research impact – Page 29 – InfoDoc MicroVeille

Users narcissism and control – tracking the impact…

Posté le 10 février 2012 par Hans Dillaerts

Users, narcissism and control – tracking the impact of scholarly publications in the 21st century :

“What is the scientific and social impact of my research publications? This question has been of interest to scientists and scholars since the inception of modern science 400 years ago. But it was hard to answer. This may now be changing. Scholarship is transforming into a variety of digital networked forms. These developments have created new possibilities and challenges in the evaluation of the quality of research. This is of interest to research funders assessing the quality of research. It is also relevant to the individual researchers interested in assessing their career development.

This report explores the explosion of tracking tools that have accompanied the surge of web based information instruments. Is it possible to monitor ‘real-time’ how new research findings are being read, cited, used and transformed in practical results and applications? And what are the potential risks and disadvantages of the new tracking tools? This report aims to contribute to a better understanding of these developments by providing a detailed assessment of the currently available novel tools and methodologies. A total of 16 quite different tools are assessed.

The report concludes that web based academic publishing is producing a variety of novel information filters. These allow the researcher to make some sort of limited self-assessment with respect to the response to his/her work. However, this does not mean that these technologies and databases can also legitimately be used in research assessments. For this application, they need to adhere to a far stricter protocol of data quality and indicator reliability and validity. Most new tools do not (yet) comply with these more strict quality criteria.

The report therefore advises to start a concerted research programme in the dynamics, properties, and potential use of new web based metrics which relates these new measures to the already established indicators of publication impact. Its goal would be to contribute to the development of more useful tools for the scientific and scholarly community. This programme should monitor at least the following tools: F1000, Microsoft Academic Research, Total-Impact, PlosONE altmetrics, and Google Scholar. The programme should moreover develop the following key research themes: concepts of new web metrics and altmetrics; standardisation of tools and data; and the use and normalisation of the new metrics.”

URL : http://www.surffoundation.nl/nl/publicaties/Documents/Users%20narcissism%20and%20control.pdf

The Future of Taxpayer-Funded Research: Who Will Control Access to the Results?

Posté le 10 février 2012 par Hans Dillaerts

This report examines the costs and benefits of increased public access, and proposals to either extend or overturn the NIH policy. It looks at increased public access to research results through the lens of “openness,” with a particular interest in how greater openness affects the progress of science, the productivity of the research enterprise, the process of innovation, the commercialization of research, and economic growth.

URL : http://www.ced.org/images/content/issues/innovation-technology/DCCReport_Final_2_9-12.pdf

The Effect of Free Access on the Diffusion…

Posté le 31 janvier 2012 par Hans Dillaerts

The Effect of Free Access on the Diffusion of Scholarly Ideas :

“This study examines a relationship between free access to research articles and the diffusion of their ideas as measured by citation counts. While free access should, in theory, help the diffusion of ideas, many researchers have debated the existence of the benefit of free access: reported empirical findings range from zero or negative effect to an over 300% increase of citations of non-free articles. By using a dataset from the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), an open repository of research articles, and employing a natural experiment that allows the estimation of the value of free access separate from confounding factors such as early viewership and quality differential, this study identifies the causal effect of free access on the citation counts. The natural experiment in this study is that a select group of published articles is posted on SSRN at a time chosen by their authors’ affiliated organizations or SSRN, not by their authors. Using a difference-in-difference method and comparing the citation profiles of the articles before and after the posting time on SSRN against a group of control articles with similar characteristics, I stimated the effect of the SSRN posting on citation counts. The articles posted on SSRN receive more citations even prior to being posted on SSRN, suggesting that they are of higher quality. Their citation counts further increase after being posted, gaining an additional 10-20% of citations. This gain is likely to be caused by the free access that SSRN provides.”

