Étiquette : Scholarly Communication

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Humanities scholars’ needs for open social scholarship platforms as online scholarly information sharing infrastructure

Authors : Daniel Tracy, Graham Jensen

The contemporary scholarly communication environment is characterized by the growth in mandates and infrastructure for open access publication and open approaches to the research lifecycle, with a consequent explosion in the number of online platforms seeking to provide infrastructure for open scholarship. These include corporate academic social networks and scholar-governed infrastructure created as a reaction against those networks, as well as the recent major transformation of the social media landscape in the wake of changes at Twitter (now X), previously a major outlet for scholarly engagement with the public.

Analysts of this environment have pointed out that most platform initiatives focus on narrow use cases rather than building up solutions through a holistic understanding of scholar workflows. This exploratory study uses focus group interviews to draw out responses to one academically governed platform, the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons, in the context of humanities scholars’ existing work.

It explores humanities scholars’ needs and behaviors related to sharing scholarly information with each other and broader audiences, particularly on the Internet. Feedback from participants sheds light on opportunities and challenges for academy-governed infrastructure for “open social scholarship.” Themes identified include technical fatigue and burnout in the current multi-platform environment, sustainability, and desires to reach and engage the right academic and non-academic audiences when appropriate.

URL : Humanities scholars’ needs for open social scholarship platforms as online scholarly information sharing infrastructure

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v30i2.13742

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Disciplinary variation in scholarly impact from two article title elements

Author : James M Donovan

For understandable reasons, scholarly impact statistics have become a contentious issue for university faculty. They often look to their librarians to advise them on how best to monitor their performance, and what they could do to raise their profile. The present investigation seeks to equip those librarians with background and tools to provide useful perspective to their worried patrons. For over forty years the literature has been debating what characteristics of an article influence its later citation.

While many suppose that outcome is determined solely by the quality and originality of the piece, one of the consistent findings has been that arguably irrelevant features appear to play an important role. The present discussion focuses on two of the most prominent such features, whether the article title includes a colon, and how long that title is. Both of these variables have been widely researched, but the outcomes are not typically offered in a form that will be useful to faculty patrons.

Specifically, while both colons and shorter titles, for whatever reasons, reliably correlate with higher citations, these patterns vary by discipline and are not conveniently aggregated and reported. To fill this need, results have been extracted from seventy-four empirical investigations and presented by discipline. A wide range of disciplinary variance was found for these two variables which can be considered by an author.

This collection of findings also has permitted correction of prior hypotheses about why such apparently irrelevant elements influence citation, which can improve understanding of the drivers of scholarly impact statistics.

URL : Disciplinary variation in scholarly impact from two article title elements

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006241311576

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Sustaining the “frozen footprints” of scholarly communication through open citations

Author : Zehra Taşkın

This review examines the role of open citations in fostering transparency, reproducibility, and accessibility in scholarly communication. Through a critical synthesis of diverse sources—articles, proceedings, presentations, datasets, and blog posts—it explores the motivations behind citing, the evolving meanings of citations, and key milestones in the open citation movement. Particular attention is given to initiatives like OpenCitations and the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), highlighting their contributions to advancing open scholarship.

Key findings indicate that open citations democratize research by providing free access to citation data, improving discoverability, and facilitating the creation of public citation graphs. Technological advancements, such as advanced data models and reference mining tools, have significantly contributed to the management and utilization of citation data. Despite these benefits, challenges such as ensuring data quality and standardization, addressing structural inequalities in citation networks, and achieving universal publisher adoption persist.

The study concludes with recommendations for future efforts, emphasizing policy advocacy, technological innovation, global collaboration, and educational initiatives to promote the widespread adoption and effective use of open citations. These strategies aim to make the “frozen footprints” of scholarly communication accessible to all, fostering a more equitable and transparent scientific landscape.

URL : Sustaining the “frozen footprints” of scholarly communication through open citations

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24982

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The impact of generative AI on the scholarly communications of early career researchers: An international, multi-disciplinary study

Authors : David Nicholas, Marzena Swigon, David Clark, Abdullah Abrizah, Jorge Revez, Eti Herman, Blanca Rodríguez Bravo, Jie Xu, Anthony Watkinson

The Harbingers study of early career researchers (ECRs), their work life and scholarly communications, began by studying generational—Millennial—change (c.2016), then moved to pandemic change (c.2020) and is now investigating another potential agent of change: artificial intelligence (2024–). We report here on a substantial scoping pilot study that looks at the impact of AI on the scholarly communications of international ECRs and, extends this to the arts and humanities.

It aims to fill the knowledge gap concerning ECRs whose millennial mindset may render them especially open to change and, as the research workhorses they are, very much in the frontline. The data was collected via in-depth interviews in China, Malaysia, Poland, Portugal, Spain and (selectively) the United Kingdom/United States. The data show ECRs to be thinking, probing and, in some cases, experimenting with AI.

There was a general acceptance that AI will be responsible for the growth of low-quality scientific papers, which could lead to a decline in the quality of research. Scholarly integrity and ethics were a big concern with issues of authenticity, plagiarism, copyright and poor citation practices raised. The most widespread belief was AI would prove to be a transformative force and would exacerbate existing scholarly disparities and inequalities.

URL : The impact of generative AI on the scholarly communications of early career researchers: An international, multi-disciplinary study

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1628

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Virtual academic conferencing: a scoping review of 1984-2021 literature. Novel modalities vs. long standing challenges in scholarly communication

Authors : Agnieszka Olechnicka, Adam Ploszaj, Ewa Zegler-Poleska

This study reviews the literature on virtual academic conferences, which have gained significant attention due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted a scoping review, analyzing 147 documents available up to October 5th, 2021.

We categorized this literature, identified main themes, examined theoretical approaches, evaluated empirical findings, and synthesized the advantages and disadvantages of virtual academic conferences. We find that the existing literature on virtual academic conferences is mainly descriptive and lacks a solid theoretical framework for studying the phenomenon.

Despite the rapid growth of the literature documenting and discussing virtual conferencing induced by the pandemic, the understanding of the phenomenon is limited. We provide recommendations for future research on academic virtual conferences: their impact on research productivity, quality, and collaboration; relations to social, economic, and geopolitical inequalities in science; and their environmental aspects.

We stress the need for further research encompassing the development of a theoretical framework that will guide empirical studies.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11583

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Scientific discourse on YouTube: Motivations for citing research in comments

Authors : Sören Striewski, Olga Zagovora, Isabella Peters

YouTube is a valuable source of user-generated content on a wide range of topics, and it encourages user participation through the use of a comment system. Video content is increasingly addressing scientific topics, and there is evidence that both academics and consumers use video descriptions and video comments to refer to academic research and scientific publications.

Because commenting is a discursive behavior, this study will provide insights on why individuals post links to research publications in comments. For this, a qualitative content analysis and iterative coding approach were applied. Furthermore, the reasons for mentioning academic publications in comments were contrasted with the reasons for citing in scholarly works and with reasons for commenting on YouTube.

We discovered that the primary motives for sharing research links were (1) providing more insights into the topic and (2) challenging information offered by other commentators.

Arxiv : https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.12798