Archives des mots-clés : research impact

Using social media to promote academic research: Identifying the benefits of twitter for sharing academic work

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Authors : Samara Klar, Yanna Krupnikov, John Barry Ryan, Kathleen Searles, Yotam Shmargad

To disseminate research, scholars once relied on university media services or journal press releases, but today any academic can turn to Twitter to share their published work with a broader audience.

The possibility that scholars can push their research out, rather than hope that it is pulled in, holds the potential for scholars to draw wide attention to their research. In this manuscript, we examine whether there are systematic differences in the types of scholars who most benefit from this push model.

Specifically, we investigate the extent to which there are gender differences in the dissemination of research via Twitter.

We carry out our analyses by tracking tweet patterns for articles published in six journals across two fields (political science and communication), and we pair this Twitter data with demographic and educational data about the authors of the published articles, as well as article citation rates.

We find considerable evidence that, overall, article citations are positively correlated with tweets about the article, and we find little evidence to suggest that author gender affects the transmission of research in this new media.

URL : Using social media to promote academic research: Identifying the benefits of twitter for sharing academic work

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0229446

Social engagement and institutional repositories: a case study

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Author : Susan Boulton

This article explores the community reach and societal impact of institutional repositories, in particular Griffith Research Online (GRO), Griffith University’s institutional repository.

To promote research on GRO, and to encourage people to click through to the repository content, a pilot social media campaign and some subsequent smaller social media activities were undertaken in 2018.

After briefly touching on these campaigns, this article provides some reflections from these activities and proposes options for the future direction of social engagement and GRO in particular, and for institutional repositories in general.

This undertaking necessitates a shift in focus from repositories as a resource for the scholarly community to a resource for the community at large. The campaign also highlighted the need to look beyond performance metrics to social media metrics as a measure of the social and community impact of a repository.

Whilst the article is written from one Australian university’s perspective, the drivers and challenges behind researchers and universities translating their research into economic, social, environmental and cultural impacts are national and international.

The primary takeaway message is for libraries to take more of a proactive stance and to kick-start conversations within their institutions and with their clients to actively partner in creating opportunities to share research.

URL : Social engagement and institutional repositories: a case study

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.504

Rethinking the Journal Impact Factor and Publishing in the Digital Age

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Authors : Mark S. Nestor, Daniel Fischer, David Arnold, Brian Berman, James Q. Del Rosso

Clinical and experimental literature search has changed significantly over the past few decades, and with it, the way in which we value information. Today, our need for immediate access to relevant and specific literature, regardless of specialty, has led to a growing demand for open access to publications.

The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) has been a long-time standard for representing the quality or “prestige” of a journal, but it appears to be losing its relevance. Here, we define the JIF and deconstruct its validity as a modern measure of a journal’s quality, discuss the current models of academic publication, including their advantages and shortcomings, and discuss the benefits and shortcomings of a variety of open-access models, including costs to the author.

We have quantified a nonsubscribed physician’s access to full articles associated with dermatologic disease and aesthetics cited on PubMed. For some of the most common dermatology conditions, 23.1 percent of citations (ranging from 17.2% for melasma to 31.9% for malignant melanoma) were available as free full articles, and for aesthetic procedures, 18.9 percent of citations (ranging from 11.9% for laser hair removal to 27.9% for botulinum toxin) were available as free full articles.

Finally, we discuss existing alternative metrics for measuring journal impact and propose the adoption of a superior publishing model, one that satisfies modern day standards of scholarly knowledge pursuit and dissemination of scholarly publications for dermatology and all of medical science.

URL : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7028381/

Science through Wikipedia: A novel representation of open knowledge through co-citation networks

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Authors : Wenceslao Arroyo-Machado, Daniel Torres-Salinas, Enrique Herrera-Viedma, Esteban Romero-Frías

This study provides an overview of science from the Wikipedia perspective. A methodology has been established for the analysis of how Wikipedia editors regard science through their references to scientific papers.

The method of co-citation has been adapted to this context in order to generate Pathfinder networks (PFNET) that highlight the most relevant scientific journals and categories, and their interactions in order to find out how scientific literature is consumed through this open encyclopaedia.

