Usage Bibliometrics

Scholarly usage data provides unique opportunities to address the known shortcomings of citation analysis. However, the collection, processing and analysis of usage data remains an area of active research. This article provides a review of the state-of-the-art in usage-based informetric, i.e. the use of usage data to study the scholarly process.Comment: Publisher's PDF (by permission). Publisher web site: books.infotoday.com/asist/arist44.shtm

Constructing experimental indicators for Open Access documents

The ongoing paradigm change in the scholarly publication system ('science is turning to e-science') makes it necessary to construct alternative evaluation criteria/metrics which appropriately take into account the unique characteristics of electronic publications and other research output in digital formats. Today, major parts of scholarly Open Access (OA) publications and the self-archiving area are not well covered in the traditional citation and indexing databases. The growing share and importance of freely accessible research output demands new approaches/metrics for measuring and for evaluating of these new types of scientific publications. In this paper we propose a simple quantitative method which establishes indicators by measuring the access/download pattern of OA documents and other web entities of a single web server. The experimental indicators (search engine, backlink and direct access indicator) are constructed based on standard local web usage data. This new type of web-based indicator is developed to model the specific demand for better study/evaluation of the accessibility, visibility and interlinking of open accessible documents. We conclude that e-science will need new stable e-indicators.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure

Science through Wikipedia: A novel representation of open knowledge through co-citation networks

We thank Altmetric.com for the transfer of the data that has allowed us to conduct this studyThis study provides an overview of science from the Wikipedia perspective. A methodology has been established for the analysis of how Wikipedia editors regard science through their references to scientific papers. The method of co-citation has been adapted to this context in order to generate Pathfinder networks (PFNET) that highlight the most relevant scientific journals and categories, and their interactions in order to find out how scientific literature is consumed through this open encyclopaedia. In addition to this, their obsolescence has been studied through Price index. A total of 1 433 457 references available at Altmetric.com have been initially taken into account. After pre-processing and linking them to the data from Elsevier's CiteScore Metrics the sample was reduced to 847 512 references made by 193 802 Wikipedia articles to 598 746 scientific articles belonging to 14 149 journals indexed in Scopus. As highlighted results we found a significative presence of “Medicine” and “Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology” papers and that the most important journals are multidisciplinary in nature, suggesting also that high-impact factor journals were more likely to be cited. Furthermore, only 13.44% of Wikipedia citations are to Open Access journals

Scholars’ Mine: Policies and Guidelines

Scholars’ Mine is the institutional repository for the Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T). Scholars\u27 Mine provides access to the digital scholarly and cultural resources created by the university community. This includes faculty papers, departmental publications, conference proceedings, graduate student works, and other scholarly material as well as campus cultural and historical works. The document contains policies and guidelines outlining various aspects of depositing and managing content in Scholars’ Mine. These policies and guidelines are subject to internal review and modification

Institutional Repositories and the Principle of Open Access: Changing the Way We Think about Legal Scholarship

Open access to scholarship, that is, making scholarship freely available to the public via the Internet without subscription or access fees, is a natural fit for legal scholarship given our tradition of making government and legal information available to citizens, and the many benefits that flow from freely disseminating information for its own sake. Law schools, journals and scholars should espouse the principle of open access to legal scholarship, not only for the public good, but also for the enhanced visibility it provides journals and authors. Open access can be accomplished by archiving digital works in online institutional repositories. Legal scholars have enjoyed the benefits of open access to working paper repositories such as SSRN for more than ten years—even if they have not thought of this practice as ‘open access.’ It is a natural progression for legal scholars to now self-archive published works as well, and they are beginning to do so as awareness grows of the benefits of providing open access to published legal scholarship. Institutional repositories provide new ways to publish student scholarship, empirical data, teaching materials, and original historical documents uncovered during the research process. Author self-archiving does not threaten the existence of law school-subsidized journals, and institutional repositories generate new audiences for legal scholarship, including international and multidisciplinary audiences. Not insignificantly, repositories also help preserve digital work. Law schools are discovering that the publicity and download counts generated by repositories provide new ways to measure scholarly impact and reputation. Approximately 40% of U.S. law schools now have some form of institutional repository, all of which are indexed by Internet search engines. Law schools seeking to establish institutional repositories enjoy a variety of options to choose from, ranging from proprietary applications like Digital Commons, SSRN’s Legal Scholarship Network, the Berkeley Electronic Press’ Legal Repository, and NELLCO’s Legal Scholarship Repository, to open source applications like EPrints and DSpace

