing the Raking Ratio method, our study reveals intriguing insights. Specifically, our findings shed light on a nuanced relationship between the length of reviewer reports and the subsequent citations received by publications.

Through a robust regression analysis, we establish that, beginning from 947 words, the length of reviewer reports is significantly associated with an increase in citations. These results not only confirm the initial hypothesis that longer reports indicate requested improvements, thereby enhancing the quality and visibility of articles, but also underscore the importance of timely and comprehensive reviewer reports.

Furthermore, insights from Publons’ data suggest that open access to reports can influence reviewer behavior, encouraging more detailed reports. Beyond the scholarly landscape, our findings prompt a reevaluation of the role of reviewers, emphasizing the need to recognize and value this resource-intensive yet underappreciated activity in institutional evaluations.

Additionally, the study sounds a cautionary note regarding the challenges faced by peer review in the context of an increasing volume of submissions, potentially compromising the vigilance of peers in swiftly assessing numerous articles.

HAL : https://cnrs.hal.science/hal-04492274

How open are hybrid journals included in transformative agreements?

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Author : Najko Jahn

The ongoing controversy surrounding transformative agreements, which aim to transition journal publishing to full open access, highlight the need for large-scale studies assessing the uptake of open access in hybrid journals. This includes evaluating the extent to which transformative agreements enabled open access.

By combining publicly available data from various sources, including cOAlition S Journal Checker, Crossref, and OpenAlex, this study presents a novel approach that analyses over 700 agreements and nine million journal articles published in more than 11.000 hybrid journals. Estimates suggest a strong growth in open access between 2018 and 2022 from 4.3% to 15%. In 2022, 58% of hybrid open access was enabled by transformative agreements.

This trend was largely driven by the three commercial publishers Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley, but the open access uptake varied substantially across journals, publishers, disciplines, and country affiliations. In particular, comparing the developments in the OECD and BRICS areas revealed different publication trends relative to hybrid open access.

In conclusion, estimates suggest that current levels of implementation of transformative agreements is insufficient to bring about a large-scale transition to full open access.

URL : How open are hybrid journals included in transformative agreements?

Arxiv : https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18255

Scholar Metrics Scraper (SMS): automated retrieval of citation and author data

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Authors : Yutong Cao, Nicole A. Cheung, Dean Giustini, Jeffrey LeDue, Timothy H. Murphy

Academic departments, research clusters and evaluators analyze author and citation data to measure research impact and to support strategic planning. We created Scholar Metrics Scraper (SMS) to automate the retrieval of bibliometric data for a group of researchers.

The project contains Jupyter notebooks that take a list of researchers as an input and exports a CSV file of citation metrics from Google Scholar (GS) to visualize the group’s impact and collaboration. A series of graph outputs are also available. SMS is an open solution for automating the retrieval and visualization of citation data.

URL : Scholar Metrics Scraper (SMS): automated retrieval of citation and author data

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2024.1335454

How can revivals of scientific publications be explained using bibliometric methods? A case study discovering booster papers for the 1985 Physics Nobel Prize paper

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Authors : Robin Haunschild, Werner Marx, Jürgen Weis

The unusual citation profile of the 1985 Physics Nobel Prize paper has been analyzed. The number of citing papers per year exhibits a maximum of 123 citations in the mid-1980s and increases to more than 200 citations about two decades later.

The publication set of the citing papers was analyzed in terms of co-authorships and research topics. The USA and (more recently) the People’s Republic of China appear prominently among the countries of the citing authors. A keyword analysis of the citing papers revealed research dealing with topological insulators as one of the major newly evolving research topics. An analysis of the co-cited papers has been performed via reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS).

The most-frequently co-cited papers (the peak papers of the RPYS spectrogram) were identified and discussed. As a result, we found two primary booster papers and three secondary booster papers that renewed the interest in the 1985 Physics Nobel Prize paper.

URL : How can revivals of scientific publications be explained using bibliometric methods? A case study discovering booster papers for the 1985 Physics Nobel Prize paper

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04906-z