Information Metrics (iMetrics): A Research Specialty with a Socio-Cognitive Identity?

"Bibliometrics", "scientometrics", "informetrics", and "webometrics" can all be considered as manifestations of a single research area with similar objectives and methods, which we call "information metrics" or iMetrics. This study explores the cognitive and social distinctness of iMetrics with respect to the general information science (IS), focusing on a core of researchers, shared vocabulary and literature/knowledge base. Our analysis investigates the similarities and differences between four document sets. The document sets are drawn from three core journals for iMetrics research (Scientometrics, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, and Journal of Informetrics). We split JASIST into document sets containing iMetrics and general IS articles. The volume of publications in this representation of the specialty has increased rapidly during the last decade. A core of researchers that predominantly focus on iMetrics topics can thus be identified. This core group has developed a shared vocabulary as exhibited in high similarity of title words and one that shares a knowledge base. The research front of this field moves faster than the research front of information science in general, bringing it closer to Price's dream.Comment: Accepted for publication in Scientometric

Citation gaming induced by bibliometric evaluation: a country-level comparative analysis

It is several years since national research evaluation systems around the globe started making use of quantitative indicators to measure the performance of researchers. Nevertheless, the effects on these systems on the behavior of the evaluated researchers are still largely unknown. We attempt to shed light on this topic by investigating how Italian researchers reacted to the introduction in 2011 of national regulations in which key passages of professional careers are governed by bibliometric indicators. A new inwardness measure, able to gauge the degree of scientific self-referentiality of a country, is defined as the proportion of citations coming from the country itself compared to the total number of citations gathered by the country. Compared to the trends of the other G10 countries in the period 2000-2016, Italy's inwardness shows a net increase after the introduction of the new evaluation rules. Indeed, globally and also for a large majority of the research fields, Italy became the European country with the highest inwardness. Possible explanations are proposed and discussed, concluding that the observed trends are strongly suggestive of a generalized strategic use of citations, both in the form of author self-citations and of citation clubs. We argue that the Italian case offers crucial insights on the constitutive effects of evaluation systems. As such, it could become a paradigmatic case in the debate about the use of indicators in science-policy contexts

Who\'s Who in Patents. A Bayesian approach

This paper proposes a bayesian methodology to treat the who’s who problem arising in individual level data sets such as patent data. We assess the usefullness of this methodology on the set of all French inventors appearing on EPO applications from 1978 to 2003.Patents, homonymy, Bayes rule

Regional and global science: Publications from Latin America and the Caribbean in the <em>SciELO Citation Index</em> and the <em>Web of Science</em>

In this article the authors compare the visibility of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) publications in the Core Collection indexes of the Web of Science (WoS) inlcuding Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index, and the SciELO Citation Index (SciELO CI) which was integrated into the larger WoS platform in 2014. The purpose of this comparison is to contribute to the broader understanding of the communication of scientific knowledge produced in Latin America and the Caribbean, and to provide some reflections on the potential benefits of the articulation of regional indexing exercises into WoS for a better understanding of geographic and disciplinary contributions. How is the regional level of SciELO CI related to the global range of WoS? In WoS, LAC authors are integrated at the global level in international networks, while SciELO has provided a platform for interactions among LAC researchers. The articulation of SciELO into WoS may improve the international visibility of the regional journals, but at the cost of own journal inclusion criteria independence

Regional and global science: Publications from Latin America and the Caribbean in the SciELO Citation Index and the Web of Science

In this article the authors compare the visibility of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) publications in the Core Collection indexes of the Web of Science (WoS) inlcuding Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index, and the SciELO Citation Index (SciELO CI) which was integrated into the larger WoS platform in 2014. The purpose of this comparison is to contribute to the broader understanding of the communication of scientific knowledge produced in Latin America and the Caribbean, and to provide some reflections on the potential benefits of the articulation of regional indexing exercises into WoS for a better understanding of geographic and disciplinary contributions. How is the regional level of SciELO CI related to the global range of WoS? In WoS, LAC authors are integrated at the global level in international networks, while SciELO has provided a platform for interactions among LAC researchers. The articulation of SciELO into WoS may improve the international visibility of the regional journals, but at the cost of own journal inclusion criteria independence

Who's Who in Patents. A Bayesian approach

This paper proposes a bayesian methodology to treat the who's who problem arising in individual level data sets such as patent data. We assess the usefullness of this methodology on the set of all French inventors appearing on EPO applications from 1978 to 2003.Patents; homonymy; Bayes rule

Decentralized provenance-aware publishing with nanopublications

Publication and archival of scientific results is still commonly considered the responsability of classical publishing companies. Classical forms of publishing, however, which center around printed narrative articles, no longer seem well-suited in the digital age. In particular, there exist currently no efficient, reliable, and agreed-upon methods for publishing scientific datasets, which have become increasingly important for science. In this article, we propose to design scientific data publishing as a web-based bottom-up process, without top-down control of central authorities such as publishing companies. Based on a novel combination of existing concepts and technologies, we present a server network to decentrally store and archive data in the form of nanopublications, an RDF-based format to represent scientific data. We show how this approach allows researchers to publish, retrieve, verify, and recombine datasets of nanopublications in a reliable and trustworthy manner, and we argue that this architecture could be used as a low-level data publication layer to serve the Semantic Web in general. Our evaluation of the current network shows that this system is efficient and reliable