The application of mathematics and statistical methods to scholarly communication: scientometrics, has facilitated the systematic analysis of the modern digital tide of literature. This chapter reviews three of such applications: coauthorship, bibliographic coupling, and coword networks. It also presents an exploratory case of study for the knowledge circulation literature. It was found a diverse geographical production, mainly in the Global North and Asian institutions with significant intermediation of universities from USA, Colombia, and Japan. The research fronts identified were related to science and medicine's history and philosophy; education, health, policy studies; and a set of interdisciplinary topics. Finally, the knowledge pillars were comprised of urban planning policy, economic geography, and historical and theoretical perspectives in the Netherlands and Central Europe; globalization and science, technology, and innovation and historical and institutional frameworks in the UK; and cultural and learning studies in the XXI century.
In order to assess Microsoft Academic as a useful data source for evaluative bibliometrics it is crucial to know, if citation counts from Microsoft Academic could be used in common normalization procedures and whether the normalized scores agree with the scores calculated on the basis of established databases. To this end, we calculate the field-normalized citation scores of the publications of a computer science institute based on Microsoft Academic and the Web of Science and estimate the statistical concordance of the scores. Our results suggest that field-normalized citation scores can be c…
Dot-science was launched in 2015 as a new academic top-level domain (TLD) aimed to provide 'a dedicated, easily accessible location for global Internet users with an interest in science'. The main objective of this work is to find out the general scholarly usage of this top-level domain. In particular, the following three questions are pursued: usage (number of web domains registered with the dot-science), purpose (main function and category of websites linked to these web domains), and impact (websites' visibility and authority). To do this, 13,900 domain names were gathered through ICANN's D…
Web of Science and Scopus are two world-leading and competing citation databases. By using the Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, this paper conducts a comparative, dynamic, and empirical study focusing on the use of Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus in academic papers published during 2004 and 2018. This brief communication reveals that although both Web of Science and Scopus are increasingly used in academic papers, Scopus as a new-comer is really challenging the dominating role of WoS. Researchers from more and more countries/regions and knowledge domains are …
Identifying and studying the formation of researchers over the years is a challenging task, as the current repositories of theses and dissertations are cataloged in a decentralized manner in different digital libraries, many of them with limited scope. In this paper, we take a step forward towards building a large repository to record the Brazilian academic genealogy. For this, we collected data from the Lattes platform, an internationally recognized initiative that provides a repository of researchers' curricula maintained by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Dev…
We present a large-scale comparison of five multidisciplinary bibliographic data sources: Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, Crossref, and Microsoft Academic. The comparison considers scientific documents from the period 2008-2017 covered by these data sources. Scopus is compared in a pairwise manner with each of the other data sources. We first analyze differences between the data sources in the coverage of documents, focusing for instance on differences over time, differences per document type, and differences per discipline. We then study differences in the completeness and accuracy of cit…
Research managers benchmarking universities against international peers face the problem of affiliation disambiguation. Different databases have taken separate approaches to this problem and discrepancies exist between them. Bibliometric data sources typically conduct a disambiguation process that unifies variant institutional names and those of its sub-units so that researchers can then search all records from that institution using a single unified name. This study examined affiliation discrepancies between Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, and Microsoft Academic for 18 Arab universities o…
The academic performance indicators of the Doctor of Science title, the highest and most prestigious qualification awarded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS), are key in the national assessment system. The types of performance indicators, as well as their minimum values, are incorporated into the application requirements of academic promotions, scientific qualifications, and research scholarships. HAS has proposed a reform of these performance indicators, to align with the current national and global trends. The proposed modifications are generally based on arbitrary decisions and the …
What does the cost of academic publishing look like to the common researcher today? Our goal is to convey the current state of academic publishing, specifically in regards to the field of computer science and provide analysis and data to be used as a basis for future studies. We will focus on author and reader costs as they are the primary points of interaction within the publishing world. In this work, we restrict our focus to only computer science in order to make the data collection more feasible (the authors are computer scientists) and hope future work can analyze and collect data across …
