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

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

Identification and classification of evaluation indicators for scientific and technical publications and related factors

Authors : Hassan Mahmoudi Topkanlo, Mehrdad CheshmehSohrabi

Introduction

Given the importance of the issue of the widespread impact of scientific and technical publications in today’s world, and the diversity and multiplicity of indicators for measuring these publications, it is a necessity to classify these indicators from different angles and through different tools and methods.

Method

This study used documentary analysis and Delphi technique methods. The members of the Delphi panel were twenty-one experts in metric fields in information science who answered the research questionnaires several times until reaching a consensus.

Analysis

Kendall’s coefficient of concordance and a one-sample t-test were used to measure the agreement of the panel members as raters on the questionnaire items.

Results

A total of thirty-four sub-categories of indicators of assessment were identified which were categorised according to their similarities and differences into eight main categories as follows: measurement method, measurement unit, measurement content, measurement purpose, measurement development, measurement resource, measurability, and measurement environment.

Conclusion

Classification of the indicators of evaluation for scientific and technical publications and related factors can lead to improved understanding, critique, modelling and development of indicators. The findings of this study can be considered a basis for further research and help develop evaluative theoretical foundations in scientific and technical publications and related factors.

URL : Identification and classification of evaluation indicators for scientific and technical publications and related factors

DOI : https://doi.org/10.47989/irpaper953

Awareness Mentality and Strategic Behavior in Science

Author : Rafael Ball

Acknowledgement of scientific achievements was and is essentially achieved through the citation of a publication. Increasingly, however, it is no longer just the publication itself that plays an important role, but also the degree of attention that a scientist achieves with this very publication.

Thus, the importance of strategic behavior in science is progressing and an awareness mentality is spreading. In this paper, the causes and backgrounds of this development are discussed, identifying the use of reductionist, quantitative systems in science management and research funding, the loss of critical judgment and technocratic dominance, quantitative assessments used for decision making, altmetrics and the like as alternative views, the use of perception scores in reference databases and universities as well as ambitions of journals as main drivers.

Besides, different forms of strategic behavior in science and the resulting consequences and impacts are being highlighted.

URL : Awareness Mentality and Strategic Behavior in Science

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2021.703159

Which aspects of the Open Science agenda are most relevant to scientometric research and publishing? An opinion paper

Authors : Lutz Bornmann, Raf Guns, Michael Thelwall, Dietmar Wolfram

Open Science is an umbrella term that encompasses many recommendations for possible changes in research practices, management, and publishing with the objective to increase transparency and accessibility.

This has become an important science policy issue that all disciplines should consider. Many Open Science recommendations may be valuable for the further development of research and publishing but not all are relevant to all fields.

This opinion paper considers the aspects of Open Science that are most relevant for scientometricians, discussing how they can be usefully applied.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_e_00121

The evolutionary pattern of language in scientific writings: A case study of Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society (1665–1869)

Authors : Kun Sun, Haitao Liu, Wenxin Xiong

Scientific writings, as one essential part of human culture, have evolved over centuries into their current form. Knowing how scientific writings evolved is particularly helpful in understanding how trends in scientific culture developed. It also allows us to better understand how scientific culture was interwoven with human culture generally.

The availability of massive digitized texts and the progress in computational technologies today provide us with a convenient and credible way to discern the evolutionary patterns in scientific writings by examining the diachronic linguistic changes. The linguistic changes in scientific writings reflect the genre shifts that took place with historical changes in science and scientific writings.

This study investigates a general evolutionary linguistic pattern in scientific writings. It does so by merging two credible computational methods: relative entropy; word-embedding concreteness and imageability.

It thus creates a novel quantitative methodology and applies this to the examination of diachronic changes in the Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society (PTRS, 1665–1869). The data from two computational approaches can be well mapped to support the argument that this journal followed the evolutionary trend of increasing professionalization and specialization.

But it also shows that language use in this journal was greatly influenced by historical events and other socio-cultural factors. This study, as a “culturomic” approach, demonstrates that the linguistic evolutionary patterns in scientific discourse have been interrupted by external factors even though this scientific discourse would likely have cumulatively developed into a professional and specialized genre.

The approaches proposed by this study can make a great contribution to full-text analysis in scientometrics.

URL : The evolutionary pattern of language in scientific writings: A case study of Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society (1665–1869)

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03816-8