DataCite as a novel bibliometric source: Coverage, strengths and limitations

This paper explores the characteristics of DataCite to determine its possibilities and potential as a new bibliometric data source to analyze the scholarly production of open data. Open science and the increasing data sharing requirements from governments, funding bodies, institutions and scientific journals has led to a pressing demand for the development of data metrics. As a very first step towards reliable data metrics, we need to better comprehend the limitations and caveats of the information provided by sources of open data. In this paper, we critically examine records downloaded from the DataCite's OAI API and elaborate a series of recommendations regarding the use of this source for bibliometric analyses of open data. We highlight issues related to metadata incompleteness, lack of standardization, and ambiguous definitions of several fields. Despite these limitations, we emphasize DataCite's value and potential to become one of the main sources for data metrics development.Comment: Paper accepted for publication in Journal of Informetric

The journal coverage of Web of Science and Scopus : a comparative analysis

Bibliometric methods are used in multiple fields for a variety of purposes, namely for research evaluation. Most bibliometric analyses have in common their data sources: Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science (WoS) and Elsevier’s Scopus. The objective of this research is to describe the journal coverage of those two databases and to assess whether some field, publishing country and language are over or underrepresented. To do this we compared the coverage of active scholarly journals in WoS (13,605 journals) and Scopus (20,346 journals) with Ulrich’s extensive periodical directory (63,013 journals). Results indicate that the use of either WoS or Scopus for research evaluation may introduce biases that favor Natural Sciences and Engineering as well as Biomedical Research to the detriment of Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities. Similarly, English-language journals are overrepresented to the detriment of other languages. While both databases share these biases, their coverage differs substantially. As a consequence, the results of bibliometric analyses may vary depending on the database used. These results imply that in the context of comparative research evaluation, WoS and Scopus should be used with caution, especially when comparing different fields, institutions, countries or languages. The bibliometric community should continue its efforts to develop methods and indicators that include scientific output that are not covered in WoS or Scopus, such as field-specific and national citation indexes

À qui le crédit? Division du travail et du capital dans les collaborations de recherche

Cette thèse de doctorat a été financée par le programme de bourses d'études supérieures du Canada Joseph-Armand-Bombardier.Le statut d’auteur attribue à la fois le crédit et la responsabilité aux chercheurs pour leur contribution à l’avancement des connaissances, et permet l’existence d’une économie du capital symbolique où les chercheurs bâtissent leur réputation et progressent dans leur carrière en signant des articles. Ce système repose sur l’existence d’un lien historiquement clair entre le statut d’auteur et la contribution. Or, ce lien est obscurci par le nombre de plus en plus élevé d’auteurs sur les articles scientifiques, par le fait que le statut d’auteur peut être attribué pour des contributions hétérogènes, parfois minimes, ou même nulles, et par la subjectivité du processus d’attribution du statut d’auteur. Ainsi, lorsqu’un article est signé par plusieurs individus, il est difficile de déterminer les contributions de chacun. Dans certaines disciplines, les chercheurs participent de plus en plus au régime de protection de la propriété intellectuelle en brevetant leurs découvertes. Contrairement au statut d’auteur, dont les pratiques d’attribution sont de plus en plus hétérogènes et subjectives, le statut d’inventeur d’un brevet est, de par son aspect légal, attribué selon des critères plus stricts. Il est en effet réservé aux individus ayant participé à la conception et à la matérialisation de l’invention. Ainsi, dans le cas des travaux de recherche menant à la fois à un article et à un brevet, la liste des inventeurs du brevet permet, en théorie, d’identifier parmi les auteurs ceux qui ont fait une contribution inventive et, donc, de mieux comprendre la relation entre le statut d’auteur et la nature de la contribution effectuée par chacun des auteurs de l’article. Notre étude compare les listes d’auteurs et d’inventeurs d’articles et de brevets issus de la même recherche afin de mieux comprendre les pratiques d’attribution des statuts d’auteur et d’inventeur. Nous utilisons la régression linéaire pour analyser la relation entre les caractéristiques de l’article (discipline, impact scientifique potentiel, nombre d’auteurs, collaboration interinstitutionnelle) et la proportion d’auteurs qui sont aussi inventeurs. De plus, nous utilisons la régression logistique pour déterminer dans quelle mesure il est possible de prédire quels auteurs d’un article obtiendront également le statut d’inventeur à partir de leur position dans la liste des auteurs, leur rôle, leur contribution, leur sexe et leur réputation. Les résultats montrent que la proportion moyenne des auteurs qui obtiennent le statut d’inventeur est liée à la discipline, est plus faible pour les recherches impliquant plusieurs institutions, et est plus élevée pour les articles publiés dans une revue à haut facteur d’impact. Les résultats montrent également que les auteurs occupant la première et la dernière position dans les listes d’auteurs sont plus souvent inventeurs que les auteurs occupant les autres positions, que les auteurs hautement cités sont plus souvent inventeurs que les auteurs peu cités, et que les hommes sont plus souvent inventeurs que les femmes.The function of scientific authorship is to assign credit and responsibility to researchers for their contribution to a piece of knowledge, thus enabling the existence of an economy of reputation economy in which researchers advance their careers by, among others, having their names associated to scientific work. This system relies on the existence of a historically clear link between authorship and contribution. However, this link is obscured by the increasingly high number of authors appearing in the bylines of scientific papers, by the fact that authorship can be given for diverse (sometimes very small) contributions, and by the subjectivity of authorship decisions. Thus, when an article is authored by several researchers, it becomes difficult to determine their respective contributions. In certain research fields, researchers can be involved in the commercialization of research, and often patent their discoveries. Patents are thus another form of contribution which is valued in the evaluation of researchers. Unlike the heterogeneous and subjective authorship practices, inventorship is, because if its legal aspect, awarded using stricter criteria. It is reserved for individuals who designed and materialized the invention. In some cases, research may lead to both an article and a patent. The list of inventors can then, in theory, help identify the authors who have made an inventive contribution and thus provide a better understanding of the relationship between authorship and the nature of the individual researchers’ contribution to the work. Our study compares the lists of authors and inventors of articles and patents reporting the same research. Specifically, we use linear regression to analyse the relationship between the characteristics of articles (discipline, potential impact, number of authors, interinstitutional collaboration) and the proportion of authors who also appear as inventors. In addition, we use logistic regression to determine to what extent the inventor status of authors can be predicted by their position in the byline of the paper, their role in the research, the nature of their contribution, their gender and their reputation. The results show that the average proportion of authors who are named inventors differs by discipline, is lower for research involving multiple institutions, and is higher when the article is published in a top Impact Factor journal. The results also show that the authors in the first and last positions of the byline are more often inventors than authors in other positions, that highly cited authors are more often inventors than authors with fewer citations, and that men are more often inventors than women

