Catégories
EN

Large-Scale Analysis of the Accuracy of the Journal Classification Systems of Web of Science and Scopus

Journal classification systems play an important role in bibliometric analyses. The two most important bibliographic databases, Web of Science and Scopus, each provide a journal classification system. However, no study has systematically investigated the accuracy of these classification systems. To examine and compare the accuracy of journal classification systems, we define two criteria on the basis of direct citation relations between journals and categories.

We use Criterion I to select journals that have weak connections with their assigned categories, and we use Criterion II to identify journals that are not assigned to categories with which they have strong connections. If a journal satisfies either of the two criteria, we conclude that its assignment to categories may be questionable. Accordingly, we identify all journals with questionable classifications in Web of Science and Scopus.

Furthermore, we perform a more in-depth analysis for the field of Library and Information Science to assess whether our proposed criteria are appropriate and whether they yield meaningful results. It turns out that according to our citation-based criteria Web of Science performs significantly better than Scopus in terms of the accuracy of its journal classification system.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.00735

Catégories
EN

The application of bibliometrics to research evaluation in the humanities and social sciences: an exploratory study using normalized Google Scholar data for the publications of a research institute

In the humanities and social sciences, bibliometric methods for the assessment of research performance are (so far) less common. The current study takes a concrete example in an attempt to evaluate a research institute from the area of social sciences and humanities with the help of data from Google Scholar (GS).

In order to use GS for a bibliometric study, we have developed procedures for the normalisation of citation impact, building on the procedures of classical bibliometrics. In order to test the convergent validity of the normalized citation impact scores, we have calculated normalized scores for a subset of the publications based on data from the WoS or Scopus.

Even if scores calculated with the help of GS and WoS/Scopus are not identical for the different publication types (considered here), they are so similar that they result in the same assessment of the institute investigated in this study: For example, the institute’s papers whose journals are covered in WoS are cited at about an average rate (compared with the other papers in the journals).

URL :  : https://figshare.com/articles/The_application_of_bibliometrics_to_research_evaluation_in_the_humanities_and_social_sciences_an_exploratory_study_using_normalized_Google_Scholar_data_for_the_publications_of_a_research_institute/1293588

Catégories
EN

On full text download and citation distributions in scientific-scholarly journals

A statistical analysis of full text downloads of articles in Elseviers ScienceDirect covering all disciplines reveals large differences in download frequencies, their skewness, and their correlation with Scopus-based citation counts, between disciplines, journals, and document types. Download counts tend to be two orders of magnitude higher and less skewedly distributed than citations. A mathematical model based on the sum of two exponentials does not adequately capture monthly download counts.

The degree of correlation at the article level within a journal is similar to that at the journal level in the discipline covered by that journal, suggesting that the differences between journals are to a large extent discipline specific. Despite the fact that in all study journals download and citation counts per article positively correlate, little overlap may exist between the set of articles appearing in the top of the citation distribution and that with the most frequently downloaded ones.

Usage and citation leaks, bulk downloading, differences between reader and author populations in a subject field, the type of document or its content, differences in obsolescence patterns between downloads and citations, different functions of reading and citing in the research process, all provide possible explanations of differences between download and citation distributions.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.05129

Catégories
EN

Types of Open Access Publishers in Scopus

This study assessed characteristics of publishers who published 2010 open access (OA) journals indexed in Scopus. Publishers were categorized into six types; professional, society, university, scholar/researcher, government, and other organizations. Type of publisher was broken down by number of journals/articles published in 2010, funding model, location, discipline and whether the journal was born or converted to OA. Universities and societies accounted for 50% of the journals and 43% of the articles published. Professional publisher accounted for a third of the journals and 42% of the articles.

With the exception of professional and scholar/researcher publishers, most journals were originally subscription journals that made at least their digital version freely available. Arts, humanities and social science journals are largely published by societies and universities outside the major publishing countries. Professional OA publishing is most common in biomedicine, mathematics, the sciences and engineering.

Approximately a quarter of the journals are hosted on national/international platforms, in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia largely published by universities and societies without the need for publishing fees. This type of collaboration between governments, universities and/or societies may be an effective means of expanding open access publications.

URL : http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/1/1/16

Catégories
Non classé

A Comparison between Two Main Academic Literature Collections…

A Comparison between Two Main Academic Literature Collections: Web of Science and Scopus Databases :

« Nowadays, the worlds scientific community has been publishing an enormous number of papers in different scientific fields. In such environment, it is essential to know which databases are equally efficient and objective for literature searches. It seems that two most extensive databases are Web of Science and Scopus. Besides searching the literature, these two databases used to rank journals in terms of their productivity and the total citations received to indicate the journals impact, prestige or influence. This article attempts to provide a comprehensive comparison of these databases to answer frequent questions which researchers ask, such as: How Web of Science and Scopus are different? In which aspects these two databases are similar? Or, if the researchers are forced to choose one of them, which one should they prefer? For answering these questions, these two databases will be compared based on their qualitative and quantitative characteristics. »

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.0377

Catégories
Non classé

Revistas y producción científica de América Latina y el Caribe: su visibilidad en SciELO, RedALyC y SCOPUS

Este trabajo comparó la cobertura de revistas procedentes de América Latina y el Caribe incluidas en SciELO, RedALyC y SCOPUS, por país y por tema. Calculó el porcentaje de revistas en estas fuentes en relación con las registradas en el catálogo de LATINDEX. Estimó el volumen de la producción científica que registra visibilidad en las tres fuentes y su evolución en el período 2005-2009. Los resultados indicaron que las tres fuentes son complementarias. En promedio, el porcentaje de solapamiento de títulos es bajo y desigual la distribución de revistas por países. Ningún país registró en las fuentes estudiadas todas las revistas incluidas en LATINDEX. SCOPUS y SciELO están más equilibradas temáticamente que RedALyC, que mostró un marcado sesgo hacia las ciencias sociales. El volumen de producción científica visible en SCOPUS es muy superior al de SciELO y RedALyC, aunque su distribución por países es muy desigual. Las tres fuentes registran tendencias de crecimiento de la producción en el período analizado.

URL : http://aprendeenlinea.udea.edu.co/revistas/index.php/RIB/article/view/10366

Catégories
EN

Web Services for Bibliometrics

Institutional repositories have spread in universities where they provide services for recording, distributing, and preserving the institution’s intellectual output. When the Lausanne « academic server », named SERVAL, was launched at the end of 2008, the Faculty of Biology and Medicine addressed from the outset the issue of quality of metadata. Accuracy is fundamental since research funds are allocated on the basis of the statistics and indicators provided by the repository. The Head of faculty also charged the medical library to explore different ways to measure and assess the research output. The first step for the Lausanne university medical library was to implement the PubMed and the Web of Science web services to easily extract clean bibliographic information from the databases directly into the repository.

Now the medical library is testing other web services (from CrossRef, Web of Science, etc.) to generate quantitative data on research impact mainly. The approach is essentially based on citation linking. Although the utility of citation and bibliometric evaluation is still debated, the most prevalent output measures used for research evaluation are still those based on citation analysis. Even when a new scientific evaluation indicator is proposed, such as h-index, we can always see its link with citation. Additionally, the results of a new indicator are often compared with citation analysis. The presentation will review the web services which might be used in institutional repositories to collect and aggregate citation information for the researchers’ publications.

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00540289/fr/