Étiquette : scientific communication

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Do all citations value the same? Valuing citations by the value of the citing items

Authors : Cristiano Giuffrida, Giovanni Abramo, Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo

Bibliometricians have long recurred to citation counts to measure the impact of publications on the advancement of science. However, since the earliest days of the field, some scholars have questioned whether all citations should value the same, and have gone on to weight them by a variety of factors.

However sophisticated the operationalization of the measures, the methodologies used in weighting citations still present limits in their underlying assumptions. This work takes an alternate approach to resolving the underlying problem: the proposal is to value citations by the impact of the citing articles.

As well as conceptualizing a new indicator of impact, the work illustrates its application to the 2004-2012 Italian scientific production indexed in the WoS.

The new indicator appears highly correlated to traditional field normalized citations, however the shifts observed between the two measures are frequent and the number of outliers not at all negligible. Moreover, the new indicator seems to show greater « sensitivity » when used in identification of the top-cited papers.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.06088

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Nanopublications: A Growing Resource of Provenance-Centric Scientific Linked Data

Authors : Tobias Kuhn, Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Alexander Malic, Jorrit H. Poelen, Allen H. Hurlbert, Emilio Centeno Ortiz, Laura I. Furlong, Núria Queralt-Rosinach, Christine Chichester, Juan M. Banda, Egon Willighagen, Friederike Ehrhart, Chris Evelo, Tareq B. Malas, Michel Dumontier

Nanopublications are a Linked Data format for scholarly data publishing that has received considerable uptake in the last few years. In contrast to the common Linked Data publishing practice, nanopublications work at the granular level of atomic information snippets and provide a consistent container format to attach provenance and metadata at this atomic level.

While the nanopublications format is domain-independent, the datasets that have become available in this format are mostly from Life Science domains, including data about diseases, genes, proteins, drugs, biological pathways, and biotic interactions.

More than 10 million such nanopublications have been published, which now form a valuable resource for studies on the domain level of the given Life Science domains as well as on the more technical levels of provenance modeling and heterogeneous Linked Data.

We provide here an overview of this combined nanopublication dataset, show the results of some overarching analyses, and describe how it can be accessed and queried.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.06532

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Agriculture Journals Covered by Directory of Open Access Journals: An Analytical Study

Author : Muruli Acharya

With the advent of open access movement, open access journals (OAJs) being the prodigious source of academic and research information have been gaining significant magnitude.

The electronic age has made it easier and more convenient than ever to break barriers to research information. The present study aims to study and analyse the status of 497 OAJs in Agriculture indexed in Directory of Open Access Journals.

Specified traits such as Geographic and language wise distribution, coverage of Indexing/Abstracting databases, ranking of journals according to Impact Factor (IF), OA licensing model adopted, policy of plagiarism, visibility on social media and related issues of the OAJs in Agriculture are evaluated in the paper.

Results indicated the dominance of De Gruyter Open as a publisher with highest number of OAJs, English as a content language, Indonesia with highest number of OAJs, Google scholar with highest journals indexed.

The study observes the increasing migration of journals from commercial practice to OA. Frontiers in Plant Science found with highest Impact Factor among OAJs in Agriculture.

URL : Agriculture Journals Covered by Directory of Open Access Journals: An Analytical Study

Alternative location : http://publications.drdo.gov.in/ojs/index.php/djlit/article/view/13114

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Altmetrics of the Open Access Institutional Repositories: A Webometrics Approach

Author : Isidro F. Aguillo

Self-archiving in Institutional Repositories (IRs) is playing a central role in the success of the Open Access initiatives. Deposited documents are more visible and probably they get more downloads and citations, but making them freely available in a local repository is not enough.

Social tools, both public and academic targeting, networking or silo oriented, should be taken into account for reaching larger audiences and increase not only the scholarly but also the social impact.

This communication explores the presence of IRs contents in 28 social tools (Academia, Bibsonomy, CiteUlike, CrossRef, Datadryad, Facebook, Figshare, Google+, GitHub, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, RenRen, ResearchGate, Scribd, SlideShare, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, VKontakte, Weibo, Wikipedia All Languages, Wikipedia English, Wikia, Wikimedia, YouTube and Zenodo) using a webometric approach.