Les rétractations et leurs conséquences sur la carrière des coauteurs : analyse bibliométrique des fraudes et des erreurs dans le domaine biomédical

Ces dernières années, la découverte de fraudes scientifiques majeures a créé des ondes de choc dans la communauté scientifique. Le nombre annuel de rétractations a considérablement augmenté, et la plupart sont dues à des cas de fraude. Bien qu’il soit généralement pris pour acquis que tous les coauteurs sont affectés par ces rétractations, l’objectif de cette étude est de vérifier cette présupposition empiriquement. Nous avons recensé toutes les rétractations du domaine biomédical (443) de 1996 à 2006 dans PubMed et mesuré, à l’aide du Web of Science (WOS), la productivité, l’impact et les pratiques de collaboration des coauteurs (1 818) sur une période de cinq ans avant et après la rétractation. Nos résultats montrent que les rétractations ont des conséquences sur la carrière des coauteurs, surtout au niveau du nombre de publications des années subséquentes. Cet impact est plus grand dans les cas de fraude, et pour les premiers auteurs.Over the last few years, major cases of scientific fraud shocked the scientific community, and the number of retractions each year increased considerably. Scientific misconduct accounts for approximately more than half of those retractions. It is assumed that co-authors of retracted papers are affected by their colleagues’ misconduct, and the aim of this study is to provide empirical evidence of how researchers’ careers are affected by a retraction. We retrieved all (443) publications retracted from 1996 to 2006 from PubMed, signed by 1818 authors. Using the Web of Science (WOS), we measured the productivity, impact and collaboration of each of those authors for a period of five years before and after the retraction. Our results show that retractions affect the career of co-authors, mostly in terms of scientific output. This impact is felt more strongly in cases of fraud and for first authors

The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era

The consolidation of the scientific publishing industry has been the topic of much debate within and outside the scientific community, especially in relation to major publishers’ high profit margins. However, the share of scientific output published in the journals of these major publishers, as well as its evolution over time and across various disciplines, has not yet been analyzed. This paper provides such analysis, based on 45 million documents indexed in the Web of Science over the period 1973-2013. It shows that in both natural and medical sciences (NMS) and social sciences and humanities (SSH), Reed-Elsevier, Wiley Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis increased their share of the published output, especially since the advent of the digital era (mid-1990s). Combined, the top five most prolific publishers account for more than 50% of all papers published in 2013. Disciplines of the social sciences have the highest level of concentration (70% of papers from the top five publishers), while the humanities have remained relatively independent (20% from top five publishers). NMS disciplines are in between, mainly because of the strength of their scientific societies, such as the ACS in chemistry or APS in physics. The paper also examines the migration of journals between small and big publishing houses and explores the effect of publisher change on citation impact. It concludes with a discussion on the economics of scholarly publishing

