Applying Blockchain Solutions to Address Research Reproducibility and Enable Scientometric Analysis

A worldwide reproducibility crisis around published scientific studies has gained attention from academics, journalists, and concerned citizens in recent decades. The inability to reliably reproduce experiments from scholarly research—especially in areas of high- impact science—has far-reaching social and economic implications. Fraud may seem an obvious culprit, but in our data-intensive world, vague methods, unclear standards, and even accidental mismanagement of digital resources can all be contributing factors. Reproducibility is an area of increasing focus within the scientometrics community and looking to emerging technologies to help mitigate reproducibility challenges makes practical sense. In the Web 3.0 era, the promise of distributed computing, the maturation of cloud services, and other novel convergences point toward new ways to enable bibliometric reproducibility. Concurrently, research artifacts beyond the peer-reviewed article are growing in prominence—datasets, algorithms, pre-prints—all serve an expanding role in research dissemination and discovery. In this paper we present an overview of some new approaches—with particular focus on the benefits of blockchain-based software systems—for managing research information and improving scientometric reproducibility

Research scenario in physiotherapy for people with human t-cell lymphotropic virus (HTLV): scientometric study / Cenário das pesquisas em Fisioterapia para pessoas com Human T-Cell Lymphotropic Virus (HTLV): estudo cientométrico

Introduction: Human T-Cell Lymphotropic Virus (HTLV) is a sexually transmitted retrovirus that can cause chronic pain of moderate to high intensity, spasticity and weakness in the lower limbs, balance, gait, urinary and sexual dysfunctions. Physiotherapy is a treatment that has been shown to be effective in improving symptoms and signs. However, research on the topic is scarce. Objective: Outline the research scenario in Physiotherapy aimed at people infected with HTLV-1. Methods: Scientometric study carried through Medline, Virtual Health Library, Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar databases. The metadata regarding the studies were tabulated and analyzed using descriptive statistics. The VOS.Viewer software was used for the analysis of quotes. Clinical studies were also analyzed considering meta-scientific impacts including analysis of conflicts of interest and methodological biases. Results: Initially 1160 studies were identified. After applying the eligibility criteria, 68 articles remained, of which 34 articles were observational studies, 21 on intervention, 9 on review, two on qualitative research and two on diagnostic accuracy. Brazil is responsible for 94.11% of the production on the theme. The sub-areas of Physiotherapy covered by the studies were neurofunctional and urogenital, using different exercise modalities, proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation, biofeedback and non-invasive neuromodulation. Conclusion: On the topic of Physiotherapy for people with HTLV-1, Brazil occupies a prominent place in scientific production. Research on the subject receives little or no funding, requiring free of charge publications in journals, which affects its visibility

Which aspects of the open science agenda are most relevant to scientometric research and publishing? An opinion paper

© 2021 The Authors. Published by MIT 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: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_e_00121Open Science is an umbrella term that encompasses many recommendations for possible changes in research practices, management, and publishing with the objective to increase transparency and accessibility. This has become an important science policy issue that all disciplines should consider. Many Open Science recommendations may be valuable for the further development of research and publishing but not all are relevant to all fields. This opinion paper considers the aspects of Open Science that are most relevant for scientometricians, discussing how they can be usefully applied.The work of R.G. was supported by the Flemish Government through its funding of the Flemish Centre for R&D Monitoring (ECOOM

Next Generation Metrics for Scientific and Scholarly Research in Europe:LERU report of an Expert Working Group

The field of evaluating academic activities is vast, complex, and highly dynamic, as are the roles of any data and indicators used to support these evaluations This Next Generation Metrics for Scientific and Scholarly Research in Europe paper, explores how universities can and should use currently available metrics and data to assess their research evaluation processes, in conjunction with qualitative expertise and information

Experiments done in Black-6 mice : what does it mean?