Institutional Repositories and the Principle of Open Access: Changing the Way We Think about Legal Scholarship

Open access to scholarship, that is, making scholarship freely available to the public via the Internet without subscription or access fees, is a natural fit for legal scholarship given our tradition of making government and legal information available to citizens, and the many benefits that flow from freely disseminating information for its own sake. Law schools, journals and scholars should espouse the principle of open access to legal scholarship, not only for the public good, but also for the enhanced visibility it provides journals and authors. Open access can be accomplished by archiving digital works in online institutional repositories. Legal scholars have enjoyed the benefits of open access to working paper repositories such as SSRN for more than ten years—even if they have not thought of this practice as ‘open access.’ It is a natural progression for legal scholars to now self-archive published works as well, and they are beginning to do so as awareness grows of the benefits of providing open access to published legal scholarship. Institutional repositories provide new ways to publish student scholarship, empirical data, teaching materials, and original historical documents uncovered during the research process. Author self-archiving does not threaten the existence of law school-subsidized journals, and institutional repositories generate new audiences for legal scholarship, including international and multidisciplinary audiences. Not insignificantly, repositories also help preserve digital work. Law schools are discovering that the publicity and download counts generated by repositories provide new ways to measure scholarly impact and reputation. Approximately 40% of U.S. law schools now have some form of institutional repository, all of which are indexed by Internet search engines. Law schools seeking to establish institutional repositories enjoy a variety of options to choose from, ranging from proprietary applications like Digital Commons, SSRN’s Legal Scholarship Network, the Berkeley Electronic Press’ Legal Repository, and NELLCO’s Legal Scholarship Repository, to open source applications like EPrints and DSpace

Evaluating the online impact of reporting guidelines for randomised trial reports and protocols: a cross-sectional web-based data analysis of CONSORT and SPIRIT initiatives

Reporting guidelines are tools to help improve the transparency, completeness, and clarity of published articles in health research. Specifically, the CONSORT (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) and SPIRIT (Standard Protocol Items: Recommendations for Interventional Trials) statements provide evidence-based guidance on what to include in randomised trial articles and protocols to guarantee the efficacy of interventions. These guidelines are subsequently described and discussed in journal articles and used to produce checklists. Determining the online impact (i.e., number and type of links received) of these articles can provide insights into the dissemination of reporting guidelines in broader environments (web-at-large) than simply that of the scientific publications that cite them. To address the technical limitations of link analysis, here the Debug-Validate-Access-Find (DVAF) method is designed and implemented to measure different facets of the guidelines' online impact. A total of 65 articles related to 38 reporting guidelines are taken as a baseline, providing 240,128 URL citations, which are then refined, analysed, and categorised using the DVAF method. A total of 15,582 links to journal articles related to the CONSORT and SPIRIT initiatives were identified. CONSORT 2010 and SPIRIT 2013 were the reporting guidelines that received most links (URL citations) from other online objects (5328 and 2190, respectively). Overall, the online impact obtained is scattered (URL citations are received by different article URL IDs, mainly from link-based DOIs), narrow (limited number of linking domain names, half of articles are linked from fewer than 29 domain names), concentrated (links come from just a few academic publishers, around 60% from publishers), non-reputed (84% of links come from dubious websites and fake domain names) and highly decayed (89% of linking domain names were not accessible at the time of the analysis). In light of these results, it is concluded that the online impact of these guidelines could be improved, and a set of recommendations are proposed to this end.Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature.S

Electronic Records Archives

What are the best practices of electronic records archives the archival field, how can problems be resolved or how to avoid them; and where do we go from here with electronic records archives? First I review practices, policies, and management of electronic records developments. Next I discuss problematic issues archives and research facilities face relating to electronic records. I then discuss and analyze survey results. To conclude, I discuss ideas, and challenges, and offer suggestions for electronic records archives