Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Beyond views, productivity, and citations: measuring geopolitical differences of scientific impact in communication research

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Authors : János József Tóth, Gergő Háló, Manuel Goyanes

Scientometric analyses applying critical sociological frameworks have previously shown that high-prestige research output—with regards to both quantity and impact—is typically clustered in a few core countries and world regions, indicating uneven power relations and systematic biases within global academia.

Although citation count is a common formula in these analyses, only a handful of studies investigated altmetrics (impact measures beyond citation-based metrics) in communication science. In this paper, we explore geopolitical biases of impact amongst the most productive scholars in the field of communication from 11 countries and 3 world regions.

Drawing on SCOPUS data, we test three formulas that measure scholarly performance (citations per document; views per document; and citations per view) to investigate how geographical location affects the impact of scholars. Our results indicate a strong US-dominance with regard to citation-based impact, emphasizing a further need for de-Westernization within the field.

Moreover, the analysis of altmetric formulas revealed that research published by Eastern European and Spanish scholars, although accessed similarly or even more often than American or Western European publications, is less cited than those. Country-level comparisons are also discussed.

URL : Beyond views, productivity, and citations: measuring geopolitical differences of scientific impact in communication research

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04801-7

Evaluative altmetrics: is there evidence for its application to research evaluation?

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Authors : Wenceslao Arroyo-Machado, Daniel Torres-Salinas

Introduction

Altmetrics have been demonstrated as a promising tool for analyzing scientific communication on social media. Nevertheless, its application for research evaluation remains underdeveloped, despite the advancement of research in the study of diverse scientific interactions.

Methods

This paper develops a method for applying altmetrics in the evaluation of researchers, focusing on a case study of the Environment/Ecology ESI field publications by researchers at the University of Granada. We considered Twitter as a mirror of social attention, news outlets as media, and Wikipedia as educational, exploring mentions from these three sources and the associated actors in their respective media, contextualizing them using various metrics.

Results

Our analysis evaluated different dimensions such as the type of audience, local attention, engagement generated around the mention, and the profile of the actor. Our methodology effectively provided dashboards that gave a comprehensive view of the different instances of social attention at the author level.

Discussion

The use of altmetrics for research evaluation presents significant potential, as shown by our case study. While this is a novel method, our results suggest that altmetrics could provide valuable insights into the social attention that researchers garner. This can be an important tool for research evaluation, expanding our understanding beyond traditional metrics.

URL : Evaluative altmetrics: is there evidence for its application to research evaluation?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2023.1188131

Gender-Related Differences in the Citation Impact of Scientific Publications and Improving the Authors’ Productivity

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Authors : Oleksandr Kuchanskyi, Yurii Andrashko, Andrii Biloshchytskyi, Serik Omirbayev, Aidos Mukhatayev, Svitlana Biloshchytska, Adil Faizullin

The article’s purpose is an analysis of the citation impact of scientific publications by authors of different gender compositions. The page method was chosen to calculate the citation impact of scientific publications, and the obtained results allowed to estimate the impact of the scientific publications based on the number of citations.

The normalized citation impact is calculated according to nine subsets of scientific publications that correspond to patterns of different gender compositions of authors. Also, these estimates were calculated for each country with which the authors of the publications are affiliated.

The Citation database, Network Dataset (Ver. 13), was chosen for the scientometric analysis. The dataset includes more than 5 million scientific publications and 48 million citations. Most of the publications in the dataset are from the STEM field. The results indicate that articles with a predominantly male composition are cited more than articles with a mixed or female composition of authors in this direction.

Analysis of advantages in dynamics indicates that in the last decade, in developed countries, there has been a decrease in the connection between the citation impact of scientific publications and the gender composition of their authors.

However, the obtained results still confirm the presence of gender inequality in science, which may be related to socioeconomic and cultural characteristics, natural homophily, and other factors that contribute to the appearance of gender gaps.

An essential consequence of overcoming these gaps, including in science, is ensuring the rights of people in all their diversity.

URL : Gender-Related Differences in the Citation Impact of Scientific Publications and Improving the Authors’ Productivity

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications11030037

Research Outputs as Testimony & the APC as Testimonial Injustice in the Global South

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Author : Emily Cox

Research outputs are a form of testimony with researchers serving as expert testifiers. Research outputs align with philosophical understandings of testimony, as research represents an everyday, informal communicative act. If research outputs are a form of testimony, they are open to ethical and epistemic critique.

The open access (OA) article processing charge (APC) in the Global South serves as an apt topic for this critique. The APC is a financial barrier to publication for Southern researchers, and thus raises problems around epistemic and testimonial injustice.

