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

The Emerging Scholarly Brain

It is now a commonplace observation that human society is becoming a coherent super-organism, and that the information infrastructure forms its emerging brain. Perhaps, as the underlying technologies are likely to become billions of times more powerful than those we have today, we could say that we are now building the lizard brain for the future organism.Comment: to appear in Future Professional Communication in Astronomy-II (FPCA-II) editors A. Heck and A. Accomazz

The NASA Astrophysics Data System: Overview

The NASA Astrophysics Data System Abstract Service has become a key component of astronomical research. It provides bibliographic information daily, or near daily, to a majority of astronomical researchers worldwide. We describe the history of the development of the system and its current status. We show several examples of how to use the ADS, and we show how ADS use has increased as a function of time. Currently it is still increasing exponentially, with a doubling time for number of queries of 17 months. Using the ADS logs we make the first detailed model of how scientific journals are read as a function of time since publication. The impact of the ADS on astronomy can be calculated after making some simple assumptions. We find that the ADS increases the efficiency of astronomical research by 333 Full Time Equivalent (2000 hour) research years per year, and that the value of the early development of the ADS for astronomy, compared with waiting for mature technologies to be adopted, is 2332 FTE research years. The ADS is available at http://adswww.harvard.edu/.Comment: 19 pages, 22 figure

Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives: costs estimates and sustainability issues

The RIOJA project (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ls/rioja) investigated the feasibility of an overlay journal model in collaboration with the arXiv and in the scientific domain of astrophysics and cosmology. Scientists in this community are active users of e-prints repositories such as the arXiv. Furthermore, they have the support of Professional Associations and Learned Societies that have been pioneers in adapting to new publishing models and in particular electronic journals. Long term access to information as well as maintaining provision to sustainable systems/services is important to various parties in the scholarly communication system: the creators of information, developers and managers of services, libraries, publishers, funders and also users. Although scientific journals have been in existence since the 18th century (Lawal, 2001), factors such as increased journal subscription prices in the last decades and the emergence of new technologies have triggered discussions on the potential of new business models for publishing research. Furthermore, the advent of the open access movement also contributed to exploration of the issues around free access to information and provision of sustainable services. Exploring aspects of sustainability is something that should be seen over a period of time and whether launching, converting or simply maintaining a new or existing system/service the needs of the community it serves should be taken into account. Scientific journal publishing is a complex process. Besides disseminating scientific knowledge, registration of a claim for new discovery and a quality “stamp” it also facilitates social factors. Besides making research findings available and contributing to the advancement of knowledge, publishing is also a means for measuring quality of the work of scientists, allocating funding, and acknowledging contributions to knowledge. In this report, we will try to provide an overview of a new publishing model, that of the overlay journal. We will discuss the use of the arXiv by scientists in astrophysics and cosmology as well as the role of professional associations and learned societies in the publishing process for this community. We will briefly explain the methods employed to compile this report. We will also briefly present the RIOJA toolkit before we try and identify costs in the publishing process associated with the functions of registration, certification, and awareness and archiving. This report does not aim to provide a comprehensive report of actual journal publishing costings. Despite the fact that there are studies in existence that tried to document costs associated with journal publishing, the information presented there rarely corresponds to the actual costs of individual journal functions. In addition, the interviews with publishers and editors did not reveal any substantial information about costings that have not already been reported in the literature or are available on some publishers' websites. Where appropriate, this report aims to acknowledge studies conducted previously as pointers to further reading and, where applicable, to compare reported findings to observations made during the development and implementation of the RIOJA toolkit (described below). We will conclude this report with some of the issues reported in the literature around sustainability of services and some brief suggestions for further work

Rotation Modulations and Distributions of the Flare Occurrence Rates on the Surface of Five UV Ceti Type Stars

