Archives des mots-clés : Web of Science

Merits and Limits: Applying open data to monitor open access publications in bibliometric databases

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Authors : Aliakbar Akbaritabar, Stephan Stahlschmidt

Identifying and monitoring Open Access (OA) publications might seem a trivial task while practical efforts prove otherwise. Contradictory information arise often depending on metadata employed.

We strive to assign OA status to publications in Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus while complementing it with different sources of OA information to resolve contradicting cases.

We linked publications from WOS and Scopus via DOIs and ISSNs to Unpaywall, Crossref, DOAJ and ROAD. Only about 50% of articles and reviews from WOS and Scopus could be matched via a DOI to Unpaywall.

Matching with Crossref brought 56 distinct licences, which define in many cases the legally binding access status of publications. But only 44% of publications hold only a single licence on Crossref, while more than 50% have no licence information submitted to Crossref.

Contrasting OA information from Crossref licences with Unpaywall we found contradictory cases overall amounting to more than 25%, which might be partially explained by (ex-)including green OA.

A further manual check found about 17% of OA publications that are not accessible and 15% non-OA publications that are accessible through publishers’ websites. These preliminary results suggest that identification of OA state of publications denotes a difficult and currently unfulfilled task.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03937

To What Extent is Inclusion in the Web of Science an Indicator of Journal ‘Quality’?

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Authors : Diego Chavarro, Ismael Rafols, Puay Tang

The assessment of research based on the journal in which it is published is a widely adopted practice. Some research assessments use the Web of Science (WoS) to identify “high quality” journals, which are assumed to publish excellent research.

The authority of WoS on journal quality stems from its selection of journals based on editorial standards and scientific impact criteria. These can be considered as universalistic criteria, meaning that they can be applied to any journal regardless of its place of publication, language, or discipline.

In this article we examine the coverage by WoS of journals produced in Latin America, Spain, and Portugal. We use a logistic regression to examine the probability of a journal to be covered by WoS given universalistic criteria (editorial standards and scientific impact of the journal) and particularistic criteria (country, language, and discipline of the journal).

We find that it is not possible to predict the inclusion of journals in WoS only through the universalistic criteria because particularistic variables such as country of the journal, its discipline and language are also related to inclusion in WoS.

We conclude that using WoS as a universalistic tool for research assessment can disadvantage science published in journals with adequate editorial standards and scientific merit. We discuss the implications of these findings within the research evaluation literature, specifically for countries and disciplines not extensively covered by WoS.

URL : https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2990653

Open access availability of scientific publications

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Author : Science-Metrix Inc.

This report details population-level measurements of the open access (OA) availability of publications indexed in two bibliometric databases—the Web of Science (WoS) by Clarivate Analytics and Scopus by Elsevier. This was achieved by matching the bibliometric database populations to the 1science database to determine the availability of the papers in OA form.

A comparative analysis of the recall and precision levels of the 1science database was performed using Scopus and the WoS. This helped to characterize the 1science database. Two policy-relevant indicators were selected for in-depth analyses: country affiliation of authors on publications, and scientific disciplines. These indicators were selected because they are very frequently used in bibliometric studies, including those performed by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and they appear in the NSF’s Science and Engineering Indicators.

URL : http://www.science-metrix.com/sites/default/files/science-metrix/publications/science-metrix_open_access_availability_scientific_publications_report.pdf

Open access levels: a quantitative exploration using Web of Science and oaDOI data

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Authors : Jeroen Bosman, Bianca Kramer

Across the world there is growing interest in open access publishing among researchers, institutions, funders and publishers alike. It is assumed that open access levels are growing, but hitherto the exact levels and patterns of open access have been hard to determine and detailed quantitative studies are scarce.

Using newly available open access status data from oaDOI in Web of Science we are now able to explore year-on-year open access levels across research fields, languages, countries, institutions, funders and topics, and try to relate the resulting patterns to disciplinary, national and institutional contexts.

With data from the oaDOI API we also look at the detailed breakdown of open access by types of gold open access (pure gold, hybrid and bronze), using universities in the Netherlands as an example.

There is huge diversity in open access levels on all dimensions, with unexpected levels for e.g. Portuguese as language, Astronomy & Astrophysics as research field, countries like Tanzania, Peru and Latvia, and Zika as topic.

