Arts and Humanities Research Evaluation: No Metrics Please, Just Data

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to make an explicit case for the use of data with contextual information as evidence in arts and humanities research evaluations rather than systematic metrics. Design/methodology/approach – A survey of the strengths and limitations of citation-based indicators is combined with evidence about existing uses of wider impact data in the arts and humanities, with particular reference to the 2014 UK Research Excellence Framework. Findings – Data are already used as impact evidence in the arts and humanities but this practice should become more widespread. Practical implications – Arts and humanities researchers should be encouraged to think creatively about the kinds of data that they may be able to generate in support of the value of their research and should not rely upon standardised metrics. Originality/value – This paper combines practices emerging in the arts and humanities with research evaluation from a scientometric perspective to generate new recommendations

The ResearchGate Score rewards academics' active participation on the platform above their publications and citations

There are now more than 13 million users registered to the ResearchGate platform, which doubles as a venue to display one’s academic achievements and a social networking site where scientists can interact with one another. Enrique Orduna-Malea, Alberto Martín-Martín, Mike Thelwall, and Emilio Delgado López-Cózar scrutinise one of its key features, the much-maligned RG Score. While the computation of this metric is not transparent, closer analysis suggests it rewards participation in the platform, especially in its Q&A section, above all else. Is the goal of ResearchGate to reward altruism, the selfless cooperation among scientists? Or is it merely to promote interaction on its platform? Whatever the reason, it is important to remember bibliometric indicators are not neutral and potentially have consequences for the credibility of science

Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus: A systematic comparison of citations in 252 subject categories

[EN] Despite citation counts from Google Scholar (GS), Web of Science (WoS), and Scopus being widely consulted by researchers and sometimes used in research evaluations, there is no recent or systematic evidence about the differences between them. In response, this paper investigates 2,448,055 citations to 2299 English-language highly-cited documents from 252 GS subject categories published in 2006, comparing GS, the WoS Core Collection, and Scopus. GS consistently found the largest percentage of citations across all areas (93%¿96%), far ahead of Scopus (35%¿77%) and WoS (27%¿73%). GS found nearly all the WoS (95%) and Scopus (92%) citations. Most citations found only by GS were from non-journal sources (48%¿65%), including theses, books, conference papers, and unpublished materials. Many were non-English (19%¿38%), and they tended to be much less cited than citing sources that were also in Scopus or WoS. Despite the many unique GS citing sources, Spearman correlations between citation counts in GS and WoS or Scopus are high (0.78-0.99). They are lower in the Humanities, and lower between GS and WoS than between GS and Scopus. The results suggest that in all areas GS citation data is essentially a superset of WoS and Scopus, with substantial extra coverage.Alberto Martin-Martin is funded for a four-year doctoral fellowship (FPU2013/05863) granted by the Ministerio de Educacion, Cultura, y Deportes (Spain). An international mobility grant from Universidad de Granada and CEI BioTic Granadafunded a research stay at the University of Wolverhampton.Martín-Martín, A.; Orduña-Malea, E.; Thelwall, M.; Delgado Lopez-Cozar, E. (2018). Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus: A systematic comparison of citations in 252 subject categories. Journal of Informetrics. 12(4):1160-1177. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2018.09.0021160117712

Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus: which is best for me?

Being able to find, assess and place new research within a field of knowledge, is integral to any research project. For social scientists this process is increasingly likely to take place on Google Scholar, closely followed by traditional scholarly databases. In this post, Alberto Martín-Martín, Enrique Orduna-Malea , Mike Thelwall, Emilio Delgado-López-Cózar, analyse the relative coverage of the three main research databases, Google Scholar, Web of Science and Scopus, finding significant divergences in the social sciences and humanities and suggest that researchers face a trade-off when using different databases: between more comprehensive, but disorderly systems and orderly, but limited systems

An Optical Velocity for the Phoenix Dwarf Galaxy

We present the results of a VLT observing program carried out in service mode using FORS1 on ANTU in Long Slit mode to determine the optical velocities of nearby low surface brightness galaxies. As part of our program of service observations we obtained long-slit spectra of several members of the Phoenix dwarf galaxy from which we derive an optical helio-centric radial velocity of -13 +/- 9km/s. This agrees very well with the velocity of the most promising of the HI clouds seen around Phoenix, which has a helio-centric velocity of -23 km/s, but is significantly different to the recently published optical heliocentric velocity of Phoenix of -52 +/- 6 km/s of Gallart et al. (2001).Comment: Aceepted for publication in MNRA

Forma analítica de la extensión de funcionales lineales en espacios normados

El objetivo de este artículo de investigación es establecer condiciones para extender una funcional lineal de un subespacio vectorial a todo el espacio normado preservando las propiedades básicas de dicho conjunto de donde se extendió y que en la actualidad tiene aplicaciones en otras áreas de la matemática, por ejemplo: análisis complejo, teoría de juegos y en el análisis convexo. Se determinó que es posible extender una funcional lineal preservando la linealidad, la relación de orden y el valor de la funcional, para todo elemento de un subespacio vectorial E sobre el campo de los números reales o complejos. Se empleó los métodos deductivo e inductivo para extender una funcional lineal de un espacio vectorial a todo el espacio normado y para contrastar el funcionamiento de estas condiciones, se analizó los teoremas de extensión de funcionales lineales en los espacios normados para el caso real y para el caso complejo las cuales se derivan en proposiciones

Was the Progenitor of the Sagittarius Stream a Disc Galaxy?

