Étiquette : scientific communication

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EN

Evolution of an Institutional Repository: A Case History from Nebraska

Author : Paul Royster

The 13-year history of the institutional repository (IR) at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln is recounted with emphasis on local conditions, administrative support, recruitment practices, and management philosophy.

Practices included offering new services, hosting materials outside the conventional tenure stream, using student employees, and providing user analytics on global dissemination. Acquiring trust of faculty depositors enhanced recruitment and extra-library support.

Evolution of policies on open access, copyright, metadata, and third-party vendors are discussed, with statistics illustrating the growth, contents, and outreach of the repository over time.

A final section discusses future directions for scholarly communications and IRs in particular.

URL : https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libraryscience/382/

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EN

Assessing the Quality of Scientific Papers

Authors : Roman Vainshtein, Gilad Katz, Bracha Shapira, Lior Rokach

A multitude of factors are responsible for the overall quality of scientific papers, including readability, linguistic quality, fluency,semantic complexity, and of course domain-specific technical factors.

These factors vary from one field of study to another. In this paper, we propose a measure and method for assessing the overall quality of the scientific papers in a particular field of study.

We evaluate our method in the computer science domain, but it can be applied to other technical and scientific fields.Our method is based on the corpus linguistics technique. This technique enables the extraction of required information and knowledge associated with a specific domain.

For this purpose, we have created a large corpus, consisting of papers from very high impact conferences. First, we analyze this corpus in order to extract rich domain-specific terminology and knowledge.

Then we use the acquired knowledge to estimate the quality of scientific papers by applying our proposed measure. We examine our measure on high and low scientific impact test corpora.

Our results show a significant difference in the measure scores of the high and low impact test corpora. Second, we develop a classifier based on our proposed measure and compare it to the baseline classifier.

Our results show that the classifier based on our measure over-performed the baseline classifier. Based on the presented results the proposed measure and the technique can be used for automated assessment of scientific papers.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.04200

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EN

Meta-Research: Use of the Journal Impact Factor in academic review, promotion, and tenure evaluations

Authors : Erin C McKiernan, Lesley A Schimanski, Carol Muñoz Nieves, Lisa Matthias, Meredith T Niles, Juan P Alperin

We analyzed how often and in what ways the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is currently used in review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) documents of a representative sample of universities from the United States and Canada. 40% of research-intensive institutions and 18% of master’s institutions mentioned the JIF, or closely related terms.

Of the institutions that mentioned the JIF, 87% supported its use in at least one of their RPT documents, 13% expressed caution about its use, and none heavily criticized it or prohibited its use. Furthermore, 63% of institutions that mentioned the JIF associated the metric with quality, 40% with impact, importance, or significance, and 20% with prestige, reputation, or status.

We conclude that use of the JIF is encouraged in RPT evaluations, especially at research-intensive universities, and that there is work to be done to avoid the potential misuse of metrics like the JIF.

URL : Meta-Research: Use of the Journal Impact Factor in academic review, promotion, and tenure evaluations

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.47338.001

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EN

The Transcript OPEN Library Political Science Model: A Sustainable Way into Open Access for E-Books in the Humanities and Social Science

Authors : Alexandra Jobmann, Nina Schönfelder

The strategic goal of the project “National Contact Point Open Access OA2020-DE” is to create the conditions for a large-scale open-access transformation in accordance with the Alliance of German Science Organizations.

In close collaboration with the publisher transcript, we developed a business model that strengthens the transformation process for e-books in the humanities and social sciences.

It largely addresses the drawbacks of existing models. Moreover, it is manageable, sustainable, transparent, and scalable for both publishers and libraries. This case report describes the setup of the model, its successful implementation for the branch “political science” of transcript in 2019, and provides a Strengths–Weaknesses–Opportunities–Threats (SWOT) analysis.

We believe that it has the potential to become one of the major open-access business models for research monographs and anthologies in the humanities and social sciences, especially for non-English e-books.

URL : The Transcript OPEN Library Political Science Model: A Sustainable Way into Open Access for E-Books in the Humanities and Social Science

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7030055

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EN

Acceptance rates of scholarly peer-reviewed journals: A literature survey

Author : Bo-Christer Bjórk

The acceptance rate of scholarly journals is an important selection criterion for authors choosing where to submit their manuscripts. Unfortunately, information about the acceptance (or rejection rates) of individual journals is seldom available.

This article surveys available systematic information and studies of acceptance rates. The overall global average is around 35-40%. There are significant differences between fields of science, with biomedicine having higher acceptance rates compared to for instance the social sciences.

Open access journals usually have higher acceptance rates than subscription journals, and this is particularly true for so-called OA mega-journals, which have peer review criteria focusing on sound science only.

URL : https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/EPI/article/view/epi.2019.jul.07

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EN

The citation from patents to scientific output revisited: a new approach to the matching Patstat / Scopus

Authors : Vicente P. Gerrero-Bote, Rodrigo Sánchez-Jiménez, Félix De-Moya-Anegón

Patents include citations, both to other patents and to documents that are not patents (NPL, Non-patent literature). Among the latter include citations to articles published in scientific journals.

Just as the scientific impact is studied through the citation of articles and other scientific works, the technological impact of scientific works can also be studied through the citation they receive from patents.

The NPL references included in the patents are far from being standardized, so determining which scientific article they refer to is not trivial. This paper presents a procedure for linking the NPL references of the patents collected in the Patstat database and the scientific works indexed in the Scopus bibliographic database.

This procedure consists of two phases: a broad generation of candidate couples and another phase of validation of couples. It has been implemented with reasonable good results and affordable costs.

URL : https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/EPI/article/view/epi.2019.jul.01

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EN

Publication in a medical student journal predicts short- and long-term academic success: a matched-cohort study

Authors : Ibrahim S. Al-Busaidi, Cameron I. Wells, Tim J. Wilkinson

Background

Medical student journals play a critical role in promoting academic research and publishing amongst medical students, but their impact on students’ future academic achievements has not been examined.

We aimed to evaluate the short- and long-term effects of publication in the New Zealand Medical Student Journal (NZMSJ) through examining rates of post-graduation publication, completion of higher academic degrees, and pursuing an academic career.

Methods

Student-authored original research publications in the NZMSJ during the period 2004–2011 were retrospectively identified. Gender-, university- and graduation year-matched controls were identified from publicly available databases in a 2:1 ratio (two controls for each student authors).

Date of graduation, current clinical scope of practice, completion of higher academic degrees, and attainment of an academic position for both groups were obtained from Google searches, New Zealand graduate databases, online lists of registered doctors in New Zealand and Australia, and author affiliation information from published articles.

Pre- and post-graduation PubMed®-indexed publications were identified using standardised search criteria.

Results

Fifty publications authored by 49 unique students were identified. The median follow-up period after graduation was 7.0 years (range 2–12 years). Compared with controls, student–authors were significantly more likely to publish in PubMed®-indexed journals (OR 3.09, p = 0.001), obtain a PhD (OR 9.21, p = 0.004) or any higher degree (OR 2.63, p = 0.007), and attain academic positions (OR 2.90, p = 0.047) following graduation.

Conclusion

Publication in a medical student journal is associated with future academic achievement and contributes to develop a clinical academic workforce. Future work should aim to explore motivators and barriers associated with these findings.

URL : Publication in a medical student journal predicts short- and long-term academic success: a matched-cohort study

Alternative location : https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12909-019-1704-x