Research Collaborations and Scientific productivity among the Research Universities in South Africa

This study presents the share of 5 most productive South African institutions for the main stream scientific out put covering the 10 year periods of 1995-2004. This paper discusses the distribution of publications by institutions, Index of specialization, collaboration and pattern of co-authorship. The result shows that South African authors collaborate more frequently with international authors with a percentage of (73.99%) than did so for national collaboration which amount to (26.01%). This was confirmed statistically at the confidence level of P-value 0.025. A further non-parametric chi-square statistical analysis illustrated that there are significant differences in the proportion of co-authorship among the 5 institutions (p-value0.005)

Analysis of ChatGPT as a Question-Answering Tool

ChatGPT, in recent months, has made a significant impact and exposure in the information world. Many studies have been conducted within a shorter timeframe about its efficiency, reliability, ethics, accuracy and acceptance. In this study, the authors have looked at the ChatGPT as a question-answering tool using randomly generated prompts to solicit answers and analysed the results from a text analysis angle. The answers are compared with text analysers both manually and statistically. Authors suggest that ChatGPT still needs more precision for linguistic effects and fails to meet comprehensive users’ requirements

Self-citations at the meso and individual levels: effects of different calculation methods

This paper focuses on the study of self-citations at the meso and micro (individual) levels, on the basis of an analysis of the production (1994–2004) of individual researchers working at the Spanish CSIC in the areas of Biology and Biomedicine and Material Sciences. Two different types of self-citations are described: author self-citations (citations received from the author him/herself) and co-author self-citations (citations received from the researchers’ co-authors but without his/her participation). Self-citations do not play a decisive role in the high citation scores of documents either at the individual or at the meso level, which are mainly due to external citations. At micro-level, the percentage of self-citations does not change by professional rank or age, but differences in the relative weight of author and co-author self-citations have been found. The percentage of co-author self-citations tends to decrease with age and professional rank while the percentage of author self-citations shows the opposite trend. Suppressing author self-citations from citation counts to prevent overblown self-citation practices may result in a higher reduction of citation numbers of old scientists and, particularly, of those in the highest categories. Author and co-author self-citations provide valuable information on the scientific communication process, but external citations are the most relevant for evaluative purposes. As a final recommendation, studies considering self-citations at the individual level should make clear whether author or total self-citations are used as these can affect researchers differently

Assessment of the impact of the journal literature produced by Indian CSIR Laboratories using subfield corrected impact

Comparative assessment of the journal literature produced by laboratories/institutions working in different fields is a difficult exercise. The impact factor of the journals is not a suitable indicator since citation practices vary with fields. The variation is corrected in this study using a measure, the "subfield corrected impact factor" and it is applied to the journal papers produced by the Indian Council of Scientific and Industrial Research Laboratories. This measure helped to compare the impact of journal literature in different fields

Self-citations, co-authorships and keywords: A new approach to scientists' field mobility?

This paper introduces a new approach to detecting scientists' field mobility by focusing on an author's self-citation network, and the co-authorships and keywords in self-citing articles. Contrary to much previous literature on self-citations, we will show that author's self-citation patterns reveal important information on the development and emergence of new research topics over time. More specifically, we will discuss self-citations as a means to detect scientists' field mobility. We introduce a network based definition of field mobility, using the Optimal Percolation Method (Lambiotte & Ausloos, 2005; 2006). The results of the study can be extended to selfcitation networks of groups of authors and, generally also for other types of networks

The relationship between co-authorship, currency of references and author self-citations

[[abstract]]This paper attempts to identify the relationship between co-authorship and the currency of the references and author self-citations in the key journals of environmental engineering. The results show that the self-citation rate of co-authored articles is higher than in single-authored articles. A statistically significant correlation is identified between the numbers of co-authors, the rate of author self-citing and the author self-cited; though it was a low correlation. The value of coefficient correlation between the number of co-authors and the author self-citing rate is slightly higher than that between the number of co-authors and the author self-cited rate, which indicates that the number of co-authors hold a stronger correlation with the self-citing rate than the self-cited rate. Meanwhile, self-citing references are found to be more up-to-date than references to others. The range of publication years of self-citing references is smaller than that of references to others, indicating that researchers tend to preferentially cite their own recent works. There is no significant difference in the latest references between self-citing references and the references to others. It might result from electronic journals that provide an easy access to the most current publications.[[notice]]補正完畢[[journaltype]]國外[[incitationindex]]SSCI[[ispeerreviewed]]Y[[booktype]]紙本[[booktype]]電子版[[countrycodes]]HU