A Citation Analysis of Articles Published in the Top-Ranking Tourism Journals (2001-2010)

This paper analyses the citations received by research papers in the three top-tier tourism journals, Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Travel Research, and Tourism Management from 2001 to 2010. ANOVA tests and post-hoc tests shows that mean citation counts in both SSCI and Scopus received by research papers in the three journals were significantly different from each other. Similarly, mean numbers of tourism articles citing the same research papers were also significant for both SSCI and Scopus. Furthermore, OLS regression analysis revealed that the issue in which the article appeared, its order in the issue, and the number of pages significantly influenced total citation counts as well as citations from tourism articles received by research papers in all three journals

The Extraction of Community Structures from Publication Networks to Support Ethnographic Observations of Field Differences in Scientific Communication

The scientific community of researchers in a research specialty is an important unit of analysis for understanding the field specific shaping of scientific communication practices. These scientific communities are, however, a challenging unit of analysis to capture and compare because they overlap, have fuzzy boundaries, and evolve over time. We describe a network analytic approach that reveals the complexities of these communities through examination of their publication networks in combination with insights from ethnographic field studies. We suggest that the structures revealed indicate overlapping sub- communities within a research specialty and we provide evidence that they differ in disciplinary orientation and research practices. By mapping the community structures of scientific fields we aim to increase confidence about the domain of validity of ethnographic observations as well as of collaborative patterns extracted from publication networks thereby enabling the systematic study of field differences. The network analytic methods presented include methods to optimize the delineation of a bibliographic data set in order to adequately represent a research specialty, and methods to extract community structures from this data. We demonstrate the application of these methods in a case study of two research specialties in the physical and chemical sciences.Comment: Accepted for publication in JASIS

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

Data extracted from PubMed records are not reliable

Bibliometrics on a research subject needs a careful selection of bibliographic records to be retrieved and downloaded. Whenever national production is evaluated or international output is compared, it is essential to have full information on institutional and country affiliation of every author. As Medline offers only the affiliation of the first author, it is mandatory to combine its results with other databases. Scopus is the obvious choice because it offers common elements in its data schema (such as PMID and Indexterms) and complete information on authors’ affiliation

The Privilege to Select : Global Research System, European Academic Library Collections, and Decolonisation

A large part of the literature published in the ‘Global South’ is barely covered by bibliographic databases. Institutional policies increasingly require researchers globally to publish in ‘international’ journals, draining local infrastructures. The standard-setting power of ‘Global South’ scholars is minimised further. My main aim is to render visible the ways in which European academic libraries contribute to this situation. It is explained as a consequence of specific features of current world society, referred to as coloniality, social injustice, and quantified communication. The thesis analyses peripherality conceptually and scientometrically: based on a sample, how is Southeast African basic social sciences and humanities (SSH) research integrated in global scholarly communication, and how do local dissemination infrastructures develop under these conditions? Finally, how are professional values, specifically neutrality, and workflows of European academic libraries, interrelated with these developments? The methodological approach of the thesis is multi-faceted, including conceptual analyses, scientometrics, and a short survey of collection managers and an analysis of the corresponding libraries' collection policies. The off-mainstream decolonial scientometric approach required the construction of a database from multiple sources. Southeast Africa was selected as a field for some of the empirical studies included, because out of all rarely studied local communities to which a peripheral status is commonly attributed, the large majority of Southeast African authors use English as their primary academic language. This excludes linguistic reasons for the peripheral attribution.The theoretical and conceptual point of departure is to analyse scholarly communication as a self-referential social system with global reach (Luhmann). In this thesis, an unorthodox understanding of social systems theory is developed, providing it with cultural humility, inspired by decolonial thinking. The value of the approach lies in its in-built capacity for social change: peripheries are constructed communicatively, and culturally humble communication avoids adding to the accumulation of peripheral references attributed to the ‘Global South’, for instance by suspending the incarceration of area studies which tends to subsume any research from and about Africa as African studies, remote from the core of SSH. While centrality serves the necessary purpose of reducing the overwhelming complexity of global research, communicative centres can just as well be constructed as topical, and do not require a spatial attachment to be functional. Another advantage of this approach is its awareness of different levels of observation, differentiating, for instance, between whether the academic librarian's neutrality is imagined as playing out in interaction with the user (passive neutrality), as representing the diversity of the research system (active neutrality), or as balancing social bias running through society at large, and hence furthering social justice (culturally humble neutrality)

Measuring and Anticipating the Impact of Data Reuse.

In this dissertation, I examined data citations in the social sciences, measured the scholarly impact of data reuse as well as explored factors that are associated with whether a dataset is reused. The guiding question for this dissertation is: What is the scholarly impact of data reuse? How can stakeholders anticipate the impact the data they fund, create, or curate will have? I addressed this question is three parts. First, in order to quantify the scholarly impact of data reuse, I looked at identifying reuse through data citation patterns. My study extends previous studies by taking a more nuanced view of how social scientists use citations to acknowledge others’ prior work on which they are building. Second, I developed a suite of impact metrics for data. By testing these metrics on a varied group of social science datasets, I was demonstrated their use and shed light on how these datasets can be high impact in different ways. Finally, I explored what factors correlate with reuse and with high impact. Examining data reuse in the social science literature showed that reusers of data regularly cite data producers’ publications, rather than citing data directly or crediting the data provider. Where they cite the data provider, they typically do so in addition to citing the data producer. This finding suggests that data reusers distinguish between the contributions producers make when they create data and when they share it: in essence, data reusers use citations to credit both actions. The four measures of reuse impact I developed highlighted different aspects of impact for data; no datasets were high-impact across the board, and few were consistently low-impact. The three metrics based on citations were especially divergent, suggesting that data can have an impact in multiple and varying ways. Finally, I showed that two characteristics of data are particularly related to whether the data are reused or not: the size of the data and how actively used they are. Together, these findings indicate that sharing data contributes to scholarship above and beyond the initial contribution a scientist makes when she creates data and publishes from them.PhDInformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/102481/1/kfear_1.pd

Theories of Informetrics and Scholarly Communication

Scientometrics have become an essential element in the practice and evaluation of science and research, including both the evaluation of individuals and national assessment exercises. Yet, researchers and practitioners in this field have lacked clear theories to guide their work. As early as 1981, then doctoral student Blaise Cronin published The need for a theory of citing - a call to arms for the fledgling scientometric community to produce foundational theories upon which the work of the field could be based. More than three decades later, the time has come to reach out the field again and ask how they have responded to this call. This book compiles the foundational theories that guide informetrics and scholarly communication research. It is a much needed compilation by leading scholars in the field that gathers together the theories that guide our understanding of authorship, citing, and impact