Identifying the Effect of Open Access on Citations Using a Panel of Science Journals

An open‐access journal allows free online access to its articles, obtaining revenue from fees charged to submitting authors or from institutional support. Using panel data on science journals, we are able to circumvent problems plaguing previous studies of the impact of open access on citations. In contrast to the huge effects found in these previous studies, we find a more modest effect: moving from paid to open access increases cites by 8% on average in our sample. The benefit is concentrated among top‐ranked journals. In fact, open access causes a statistically significant reduction in cites to the bottom‐ranked journals in our sample, leading us to conjecture that open access may intensify competition among articles for readers\u27 attention, generating losers as well as winners

The metric tide: report of the independent review of the role of metrics in research assessment and management

This report presents the findings and recommendations of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management. The review was chaired by Professor James Wilsdon, supported by an independent and multidisciplinary group of experts in scientometrics, research funding, research policy, publishing, university management and administration. This review has gone beyond earlier studies to take a deeper look at potential uses and limitations of research metrics and indicators. It has explored the use of metrics across different disciplines, and assessed their potential contribution to the development of research excellence and impact. It has analysed their role in processes of research assessment, including the next cycle of the Research Excellence Framework (REF). It has considered the changing ways in which universities are using quantitative indicators in their management systems, and the growing power of league tables and rankings. And it has considered the negative or unintended effects of metrics on various aspects of research culture. The report starts by tracing the history of metrics in research management and assessment, in the UK and internationally. It looks at the applicability of metrics within different research cultures, compares the peer review system with metric-based alternatives, and considers what balance might be struck between the two. It charts the development of research management systems within institutions, and examines the effects of the growing use of quantitative indicators on different aspects of research culture, including performance management, equality, diversity, interdisciplinarity, and the ‘gaming’ of assessment systems. The review looks at how different funders are using quantitative indicators, and considers their potential role in research and innovation policy. Finally, it examines the role that metrics played in REF2014, and outlines scenarios for their contribution to future exercises

Using Reference Manager

This is a handout to describe how to use Reference Manager v12. It is focused on the BioMedical area and covers linking to PubMed, Web of Knowledge, other biblographic providers (OVID and EBSCO) and searching for book information. The notes include how to use Word 2003 and Word 2007/2010 . You must be running v12.0.3 or later for Reference Manager to work with Word 2010

The Open Research Web: A Preview of the Optimal and the Inevitable

The multiple online research impact metrics we are developing will allow the rich new database , the Research Web, to be navigated, analyzed, mined and evaluated in powerful new ways that were not even conceivable in the paper era – nor even in the online era, until the database and the tools became openly accessible for online use by all: by researchers, research institutions, research funders, teachers, students, and even by the general public that funds the research and for whose benefit it is being conducted: Which research is being used most? By whom? Which research is growing most quickly? In what direction? under whose influence? Which research is showing immediate short-term usefulness, which shows delayed, longer term usefulness, and which has sustained long-lasting impact? Which research and researchers are the most authoritative? Whose research is most using this authoritative research, and whose research is the authoritative research using? Which are the best pointers (“hubs”) to the authoritative research? Is there any way to predict what research will have later citation impact (based on its earlier download impact), so junior researchers can be given resources before their work has had a chance to make itself felt through citations? Can research trends and directions be predicted from the online database? Can text content be used to find and compare related research, for influence, overlap, direction? Can a layman, unfamiliar with the specialized content of a field, be guided to the most relevant and important work? These are just a sample of the new online-age questions that the Open Research Web will begin to answer

How Does Science Come to Speak in the Courts? Citations Intertexts, Expert Witnesses, Consequential Facts, and Reasoning

Citations, in their highly conventionalized forms, visibly indicate each texts explicit use of the prior literature that embodies the knowledge and contentions of its field. This relation to prior texts has been called intertextuality in literary and literacy studies. Here, Bazerman discusses the citation practices and intertextuality in science and the law in theoretical and historical perspective, and considers the intersection of science and law by identifying the judicial rules that limit and shape the role of scientific literature in court proceedings. He emphasizes that from the historical and theoretical analysis, it is clear that, in the US, judicial reasoning is an intertextually tight and self-referring system that pays only limited attention to documents outside the laws, precedents, and judicial rules. The window for scientific literature to enter the courts is narrow, focused, and highly filtered. It serves as a warrant for the expert witnesses\u27 expertise, which in turn makes opinion admissible in a way not available to ordinary witnesses

Student Use of the Internet for Research Projects: A Problem? Our Problem? What Can We Do About It?

The Internet and other electronic media have changed the way undergraduate students conduct research. The effects of this technological change on the role of the professor are still not well understood. This article reports on the findings of a recent study that evaluated the scholarly content of student citations in a political science course and tested two interventions designed to improve their quality. The study finds that these students’ use of electronic sources was not as poor as some may have assumed, and that the quality of bibliographies improved when in-class instruction was combined with academic penalties. This article reflects on the study’s findings, and offers suggestions for how instructors might encourage students to improve the quality of their research

Negating the Gender Citation Advantage in Political Science

Open-access (OA) advocates have long promoted OA as an egalitarian alternative to traditional subscription-based academic publishing. The argument is simple: OA gives everyone access to high-quality research at no cost. In turn, this should benefit individual researchers by increasing the number of people reading and citing academic articles. As the OA movement gains traction in the academy, scholars are investing considerable research energy to determine whether there is an OA citation advantage—that is, does OA increase an article’s citation counts? Research indicates that it does. Scholars also explored patterns of gender bias in academic publishing and found that women are cited at lower rates in many disciplines. Indeed, in many disciplines, men enjoy a significant and positive gender citation effect (GCE) compared to their female colleagues. This article combines these research areas to determine whether the OA citation advantage varies by gender. Using Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney (WMW) tests, the nonparametric analog to the independent samples T-test, I conclude that OA benefits male and female political scientists at similar rates. Thus, OA negates the gender citation advantage that typically accrues to male political scientists