Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Assessment of gender divide in scientific communities

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Authors : Antonio De Nicola, Gregorio D’Agostino

Increasing evidence of women’s under-representation in some scientific disciplines is prompting researchers to expand our understanding of this social phenomenon. Moreover, any countermeasures proposed to eliminate this under-representation should be tailored to the actual reasons for this different participation.

Here, we take a multi-dimensional approach to assessing gender differences in science by representing scientific communities as social networks, and using data analytics, complexity science methods, and semantic methods to measure gender differences in the context, the attitude and the success of scientists.

We apply this approach to four scientific communities in the two fields of computer science and information systems using the network of authors at four different conferences. For each discipline, one conference is based in Italy and attracts mostly Italians, while one conference is international in both location and participants.

The present paper provides evidence against common narratives that women’s under-representation is due to women’s limited skills and/or less social centrality.

URL : Assessment of gender divide in scientific communities

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03885-3

Accuracy of PubMed-based author lists of publications and use of author identifiers to address author name ambiguity: a cross-sectional study

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Authors : Paul Sebo, Sylvain de Lucia, Nathalie Vernaz

Objective

To assess the accuracy of PubMed-based author lists of publications and use of author identifiers to address author name ambiguity.

Methods

In this Swiss study conducted in 2019, 300 hospital-based senior physicians were asked to generate a list of their publications in PubMed and complete a questionnaire (type of query used, number of errors in their list of publications, knowledge and use of ORCID and ResearcherID).

Results

156 physicians (52%) agreed to participate, 145 of whom published at least one article (mean number of publications: 60 (SD 73)). Only 17% used the advanced search option. On average, there were 5 articles in the lists that were not co-authored by participants (advanced search: 1.0 (SD 2.6) vs. 5.9 (SD 13.9), p value 0.02) and 3 articles co-authored by participants that did not appear in the lists (advanced search: 1.5 (SD 2.0) vs. 3.6 (SD 8.4), p-value 0.05). Although 82% were aware of ORCID, only 16% added all their articles (39% and 6% respectively for ResearcherID).

Conclusions

When used by senior physicians, the advanced search in PubMed is accurate for retrieving authors’ publications. Author identifiers are only used by a minority of physicians and are therefore not recommended in this context, as they would lead to inaccurate results.

URL : Accuracy of PubMed-based author lists of publications and use of author identifiers to address author name ambiguity: a cross-sectional study

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03845-3

The aging effect in evolving scientific citation networks

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Authors : Feng Hu, Lin Ma, Xiu-Xiu Zhan, Yinzuo Zhou, Chuang Liu, Haixing Zhao, Zi-Ke Zhang

The study of citation networks is of interest to the scientific community. However, the underlying mechanism driving individual citation behavior remains imperfectly understood, despite the recent proliferation of quantitative research methods.

Traditional network models normally use graph theory to consider articles as nodes and citations as pairwise relationships between them. In this paper, we propose an alternative evolutionary model based on hypergraph theory in which one hyperedge can have an arbitrary number of nodes, combined with an aging effect to reflect the temporal dynamics of scientific citation behavior.

Both theoretical approximate solution and simulation analysis of the model are developed and validated using two benchmark datasets from different disciplines, i.e. publications of the American Physical Society (APS) and the Digital Bibliography & Library Project (DBLP).

Further analysis indicates that the attraction of early publications will decay exponentially. Moreover, the experimental results show that the aging effect indeed has a significant influence on the description of collective citation patterns.

Shedding light on the complex dynamics driving these mechanisms facilitates the understanding of the laws governing scientific evolution and the quantitative evaluation of scientific outputs.

URL : The aging effect in evolving scientific citation networks

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03929-8

What is the benefit from publishing a working paper in a journal in terms of citations? Evidence from economics

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Authors : Klaus Wohlraben, Constantin Bürgi

Many papers in economics that are published in peer reviewed journals are initially released in widely circulated working paper series. This raises the question about the benefit of publishing in a peer-reviewed journal in terms of citations.

