36,194 research outputs found
Quantifying the quality of peer reviewers through Zipf's law
This paper introduces a statistical and other analysis of peer reviewers in
order to approach their "quality" through some quantification measure, thereby
leading to some quality metrics. Peer reviewer reports for the Journal of the
Serbian Chemical Society are examined. The text of each report has first to be
adapted to word counting software in order to avoid jargon inducing confusion
when searching for the word frequency: e.g. C must be distinguished, depending
if it means Carbon or Celsius, etc. Thus, every report has to be carefully
"rewritten". Thereafter, the quantity, variety and distribution of words are
examined in each report and compared to the whole set. Two separate months,
according when reports came in, are distinguished to observe any possible
hidden spurious effects. Coherence is found. An empirical distribution is
searched for through a Zipf-Pareto rank-size law. It is observed that peer
review reports are very far from usual texts in this respect. Deviations from
the usual (first) Zipf's law are discussed. A theoretical suggestion for the
"best (or worst) report" and by extension "good (or bad) reviewer", within this
context, is provided from an entropy argument, through the concept of "distance
to average" behavior. Another entropy-based measure also allows to measure the
journal reviews (whence reviewers) for further comparison with other journals
through their own reviewer reports.Comment: 28 pages; 8 Tables; 9 Figures; 39 references; prepared for and to be
published in Scientometric
Betweenness and Diversity in Journal Citation Networks as Measures of Interdisciplinarity -- A Tribute to Eugene Garfield --
Journals were central to Eugene Garfield's research interests. Among other
things, journals are considered as units of analysis for bibliographic
databases such as the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. In addition to
disciplinary classifications of journals, journal citation patterns span
networks across boundaries to variable extents. Using betweenness centrality
(BC) and diversity, we elaborate on the question of how to distinguish and rank
journals in terms of interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity, however, is
difficult to operationalize in the absence of an operational definition of
disciplines, the diversity of a unit of analysis is sample-dependent. BC can be
considered as a measure of multi-disciplinarity. Diversity of co-citation in a
citing document has been considered as an indicator of knowledge integration,
but an author can also generate trans-disciplinary--that is,
non-disciplined--variation by citing sources from other disciplines. Diversity
in the bibliographic coupling among citing documents can analogously be
considered as diffusion of knowledge across disciplines. Because the citation
networks in the cited direction reflect both structure and variation, diversity
in this direction is perhaps the best available measure of interdisciplinarity
at the journal level. Furthermore, diversity is based on a summation and can
therefore be decomposed, differences among (sub)sets can be tested for
statistical significance. In an appendix, a general-purpose routine for
measuring diversity in networks is provided
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Diversification in the international construction business
Economic globalization has created an interdependent market that allows companies to transcend traditional national boundaries to conduct business overseas. In the international construction market, companies often adopt diversification as a strategy for growth, for risk management or for both. However, the diversification patterns of international construction companies (ICCs) as a group are barely clear. The primary aim of this research is to cover this knowledge void by mapping ICCs’ diversification patterns in both business sectors and geographical dispersal. It starts from a literature review of diversification theories. Based on the review, a series of hypotheses relating to ICCs’ diversification are proposed. Data are gleaned from Engineering News-Record, i.e. Bloomberg and Capital IQ, ranging from 2001 to 2015. By testing the hypotheses, it is found that larger ICCs prefer to diversify than their smaller counterparts. Most of the ICCs tend to diversify to geographical markets with similar cultural or institutional environment. Market demands drive ICCs to diversify to different geographical markets while they are more prudential in venturing into new business sectors. The research provides not only valuable insights into diversification patterns of ICCs, but also a solid point of departure for future theoretical and empirical studies
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