In addition to this, their obsolescence has been studied through Price index. A total of 1 433 457 references available at this http URL have been initially taken into account. After pre-processing and linking them to the data from Elsevier’s CiteScore Metrics the sample was reduced to 847 512 references made by 193 802 Wikipedia articles to 598 746 scientific articles belonging to 14 149 journals indexed in Scopus.

As highlighted results we found a significative presence of “Medicine” and “Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology” papers and that the most important journals are multidisciplinary in nature, suggesting also that high-impact factor journals were more likely to be cited. Furthermore, only 13.44% of Wikipedia citations are to Open Access journals.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.04347

The extent and drivers of gender imbalance in neuroscience reference lists

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Authors : Jordan D. Dworkin, Kristin A. Linn, Erin G. Teich, Perry Zurn, Russell T. Shinohara, Danielle S. Bassett

Like many scientific disciplines, neuroscience has increasingly attempted to confront pervasive gender imbalances within the field. While much of the conversation has centered around publishing and conference participation, recent research in other fields has called attention to the prevalence of gender bias in citation practices.

Because of the downstream effects that citations can have on visibility and career advancement, understanding and eliminating gender bias in citation practices is vital for addressing inequity in a scientific community. In this study, we sought to determine whether there is evidence of gender bias in the citation practices of neuroscientists.

Utilizing data from five top neuroscience journals, we indeed find that reference lists tend to include more papers with men as first and last author than would be expected if gender was not a factor in referencing. Importantly, we show that this overcitation of men and undercitation of women is driven largely by the citation practices of men, and is increasing with time despite greater diversity in the academy.

We develop a co-authorship network to determine the degree to which homophily in researchers’ social networks explains gendered citation practices and we find that men tend to overcite other men even when their social networks are representative of the field.

We discuss possible mechanisms and consider how individual researchers might incorporate these findings into their own referencing practices.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.03.894378

Altmetrics and societal impact measurements: Match or mismatch? A literature review

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Authors : Iman Tahamtan, Lutz Bornmann

Can alternative metrics (altmetrics) data be used to measure societal impact? We wrote this literature overview of empirical studies in order to find an answer to this question. The overview includes two parts.

The first part, “societal impact measurements”, explains possible methods and problems in measuring the societal impact of research, case studies for societal impact measurement, societal impact considerations at funding organizations, and the societal problems that should be solved by science.

The second part of the review, “altmetrics”, addresses a major question in research evaluation, which is whether altmetrics are proper indicators for measuring the societal impact of research. In the second part we explain the data sources used for altmetrics studies and the importance of field-normalized indicators for impact measurements.

This review indicates that it should be relevant for impact measurements to be oriented towards pressing societal problems. Case studies in which societal impact of certain pieces of research is explained seem to provide a legitimate method for measuring societal impact.

In the use of altmetrics, field-specific differences should be considered by applying field normalization (in cross-field comparisons). Altmetrics data such as social media counts might mainly reflect the public interest and discussion of scholarly works rather than their societal impact.

Altmetrics (Twitter data) might be especially fruitfully employed for research evaluation purposes, if they are used in the context of network approaches. Conclusions based on altmetrics data in research evaluation should be drawn with caution.

URL : Altmetrics and societal impact measurements: Match or mismatch? A literature review

Original location : https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/EPI/article/view/epi.2020.ene.02

Inferring the causal effect of journals on citations

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Author : Vincent Traag

Articles in high-impact journals are by definition more highly cited on average. But are they cited more often because the articles are somehow “better”? Or are they cited more often simply because they appeared in a high-impact journal? Although some evidence suggests the latter the causal relationship is not clear.

We here compare citations of published journal articles to citations of their preprint versions to uncover the causal mechanism. We build on an earlier model to infer the causal effect of journals on citations. We find evidence for both effects.

We show that high-impact journals seem to select articles that tend to attract more citations. At the same time, we find that high-impact journals augment the citation rate of published articles.

Our results yield a deeper understanding of the role of journals in the research system. The use of journal metrics in research evaluation has been increasingly criticised in recent years and article-level citations are sometimes suggested as an alternative.

Our results show that removing impact factors from evaluation does not negate the influence of journals. This insight has important implications for changing practices of research evaluation.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.08648