Transitive reduction of citation networks

In many complex networks, the vertices are ordered in time, and edges represent causal connections. We propose methods of analysing such directed acyclic graphs taking into account the constraints of causality and highlighting the causal structure. We illustrate our approach using citation networks formed from academic papers, patents and US Supreme Court verdicts. We show how transitive reduction (TR) reveals fundamental differences in the citation practices of different areas, how it highlights particularly interesting work, and how it can correct for the effect that the age of a document has on its citation count. Finally, we transitively reduce null models of citation networks with similar degree distributions and show the difference in degree distributions after TR to illustrate the lack of causal structure in such models

The pros and cons of the use of altmetrics in research assessment

© 2020 The Authors. Published by Levi Library Press. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: http://doi.org/10.29024/sar.10Many indicators derived from the web have been proposed to supplement citation-based indicators in support of research assessments. These indicators, often called altmetrics, are available commercially from Altmetric.com and Elsevier’s Plum Analytics or can be collected directly. These organisations can also deliver altmetrics to support institutional selfevaluations. The potential advantages of altmetrics for research evaluation are that they may reflect important non-academic impacts and may appear before citations when an article is published, thus providing earlier impact evidence. Their disadvantages often include susceptibility to gaming, data sparsity, and difficulties translating the evidence into specific types of impact. Despite these limitations, altmetrics have been widely adopted by publishers, apparently to give authors, editors and readers insights into the level of interest in recently published articles. This article summarises evidence for and against extending the adoption of altmetrics to research evaluations. It argues that whilst systematicallygathered altmetrics are inappropriate for important formal research evaluations, they can play a role in some other contexts. They can be informative when evaluating research units that rarely produce journal articles, when seeking to identify evidence of novel types of impact during institutional or other self-evaluations, and when selected by individuals or groups to support narrative-based non-academic claims. In addition, Mendeley reader counts are uniquely valuable as early (mainly) scholarly impact indicators to replace citations when gaming is not possible and early impact evidence is needed. Organisations using alternative indicators need recruit or develop in-house expertise to ensure that they are not misused, however

Utilising content marketing metrics and social networks for academic visibility

There are numerous assumptions on research evaluation in terms of quality and relevance of academic contributions. Researchers are becoming increasingly acquainted with bibliometric indicators, including; citation analysis, impact factor, h-index, webometrics and academic social networking sites. In this light, this chapter presents a review of these concepts as it considers relevant theoretical underpinnings that are related to the content marketing of scholars. Therefore, this contribution critically evaluates previous papers that revolve on the subject of academic reputation as it deliberates on the individual researchers’ personal branding. It also explains how metrics are currently being used to rank the academic standing of journals as well as higher educational institutions. In a nutshell, this chapter implies that the scholarly impact depends on a number of factors including accessibility of publications, peer review of academic work as well as social networking among scholars.peer-reviewe

Footnotes as Product Differentiation

When Professor Fred Rodell announced his first Goodbye to Law Reviews in 1936, he established the accepted wisdom for law review criticism. Rodell complained that law review literature had two serious defects-style and content. Subsequent criticism has been persistently harsh; the common theme is that [the extraordinary proliferation of law reviews, most of them student edited and all but a handful very erratic in quality, has been harmful for the nature, evaluation, and accessibility of legal scholarship. Having exhausted complaints on substance, critics uncovered another mischievous threat. They discovered that articles are Typhoid Marys of an insidious plague-footnotes. Second-rate style and pedantic substance are subverted further by cosmetic and trivial pursuits in footnoting.\u27 What started as incidental and functional, footnoting now is thought to be a Frankenstein monster,rambling uncontrolled at the bottom of the page to serve devious purposes. \u27 A chorus of critics argue that footnotes have become a serious embarrassment to legal scholarship and one of the main culprits in the death of decent writing in law reviews by contributing more to form than substance. One of the most vehement critics of footnotes is Judge Abner Mikva, of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who bluntly calls footnotes an abomination

Universality of citation distributions: towards an objective measure of scientific impact

We study the distributions of citations received by a single publication within several disciplines, spanning broad areas of science. We show that the probability that an article is cited $c$ times has large variations between different disciplines, but all distributions are rescaled on a universal curve when the relative indicator $c_f=c/c_0$ is considered, where $c_0$ is the average number of citations per article for the discipline. In addition we show that the same universal behavior occurs when citation distributions of articles published in the same field, but in different years, are compared. These findings provide a strong validation of $c_f$ as an unbiased indicator for citation performance across disciplines and years. Based on this indicator, we introduce a generalization of the h-index suitable for comparing scientists working in different fields.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures. accepted for publication in Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. US

The invention of facts: Bentham’s ethics and the education of public taste

This article uses Jeremy Bentham’s comments on taste and ethics to analyse the efforts of ‘Philosophical Radical’ members of the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures of 1835/6, including Bentham’s executor and editor John Bowring, to apply utilitarianism to questions of public taste. The application of utilitarian thinking to questions of public taste by Members of Parliament was an unlikely occurrence, but it raised problems of ethics, governance and public pedagogy that persist to this day. Bentham had sketched out a utilitarian approach to public taste in his writing on ‘Rules Respecting the Method of Transplanting Laws’, where the correspondence between individuals and tastes is presented as a set of contingent statements within a signifying system. However, the problem of describing taste as a set of contingent statements is that it challenges the ‘interest begotten prejudice’ that may be expressed in judgments of sympathy or antipathy. My analysis of the problems attending Bentham’s wish to set ‘prejudice apart’ in discussions of taste, is undertaken with specific reference to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s emphasis on the importance of what he termed ‘the utilitarian conversion’ in ethics. Lacan’s praise for Bentham and the ‘Theory of Fictions’ demonstrates a limited insight into the importance of Bentham’s ethics, while misunderstanding some of its most important features. I argue that Bentham’s treatment of fact, rather than fiction, gives us a more precise route to the place of the unconscious in Bentham’s thought, as well as a better understanding of a utilitarian consciousness of taste

Should Supreme Court Justices Fear Access to Their Papers? An Empirical Study of the Use of Three Archival Collections

Susan deMaine\u27s contribution to this volume is Should Supreme Court Justices Fear Access to Their Papers? An Empirical Study of the Use of Three Archival Collections. Co-authored by Benjamin J. Keele. US. Supreme Court justices typically donate their working papers to archives upon their retirement, often with lengthy embargoes. 1 Researchers have debated whether the justices should be required to retain and disclose their papers as government · records, but there has been little study of how the papers are used in scholarly and journalistic discussions of the Court.· This empirical study examines how the papers of Justices William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, and Harry Blackmun are used via citations in books and academic law journal articles. We find that most citations to the papers support discussions of the justices\u27 views on the law along with deliberations and negotiations when deciding cases, precisely the kinds of uses that show the value of transparency. To address constitutional objections to mandated disclosures, we propose an incentive grant program that benefits the archives receiving justices\u27 collections. This program would encourage justices to donate their papers with relatively short embargoes, ideally fifteen years after retirement from the Court.https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facbooks/1303/thumbnail.jp