Mr. DLib: Recommendations-as-a-Service (RaaS) for Academia

Only few digital libraries and reference managers offer recommender systems, although such systems could assist users facing information overload. In this paper, we introduce Mr. DLib's recommendations-as-a-service, which allows third parties to easily integrate a recommender system into their products. We explain the recommender approaches implemented in Mr. DLib (content-based filtering among others), and present details on 57 million recommendations, which Mr. DLib delivered to its partner GESIS Sowiport. Finally, we outline our plans for future development, including integration into JabRef, establishing a living lab, and providing personalized recommendations.Comment: Accepted for publication at the JCDL conference 201

Evaluating a Department’s Research: Testing the Leiden Methodology in Business and Management

The Leiden methodology (LM), also sometimes called the “crown indicator”, is a quantitative method for evaluating the research quality of a research group or academic department based on the citations received by the group in comparison to averages for the field. There have been a number of applications but these have mainly been in the hard sciences where the data on citations, provided by the ISI Web of Science (WoS), is more reliable. In the social sciences, including business and management, many journals and books are not included within WoS and so the LM has not been tested here. In this research study the LM has been applied on a dataset of over 3000 research publications from three UK business schools. The results show that the LM does indeed discriminate between the schools, and has a degree of concordance with other forms of evaluation, but that there are significant limitations and problems within this discipline

How do practitioners, PhD students and postdocs in the social sciences assess topic-specific recommendations?

"In this paper we describe a case study where researchers in the social sciences (n=19) assess topical relevance for controlled search terms, journal names and author names which have been compiled by recommender services. We call these services Search Term Recommender (STR), Journal Name Recommender (JNR) and Author Name Recommender (ANR) in this paper. The researchers in our study (practitioners, PhD students and postdocs) were asked to assess the top n preprocessed recommendations from each recommender for specific research topics which have been named by them in an interview before the experiment. Our results show clearly that the presented search term, journal name and author name recommendations are highly relevant to the researchers topic and can easily be integrated for search in Digital Libraries. The average precision for top ranked recommendations is 0.749 for author names, 0.743 for search terms and 0.728 for journal names. The relevance distribution differs largely across topics and researcher types. Practitioners seem to favor author name recommendations while postdocs have rated author name recommendations the lowest. In the experiment the small postdoc group favors journal name recommendations." (author's abstract

Do altmetrics correlate with citations? Extensive comparison of altmetric indicators with citations from a multidisciplinary perspective

An extensive analysis of the presence of different altmetric indicators provided by Altmetric.com across scientific fields is presented, particularly focusing on their relationship with citations. Our results confirm that the presence and density of social media altmetric counts are still very low and not very frequent among scientific publications, with 15%-24% of the publications presenting some altmetric activity and concentrating in the most recent publications, although their presence is increasing over time. Publications from the social sciences, humanities and the medical and life sciences show the highest presence of altmetrics, indicating their potential value and interest for these fields. The analysis of the relationships between altmetrics and citations confirms previous claims of positive correlations but relatively weak, thus supporting the idea that altmetrics do not reflect the same concept of impact as citations. Also, altmetric counts do not always present a better filtering of highly cited publications than journal citation scores. Altmetrics scores (particularly mentions in blogs) are able to identify highly cited publications with higher levels of precision than journal citation scores (JCS), but they have a lower level of recall. The value of altmetrics as a complementary tool of citation analysis is highlighted, although more research is suggested to disentangle the potential meaning and value of altmetric indicators for research evaluation

The transition to IFRS: disclosures by Portuguese listed companies

In the context of the CESR and of the Portuguese market regulator recommendations regarding the disclosure of the impacts of the transition to IFRS, this paper analyses the content of those disclosures by Portuguese listed companies. We found a high degree of variability among the disclosure either regarding the qualitative (narrative explanations of transition) or quantitative (reconciliations) disclosures. The results show that the objective of comparability, relevance and understandability stated in CESR’s recommendation were not achieved. Regarding accounting changes, the analysis shows that the reported impacts by companies confirmed expectations based on prior de jure studies on major impacts of changing from Portuguese GAAP to IFRS; these major impacts regard the recognition of intangibles, the accounting treatment of goodwill and financial instruments. Finally, Gray’s (1980) “conservatism” index was computed using the reconciliated profits to IFRS reported by companies. This analysis shows that Portuguese standards are more conservative than IFRS. This study is relevant to several parties: to the market regulators and policy makers in predicting the level of compliance with IFRS and calling attention for the importance of enforcement mechanisms; to the preparers, auditors and users in identifying the most problematic areas of implementation of IFRS.International Accounting, Disclosure, IAS/IFRS, Portugal