New sources of citation data have recently become available, such as Microsoft Academic, Dimensions, and the OpenCitations Index of CrossRef open DOI-to-DOI citations (COCI). Although these have been compared to the Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, or Google Scholar, there is no systematic evidence of their differences across subject categories. In response, this paper investigates 3,073,351 citations found by these six data sources to 2,515 English-language highly-cited documents published in 2006 from 252 subject categories, expanding and updating the largest previous study. Google Scholar foun…
Book reviews play important roles in scholarly communication especially in arts and humanities disciplines. By using Web of Science's Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index, this study probed the patterns and dynamics of book reviews within these three indexes empirically during the past decade (2006-2015). We found that the absolute numbers of book reviews among all the three indexes were relatively stable but the relative shares were decreasing. Book reviews were very common in arts and humanities, common in social sciences, but …
In this paper, we present an open data set extracted from the transaction log of the social sciences academic search engine sowiport. The data set includes a filtered set of 484,449 retrieval sessions which have been carried out by sowiport users in the period from April 2014 to April 2015. We propose a description of interactions performed by the academic search engine users that can be used in different applications such as result ranking improvement, user modeling, query reformulation analysis, search pattern recognition.
We perform a statistical analysis of scientific-publication data with a goal to provide quantitative analysis of scientific process. Such an investigation belongs to the newly established field of scientometrics: a branch of the general science of science that covers all quantitative methods to analyze science and research process. As a case study we consider download and citation statistics of the journal `Europhysics Letters' (EPL), as Europe's flagship letters journal of broad interest to the physics community. While citations are usually considered as an indicator of academic impact, downl…
Information exposing, in conjunction with technological innovations and the emergence of social media, altered the traditional roles of academic libraries and enabled librarians to become necessary partners in research. The role of academic librarians in conducting systematic reviews is well recognised, however, their role in conducting scoping reviews is not yet well established. Nevertheless, we propose that, in more and more frequent situations when it is not feasible to read and analyse all relevant literature to be scoped manually, librarians employ bibliometric analysis and mapping to vi…
In Hungary, the highest and most prestigious scientific qualification is considered to be the Doctor of Science (DSc) title being awarded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The academic performance indicators of the DSc title are of high importance in the evaluation of individuals' research performance not only when a researcher applies for obtaining a DSc title, but also during promotions and appointments at universities, and in the case of the evaluation of applications for scientific titles and degrees, and the assessment of applications for funding. In the Section of Earth Sciences enco…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
Research on the construction of traditional information science methodology taxonomy is mostly conducted manually. From the limited corpus, researchers have attempted to summarize some of the research methodology entities into several abstract levels (generally three levels); however, they have been unable to provide a more granular hierarchy. Moreover, updating the methodology taxonomy is traditionally a slow process. In this study, we collected full-text academic papers related to information science. First, we constructed a basic methodology taxonomy with three levels by manual annotation. …
A Double Bind: Gendered Funding, Research Topics, and Academic Performance in the Social Sciences
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Edinburgh Futures Institute, University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡未来研究所）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University（武汉大学人民医院）；University of Münster（明斯特大学）；University of York（约克大学）；Polytechnic University of Milan（米兰理工大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；University of Reading（雷丁大学）；City University of Macau（澳门城市大学）
In this paper, the scientometric evaluation of faculty members of 50 Greek Science and Engineering University Departments is presented. 1978 academics were examined in total. The number of papers, citations, h-index and i10-index have been collected for each academic, department, school and university using Google Scholar and the citations analysis program Publish or Perish. Analysis of the collected data showed that departments of the same academic discipline are characterized by significant differences on the scientific outcome. In addition, in the majority of the evaluated departments a sig…
