Issues of work-life balance among JASIST authors and editors

International audienceMany dedicated scientists reject the concept of maintaining a “work-life balance.”They argue that work is actually a huge part of life. In the mindset of these scientists, weekdays and weekends are equally appropriate for working on their research. While we all have encountered such people, we may wonder about how frequent this condition is in other scientists in our field. This brief communication probes the degree of work-life balance issues among JASIST authors and editors. We collected and examined the publication histories for all 1,533 of the 2,402 papers published in JASIST between 2001 and 2012. Although there is no rush to submit, revise, or accept papers, we found that 11% of these events happened during weekends and that this trend has been increasing since 2005. Our findings suggest that working during the weekend may be one of the ways that scientists find to cope with the highly demanding era of “publish or perish.” We hope that our findings will raise an awareness of the steady increases in work among scientists before it affects our work-life balance even more

Exploring the interdependencies of research funders in the UK

Investment in medical research is vital to the continuing improvement of the UK's health and wealth. It is through research that we expand our understanding of disease and develop new treatments for patients. Medical research charities currently contribute over £1 billion annually to medical research in the UK, of which over £350 million is provided by Cancer Research UK. Many charities, including Cancer Research UK, receive no government funding for their research activity. Cancer Research UK is engaged in a programme of work in order to better understand the medical research funding environment and demonstrate the importance of sustained investment. A key part of that is the Office of Health Economics‟ (OHE) 2011 report “Exploring the interdependency between public and charitable medical research”. This study found that there are substantial benefits, both financial and qualitative, from the existence of a variety of funders and that reductions in the level of government financial support for medical research are likely to have broader negative effects. This contributed to other evidence which found that the activities and funding of the charity, public and private sectors respectively are complementary, i.e. mutually reinforcing, rather than duplicative or merely substituting for one another. “Exploring the interdependencies of research funders in the UK” by the Office of Health Economics (OHE) and SPRU: Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Sussex, represents a continued effort to build the evidence base around the funding of medical research. This report uncovers the extent to which funders of cancer research are interdependent, nationally and internationally. Key figures show that two thirds of publications acknowledging external support have relied on multiple funders, while just under half benefited from overseas funding, and almost a fifth are also supported by industry. In addition the analysis shows that the general public would not want tax funding of cancer research to be reduced, but would not donate enough to charities to compensate for any such reduction

An Assessment of Impact Metrics’ Potential as Research Indicators Based on Their Perception, Usage, and Dependencies from External Science Communication

The demand for practicable methods for quantitative assessments of scientific products’ relevance has risen considerably over the past decades. As a consequence, research and commercial providers of scholarly data developed a wide variety of impact indicators, ranging from citation-based to so-called altmetrics. This highly heterogeneous family of indicators is based on the principle of measuring interactions with scientific publications that are observable online, and covers for instance mentions of publications in social and journalistic media, in literature management software, or in policy documents. The various metrics' theoretical validity as impact indicators is debated constantly, as questions regarding what it is that different metrics measure or express in many facets remain unanswered. This thesis makes two central contributions towards answering these questions. Its first part systematically assesses the status quo of various metrics’ perception and usage by researchers. This assessment serves to determine the significance of metrics in academic daily routines, as well as to identify relevant perceived problems concerning their usage. The challenges identified this way are in later sections of the thesis opposed with concrete measures to be taken during the development of future research metrics and their infrastructure to effectively solve common criticisms regarding current metrics and their use. Proceeding from the first part’s user studies, this thesis’ second part examines the relationship between research metrics and external science communication. It this way addresses a wide research gap with considerable potential implications for metrics’ validity as indicators for quality - the question to which degree these metrics are merely the result of promotion, which respective research publications receive

Modern Problems of Scientometric Assessment of Publication Activity

As is known, an objective assessment of scientific activity is one of the most difficult problems, in terms of the relationship within itself as well as with society. However, for many decades, the significance of scientists’ contribution to the development of the corresponding branch of science was assessed by the scientific community only by meaningful qualitative criteria, wherein the principle and mechanism of such an assessment was actually intuitive and defied quantitative description. That is why the urgent task was undertaken to create a system for evaluating scientific activity based on some objective indicators of the activity of a particular scientist; in search of such criteria, in the 1970s–1980s, the term “citation index” appeared. Although a close examination of this indicator revealed its limitations and in a number of cases even inadequacy in assessing scientific activity, it has nevertheless since the 1990s gained very wide popularity in the scientific community. This has contributed to the emergence of numerous works aimed at finding new and ideal indicators for assessing publication activity (so-called bibliometric indices). To date, several dozen such indices have been proposed, the most significant of which was the so-called Hirsch index or h-index. Nevertheless, despite the incredibly significant advances in this specific area of sociology, the above problem is still far from resolved. In this regard, the key task of this Special Issue is to familiarize its readers with the latest achievements both in the search for new, more advanced bibliometric indicators and in the improvement of existing ones

Current, February 14, 1994

https://irl.umsl.edu/current1990s/1134/thumbnail.jp

Why are some websites researched more than others? A review of research into the global top twenty

The web is central to the work and social lives of a substantial fraction of the world’s population, but the role of popular websites may not always be subject to academic scrutiny. This is a concern if social scientists are unable to understand an aspect of users’ daily lives because one or more major websites have been ignored. To test whether popular websites may be ignored in academia, this article assesses the volume and citation impact of research mentioning any of twenty major websites. The results are consistent with the user geographic base affecting research interest and citation impact. In addition, site affordances that are useful for research also influence academic interest. Because of the latter factor, however, it is not possible to estimate the extent of academic knowledge about a site from the number of publications that mention it. Nevertheless, the virtual absence of international research about some globally important Chinese and Russian websites is a serious limitation for those seeking to understand reasons for their web success, the markets they serve or the users that spend time on them. The sites investigated were Google, YouTube, Facebook, Baidu, Wikipedia, QQ, Tmall, Taobao, Yahoo, Amazon, Twitter, Sohu, Live, VK, JD, Instagram, Sina, Weibo, Yandex, and 360

Leveraging Natural Language Processing To Mine Issues on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The recent global outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has spread to all corners of the globe. The international travel ban, panic buying, and the need for self-quarantine are among the many other social challenges brought about in this new era. Twitter platforms have been used in various public health studies to identify public opinion about an event at the local and global scale. To understand the public concerns and responses to the pandemic, a system that can leverage machine learning techniques to filter out irrelevant tweets and identify the important topics of discussion on social media platforms like Twitter is needed. In this study, we constructed a system to identify the relevant tweets related to the COVID-19 pandemic throughout January 1st, 2020 to April 30th, 2020, and explored topic modeling to identify the most discussed topics and themes during this period in our data set. Additionally, we analyzed the temporal changes in the topics with respect to the events that occurred during this pandemic. We found out that eight topics were sufficient to identify the themes in our corpus. These topics depicted a temporal trend. The dominant topics vary over time and align with the events related to the COVID-19 pandemic