Between fetishism and survival : is the scientific article an academic commodity?

This article discusses the possible meanings of the intense prevailing concern in academic circles over the notion of research productivity, as reflected in an excess number of articles published in various scientific journals. The numerical accounting of articles published by researchers in scientific journals with renowned academic status serves to legitimize academics in their fields of work, in various ways. In this sense, we suggest that scientific articles take on aspects of merchandise-as-fetish, according to Marx's theory of use-value and exchange-value and Benjamin's exposure value. Meanwhile, the biological notions of selection and evolution are used as metaphorical elements in "bibliographic Darwinism". There are references as to the possibility many of the prevailing bibliometric concerns serve as instruments for econometric analysis, especially to orient and enhance cost-effectiveness analysis in research investments of various orders and types, from the point of view of their economic return

Do Linguistic Style and Readability of Scientific Abstracts affect their Virality?

Reactions to textual content posted in an online social network show different dynamics depending on the linguistic style and readability of the submitted content. Do similar dynamics exist for responses to scientific articles? Our intuition, supported by previous research, suggests that the success of a scientific article depends on its content, rather than on its linguistic style. In this article, we examine a corpus of scientific abstracts and three forms of associated reactions: article downloads, citations, and bookmarks. Through a class-based psycholinguistic analysis and readability indices tests, we show that certain stylistic and readability features of abstracts clearly concur in determining the success and viral capability of a scientific article.Comment: Proceedings of the Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2012), 4-8 June 2012, Dublin, Irelan

What makes a Scientific Article influential?

In this paper we examine, by means of a citation analysis, which factors influence the impact of articles published in demography journals between 1990 and 1992. Several quantifiable characteristics of the articles (characteristics with respect to authors, visibility, content and journals) are strongly related to their subsequent impact in the social sciences. Articles are most frequently cited when they deal with empirical, ahistorical research focusing on populations in the developed world, when they are prominently placed in a journal issue, when they are written in English and when they appear in core demography journals. Furthermore, although eminent scholars are likely to be cited on the basis of their reputation, the effect of reputation appears to be small in demography

Tosio Kato's Work on Non-Relativistic Quantum Mechanics: An Outline

Based at a talk given at the Kato Centennial Symposium in Sept. 2017, this article discusses the scientific life and some of the scientific work of T. Kato.Comment: 15 pages. Based on a much longer review article (of 200 plus pages) still in prpearatio

RIP: The Macho Era (1974-2004)

This article reviews the life and death of a scientific theory.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, invited review for "The Fifth International Workshop on the Identification of Dark Matter", eds N. Spooner, V. Kudryavtsev (World Scientific, Singapore