In the context of a comprehensive Microsoft Academic (MA) study, we explored in an initial step the quality of linked references data in MA in comparison with Web of Science (WoS). Linked references are the backbone of bibliometrics, because they are the basis of the times cited information in citation indexes. We found that the concordance of linked references between MA and WoS ranges from weak to non-existent for the full sample (publications of the University of Zurich with less than 50 linked references in MA). An analysis with a sample restricted to less than 50 linked references in WoS …
The evolution of vocabulary in academic publishing is characterized via keyword frequencies recorded the ISI Web of Science citations database. In four distinct case-studies, evolutionary analysis of keyword frequency change through time is compared to a model of random copying used as the null hypothesis, such that selection may be identified against it. The case studies from the physical sciences indicate greater selection in keyword choice than in the social sciences. Similar evolutionary analyses can be applied to a wide range of phenomena; wherever the popularity of multiple items through…
A study released by the Google Scholar team found an apparently increasing fraction of citations to old articles from studies published in the last 24 years (1990-2013). To demonstrate this finding we conducted a complementary study using a different data source (Journal Citation Reports), metric (aggregate cited half-life), time spam (2003-2013), and set of categories (53 Social Science subject categories and 167 Science subject categories). Although the results obtained confirm and reinforce the previous findings, the possible causes of this phenomenon keep unclear. We finally hypothesize th…
The complexity of emergent wicked problems, such as climate change, culminates in a reformulation of how we think about society and mobilize scientists from various disciplines to seek solutions and perspectives on the problem. From an epistemological point of view, it is essential to evaluate how such topics can be developed inside the academic arena but, to do that, it is necessary to perform complex analysis of the great number of recent academic publications. In this work, we discuss how climate change has been addressed by social sciences in practice. Can we observe the development of a n…
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 ans…
This study measures the tendency to publish in international scientific journals. For each of nearly 35 thousands Scopus-indexed journals, we derive seven globalization indicators based on the composition of authors by country of origin and other characteristics. These are subsequently scaled up to the level of 174 countries and 27 disciplines between 2005 and 2017. The results indicate that advanced countries maintain high globalization of scientific communication that is not varying across disciplines. Social sciences and health sciences are less globalized than physical and life sciences. C…
Social inequality is traditionally measured by the Gini-index ($g$). The $g$-index takes values from $0$ to $1$ where $g=0$ represents complete equality and $g=1$ represents complete inequality. Most of the estimates of the income or wealth data indicate the $g$ value to be widely dispersed across the countries of the world: \textit{g} values typically range from $0.30$ to $0.65$ at a particular time (year). We estimated similarly the Gini-index for the citations earned by the yearly publications of various academic institutions and the science journals. The ISI web of science data suggests re…
The main objective of this work is to analyse the contributions of Judit Bar-Ilan to the search engines studies. To do this, two complementary approaches have been carried out. First, a systematic literature review of 47 publications authored and co-authored by Judit and devoted to this topic. Second, an interdisciplinarity analysis based on the cited references (publications cited by Judit) and citing documents (publications that cite Judit's work) through Scopus. The systematic literature review unravels an immense amount of search engines studied (43) and indicators measured (especially tec…
Scholarly communication has the scope to transcend the limitations of the physical world through social media extended coverage and shortened information paths. Accordingly, publishers have created profiles for their journals in Twitter to promote their publications and to initiate discussions with public. This paper investigates the Twitter presence of humanities and social sciences (HSS) journal titles obtained from mainstream citation indices, by analysing the interaction and communication patterns. This study utilizes webometric data collection, descriptive analysis, and social network ana…
The web does not only enable new forms of science, it also creates new possibilities to study science and new digital scholarship. This paper brings together multiple perspectives: from individual researchers seeking the best options to display their activities and market their skills on the academic job market; to academic institutions, national funding agencies, and countries needing to monitor the science system and account for public money spending. We also address the research interests aimed at better understanding the self-organising and complex nature of the science system through rese…
The present paper takes its place in the stream of studies that analyze the effect of interdisciplinarity on the impact of research output. Unlike previous studies, in this study the interdisciplinarity of the publications is not inferred through their citing or cited references, but rather by identifying the authors' designated fields of research. For this we draw on the scientific classification of Italian academics, and their publications as indexed in the WoS over a five-year period (2004-2008). We divide the publications in three subsets on the basis the nature of co-authorship: those pap…
