Archives des mots-clés : research impact

Quantifying the changing role of past publications

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Our current societies increasingly rely on electronic repositories of collective knowledge. An archetype of these databases is the Web of Science (WoS) that stores scientific publications. In contrast to several other forms of knowledge — e.g., Wikipedia articles — a scientific paper does not change after its “birth”.

Nonetheless, from the moment a paper is published it exists within the evolving web of other papers, thus, its actual meaning to the reader changes.

To track how scientific ideas (represented by groups of scientific papers) appear and evolve, we apply a novel combination of algorithms explicitly allowing for papers to change their groups. We (i) identify the overlapping clusters of the undirected yearly co-citation networks of the WoS (1975-2008) and (ii) match these yearly clusters (groups) to form group timelines.

After visualizing the longest lived groups of the entire data set we assign topic labels to the groups. We find that in the entire Web of Science multidisciplinarity is clearly over-represented among cutting edge ideas. In addition, we provide detailed examples for papers that (i) change their topic labels and (ii) move between groups.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.00509

The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review

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Ongoing debates surrounding Open Access to the scholarly literature are multifaceted and complicated by disparate and often polarised viewpoints from engaged stakeholders. At the current stage, Open Access has become such a global issue that it is critical for all involved in scholarly publishing, including policymakers, publishers, research funders, governments, learned societies, librarians, and academic communities, to be well-informed on the history, benefits, and pitfalls of Open Access.

In spite of this, there is a general lack of consensus regarding the advantages or disadvantages of Open Access at multiple levels. This review aims to to be a resource for current knowledge on the impacts of Open Access by synthesizing important research in three major areas of impact: academic, economic and societal.

While there is clearly much scope for additional research, several key trends are identified, including a broad citation advantage for researchers who publish openly, as well as additional benefits to the non-academic dissemination of their work.

The economic case for Open Access is less well-understood, although it is clear that access to the research literature is key for innovative enterprises, and a range of governmental and non-governmental services.

Furthermore, Open Access has the potential to save publishers and research funders considerable amounts of financial resources. The social case for Open Access is strong, in particular for advancing citizen science initiatives, and leveling the playing field for researchers in developing countries.

Open Access supersedes all potential alternative modes of access to the scholarly literature through enabling unrestricted re-use, and long-term stability independent of financial constraints of traditional publishers that impede knowledge sharing.

Open Access remains only one of the multiple challenges that the scholarly publishing system is currently facing. Yet, it provides one foundation for increasing engagement with researchers regarding ethical standards of publishing.

We recommend that Open Access supporters focus their efforts on working to establish viable new models and systems of scholarly communication, rather than trying to undermine the existing ones as part of the natural evolution of the scholarly ecosystem. Based on this, future research should investigate the wider impacts of an ecosystem-wide transformation to a system of Open Research.

URL : The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review

Alternative location : http://f1000research.com/articles/5-632/v1

A review of the literature on citation impact indicators

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Citation impact indicators nowadays play an important role in research evaluation, and consequently these indicators have received a lot of attention in the bibliometric and scientometric literature. This paper provides an in-depth review of the literature on citation impact indicators. First, an overview is given of the literature on bibliographic databases that can be used to calculate citation impact indicators (Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar).

Next, selected topics in the literature on citation impact indicators are reviewed in detail. The first topic is the selection of publications and citations to be included in the calculation of citation impact indicators. The second topic is the normalization of citation impact indicators, in particular normalization for field differences.

Counting methods for dealing with co-authored publications are the third topic, and citation impact indicators for journals are the last topic. The paper concludes by offering some recommendations for future research.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.02099

Open Access Meets Discoverability: Citations to Articles Posted to Academia.edu

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Using matching and regression analyses, we measure the difference in citations between articles posted to Academia.edu and other articles from similar journals, controlling for field, impact factor, and other variables. Based on a sample size of 31,216 papers, we find that a paper in a median impact factor journal uploaded to Academia.edu receives 16% more citations after one year than a similar article not available online, 51% more citations after three years, and 69% after five years. We also found that articles also posted to Academia.edu had 58% more citations than articles only posted to other online venues, such as personal and departmental home pages, after five years.

URL : Open Access Meets Discoverability: Citations to Articles Posted to Academia.edu

DOI : 10.1371/journal.pone.0148257

Meaningful Metrics: A 21st Century Librarian’s Guide to Bibliometrics, Altmetrics, and Research Impact

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What does it mean to have meaningful metrics in today’s complex higher education landscape? With a foreword by Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem, this highly engaging and activity-laden book serves to introduce readers to the fast-paced world of research metrics from the unique perspective of academic librarians and LIS practitioners.

Starting with the essential histories of bibliometrics and altmetrics, and continuing with in-depth descriptions of the core tools and emerging issues at stake in the future of both fields, Meaningful Metrics is a convenient all-in-one resource that is designed to be used by a range of readers, from those with little to no background on the subject to those looking to become movers and shakers in the current scholarly metrics movement. Authors Borchardt and Roemer, offer tips, tricks, and real-world examples illustrate how librarians can support the successful adoption of research metrics, whether in their institutions or across academia as a whole.

URL : http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/publications/booksanddigitalresources/digital/9780838987568_metrics_OA.pdf

Tweets Do Measure Non – Citational Intellectual Impact

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Purpose

The aim of the paper is to identify the motive behind the social media indicators in focus to tweets and attempts to identify what is measured or indicated by tweets, based on these motives.

Design/methodology/approach

Documents with non zero tweets were manually collected from a source of 5 journals – Nature Biotechnology, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Physics, Nature Chemistry and Nature Communications for the period January 2014 – October 2014 so as to depict the contemporary trend, as tweets tends to have L shaped curve in time-wise distribution.

Findings

Investigations suggest that the motives behind the tweets are research reach, research acceptance and research usage. Further analysis revealed that the motive behind self – tweets are research visibility, which is one of the attributes of social media and therefore self tweets may not be a complex problem as expected seeing that documents are self tweeted not more than once in most cases.

Furthermore, identifying and classifying tweets based on users – Publishers, Frequent tweeters who apparently tweet all documents of an issue and Authors will increase the effectiveness of altmetrics in research evaluation. It was also found that association between subjects can be identified by the analysis of tweets pattern among subjects.

Originality/value

Study proposes an overall hierarchical structure of impact based on the change/advancement instigated. The study confirms that tweets do measure non – academic intellectual impact that is not captured by traditional metrics.

URL : http://www.itlit.net/v2n2art2.pdf

Wikiometrics: A Wikipedia Based Ranking System

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We present a new concept – Wikiometrics – the derivation of metrics and indicators from Wikipedia. Wikipedia provides an accurate representation of the real world due to its size, structure, editing policy and popularity. We demonstrate an innovative mining methodology, where different elements of Wikipedia – content, structure, editorial actions and reader reviews – are used to rank items in a manner which is by no means inferior to rankings produced by experts or other methods. We test our proposed method by applying it to two real-world ranking problems: top world universities and academic journals. Our proposed ranking methods were compared to leading and widely accepted benchmarks, and were found to be extremely correlative but with the advantage of the data being publically available.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.01058