In this study, we considered stellar spots, stellar flares, and also the relation between these two magnetic proccesses that take place on UV Cet stars. In addition, the hypothesis about slow flares described by Gurzadyan (1986 Ap&SS, 125, 127) was investigated. All of these discussions were based on the results of three years of observations of UV Cet-type stars: AD Leo, EV Lac, V1005 Ori, EQ Peg, and V1054 Oph. First of all, the results show that stellar spot activity occurs on the stellar surface of EV Lac, V1005 Ori, and EQ Peg, while AD Leo does not show any short-term variability and V1054 Oph does not exhibit any variability. We report on new ephemerides for EV Lac, V1005 Ori, and EQ Peg, obtained from time-series analyses. The phases, computed at intervals of 0.10 phase length, where the mean flare occurence rates to obtain maximum amplitude; also, the phases of rotational modulation were compared in order to investigate whether there is any longitudinal relation between stellar flares and spots. Although the results show that flare events are related with spotted areas on stellar surfaces during some of the observing seasons, we did not find any clear correlation among them. Finally, it was tested whether slow flares are fast flares occurring on the opposite side of the stars according to the direction of the observers, as mentioned in a hypothesis developed by <A >Gurzadyan (1986). The flare occurence rates reveal that both slow and fast flares can occur in any rotational phases. The flare occurence rates of both fast and slow flares vary in the same way along the longitudes for all program stars. These results are not expected based on the case mentioned in the hypothesis.Comment: 24 pages, 15 figures, 6 tabels, 2011PASJ...63..427

The Bibliometric Properties of Article Readership Information

The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), along with astronomy's journals and data centers (a collaboration dubbed URANIA), has developed a distributed on-line digital library which has become the dominant means by which astronomers search, access and read their technical literature. Digital libraries such as the NASA Astrophysics Data System permit the easy accumulation of a new type of bibliometric measure, the number of electronic accesses (``reads'') of individual articles. We explore various aspects of this new measure. We examine the obsolescence function as measured by actual reads, and show that it can be well fit by the sum of four exponentials with very different time constants. We compare the obsolescence function as measured by readership with the obsolescence function as measured by citations. We find that the citation function is proportional to the sum of two of the components of the readership function. This proves that the normative theory of citation is true in the mean. We further examine in detail the similarities and differences between the citation rate, the readership rate and the total citations for individual articles, and discuss some of the causes. Using the number of reads as a bibliometric measure for individuals, we introduce the read-cite diagram to provide a two-dimensional view of an individual's scientific productivity. We develop a simple model to account for an individual's reads and cites and use it to show that the position of a person in the read-cite diagram is a function of age, innate productivity, and work history. We show the age biases of both reads and cites, and develop two new bibliometric measures which have substantially less age bias than citationsComment: ADS bibcode: 2005JASIS..56..111K This is the second paper (the first is Worldwide Use and Impact of the NASA Astrophysics Data System Digital Library) from the original article The NASA Astrophysics Data System: Sociology, Bibliometrics, and Impact, which went on-line in the summer of 200

Usage History of Scientific Literature: Nature Metrics and Metrics of Nature Publications

In this study, we analyze the dynamic usage history of Nature publications over time using Nature metrics data. We conduct analysis from two perspectives. On the one hand, we examine how long it takes before the articles' downloads reach 50%/80% of the total; on the other hand, we compare the percentage of total downloads in 7 days, 30 days, and 100 days after publication. In general, papers are downloaded most frequently within a short time period right after their publication. And we find that compared with Non-Open Access papers, readers' attention on Open Access publications are more enduring. Based on the usage data of a newly published paper, regression analysis could predict the future expected total usage counts.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures and 4 table

Metaphorical patterns in Anthropocene fiction

This article explores metaphorical language in the strand of contemporary fiction that Trexler discusses under the heading of ‘Anthropocene fiction’ – namely, novels that probe the convergence of human experience and geological or climatological processes in times of climate change. Why focus on metaphor? Because, as cognitive linguists working in the wake of Lakoff and Johnson have shown, metaphor plays a key role in closing the gap between everyday, embodied experience and more intangible or abstract realities – including, we suggest, the more-than-human temporal and spatial scales that come to the fore with the Anthropocene. In literary narrative, metaphorical language is typically organized in coherent clusters that amplify the effects of individual metaphors. Based on this assumption, we discuss the results of a systematic coding of metaphorical language in three Anthropocene novels by Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson, and Ian McEwan. We show that the emergent metaphorical patterns enrich and complicate the novels’ staging of the Anthropocene, and that they can destabilize the strict separation between human experience and nonhuman realities