35,074 research outputs found
Leveraging Citation Networks to Visualize Scholarly Influence Over Time
Assessing the influence of a scholar's work is an important task for funding
organizations, academic departments, and researchers. Common methods, such as
measures of citation counts, can ignore much of the nuance and
multidimensionality of scholarly influence. We present an approach for
generating dynamic visualizations of scholars' careers. This approach uses an
animated node-link diagram showing the citation network accumulated around the
researcher over the course of the career in concert with key indicators,
highlighting influence both within and across fields. We developed our design
in collaboration with one funding organization---the Pew Biomedical Scholars
program---but the methods are generalizable to visualizations of scholarly
influence. We applied the design method to the Microsoft Academic Graph, which
includes more than 120 million publications. We validate our abstractions
throughout the process through collaboration with the Pew Biomedical Scholars
program officers and summative evaluations with their scholars
Making visible the invisible through the analysis of acknowledgements in the humanities
Purpose: Science is subject to a normative structure that includes how the
contributions and interactions between scientists are rewarded. Authorship and
citations have been the key elements within the reward system of science,
whereas acknowledgements, despite being a well-established element in scholarly
communication, have not received the same attention. This paper aims to put
forward the bearing of acknowledgements in the humanities to bring to the
foreground contributions and interactions that, otherwise, would remain
invisible through traditional indicators of research performance.
Design/methodology/approach: The study provides a comprehensive framework to
understanding acknowledgements as part of the reward system with a special
focus on its value in the humanities as a reflection of intellectual
indebtedness. The distinctive features of research in the humanities are
outlined and the role of acknowledgements as a source of contributorship
information is reviewed to support these assumptions.
Findings: Peer interactive communication is the prevailing support thanked in
the acknowledgements of humanities, so the notion of acknowledgements as
super-citations can make special sense in this area. Since single-authored
papers still predominate as publishing pattern in this domain, the study of
acknowledgements might help to understand social interactions and intellectual
influences that lie behind a piece of research and are not visible through
authorship.
Originality/value: Previous works have proposed and explored the prevailing
acknowledgement types by domain. This paper focuses on the humanities to show
the role of acknowledgements within the reward system and highlight publication
patterns and inherent research features which make acknowledgements
particularly interesting in the area as reflection of the socio-cognitive
structure of research.Comment: 14 page
Quantifying the consistency of scientific databases
Science is a social process with far-reaching impact on our modern society.
In the recent years, for the first time we are able to scientifically study the
science itself. This is enabled by massive amounts of data on scientific
publications that is increasingly becoming available. The data is contained in
several databases such as Web of Science or PubMed, maintained by various
public and private entities. Unfortunately, these databases are not always
consistent, which considerably hinders this study. Relying on the powerful
framework of complex networks, we conduct a systematic analysis of the
consistency among six major scientific databases. We found that identifying a
single "best" database is far from easy. Nevertheless, our results indicate
appreciable differences in mutual consistency of different databases, which we
interpret as recipes for future bibliometric studies.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures, 4 table
Library Resources: Procurement, Innovation and Exploitation in a Digital World
The possibilities of the digital future require new models for procurement, innovation and exploitation. Emma Crowley and Chris Spencer describe the skills staff need to deliver resources in hybrid and digital environments. The chapter demonstrates the innovative ways that librarians use to procure and exploit the wealth of resources available in a digital world. They also describe the technological developments that can be adopted to improve workflow processes and they highlight the challenges faced on this fascinating journey
Science Models as Value-Added Services for Scholarly Information Systems
The paper introduces scholarly Information Retrieval (IR) as a further
dimension that should be considered in the science modeling debate. The IR use
case is seen as a validation model of the adequacy of science models in
representing and predicting structure and dynamics in science. Particular
conceptualizations of scholarly activity and structures in science are used as
value-added search services to improve retrieval quality: a co-word model
depicting the cognitive structure of a field (used for query expansion), the
Bradford law of information concentration, and a model of co-authorship
networks (both used for re-ranking search results). An evaluation of the
retrieval quality when science model driven services are used turned out that
the models proposed actually provide beneficial effects to retrieval quality.
From an IR perspective, the models studied are therefore verified as expressive
conceptualizations of central phenomena in science. Thus, it could be shown
that the IR perspective can significantly contribute to a better understanding
of scholarly structures and activities.Comment: 26 pages, to appear in Scientometric
Assessing iSchools
Over the past decade, iSchools have emerged to educate the next generation of information professionals and scholars. Claiming to be edgy and innovative, how can and should these schools function in the spirit of assessment that now drives so much in the university? This essay, which explores how well we can assess iSchools, emerged from a doctoral seminar. Academic Culture and Practice, taught by Richard Cox and including four doctoral student participants and the Dean of School of Information Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, Ronald Larsen. The doctoral students, among other activities, were required to work on assignments to support a self-study for the University of Pittsburgh's reaccreditation by the Middle States Association. As we proceeded through the course, we found ourselves increasingly drawn to questions about how iSchools, in their nascent state, can assess themselves. Four major areas—reputation, evaluating productivity in scholarly publishing, student evaluation of teaching, and student satisfaction with their academic programs—that emerged based on student interest as the seminar proceeded are discussed
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