Leveraging full-text article exploration for citation analysis

Scientific articles often include in-text citations quoting from external sources. When the cited source is an article, the citation context can be analyzed by exploring the article full-text. To quickly access the key information, researchers are often interested in identifying the sections of the cited article that are most pertinent to the text surrounding the citation in the citing article. This paper first performs a data-driven analysis of the correlation between the textual content of the sections of the cited article and the text snippet where the citation is placed. The results of the correlation analysis show that the title and abstract of the cited article are likely to include content highly similar to the citing snippet. However, the subsequent sections of the paper often include cited text snippets as well. Hence, there is a need to understand the extent to which an exploration of the full-text of the cited article would be beneficial to gain insights into the citing snippet, considering also the fact that the full-text access could be restricted. To this end, we then propose a classification approach to automatically predicting whether the cited snippets in the full-text of the paper contain a significant amount of new content beyond abstract and title. The proposed approach could support researchers in leveraging full-text article exploration for citation analysis. The experiments conducted on real scientific articles show promising results: the classifier has a 90% chance to correctly distinguish between the full-text exploration and only title and abstract cases

A bibliometric analysis of the reception of Pierre Bourdieu’s work in political science

Pierre Bourdieu é o autor com a reputação mais bem estabelecida nas ciências sociais, em especial na Sociologia. Mas qual é a recepção de Bourdieu na ciência política? Se tomamos as citações aos seus livros nos periódicos mais importantes da área ela é inexistente. Por outro lado, há inúmeras pesquisas na França, no Brasil, na Argentina, no Chile, etc., sobre o campo do poder inspiradas por sua Sociologia da vida política. Este artigo investiga a presença e a influência do autor na ciência política publicada fora dos periódicos de maior impacto na disciplina. Partindo de uma base ampla de 25.475 documentos indexados na base Scopus que mencionam Pierre Bourdieu nas referências bibliográficas, analisamos 355 artigos que utilizaram seus conceitos-chave conectados à política, tais como campo político, Estado e poder simbólico. Verificamos que mesmo quando há citações aos escritos de Bourdieu, não são os trabalhos vinculados à sua sociologia da política que são referidos. Um estudo detalhado do contexto das citações para os vinte artigos mais citados desses 355 documentos mostrou que as referências a Bourdieu eram majoritariamente positivas e que havia mais menções de reconhecimento baseadas na autoridade do autor do que de corroboração com base em sua teoria. A influência das ideias de Bourdieu sobre os trabalhos analisados foi superficial em 17 dos 20 casos.Pierre Bourdieu has a firmly established reputation within the social sciences, particularly in the field of Sociology. But how has Bourdieu been received in the field of Political Science? If we look at the most important journals in the area, citations to his books are practically non-existent. On the other hand, many researches devoted to the field of power in France, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, etc., have been inspired by Bourdieu’s Sociology of political life. This article explores the author’s presence and influence on political science publications outside of mainstream journals. Stemming from an extensive database of 25,475 documents indexed in the Scopus database that mention Pierre Bourdieu in the bibliographic references, we analyzed 355 articles that used his key concepts for political analysis, such as political field, State, and symbolic power. We found that even when Bourdieu’s writings are cited, the works referenced are not connected to his sociology of politics. A contextual analysis of the 20 most cited articles of these 355 documents revealed that references to Bourdieu were mostly positive. Furthermore, acknowledgments of the author’s authority were more common than corroborative arguments based on his theory. The influence of Bourdieu’s ideas on the works analyzed was superficial in 17 of the 20 cases

Study on open science: The general state of the play in Open Science principles and practices at European life sciences institutes

Nowadays, open science is a hot topic on all levels and also is one of the priorities of the European Research Area. Components that are commonly associated with open science are open access, open data, open methodology, open source, open peer review, open science policies and citizen science. Open science may a great potential to connect and influence the practices of researchers, funding institutions and the public. In this paper, we evaluate the level of openness based on public surveys at four European life sciences institute

Comparative analysis of Registered Reports and the standard research literature

The replication crisis revealed high levels of bias and questionable research practices (QRPs) in psychology research. Registered Reports (RRs) have been increasingly adopted as a possible solution, but there has been relatively little evidence of whether this novel publishing format appears to be working as intended to reduce bias and QRPs. This project sought to build a detailed database of RRs and closely matched standard reports (SRs), to investigate whether RRs perform better than SRs on indicators of quality, rigour, and transparency. 170 RRs were gathered, representing psychology, health, and related disciplines. Each RR was matched to 2 SRs and their characteristics were coded and compared between the two article types. Some brief descriptive analyses were also undertaken on a larger total sample of RRs (n = 359) that did not have a comparison sample, and a smaller sample of 12 RRs and 12 SRs was examined for signs of HARKing. Six key findings were observed. First, RRs exhibit lower rates of supported hypotheses and higher rates of unsupported hypotheses compared with SRs. Second, rates of open practices are higher among RRs than SRs. Third, RRs also appear to be more strongly associated with some methodological practices indicative of greater rigour and transparency. Fourth, author demographics and article citation rates revealed few differences between the article types. Fifth, higher citation rates were associated with more positive findings and fewer negative findings within both the SRs and RRs, but there was no statistically significant relationship between the journal impact factor and whether hypotheses were supported, for either article type. Finally, HARKing appeared to be non-existent in RRs, while some evidence of HARKing was observed in SRs, however, replication is needed. Overall, the evidence presented in this work demonstrates that, while there are still areas for improvement, RRs do appear to be working as intended in being associated with improved research practices, although further research is needed to determine causal impacts

Citation function, polarity and influence classification

Current methods for assessing the impact of authors and scientific media employ tools such as H-Index, Co-Citation and PageRank. These tools are primarily based on citation counting, which considers all citations to be equal. This type of methods can produce perverse incentives to publish controversial or incomplete papers, as mixed or negative reviews often generate larger citation counts and better indexes, regardless of whether the citations were critical or exerted minimal influence on the citing document. Passing citations that are employed to establish background, which do not have a real impact on the citing paper, are common in scientific literature. However, these citations have equal weight in impact evaluations. Notable researchers have emphasized the need to correct this situation by developing estimation methods that consider the different roles of quotations in citing papers. To accomplish this type of evaluation, a context citation analysis should be applied to determine the nature of the citations. We propose that citations should be categorized using four dimensions – FUNCTION, POLARITY, ASPECTS and INFLUENCE – as these dimensions provide adequate information that can be employed toward the generation of a qualitative method to measure the impact of a given publication in a citing paper. In this paper, we used interchangeably the words influence and impact. We present a method for obtaining this information using our proposed classification scheme and manually annotated corpus, which is marked with meaningful keywords and labels to help identify the characteristics or properties that constitute what we call ASPECTS. We develop a classification scheme which considers purpose definition shared by previous works. Our contribution is to abstract purpose classes from several other schemes and divide a complex structure in more manageable parts, to attain a simple system that combines low granularity dimensions but nevertheless produces a fine-grained classification. For annotators, the classification process is simple because in a first step, the coders distinguish only four primary classes, and in a second pass, they add the information contained in ASPECTS keyword and labels to obtain the more specific functions. This way, we gain a high granularity labeling that gives enough information about the citations to characterize and classify them, and we achieve this detailed coding with a straightforward process where the level of human error could be minimized