Knowing how and by whom articles are shared on social media can help the challenging task of qualifying alternative metrics indicators. In this interview, Stefanie Haustein, assistant professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Information Studies in Canada and co-director of the ScholCommLab, addresses the role of social networks such as Twitter as a data source for altmetrics. She also looks at the role journals play in the dissemination of their articles on Twitter and investigates how scholarly articles from Brazil and Brazilian Twitter users tweet about scholarly outputs. … Read More →
Mapping the impact of UN Sustainable Development Goals on global research [Originally published in LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog in May/2019]
The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent one of the largest and most sustained influences on global research to date. However, charting the effect of these 17 goals on the global research community is a complex task. In this post, Martin Szomszor draws on the findings of a recent bibliometric study to produce a ‘citation map’ of sustainability research, which highlights how the UN SDGs have enabled the development of new areas of transdisciplinary and international collaboration in research. … Read More →
From star peer reviewers to ghost peer reviewers – Part II
Open reviews and the emergence of platforms such as Publons, which publish these activities and integrate them into other academic tasks, open the possibility of the emergence of a new aspect of bibliometrics and certainly a new and prestigious market. … Read More →
From star peer reviewers to ghost peer reviewers – Part I
Peer review is an integral part of scholarly publishing and is carried out globally by most researchers in developed countries. To what extent researchers from emerging countries participate and which measures of their performance are reported in the result of the largest survey on peer review conducted so far. This note is the first of two on the subject. … Read More →
Pirates of the medical literature – a worldwide bibliometric study
A large volume of medical literature is being illegally downloaded in almost every country in the world. There is a significant relationship between the scientific output of these countries and the density of illegal downloads, especially in middle-income countries. This unequal pattern of legal access to medical literature requires the attention of both the publishing industry and policy makers. … Read More →
The role of non-Brazilian contribution in the publishing performance of psychology journals in Brazil
An examination of publishing performance among psychology journals in Brazil finds higher publishing performance associated with non-Brazilian contribution, in terms of: authors and editorial board members from English-speaking countries; as well as collaboration with authors from English-speaking countries. Implications are discussed for editors and publishers, as well as arbiters of public policy. … Read More →
The absurdity of the same requirement for law that the rest of the scientific publications
Bibliometric indexes (e.g., WoS/Scopus), normally used for hard sciences and even social sciences, should not be used as a parameter for law research in the same way, as it does not respond to the same extent to measure quality or productivity of research in this field. Text available only in Spanish. … Read More →
Introduction to JATS (Journal Article Tag Suite)
Deborah A. Lapeyre, one of the developers of JATS and a member of the JATS secretariat, introduces us to the ANSI/NISO standard for the XML interchange of journal articles.
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SciELO 20 years: from visionary to indispensable [Originally published in Jornal da Unicamp in October/2018]
SciELO celebrates 20 years, surpassing in these two decades the mark of 1,200 journals from 14 countries, indexed and accessible through its portal. There are more than 700,000 daily hits. The project is still a pioneer producing an information source complementary to the international bibliographic and bibliometric databases. … Read More →
The power relations in world science. An anti-ranking to know the science produced in the periphery
The concept of mainstream science was consolidated globally because publications became the main axis of institutional and individual evaluation also in the periphery. The use of bibliometrics contributed to reinforce the extension of a progressively homogenous style of publication and the International Rankings of universities favored the extension of a heteronomous evaluative culture. However, the styles of production and circulation of the so-called science in the periphery are very diverse. … Read More →
Output and impact of Brazilian research: confronting international and national contexts
Brazilian scientific research, seen through its articles and their impact reveals a scenario that 30 years ago could not have been described. SciELO concretizes what Garfield envisioned for Latin America in the 1990s, allowing to delineate the citation flow, as in many countries, as yet unseen, and allowing to question the pertinence of Gibbs’s expression: “lost science in the third world”. … Read More →
Radiography of open access academic publishing and its bibliometric indicators
How does open access publishing evolves over time? Is it true that open access papers get more citations? Is open access increasing due to institutional or government mandates or at the initiative of authors themselves? To answer these and other questions, the US National Science Foundation commissioned Science-Metrix a detailed study on open access academic publishing, considering the gold route and the green route, the influence of the areas and the behavior of the research leading countries over the last decade. Here are the results. … Read More →
Quantity does matter as citation impact increases with productivity [Originally published in LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog in January/2018]
Many scholars are encouraged to focus on the quality not the quantity of their publications, the rationale being that becoming too focused on productivity risks reducing the quality of one’s work. But is this, in fact, the case? Peter van den Besselaar and Ulf Sandström have studied a large sample of researchers and found that, while results vary by field, there is a positive and stronger than linear relationship between productivity and quality (in terms of the top cited papers). This same pattern appears to apply to institutions as well as individual researchers. … Read More →
Academic journals with a presence on Twitter are more widely disseminated and receive a higher number of citations [Originally published in LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog in December/2017]
Previous research has shown that researchers’ active participation on Twitter can be a powerful way of promoting and disseminating academic outputs and improving the prospects of increased citations. But does the same hold true for the presence of academic journals on Twitter? José Luis Ortega examined the role of 350 scholarly journals, analysing how their articles were tweeted and cited. … Read More →
Open-access books are downloaded, cited, and mentioned more than non-OA books [Originally published in LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog in November/2017]
Open-access journal articles have been found, to some extent, to be downloaded and cited more than non-OA articles. But could the same be true for books? Carrie Calder reports on recent research into how open access affects the usage of scholarly books, including the findings that OA books are, on average, downloaded seven times more, cited 50% more, and mentioned online ten times more. A number of accompanying interviews reveal that authors are choosing open access routes to publish their books not only because of wider dissemination and easier access but also for ethical reasons. … Read More →
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