The link mentions of 2185 IRs in the cited tools were collected during July 2017 from Google selected data centers. The results showed that most of the IRs have no strong presence in the most specializes tools and even for the most popular services the figures are not high enough too.

Lack of strategies and bad practices are suggested as possible explanations for the low altmetrics figures.

URL : Altmetrics of the Open Access Institutional Repositories: A Webometrics Approach

Alternative location : https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/65298/STI2018_paper_37.pdf

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Is together better? Examining scientific collaborations across multiple authors, institutions, and departments

Authors : Lovenoor Aulck, Kishore Vasan, Jevin West

Collaborations are an integral part of scientific research and publishing. In the past, access to large-scale corpora has limited the ways in which questions about collaborations could be investigated. However, with improvements in data/metadata quality and access, it is possible to explore the idea of research collaboration in ways beyond the traditional definition of multiple authorship.

In this paper, we examine scientific works through three different lenses of collaboration: across multiple authors, multiple institutions, and multiple departments. We believe this to be a first look at multiple departmental collaborations as we employ extensive data curation to disambiguate authors’ departmental affiliations for nearly 70,000 scientific papers.

We then compare citation metrics across the different definitions of collaboration and find that papers defined as being collaborative were more frequently cited than their non-collaborative counterparts, regardless of the definition of collaboration used.

We also share preliminary results from examining the relationship between co-citation and co-authorship by analyzing the extent to which similar fields (as determined by co-citation) are collaborating on works (as determined by co-authorship).

These preliminary results reveal trends of compartmentalization with respect to intra-institutional collaboration and show promise in being expanded.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.04093

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Dynamics of co-authorship and productivity across different fields of scientific research

Authors : Austin J. Parish, Kevin W. Boyack, John P. A. Ioannidis

We aimed to assess which factors correlate with collaborative behavior and whether such behavior associates with scientific impact (citations and becoming a principal investigator). We used the R index which is defined for each author as log(Np)/log(I1), where I1 is the number of co-authors who appear in at least I1 papers written by that author and Np are his/her total papers.

Higher R means lower collaborative behavior, i.e. not working much with others, or not collaborating repeatedly with the same co-authors. Across 249,054 researchers who had published ≥30 papers in 2000–2015 but had not published anything before 2000, R varied across scientific fields. Lower values of R (more collaboration) were seen in physics, medicine, infectious disease and brain sciences and higher values of R were seen for social science, computer science and engineering.

Among the 9,314 most productive researchers already reaching Np ≥ 30 and I1 ≥ 4 by the end of 2006, R mostly remained stable for most fields from 2006 to 2015 with small increases seen in physics, chemistry, and medicine.

Both US-based authorship and male gender were associated with higher values of R (lower collaboration), although the effect was small. Lower values of R (more collaboration) were associated with higher citation impact (h-index), and the effect was stronger in certain fields (physics, medicine, engineering, health sciences) than in others (brain sciences, computer science, infectious disease, chemistry).

Finally, for a subset of 400 U.S. researchers in medicine, infectious disease and brain sciences, higher R (lower collaboration) was associated with a higher chance of being a principal investigator by 2016. Our analysis maps the patterns and evolution of collaborative behavior across scientific disciplines.

URL : Dynamics of co-authorship and productivity across different fields of scientific research

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0189742

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‘Publication favela’ or bibliodiversity? Open access publishing viewed from a European perspective

Author : Pierre Mounier

A number of initiatives exist in European countries to support open scholarly communication in humanities and social sciences.

This article looks at the work of Open Access in the European Research Area through Scholarly Communication (OPERAS), a consortium of 36 partners from all over Europe, including many university presses, that is working to build a future European infrastructure to address the challenges in open access publishing.

Their initial study, OPERAS‐D, revealed a variety of models among the partners influenced by national cultures. Although the partners’ activities were found to be fragmented, they also reflect the ‘bibliodiversity’ that exists in European societies.

To address the challenge of fragmentation, it is argued that, by following a cooperative model, European actors can benefit by sharing expertise, resources, and costs of development for the good of all.

As a future infrastructure to support open scholarly communication across Europe, OPERAS aims to coordinate a range of publishers and service providers to offer researchers and societies a fully functional web of services to cover the entire research lifecycle.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1194