"Seed+Expand": A validated methodology for creating high quality publication oeuvres of individual researchers

The study of science at the individual micro-level frequently requires the disambiguation of author names. The creation of author's publication oeuvres involves matching the list of unique author names to names used in publication databases. Despite recent progress in the development of unique author identifiers, e.g., ORCID, VIVO, or DAI, author disambiguation remains a key problem when it comes to large-scale bibliometric analysis using data from multiple databases. This study introduces and validates a new methodology called seed+expand for semi-automatic bibliographic data collection for a given set of individual authors. Specifically, we identify the oeuvre of a set of Dutch full professors during the period 1980-2011. In particular, we combine author records from the National Research Information System (NARCIS) with publication records from the Web of Science. Starting with an initial list of 8,378 names, we identify "seed publications" for each author using five different approaches. Subsequently, we "expand" the set of publication in three different approaches. The different approaches are compared and resulting oeuvres are evaluated on precision and recall using a "gold standard" dataset of authors for which verified publications in the period 2001-2010 are available.Comment: Paper accepted for the ISSI 2013, small changes in the text due to referee comments, one figure added (Fig 3

Scientific mobility indicators in practice : international mobility profiles at the country level

This paper presents and describes the methodological opportunities offered by bibliometric data to produce indicators of scientific mobility. Large bibliographic datasets of disambiguated authors and their affiliations allow for the possibility of tracking the affiliation changes of scientists. Using the Web of Science as data source, we analyze the distribution of types of mobile scientists for a selection of countries. We explore the possibility of creating profiles of international mobility at the country level, and discuss potential interpretations and caveats. Five countries—Canada, The Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, and the United States—are used as examples. These profiles enable us to characterize these countries in terms of their strongest links with other countries. This type of analysis reveals circulation among and between countries with strong policy implications.Este trabajo presenta y describe las oportunidades metodológicas que ofrecen los datos bibliográficos para producir indicadores de movilidad científica. El uso de grandes conjuntos de datos bibliográficos con autores y afiliaciones desambiguadas, abren la posibilidad de rastrear cambios de afiliación de investigadores. Empleando la Web of Science como base de datos, desarrollamos distintas perspectivas para mostrar la movilidad observable de una selección de países. Exploramos la posibilidad de crear perfiles de movilidad internacional a nivel de países y discutimos cómo interpretar estos indicadores así como sus potenciales limitaciones. Para ello, estudiamos los casos de Canadá, Países Bajos, Sudáfrica, España y Estados Unidos. Sus perfiles no solo nos permiten identificar a grupos de investigadores que muestran distintos tipos de movilidad, pero también nos permiten caracterizar los países según aquellos otros con los que tienen mayores vínculos. Este tipo de análisis permiten realizar comparaciones entre países de origen y destino de cada uno de los países analizados, especialmente relevantes en el contexto de política cientifica

I Cannot Tell What the Dickens His Name Is : Name Disambiguation in Institutional Repositories

INTRODUCTION Authors who publish under more than one form of their name, multiple authors with the same name, and incomplete author information can all create challenges for repository staff when entering metadata. Unless properly addressed, these variations and duplications can result in search and retrieval errors for users. Name disambiguation, the process of identifying, merging, and making names accessible in one standard form, is a vital process repository staff should incorporate into their workflow to address these issues. DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM Staff working with ScholarWorks, Boise State’s institutional repository, are exploring the use of disambiguation tools to solve the issue of name duplication. Systems explored include ORCID, ResearcherID, Scopus, Google Scholar Citations, Names Project, and the Digital Commons’ Author Merge Tool. NEXT STEPS Based on this initial assessment, ScholarWorks staff will continue to use the Author Merge Tool on a regular basis and explore ways to document and retain information discovered during the analysis phase. Additionally, they will continue to experiment with emerging name authority tools, such as ORCID. Finally, metadata specialists are encouraged to advocate for international standards that will provide prescribed rules for how metadata is entered into a repository system

Large publishing consortia produce higher citation impact research but co-author contributions are hard to evaluate

This paper introduces a simple agglomerative clustering method to identify large publishing consortia with at least 20 authors and 80% shared authorship between articles. Based on Scopus journal articles 1996-2018, under these criteria, nearly all (88%) of the large consortia published research with citation impact above the world average, with the exceptions being mainly the newer consortia for which average citation counts are unreliable. On average, consortium research had almost double (1.95) the world average citation impact on the log scale used (Mean Normalised Log Citation Score). At least partial alphabetical author ordering was the norm in most consortia. The 250 largest consortia were for nuclear physics and astronomy around expensive equipment, and for predominantly health-related issues in genomics, medicine, public health, microbiology and neuropsychology. For the health-related issues, except for the first and last few authors, authorship seem to primary indicate contributions to the shared project infrastructure necessary to gather the raw data. It is impossible for research evaluators to identify the contributions of individual authors in the huge alphabetical consortia of physics and astronomy, and problematic for the middle and end authors of health-related consortia. For small scale evaluations, authorship contribution statements could be used, when available

The development of political science in Central and Eastern Europe : bibliometric perspective, 1996–2013

This research aims to develop a deeper insight into the development of political science from the bibliometric perspective by analysing peer-reviewed journal articles (n = 1117) indexed in the Scopus database and published by authors from fifteen Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries in the period 1996–2013. Results indicate that the majority of articles (84%) by CEE authors have been published in international journals and in the English language. The visibility of these articles in international journals, measured by the mean number of citations, is 5.2 per paper, while the same indicator for CEE journal articles amounts to 0.2. Authorship analysis indicates a gradual but continuous increase in co-authorships. Additionally, there are significant differences in citations between single-authored and co-authored articles, both in international and CEE journals. Co-authorship among CEE authors is present in only 1% of the analysed articles, confirming weak collaboration between political scientists in CEE countries

Openness and Impact of Leading Scientific Countries

The rapid rise of international collaboration over the past three decades, demonstrated in coauthorship of scientific articles, raises the question of whether countries benefit from cooperative science and how this might be measured. We develop and compare measures to ask this question. For all source publications in 2013, we obtained from Elsevier national-level full and fractional paper counts as well as accompanying field-weighted citation counts. Then we collected information from Elsevier on the percent of all internationally coauthored papers for each country, as well as Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) measures of the international mobility of the scientific workforce in 2013, and conducted a principle component analysis that produced an openness index. We added data from the OECD on government budget allocation on research and development (GBARD) for 2011 to tie in the public spending that contributed to the 2013 output. We found that openness among advanced science systems is strongly correlated with impact—the more internationally engaged a nation is in terms of coauthorships and researcher mobility, the higher the impact of scientific work. The results have important implications for policy making around investment, as well as the flows of students, researchers, and technical workers