Big publishers, bigger profits : how the scholarly community lost the control of its journals

Despite holding the potential to liberate scholarly information, the digital era has, to the contrary, increased the control of a few for-profit publishers. While most journals in the print era were owned by academic institutions and scientific societies, the majority of scientific papers are currently published by five for-profit publishers, which often exhibit profit margins between 30%-40%. This paper documents the evolution of this consolidation over the last 40 years, discusses the peculiar economics of scholarly publishing, and reflects upon the role of publishers in today’s academe

On the effects of the reunification on German researchers’ publication patterns

After developing independently following World War II, the research systems of East and West Germany reunited at the end of the Cold War, resulting in Westernization of East German Research institutions. Using data from the Web of Science over the 1980-2000 period, this paper analyses the effects of these political changes on the research activity of scholars from East and West Germany before and after the reunification. It shows that these groups differ in terms of levels of production, publication language, collaboration patterns and scientific impact and that, unsurprisingly, the scholarly output of the East became much more similar to that of the West after the reunification. At the level of individual researchers, analysis shows that East German researchers who had direct or indirect ties with the West prior to the 1990s were less affected by the reunification, or were perhaps quicker to adapt to this major change, than their colleagues who were more deeply rooted in the Eastern research system

From art to science : a bibliometric analysis of architectural scholarly production from 1980 to 2015

According to recent literature on “architecture” as a discipline, practical knowledge relevant to its process of making has decreased in importance in favor of a more academic approach. Using data derived from Ulrich’s Periodical Directory and Clarivate Analytics’s Web of Science, this paper suggests providing empirical evidence supporting of such shift, as revealed by an overview of the dissemination practices in architecture scholarly production between 1980 and 2015. Our results support that architecture is becoming increasingly academic, as demonstrated by the growing proportion of articles and journals intended for scholars rather than for professionals. We also show that architecture is increasingly global, with decreased interest in local and/or national issues and the growing prevalence of English as a publication language. Finally, this academic focus is manifested in references cited by architectural papers with the gradual substitution of professional and artistic oriented knowledge, for scientific approaches tied to engineering and technology

On the topicality and research impact of special issues

The publication of special issues constitute an important yet underinvestigated phenomenon of scholarly communication. In an attempt to draw attention to the proliferation of special issues, Priem (2006) suggested that their commissioning has an underestimated opportunity cost, given the relative scarcity of publication space: by distorting the “marketplace for ideas” through the commanding of preselected topical distributions, special issues undermine the total research output by “squeezing out” high-quality but topically unrelated articles. The present paper attempts to test this hypothesis by providing a topicality and research impact analysis of conference-based, monographic, and regular issues published between 2010 and 2015 inclusive and indexed in Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The results show that the titles and abstracts of articles copublished are topically closer to each other than those copublished in regular issues, which suggests that their relative importance might influence the total topical distribution. However, disciplinary and overall comparison of relative citations for both special and regular issues shows that intraissue averages and variances in the former case are respectively higher and lower than in the regular issue context, which undermines not only the abovementioned hypothesis, but also the belief that editors often “fill up” special issues by accepting substandard papers

The rise of the middle author : investigating collaboration and division of labor in biomedical research using partial alphabetical authorship

Contemporary biomedical research is performed by increasingly large teams. Consequently, an increasingly large number of individuals are being listed as authors in the bylines, which complicates the proper attribution of credit and responsibility to individual authors. Typically, more importance is given to the first and last authors, while it is assumed that the others (the middle authors) have made smaller contributions. However, this may not properly reflect the actual division of labor because some authors other than the first and last may have made major contributions. In practice, research teams may differentiate the main contributors from the rest by using partial alphabetical authorship (i.e., by listing middle authors alphabetically, while maintaining a contribution-based order for more substantial contributions). In this paper, we use partial alphabetical authorship to divide the authors of all biomedical articles in the Web of Science published over the 1980–2015 period in three groups: primary authors, middle authors, and supervisory authors. We operationalize the concept of middle author as those who are listed in alphabetical order in the middle of an authors’ list. Primary and supervisory authors are those listed before and after the alphabetical sequence, respectively. We show that alphabetical ordering of middle authors is frequent in biomedical research, and that the prevalence of this practice is positively correlated with the number of authors in the bylines. We also find that, for articles with 7 or more authors, the average proportion of primary, middle and supervisory authors is independent of the team size, more than half of the authors being middle authors. This suggests that growth in authors lists are not due to an increase in secondary contributions (or middle authors) but, rather, in equivalent increases of all types of roles and contributions (including many primary authors and many supervisory authors). Nevertheless, we show that the relative contribution of alphabetically ordered middle authors to the overall production of knowledge in the biomedical field has greatly increased over the last 35 years