Citation gaming induced by bibliometric evaluation: a country-level comparative analysis

It is several years since national research evaluation systems around the globe started making use of quantitative indicators to measure the performance of researchers. Nevertheless, the effects on these systems on the behavior of the evaluated researchers are still largely unknown. We attempt to shed light on this topic by investigating how Italian researchers reacted to the introduction in 2011 of national regulations in which key passages of professional careers are governed by bibliometric indicators. A new inwardness measure, able to gauge the degree of scientific self-referentiality of a country, is defined as the proportion of citations coming from the country itself compared to the total number of citations gathered by the country. Compared to the trends of the other G10 countries in the period 2000-2016, Italy's inwardness shows a net increase after the introduction of the new evaluation rules. Indeed, globally and also for a large majority of the research fields, Italy became the European country with the highest inwardness. Possible explanations are proposed and discussed, concluding that the observed trends are strongly suggestive of a generalized strategic use of citations, both in the form of author self-citations and of citation clubs. We argue that the Italian case offers crucial insights on the constitutive effects of evaluation systems. As such, it could become a paradigmatic case in the debate about the use of indicators in science-policy contexts

Culture in international business research: a bibliometric study in four top IB journals

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to conduct a study on the articles published in the four top international business (IB) journals to examine how four cultural models and concepts – Hofstede’s (1980), Hall’s (1976), Trompenaars’s (1993) and Project GLOBE’s (House et al., 2004) – have been used in the extant published IB research. National cultures and cultural differences provide a crucial component of the context of IB research. Design/methodology – This is a bibliometric study on the articles published in four IB journals over the period from 1976 to 2010, examining a sample of 517 articles using citations and co-citation matrices. Findings – Examining this sample revealed interesting patterns of the connections across the studies. Hofstede’s (1980) and House et al.’s (2004) research on the cultural dimensions are the most cited and hold ties to a large variety of IB research. These findings point to a number of research avenues to deepen the understanding on how firms may handle different national cultures in the geographies they operate. Research limitations – Two main limitations are faced, one associated to the bibliometric method, citations and co-citations analyses and other to the delimitation of our sample to only four IB journals, albeit top-ranked. Originality/value – The paper focuses on the main cultural models used in IB research permitting to better understand how culture has been used in IB research, over an extended period.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Network Science and Law: A Sales Pitch and an Application to the Patent Explosion

The network may be the technological metaphor of the present era. A network, consisting of “nodes” and “links,” may be a group of individuals linked by friendship; a group of computers linked by network cables; a system of roads or airline flights -- or another of a virtually limitless variety of systems of connected “things.” The past few years have seen an explosion of interest in “network science” in fields from physics to sociology. Network science highlights the role of relationship patterns in determining collective behavior. It underscores and begins to address the difficulty of predicting collective behavior from individual interactions. This Article seeks first to describe how network science can provide new conceptual and empirical approaches to legal questions because of its focus on analyzing the effects of patterns of relationship. Second, the Article illustrates the network approach by describing a study of the network created by patents and the citations between them. Burgeoning patenting has raised concerns about patent quality, reflected in proposed legislation and in renewed Supreme Court attention to patent law. The network approach allows us to get behind the increasing numbers and investigate the relationships between patented technologies. We distinguish between faster technological progress, increasing breadth of patented technologies, and a lower patentability standard as possible explanations for increased patenting. Our analysis suggests that increasing pace and breadth of innovation alone are unlikely to explain the recent evolution of the patent citation network. Since the early 1990s the disparity in likelihood of citation between the most “citable” and least “citable” patents has grown, suggesting that patents may be being issued for increasingly trivial advances. The timing of the increasing stratification is correlated with increasing reliance by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals on the widely criticized “motivation or suggestion to combine” test for nonobviousness, although we cannot rule out other explanations. The final part of the Article describes how network analysis may be used to address other issues in patent law

Newspaper Theft, Self-Preservation and the Dimensions of Censorship

One of the most common yet understudied means of suppressing free expression on college and university campuses is the theft of freely-distributed student publications, particularly newspapers. This study examines news accounts of nearly 300 newspaper theft incidents at colleges and universities between 1995 and 2008 in order to identify the manifestations and consequences of this peculiar form of censorship, and to augment existing research on censorship and tolerance by looking, not at what people say about free expression, but at what they do when they have the power of censorship in their own hands. Among the key findings is that men commit nearly 70% of newspaper thefts, which is inconsistent with much of the existing research on censorship and gender, and that those who censor college newspapers are far more concerned with their own self-preservation than with shaping public dialog on controversial social or political issues

Development of Computer Science Disciplines - A Social Network Analysis Approach

In contrast to many other scientific disciplines, computer science considers conference publications. Conferences have the advantage of providing fast publication of papers and of bringing researchers together to present and discuss the paper with peers. Previous work on knowledge mapping focused on the map of all sciences or a particular domain based on ISI published JCR (Journal Citation Report). Although this data covers most of important journals, it lacks computer science conference and workshop proceedings. That results in an imprecise and incomplete analysis of the computer science knowledge. This paper presents an analysis on the computer science knowledge network constructed from all types of publications, aiming at providing a complete view of computer science research. Based on the combination of two important digital libraries (DBLP and CiteSeerX), we study the knowledge network created at journal/conference level using citation linkage, to identify the development of sub-disciplines. We investigate the collaborative and citation behavior of journals/conferences by analyzing the properties of their co-authorship and citation subgraphs. The paper draws several important conclusions. First, conferences constitute social structures that shape the computer science knowledge. Second, computer science is becoming more interdisciplinary. Third, experts are the key success factor for sustainability of journals/conferences

In response to 'Celebrate citation: flipping the pedagogy of plagiarism in Qatar'

In her article (http://uobrep.openrepository.com/uobrep/handle/10547/335947) Molly McHarg makes several points that I agree with, particularly that for the majority of students the plagiarism is not deliberate but is due to a lack of understanding of how to reference correctly

Dancing to the Partisan Beat: A First Analysis of Political Communication on TikTok

TikTok is a video-sharing social networking service, whose popularity is increasing rapidly. It was the world's second-most downloaded app in 2019. Although the platform is known for having users posting videos of themselves dancing, lip-syncing, or showcasing other talents, user-videos expressing political views have seen a recent spurt. This study aims to perform a primary evaluation of political communication on TikTok. We collect a set of US partisan Republican and Democratic videos to investigate how users communicated with each other about political issues. With the help of computer vision, natural language processing, and statistical tools, we illustrate that political communication on TikTok is much more interactive in comparison to other social media platforms, with users combining multiple information channels to spread their messages. We show that political communication takes place in the form of communication trees since users generate branches of responses to existing content. In terms of user demographics, we find that users belonging to both the US parties are young and behave similarly on the platform. However, Republican users generated more political content and their videos received more responses; on the other hand, Democratic users engaged significantly more in cross-partisan discussions.Comment: Accepted as a full paper at the 12th International ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci 2020). Please cite the WebSci version; Second version includes corrected typo