Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Publication patterns’ changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic: a longitudinal and short-term scientometric analysis

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Authors : Shir Aviv-Reuven, Ariel Rosenfeld

In recent months the COVID-19 (also known as SARS-CoV-2 and Coronavirus) pandemic has spread throughout the world. In parallel, extensive scholarly research regarding various aspects of the pandemic has been published. In this work, we analyse the changes in biomedical publishing patterns due to the pandemic.

We study the changes in the volume of publications in both peer reviewed journals and preprint servers, average time to acceptance of papers submitted to biomedical journals, international (co-)authorship of these papers (expressed by diversity and volume), and the possible association between journal metrics and said changes.

We study these possible changes using two approaches: a short-term analysis through which changes during the first six months of the outbreak are examined for both COVID-19 related papers and non-COVID-19 related papers; and a longitudinal approach through which changes are examined in comparison to the previous four years.

Our results show that the pandemic has so far had a tremendous effect on all examined accounts of scholarly publications: A sharp increase in publication volume has been witnessed and it can be almost entirely attributed to the pandemic; a significantly faster mean time to acceptance for COVID-19 papers is apparent, and it has (partially) come at the expense of non-COVID-19 papers; and a significant reduction in international collaboration for COVID-19 papers has also been identified.

As the pandemic continues to spread, these changes may cause a slow down in research in non-COVID-19 biomedical fields and bring about a lower rate of international collaboration.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04059-x

Manuscript Accepted!: Collaborating on a scholarly publishing symposium for graduate students and early career academic faculty

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Authors : Teresa Auch Schultz, Rosalind Bucy, Amy Hunsaker, Amy Shannon, Chrissy Klenke, Iñaki Arrieta Baro

INTRODUCTION

As academic libraries expand their scholarly communication support, they also need to find ways to help educate graduate students about this area as well as market themselves.

DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM

The University of Nevada, Reno Libraries created a one-day symposium, called Manuscript Accepted!, aimed at graduate students and early career faculty that would use faculty and library expertise to lead panels and workshops.

This article discusses planning for the event, including collaborating with other on-campus groups, working with publishers for financial support, and planning a program that would meet a variety of needs. Assessment of the first two symposiums, held in 2019 and 2020, shows that attendees valued the event while also highlighting the need for more targeted support for specific areas, such as the humanities.

NEXT STEPS

The Libraries plans to continue Manuscript Accepted! as a one-day symposium, although it will also look to ways to expand attendance. Finally, the Libraries is investigating ways to create smaller events that could be tied into the Manuscript Acceptance! brand but that help meet other needs of our attendees.

URL : Manuscript Accepted!: Collaborating on a scholarly publishing symposium for graduate students and early career academic faculty

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2385

Measuring academic entities’ impact by content-based citation analysis in a heterogeneous academic network

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Authors : Fang Zhang, Shengli Wu

Evaluating the impact of papers, researchers and venues objectively is of great significance to academia and beyond. This may help researchers, research organizations, and government agencies in various ways, such as helping researchers find valuable papers and authoritative venues and helping research organizations identify good researchers.

A few studies find that rather than treating citations equally, differentiating them is a promising way for impact evaluation of academic entities. However, most of those methods are metadata-based only and do not consider contents of cited and citing papers; while a few content-based methods are not sophisticated, and further improvement is possible.

In this paper, we study the citation relationships between entities by content-based approaches. Especially, an ensemble learning method is used to classify citations into different strength types, and a word-embedding based method is used to estimate topical similarity of the citing and cited papers.

A heterogeneous network is constructed with the weighted citation links and several other features. Based on the heterogeneous network that consists of three types of entities, we apply an iterative PageRank-like method to rank the impact of papers, authors and venues at the same time through mutual reinforcement.

Experiments are conducted on an ACL dataset, and the results demonstrate that our method greatly outperforms state-of-the art competitors in improving ranking effectiveness of papers, authors and venues, as well as in being robust against malicious manipulation of citations.

URL : Measuring academic entities’ impact by content‑based citation analysis in a heterogeneous academic network

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04063-1

Invisible science: publication of negative research results

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Authors : Luis Fernando Sayão, Luana Farias Sales, Carla Beatriz Marques Felipe

An important part of scientific research activities yield negative results – non-confirmatory and null data, inconclusive experiments, unexpected data. These results permeate the entire research cycle and constitute an important part of the full scientific knowledge flow generation.

However, despite the acknowledgment that it is the non-confirmatory findings that result in the rejection of consolidated hypotheses that drive the progress of science, most of these investigation routes are not documented.

Growing competition for resources, tenure, and impact publications induces researchers to produce “positive” results that are more likely to be published, interfering with the principles of science reproducibility and self-correction and in the scientific communication cycle.