Specifically, we address the question: to what extent does the stamp of approval obtained by publishing in a peer-reviewed journal lead to more subsequent citations for papers that are already available in working paper series? Our data set comprises about 28,000 working papers from four major working paper series in economics.

Using panel data methods, we show that the publication in a peer reviewed journal results in around twice the number of yearly citations relative to working papers that never get published in a journal. Our results hold in several robustness checks.

URL : What is the benefit from publishing a working paper in a journal in terms of citations? Evidence from economics

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03942-x

An analysis of the factors affecting open access to research output in institutional repositories in selected universities in East Africa

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Author : Miriam Kakai

INTRODUCTION

Institutional repositories (IRs) present universities with an opportunity to provide global open access (OA) to their scholarship, however, this avenue was underutilised in two of the three universities in this study.

This study aimed at proposing interventions to improve access to research output in IRs in universities in East Africa, and it adds to the depth of knowledge on IRs by pointing out the factors that limit OA in IRs, some of which include lack of government and funder support for OA and mediated content collection workflows that hardly involved seeking author permission to self-archive.

METHODS

A mixed methods approach, following a concurrent strategy was used to investigate the low level of OA in IRs. Data was collected from three purposively selected IRs in universities in East Africa, using self-administered questionnaires from 183 researchers and face-to-face interviews from six librarians.

RESULTS

The findings revealed that content was collected on a voluntary basis, with most of the research output deposited in the IR without the authors’ knowledge. The respondents in this study were, however, supportive of the activities of the IR, and would participate in providing research output in the IR as OA if required to do so.

CONCLUSION

The low level of OA in IRs in universities in East Africa could be increased by improving the IR workflow, collection development, and marketing processes. Self-archiving could be improved by increasing the researchers’ awareness and knowledge of OA and importance of IRs, while addressing their concerns about copyright infringement.

URL : An analysis of the factors affecting open access to research output in institutional repositories in selected universities in East Africa

DOI : http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2276

Inferring the causal effect of journals on citations

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Author : Vincent A Traag

Articles in high-impact journals are, on average, more frequently cited. But are they cited more often because those articles are somehow more “citable”? Or are they cited more often simply because they are published in a high-impact journal? Although some evidence suggests the latter, the causal relationship is not clear.

We here compare citations of preprints to citations of the published version to uncover the causal mechanism. We build on an earlier model of citation dynamics to infer the causal effect of journals on citations. We find that high-impact journals select articles that tend to attract more citations.

At the same time, we find that high-impact journals augment the citation rate of published articles. Our results yield a deeper understanding of the role of journals in the research system.

The use of journal metrics in research evaluation has been increasingly criticized in recent years and article-level citations are sometimes suggested as an alternative. Our results show that removing impact factors from evaluation does not negate the influence of journals. This insight has important implications for changing practices of research evaluation.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00128

Working with publication technology to make open access journals sustainable

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Authors : Marcel Wrzesinski, Patrick Urs Riechert, Frédéric Dubois, Christian Katzenbach

Over the last 25 years, scholars around the world have used electronic publishing to open up their work, share it with interested publics instantly or even become publishers themselves.

This white paper explores in what ways advances in publication technology in the journal sector (e.g. the widespread use of content management and editorial systems) contributes to a more inclusive and sustainable open access ecosystem.

Drawing on a study we did in Germany in 2019-2021, and for which we tested technical solutions together with the international, peer-reviewed diamond open access journal Internet Policy Review, we present and discuss publishing solutions based on software, workflows, and collaborations with regard to their practicability and scalability.

The paper finds that scholar-led publishing is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to technical solutions tending towards increased bibliodiversity (i.e., variety of content, publication formats and publishing institutions).

URL : Working with publication technology to make open access journals sustainable

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4558781