We use N-body simulations to explore the possibility that the Sagittarius (Sgr) dwarf galaxy was originally a late-type, rotating disc galaxy, rather than a non-rotating, pressure-supported dwarf spheroidal galaxy, as previously thought. We find that bifurcations in the leading tail of the Sgr stream, similar to those detected by the SDSS survey, naturally arise in models where the Sgr disc is misaligned with respect to the orbital plane. Moreover, we show that the internal rotation of the progenitor may strongly alter the location of the leading tail projected on the sky, and thus affect the constraints on the shape of the Milky Way dark matter halo that may be derived from modelling the Sgr stream. Our models provide a clear, easily-tested prediction: although tidal mass stripping removes a large fraction of the original angular momentum in the progenitor dwarf galaxy, the remnant core should still rotate with a velocity amplitude ~20 km/s that could be readily detected in future, wide-field kinematic surveys of the Sgr dwarf.Comment: Letter accepted by MNRAS. N-body model animations can be downloaded from http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~jorpega/files/sgr

Utilizing a Suited Manikin Test Apparatus and Space Suit Ventilation Loop to Evaluate Carbon Dioxide Washout

NASA is pursuing technology development of an Advanced Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AEMU) which is an integrated assembly made up of primarily a pressure garment system and a portable life support subsystem (PLSS). The PLSS is further composed of an oxygen subsystem, a ventilation subsystem, and a thermal subsystem. One of the key functions of the ventilation system is to remove and control the carbon dioxide (CO2) delivered to the crewmember. Carbon dioxide washout is the mechanism by which CO2 levels are controlled within the space suit helmet to limit the concentration of CO2 inhaled by the crew member. CO2 washout performance is a critical parameter needed to ensure proper and robust designs that are insensitive to human variabilities in a space suit. A suited manikin test apparatus (SMTA) was developed to augment testing of the PLSS ventilation loop in order to provide a lower cost and more controlled alternative to human testing. The CO2 removal function is performed by the regenerative Rapid Cycle Amine (RCA) within the PLSS ventilation loop and its performance is evaluated within the integrated SMTA and Ventilation Loop test system. This paper will provide a detailed description of the schematics, test configurations, and hardware components of this integrated system. Results and analysis of testing performed with this integrated system will be presented within this paper

Microsoft Academic automatic document searches: accuracy for journal articles and suitability for citation analysis

Microsoft Academic is a free academic search engine and citation index that is similar to Google Scholar but can be automatically queried. Its data is potentially useful for bibliometric analysis if it is possible to search effectively for individual journal articles. This article compares different methods to find journal articles in its index by searching for a combination of title, authors, publication year and journal name and uses the results for the widest published correlation analysis of Microsoft Academic citation counts for journal articles so far. Based on 126,312 articles from 323 Scopus subfields in 2012, the optimal strategy to find articles with DOIs is to search for them by title and filter out those with incorrect DOIs. This finds 90% of journal articles. For articles without DOIs, the optimal strategy is to search for them by title and then filter out matches with dissimilar metadata. This finds 89% of journal articles, with an additional 1% incorrect matches. The remaining articles seem to be mainly not indexed by Microsoft Academic or indexed with a different language version of their title. From the matches, Scopus citation counts and Microsoft Academic counts have an average Spearman correlation of 0.95, with the lowest for any single field being 0.63. Thus, Microsoft Academic citation counts are almost universally equivalent to Scopus citation counts for articles that are not recent but there are national biases in the results

The Resolved Structure and Dynamics of an Isolated Dwarf Galaxy: A VLT and Keck Spectroscopic Survey of WLM

We present spectroscopic data for 180 red giant branch stars in the isolated dwarf irregular galaxy WLM. Observations of the Calcium II triplet lines in spectra of RGB stars covering the entire galaxy were obtained with FORS2 at the VLT and DEIMOS on Keck II allowing us to derive velocities, metallicities, and ages for the stars. With accompanying photometric and radio data we have measured the structural parameters of the stellar and gaseous populations over the full galaxy. The stellar populations show an intrinsically thick configuration with $0.39 \leq q_{0} \leq 0.57$. The stellar rotation in WLM is measured to be $17 \pm 1$ km s$^{-1}$, however the ratio of rotation to pressure support for the stars is $V/\sigma \sim 1$, in contrast to the gas whose ratio is seven times larger. This, along with the structural data and alignment of the kinematic and photometric axes, suggests we are viewing WLM as a highly inclined oblate spheroid. Stellar rotation curves, corrected for asymmetric drift, are used to compute a dynamical mass of $4.3\pm 0.3\times10^{8}$M$_{\odot}$ at the half light radius ($r_{h} = 1656 \pm 49$ pc). The stellar velocity dispersion increases with stellar age in a manner consistent with giant molecular cloud and substructure interactions producing the heating in WLM. Coupled with WLM's isolation, this suggests that the extended vertical structure of its stellar and gaseous components and increase in stellar velocity dispersion with age are due to internal feedback, rather than tidally driven evolution. These represent some of the first observational results from an isolated Local Group dwarf galaxy which can offer important constraints on how strongly internal feedback and secular processes modulate SF and dynamical evolution in low mass isolated objects.Comment: 14 Pages, 17 figures, 3 tables. Accepted for publication in Ap