URL : http://mis.eller.arizona.edu/events/speakers_series/2012/mis_speaker_series_Heekyung_Kim.asp

Open Access to Scientific Information in Croatia Increasing…

Posté le 24 octobre 2011 par Hans Dillaerts

Open Access to Scientific Information in Croatia : Increasing Research Impact of a Scientifically Peripheral Country :

“Open Access (OA) to scientific information has become, during the last decade, an important means of communicating in science. The most important fact, proved by numerous studies, is that OA can increase visibility and impact of research results. The first chapter of the book gives an overview of the beginnings of formal scientific communication as an introduction to the further discussion on OA, especially OA in developing and transition countries. In the second chapter, basic definitions of OA and basic OA initiatives are explained as well as the two ways of achieving OA. The third chapter analyses access barriers for scientifically peripheral countries and the ways of removing them. Chapters four and five are completely dedicated to the Open Access in Croatia. Using an example of Croatia, the possibilities of increasing research results of a scientifically peripheral country are explained. Results of the complete study of OA in Croatia are analysed and explained. The study consists of two parts – study of Croatian OA journals and study of Croatian OA repositories. In the first part, the data on editorial policy regarding electronic publishing are gathered by the method of web content analysis. In the sample are all the Croatian scientific journals that had, by the end of June 2010, at least one 2009 issue freely available on the internet. The second part of the study discusses the problem of OA repositories in Croatia and gives an example of such a repository. Recommendations for further development of OA in Croatia are given as a part of the conclusion.”

URL : http://darhiv.ffzg.hr/1397/

The impact of open access journals on library and information scientists’ research in Taiwan

Posté le 11 octobre 2011 par Hans Dillaerts

“As some library and information science (LIS) journals in Taiwan are open access, the aim of the study is to investigate what, if any, impact open access journals have on library and information science scholars‘ research in Taiwan. Therefore, the objectives of the study is to explore the scholarly productivity of LIS scholars in Taiwan, to find out what articles they publish and OA articles as a percentage of all titles, and to calculate the mean citation rate of open access articles and articles not freely available online. A bibliometric method was used in the study. To determine whether a difference in research impact existed, two research impact indicators were used, that is, open access articles as a percentage of all published titles and mean citation rate of open access articles and those not freely available online. Data on published articles with citation counts by the LIS scholars in Taiwan from 2000 to 2009 was collected from the ACI Database and Social Science Citation Index Database. The study shows that for 72 LIS scholars who were subjects of the investigation, 64 of them had published 745 articles within the previous ten years: 679 articles in Chinese and 66 articles in English; 499 of these were OA articles, and 264 were non-OA articles; OA articles constituted 66.98% of the total number of academic articles. The mean citation rate of OA versus non-OA article citation was 1.29.Analysis of impact indicators shows that open access journals have an impact on the research of LIS scholars in Taiwan, in particular, LIS OA journals have more research impact in Chinese than those in English.”

URL : http://eprints.ptar.uitm.edu.my/3624/

Public Availability of Published Research Data in High…

Posté le 9 septembre 2011 par Hans Dillaerts

Public Availability of Published Research Data in High-Impact Journals :

“Background : There is increasing interest to make primary data from published research publicly available. We aimed to assess the current status of making research data available in highly-cited journals across the scientific literature.

Methods and Results : We reviewed the first 10 original research papers of 2009 published in the 50 original research journals with the highest impact factor. For each journal we documented the policies related to public availability and sharing of data. Of the 50 journals, 44 (88%) had a statement in their instructions to authors related to public availability and sharing of data. However, there was wide variation in journal requirements, ranging from requiring the sharing of all primary data related to the research to just including a statement in the published manuscript that data can be available on request. Of the 500 assessed papers, 149 (30%) were not subject to any data availability policy. Of the remaining 351 papers that were covered by some data availability policy, 208 papers (59%) did not fully adhere to the data availability instructions of the journals they were published in, most commonly (73%) by not publicly depositing microarray data. The other 143 papers that adhered to the data availability instructions did so by publicly depositing only the specific data type as required, making a statement of willingness to share, or actually sharing all the primary data. Overall, only 47 papers (9%) deposited full primary raw data online. None of the 149 papers not subject to data availability policies made their full primary data publicly available.

Conclusion : A substantial proportion of original research papers published in high-impact journals are either not subject to any data availability policies, or do not adhere to the data availability instructions in their respective journals. This empiric evaluation highlights opportunities for improvement.”

URL : http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0024357
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0024357