We explore methodological issues and offer suggestions to improve conditions for tracking open access status of research output. Finally, we suggest potential future applications for research and policy development. We have shared all data and code openly.

URL : Open access levels: a quantitative exploration using Web of Science and oaDOI data

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3520v1

Scholars on Twitter: who and how many are they?

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Authors :  Rodrigo Costas, Jeroen van Honk, Thomas Franssen

In this paper we present a novel methodology for identifying scholars with a Twitter account. By combining bibliometric data from Web of Science and Twitter users identified by Altmetric.com we have obtained the largest set of individual scholars matched with Twitter users made so far.

Our methodology consists of a combination of matching algorithms, considering different linguistic elements of both author names and Twitter names; followed by a rule-based scoring system that weights the common occurrence of several elements related with the names, individual elements and activities of both Twitter users and scholars matched.

Our results indicate that about 2% of the overall population of scholars in the Web of Science is active on Twitter. By domain we find a strong presence of researchers from the Social Sciences and the Humanities. Natural Sciences is the domain with the lowest level of scholars on Twitter.

Researchers on Twitter also tend to be younger than those that are not on Twitter. As this is a bibliometric-based approach, it is important to highlight the reliance of the method on the number of publications produced and tweeted by the scholars, thus the share of scholars on Twitter ranges between 1% and 5% depending on their level of productivity. Further research is suggested in order to improve and expand the methodology.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.05667

Betweenness and diversity in journal citation networks as measures of interdisciplinarity—A tribute to Eugene Garfield

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Authors : Loet Leydesdorff, Caroline S. Wagner, Lutz Bornmann

Journals were central to Eugene Garfield’s research interests. Among other things, journals are considered as units of analysis for bibliographic databases such as the Web of Science and Scopus. In addition to providing a basis for disciplinary classifications of journals, journal citation patterns span networks across boundaries to variable extents.

Using betweenness centrality (BC) and diversity, we elaborate on the question of how to distinguish and rank journals in terms of interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity, however, is difficult to operationalize in the absence of an operational definition of disciplines; the diversity of a unit of analysis is sample-dependent. BC can be considered as a measure of multi-disciplinarity.

Diversity of co-citation in a citing document has been considered as an indicator of knowledge integration, but an author can also generate trans-disciplinary—that is, non-disciplined—variation by citing sources from other disciplines.

Diversity in the bibliographic coupling among citing documents can analogously be considered as diffusion  or differentiation of knowledge across disciplines. Because the citation networks in the cited direction reflect both structure and variation, diversity in this direction is perhaps the best available measure of interdisciplinarity at the journal level.

Furthermore, diversity is based on a summation and can therefore be decomposed; differences among (sub)sets can be tested for statistical significance. In the appendix, a general-purpose routine for measuring diversity in networks is provided.

URL : Betweenness and diversity in journal citation networks as measures of interdisciplinarity—A tribute to Eugene Garfield

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2528-2

 

 

Practicing What You Preach: Evaluating Access of Open Access Research

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Author : Teresa Schultz

The open access movement seeks to encourage all researchers to make their works openly available and free of paywalls so more people can access their knowledge. Yet some researchers who study open access (OA) continue to publish their work in paywalled journals and fail to make it open.

This project set out to study just how many published research articles about OA fall into this category, how many are being made open (whether by being published in a gold OA or hybrid journal or through open deposit), and how library and information science authors compare to other disciplines researching this field.

Because of the growth of tools available to help researchers find open versions of articles, this study also sought to compare how these new tools compare to Google Scholar in their ability to disseminating OA research.

From a sample collected from Web of Science of articles published since 2010, the study found that although a majority of research articles about OA are open in some form, a little more than a quarter are not.

A smaller rate of library science researchers made their work open compared to non-library science researchers. In looking at the copyright of these articles published in hybrid and open journals, authors were more likely to retain copyright ownership if they printed in an open journal compared to authors in hybrid journals.

Articles were more likely to be published with a Creative Commons license if published in an open journal compared to those published in hybrid journals.

URL : Practicing What You Preach: Evaluating Access of Open Access Research

DOI : https://dx.doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/YBDR8