The second half of this paper examines a variety of equity issues in prestige scholarly publishing and OA APCs, which are then more fully illustrated by the development of a hypothetical testimonial injustice case study focused on a researcher working in Latin America.

Ultimately, I propose the following argument: If people use journal rankings as a guide to which testimony they should take seriously and the OA APC publishing model systematically excludes researchers from the Global South on non-meritocratic grounds, then the OA APC publishing model contributes to testimonial injustice.

This paper is a philosophical, theory-based discussion that contributes to research about equitable systems of scholarship.

URL : Research Outputs as Testimony & the APC as Testimonial Injustice in the Global South

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.84.4.513

Open Access Author Contracts and Alignment with the Open Ethos: A Global Study

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Authors : Melissa H. Cantrell, Sarah Wipperman

Author contracts in scholarly publishing serve to outline the rights and permissions for each party in the use and redistribution of a work throughout the life of its copyright term. Although rights and licensing expectations for open access publishing—the “open access ethos”—have been detailed in the Budapest Declaration, Plan S Principles, and other documentation, studies that explore the implementation of these ideals in contracts between authors and publishers have been limited in focus and scope.

This study seeks to initiate a holistic approach toward evaluating open access journal agreements that is not limited by region or discipline, with the aim of discerning best practices as well as delineating common points of deviation. The authors distributed a survey to contacts from journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), including both journals with and without a DOAJ Seal.

The results suggest that DOAJ Seal status is central to alignment with the open access ethos and that there is more misunderstanding about the importance of copyright and licensing terms than shown in previous research. This research contributes to discussions pursuing a future of open access publishing that supports authors’ rights as a central tenet.

URL : Open Access Author Contracts and Alignment with the Open Ethos: A Global Study

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.84.4.605

Monitoring Organisational Article Processing Charges (APCs) using Bibliographic Information Sources: Turku University Library Case

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Authors : Anna-Kaarina Linna, Irene Ylönen, Anna Salmi

As open access publishing has become more widespread and required by research funders and the research community, the management and monitoring of article processing charges (APCs) have emerged as an important task in research organisations around the world. Within this tendency, a question of the comprehensiveness of organisational APC monitoring has become relevant.

This case study demonstrates how the comprehensiveness of in-house APC monitoring can be evaluated using international bibliographic information sources like Web of Science and Scopus, where it is possible to identify the corresponding author, as well as Unpaywall and DOAJ, which contain information about the open access statuses and APCs of articles.

Based on study results, it can be assumed that the organisation’s in-house bookkeeping has succeeded in registering 52 percent of APC invoices while 48 percent have not been identified.

The results show that the number of unreported publications that have been openly published and whose corresponding author is affiliated with the university is almost equal to those registered in the university’s institutional APC report.

The study describes the stages of data collection and processing in order of implementation, which allows a similar review to be feasible in another organisation.

At the end of the article, development proposals are presented for both the organisations’ in-house data collection and the content of publishers’ invoices.

URL : Monitoring Organisational Article Processing Charges (APCs) using Bibliographic Information Sources: Turku University Library Case

DOI : https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.13361

Social Justice: The Golden Thread in the Openness Movement

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Authors : Reggie Raju, Jill Claassen, Kaela De Lillie

The current publishing landscape perpetuates biases that continue to exclude those who have been previously marginalized, specifically from the Global South including Africa. Incorporating philanthropy as the only driving principle to openly share knowledge is insufficient to truly empower and be inclusive to those who have been relegated to the periphery of the scholarly communication ecosystem.

Social justice principles have to underpin the foundation of this ecosystem, in tandem with philanthropy, to shed light on these exclusionary, systemic publishing practices and processes. This will entail first breaking down these unfair practices and then rebuilding the ecosystem by advancing equity, diversity and inclusion.

This paper highlights the current gaps in the openness movement and demonstrates, through an exemplar of a publishing platform, how the publishing landscape can be transformed. The publishing platform employs a multi-tenant model that enables multiple institutions to publish and disseminate knowledge on one shared instance of the software.

The continental platform and the tenant model that it utilizes address the technological and infrastructural barriers often experienced in the Global South and Africa, while simultaneously serving as a collective hub for hosting African scholarship.

This case study methodology is used to investigate how the alternate publishing route recaptures the philanthropic pillars of the openness movement. The findings provide evidence for a return to the founding principles of the openness movement and, as importantly, demonstrates the impact of open access on student success.

URL : Social Justice: The Golden Thread in the Openness Movement

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications11030036