International academic collaborations cultivate diversity in the research landscape and facilitate multiperspective methods, as the scope of each country's science depends on its needs, history, wealth etc. Moreover the quality of science differ significantly amongst nations\cite{king2004scientific}, which renders international collaborations a potential source to understand the dynamics between countries and their advancements. Analyzing these collaborations can reveal sharing expertise between two countries in different fields, the most well-known institutions of a nation, the overall succes…
The present politically correct consensus is that increased exchange of scientific insight, knowledge, practitioners and skills at the global level brings significant benefits to all. The quantifiable scientometric changes during the last decade, however, suggest that many areas of knowledge are evolving in the opposite direction. Despite an increase during the last decade of the numbers of journals and academic articles published, increases in the number of citations the published articles receive, and increases in the number of countries participating; important parts of the academic activit…
The objective of the OSCOSS research project on "Opening Scholarly Communication in the Social Sciences" is to build a coherent collaboration environment that facilitates scholarly communication workflows of social scientists in the roles of authors, reviewers, editors and readers. This paper presents the implementation of the core of this environment: the integration of the Fidus Writer academic word processor with the Open Journal Systems (OJS) submission and review management system.
The networking ability of journals reflects their academic influence among peer journals. This paper analyzes the cited and citing environments of the journal--Advances in Atmospheric Sciences--using methods from social network analysis. The journal has been actively participating in the international journal environment, but one has a tendency to cite papers published in international journals. Advances in Atmospheric Sciences is intensely interrelated with international peer journals in terms of similar citing pattern. However, there is still room for an increase in its academic visibility g…
The composition of the scientific workforce shapes the direction of scientific research, directly through the selection of questions to investigate, and indirectly through its influence on the training of future scientists. In most fields, however, complete census information is difficult to obtain, complicating efforts to study workforce dynamics and the effects of policy. This is particularly true in computer science, which lacks a single, all-encompassing directory or professional organization. A full census of computer science would serve many purposes, not the least of which is a better u…
With the rise of Wikipedia as a first-stop source for scientific knowledge, it is important to compare its representation of that knowledge to that of the academic literature. Here we identify the 250 most heavily used journals in each of 26 research fields (4,721 journals, 19.4M articles in total) indexed by the Scopus database, and test whether topic, academic status, and accessibility make articles from these journals more or less likely to be referenced on Wikipedia. We find that a journal's academic status (impact factor) and accessibility (open access policy) both strongly increase the p…
We study the disproportionate impact of the lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak on female and male academics' research productivity in social science. The lockdown has caused substantial disruptions to academic activities, requiring people to work from home. How this disruption affects productivity and the related gender equity is an important operations and societal question. We collect data from the largest open-access preprint repository for social science on 41,858 research preprints in 18 disciplines produced by 76,832 authors across 25 countries over a span of two years. We use…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）
In scientific research, the method is an indispensable means to solve scientific problems and a critical research object. With the advancement of sciences, many scientific methods are being proposed, modified, and used in academic literature. The authors describe details of the method in the abstract and body text, and key entities in academic literature reflecting names of the method are called method entities. Exploring diverse method entities in a tremendous amount of academic literature helps scholars understand existing methods, select the appropriate method for research tasks, and propos…
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；King Saud University（沙特国王大学）；Menoufia University（梅努菲亚大学）
Advisor-advisee relationship is important in academic networks due to its universality and necessity. Despite the increasing desire to analyze the career of newcomers, however, the outcomes of different collaboration patterns between advisors and advisees remain unknown. The purpose of this paper is to find out the correlation between advisors' academic characteristics and advisees' academic performance in Computer Science. Employing both quantitative and qualitative analysis, we find that with the increase of advisors' academic age, advisees' performance experiences an initial growth, follows…