This study aims to review negative results incorporation in the traditional academic publication cycle. It also seeks to identify and systematize the main barriers that prevent researchers from publishing negative results.

This exploratory study is based methodologically on the scarce literature on the subject. It confirms the initial assumption that few scientific journals accept, edit special issues or are dedicated to the publication of negative results.

URL : Invisible science: publication of negative research results

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1590/2318-0889202133e200009

Pricing Research: State of the Art and Future Opportunities

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Authors : Aliomar Lino Mattos, José Carlos Tiomatsu Oyadomari, Fernando Nascimento Zatta

The most commonly used pricing approaches adopted by companies worldwide are based on costs, customer value, and competition. The purpose of the present study is to review the current status of publications on pricing globally with the addition of Brazilian literature, identify the most cited authors and highest publishing institutions, and outline further research opportunities.

To this end, we use the bibliometric method to analyze relevant publications from the following four databases: Web of Science, Emerald, Elsevier, and Spell. A total of 286 papers from 195 periodicals and 31 journals (primarily from marketing, accounting, economics, and production engineering) are reviewed.

The findings show that pricing is a complex and multifaceted topic involving far more than merely establishing selling prices, and that pricing managers face substantial challenges. The results also reveal that the cost-based pricing approach is superior to the perceived customer-value-based and the competition-based approaches.

Finally, the findings show that pricing remains an underresearched topic, and is thus a fertile ground for further investigation.

URL : Pricing Research: State of the Art and Future Opportunities

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177%2F21582440211032168

A qualitative and quantitative analysis of open citations to retracted articles: the Wakefield 1998 et al.’s case

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Authors : Ivan Heibi, Silvio Peroni

In this article, we show the results of a quantitative and qualitative analysis of open citations on a popular and highly cited retracted paper: “Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis and pervasive developmental disorder in children” by Wakefield et al., published in 1998.

The main purpose of our study is to understand the behavior of the publications citing one retracted article and the characteristics of the citations the retracted article accumulated over time. Our analysis is based on a methodology which illustrates how we gathered the data, extracted the topics of the citing articles and visualized the results.

The data and services used are all open and free to foster the reproducibility of the analysis. The outcomes concerned the analysis of the entities citing Wakefield et al.’s article and their related in-text citations. We observed a constant increasing number of citations in the last 20 years, accompanied with a constant increment in the percentage of those acknowledging its retraction.

Citing articles have started either discussing or dealing with the retraction of Wakefield et al.’s article even before its full retraction happened in 2010. Articles in the social sciences domain citing the Wakefield et al.’s one were among those that have mostly discussed its retraction.

In addition, when observing the in-text citations, we noticed that a large number of the citations received by Wakefield et al.’s article has focused on general discussions without recalling strictly medical details, especially after the full retraction.

Medical studies did not hesitate in acknowledging the retraction of the Wakefield et al.’s article and often provided strong negative statements on it.

URL : A qualitative and quantitative analysis of open citations to retracted articles: the Wakefield 1998 et al.’s case

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04097-5

The Use of Twitter by Medical Journals: Systematic Review of the Literature

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Authors : Natalie Erskine, Sharief Hendricks

Background

Medical journals use Twitter to engage and disseminate their research articles and implement a range of strategies to maximize reach and impact.

Objective

This study aims to systematically review the literature to synthesize and describe the different Twitter strategies used by medical journals and their effectiveness on journal impact and readership metrics.

Methods

A systematic search of the literature before February 2020 in four electronic databases (PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, and ScienceDirect) was conducted. Articles were reviewed using the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses) guidelines.

Results

The search identified 44 original research studies that evaluated Twitter strategies implemented by medical journals and analyzed the relationship between Twitter metrics and alternative and citation-based metrics. The key findings suggest that promoting publications on Twitter improves citation-based and alternative metrics for academic medical journals.

Moreover, implementing different Twitter strategies maximizes the amount of attention that publications and journals receive. The four key Twitter strategies implemented by many medical journals are tweeting the title and link of the article, infographics, podcasts, and hosting monthly internet-based journal clubs. Each strategy was successful in promoting the publications. However, different metrics were used to measure success.

Conclusions

Four key Twitter strategies are implemented by medical journals: tweeting the title and link of the article, infographics, podcasts, and hosting monthly internet-based journal clubs. In this review, each strategy was successful in promoting publications but used different metrics to measure success.

Thus, it is difficult to conclude which strategy is most effective. In addition, the four strategies have different costs and effects on dissemination and readership. We recommend that journals and researchers incorporate a combination of Twitter strategies to maximize research impact and capture audiences with a variety of learning methods.

URL : The Use of Twitter by Medical Journals: Systematic Review of the Literature

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2196/26378