Article examines the activity of citing publications during the process of writing a scientific paper. The suggested model consists of four main categories – Arguments, Social Alignment, Mercantile Alignment and Data – plus subcategories. The authors argue that the complexities of citation practice show how little can be assumed about the real reasons for citing an article by analyzing the final paper. The study has an impact mainly in attributing relevance to articles based solely on citations, and therefore, on journal and researcher assessment. … Read More →
“10 years of research impact : the most cited articles in Scopus 2001 – 2011” – Synthesis of the article originally published in the Elsevier newsletter “Research Trends, Issue 38”
Gali Halevi and Henk Moed investigate what the most frequently cited articles were in Scopus from 2001-2011, in eight main research areas, and give their authors the chance to comment on their achievements. … Read More →
Rise of the Rest: The Growing Impact of Non-Elite Journals – Originally published on Google Scholar Blog on October 8, 2014
The world of scholarly communication has changed quite a bit over the last decade. This post from Google Scholar team explore the impact of these changes – looking at how scholarship and citation patterns have changed as publications and archives moved online and comprehensive relevance-ranked search became available to everyone. … Read More →
The challenges of retraction: cleaning up the literature might be difficult
There is consensus that misconduct in academic publications should be remedied as soon as possible. However, there are a number of implications – ethical, moral, legal and those related to the reputation of the journals and researchers in the retraction process – that turn the process into a complex one which can often become unworkable. … Read More →
Publish or perish? The rise of the fractional author… – Originally published on the Elsevier newsletter “Research Trends Issue 38”
Andrew Plume and Daphne van Weijen investigate how the pressure researchers feel to publish their work has affected co-authorship patterns over the past 10 years. Are researchers publishing more unique articles or co-authoring more articles? … Read More →
Retraction of scientific works and pseudoscience
Is the growing number of scientific retractions necessarily due to the fruits of pseudoscience? Productive reflection on the subject leads us to the need to recognize the current demands of the scientific system for researchers, conflicts of interests at stake and that science is produced by fallible human beings with their own moral values . Globalization, while supporting misconduct, strengthens social control. Increased retraction of papers is a necessary response of the social control to what some authors refer to as “pseudoscience”. … Read More →
Latin-American repositories have little visibility in Google Scholar
A recent study concerning the visibility of Latin American scholarly output in open access repositories reveals their poor indexing in Google and Google Scholar. The technical reasons for these problems, which affect the visibility of Latin-American research which, for the most part, is not indexed in either in WoS or Scopus, are explained in this post. … Read More →
Editorial ethics – good and bad scientific practices
III BRISPE: Brazilian Meeting on Research Integrity, Science and Publication Ethics, sponsored by FAPESP, was the third event held in Brazil with the objective to promote institutional policies and practices of ethical research integrity and responsible conduct. With the presence of several prestigious guests from developed countries, the education strategies to new scientists were analyzed as well as how to reduce bad practices such falsification of data, plagiarism, conflict of interests, manipulation of results, etc. … Read More →
Profile of researchers that integrate the core of world science publishing
A limited number of researchers all over the world can keep a continuous and uninterrupted flow of publications over time. This ability is shared by only 1% of researchers, who form the core of most productive and cited scientists. The inability to maintain this flow is translated into less scientific impact. … Read More →
What can alternative metrics – or altmetrics – offer us?
The results and comments in four articles dedicated to altmetrics and published in an issue of EPI are analyzed. They show future possibilities and the real difficulties in the development of a new technique for the measurement of the impact of research based on social networks on the web. … Read More →
The SciELO journals are being improved by the adoption of classic workflows relating to the online management of article submissions
Together with the journals that it indexes, SciELO is fostering the improvement of the management of the evaluation of article submissions in order to help overcome the various difficulties faced by the journals, and to strengthen the transparency of the processes. Part of this initiative is the use of automated management systems that organize the functions of the parties involved in the evaluation of article submissions, allow for the monitoring of the workflows and provide statistics on the corresponding activities, with a view to steering the systematic improvement of the processes. This post analyzes three classic workflows in the automated management of article submissions adopted by a group of SciELO journals whose promising results show the viability of SciELO’s strategy. … Read More →
Author credits …. Credited for what?
When the publication of a scientific article has been the joint responsibility of dozens of people, the following questions can arise: Who is the author? How is credit apportioned? and Does everyone have the same level of responsibility? A recent editorial in Nature puts forward a taxonomy which can be used to categorize the different roles which come together to make up the concept of authorship. It is interesting to make a comparison with how the film industry addresses this issue when apportioning credits in the awarding of Oscars. … Read More →
The Open Data movement: international consolidation
The open data movement – the availability of scientific research data for preservation, searching, using and citing – is gaining followers in all sectors of the academic world, and with editors, publishers, research institutions and funding agencies. The movement will allow greater interoperability, transparency, visibility and research impact, in addition to ensuring the digital preservation of the original data that would otherwise have a tendency to be lost or become inaccessible with the passage of time. … Read More →
South America science in Nature
The celebrated journal Nature devotes a special section of its June 11 issue to an analysis of South American research output, highlighting areas of excellence and innovation which are internationally recognized, and fields of collaboration with other countries both inside and outside the region. The articles in this section stress the economic and infrastructural inequalities within the region, as well as the low levels of investment in research and development, and point to FAPESP as a successful model of investment directly linked to a state’s GDP. … Read More →
What are the Public Library of Science Collections ? – Part II
This post is the second part of the description of the contents of the PLOS Collections. Of the seven collections that makeup PLOS Collections, the Text Mining and Altmetrics collections have been selected for a brief analysis of their contents and their importance to scientometrics and information science, and of the growth of these disciplines that are bolstered by free access to full text. … Read More →
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