Low replicability of animal experiments is perceived as a major hurdle in the field of biomedicine. Attempts to enhance the replicability and to reduce the variability in basic research has led to the recommendation to use isogenic mice. The C57BL/6 strain has evolved as a gold standard strain for this purpose. However, C57BL/6 mice are maintained as substrains by multiple vendors. Evidence exists that the subtle differences between these mouse lines have not been systematically investigated and are often ignored. In the present study, we characterized the female mice of two closely related substrains (C57BL/6J and C57BL/6N) from three vendors in Europe (Charles River Laboratories, Envigo, Janvier Labs) in a battery of behavioral tests. Our data show and confirm substantial behavioral differences between the C57BL/6J and C57BL/6N mice. Importantly, the substrain differences were largely affected by the origin of the animals, as a significant effect of vendor or interaction between the substrain and vendor occurred in all tests. This work highlights the importance of adhering to precise international nomenclature in all publications reporting animal experiments. Moreover, the generalization of research findings from a single mouse substrain can be seriously limited due to genetic drift and environmental variables occurring at different vendors. However, heterogenization of samples, by including animals of different substrains, can enhance generalizability. These issues need to be seriously addressed to improve reproducibility, replicability, and the translational potential of the mouse models.Peer reviewe

Intellectual Structure of the Belt and Road Initiative Research: A Scientometric Analysis and Suggestions for a Future Research Agenda

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Predictive Health Analysis in Industry 5.0: A Scientometric and Systematic Review of Motion Capture in Construction

In an era of rapid technological advancement, the rise of Industry 4.0 has prompted industries to pursue innovative improvements in their processes. As we advance towards Industry 5.0, which focuses more on collaboration between humans and intelligent systems, there is a growing requirement for better sensing technologies for healthcare and safety purposes. Consequently, Motion Capture (MoCap) systems have emerged as critical enablers in this technological evolution by providing unmatched precision and versatility in various workplaces, including construction. As the construction workplace requires physically demanding tasks, leading to work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs) and health issues, the study explores the increasing relevance of MoCap systems within the concept of Industry 4.0 and 5.0. Despite the growing significance, there needs to be more comprehensive research, a scientometric review that quantitatively assesses the role of MoCap systems in construction. Our study combines bibliometric, scientometric, and systematic review approaches to address this gap, analyzing articles sourced from the Scopus database. A total of 52 papers were carefully selected from a pool of 962 papers for a quantitative study using a scientometric approach and a qualitative, indepth examination. Results showed that MoCap systems are employed to improve worker health and safety and reduce occupational hazards.The in-depth study also finds the most tested construction tasks are masonry, lifting, training, and climbing, with a clear preference for markerless systems

Validation of scientific topic models using graph analysis and corpus metadata

Probabilistic topic modeling algorithms like Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) have become powerful tools for the analysis of large collections of documents (such as papers, projects, or funding applications) in science, technology an innovation (STI) policy design and monitoring. However, selecting an appropriate and stable topic model for a specific application (by adjusting the hyperparameters of the algorithm) is not a trivial problem. Common validation metrics like coherence or perplexity, which are focused on the quality of topics, are not a good fit in applications where the quality of the document similarity relations inferred from the topic model is especially relevant. Relying on graph analysis techniques, the aim of our work is to state a new methodology for the selection of hyperparameters which is specifically oriented to optimize the similarity metrics emanating from the topic model. In order to do this, we propose two graph metrics: the first measures the variability of the similarity graphs that result from different runs of the algorithm for a fixed value of the hyperparameters, while the second metric measures the alignment between the graph derived from the LDA model and another obtained using metadata available for the corresponding corpus. Through experiments on various corpora related to STI, it is shown that the proposed metrics provide relevant indicators to select the number of topics and build persistent topic models that are consistent with the metadata. Their use, which can be extended to other topic models beyond LDA, could facilitate the systematic adoption of this kind of techniques in STI policy analysis and design.Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101004870 (IntelComp project), and has also been partially supported by FEDER/ Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, State Agency of Research, project TEC2017-83838-R