98 research outputs found
The role of handbooks in knowledge creation and diffusion: A case of science and technology studies
Genre is considered to be an important element in scholarly communication and
in the practice of scientific disciplines. However, scientometric studies have
typically focused on a single genre, the journal article. The goal of this
study is to understand the role that handbooks play in knowledge creation and
diffusion and their relationship with the genre of journal articles,
particularly in highly interdisciplinary and emergent social science and
humanities disciplines. To shed light on these questions we focused on
handbooks and journal articles published over the last four decades belonging
to the research area of Science and Technology Studies (STS), broadly defined.
To get a detailed picture we used the full-text of five handbooks (500,000
words) and a well-defined set of 11,700 STS articles. We confirmed the
methodological split of STS into qualitative and quantitative (scientometric)
approaches. Even when the two traditions explore similar topics (e.g., science
and gender) they approach them from different starting points. The change in
cognitive foci in both handbooks and articles partially reflects the changing
trends in STS research, often driven by technology. Using text similarity
measures we found that, in the case of STS, handbooks play no special role in
either focusing the research efforts or marking their decline. In general, they
do not represent the summaries of research directions that have emerged since
the previous edition of the handbook.Comment: Accepted for publication in Journal of Informetric
Age stratification and cohort effects in scholarly communication : a study of social sciences
Aging is considered to be an important factor in a scholar’s propensity to
innovate, produce, and collaborate on high quality work. Yet, empirical studies in the area
are rare and plagued with several limitations. As a result, we lack clear evidence on the
relationship between aging and scholarly communication activities and impact. To this
end, we study the complete publication profiles of more than 1000 authors across three
fields—sociology, economics, and political science—to understand the relationship
between aging, productivity, collaboration, and impact. Furthermore, we analyze multiple
operationalizations of aging, to determine which is more closely related to observable
changes in scholarly communication behavior. The study demonstrates that scholars
remain highly productive across the life-span of the career (i.e., 40 years), and that productivity increases steeply until promotion to associate professor and then remains stable.
Collaboration increases with age and has increased over time. Lastly, a scholar’s work
obtains its highest impact directly around promotion and then decreases over time. Finally,
our results suggest a statistically significant relationship between rank of the scholar and
productivity, collaboration, and impact. These results inform our understanding of the
scientific workforce and the production of science
Analyzing and predicting the spatial penetration of Airbnb in U.S. cities
In the hospitality industry, the room and apartment sharing platform of Airbnb has been accused of unfair competition. Detractors have pointed out the chronic lack of proper legislation. Unfortunately, there is little quantitative evidence about Airbnb's spatial penetration upon which to base such a legislation. In this study, we analyze Airbnb's spatial distribution in eight U.S. urban areas, in relation to both geographic, socio-demographic, and economic information. We find that, despite being very different in terms of population composition, size, and wealth, all eight cities exhibit the same pattern: that is, areas of high Airbnb presence are those occupied by the \newpart{``talented and creative''} classes, and those that are close to city centers. This result is consistent so much so that the accuracy of predicting Airbnb's spatial penetration is as high as 0.725
Numerical study on hygroscopic material drying in packed bed
The paper addresses numerical simulation for the case of convective drying of hygroscopic material in a packed bed, analyzing agreement between the simulated and the corresponding experimental results. In the simulation model of unsteady simultaneous one-dimensional heat and mass transfer between gas phase and dried material, it is assumed that the gas-solid interface is at thermodynamic equilibrium, while the drying rate of the specific product is calculated by applying the concept of a "drying coefficient". Model validation was clone on the basis of the experimental data obtained with potato cubes. The obtained drying kinetics, both experimental and numerical, show that higher gas (drying agent) velocities (flow-rates), as well as lower equivalent grain diameters, induce faster drying. This effect is more pronounced for deeper beds, because of the larger amount of wet material to be dried using the same drying agent capacity
Mapping recent information behavior research: an analysis of co-authorship and cocitation networks
There has been an increase in research published on information behavior in recent years, and this has been accompanied by an increase in its diversity and interaction with other fields, particularly information retrieval (HR). The aims of this study are to determine which researchers have contributed to producing the current body of knowledge on this subject, and to describe its intellectual basis. A bibliometric and network analysis was applied to authorship and co-authorship as well as citation and co-citation. According to these analyses, there is a small number of authors who can be considered to be the most productive and who publish regularly, and a large number of transient ones. Other findings reveal a marked predominance of theoretical works, some examples of qualitative methodology that originate in other areas of social science, and a high incidence of research focused on the user interaction with information retrieval systems and the information behavior of doctors
How Much Research Shared On Facebook Happens Outside Of Public Pages And Groups? A Comparison of Public and Private Online Activity around PLOS ONE Papers
Despite its undisputed position as the biggest social media platform, Facebook has never entered the main stage of altmetrics research. In this study, we argue that the lack of attention by altmetrics researchers is due, in part, to the challenges in collecting Facebook data regarding activity that takes place outside of public pages and groups. We present a new method of collecting aggregate counts of shares, reactions, and comments across the platform—including users’ personal timelines—and use it to gather data for all articles published between 2015 to 2017 in the journal PLOS ONE. We compare the gathered data with altmetrics collected and aggregated by Altmetric. The results show that 58.7% of papers shared on Facebook happen outside of public spaces and that, when collecting all shares, the volume of activity approximates patterns of engagement previously only observed for Twitter. Both results suggest that the role and impact of Facebook as a medium for science and scholarly communication has been underestimated. Furthermore, they emphasize the importance of openness and transparency around the collection and aggregation of altmetrics
All downhill from the PhD? The typical impact trajectory of US academic careers
© 2020 The Authors. Published by MIT Press. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence.
The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00072.Within academia, mature researchers tend to be more senior, but do they also tend to write higher impact articles? This article assesses long-term publishing (16+ years) United States (US) researchers, contrasting them with shorter-term publishing researchers (1, 6 or 10 years). A long-term US researcher is operationalised as having a first Scopus-indexed journal article in exactly 2001 and one in 2016-2019, with US main affiliations in their first and last articles. Researchers publishing in large teams (11+ authors) were excluded. The average field and year normalised citation impact of long- and shorter-term US researchers’ journal articles decreases over time relative to the national average, with especially large falls to the last articles published that may be at least partly due to a decline in self-citations. In many cases researchers start by publishing above US average citation impact research and end by publishing below US average citation impact research. Thus, research managers should not assume that senior researchers will usually write the highest impact papers
Paleogeographic evolution of the Southern Pannonian Basin: 40Ar/39Ar age constraints on the Miocene continental series of notthern Croatia
The Pannonian Basin, originating during the
Early Miocene, is a large extensional basin incorporated
between Alpine, Carpathian and Dinaride fold-thrust belts.
Back-arc extensional tectonics triggered deposition of up to
500-m-thick continental fluvio-lacustrine deposits distributed
in numerous sub-basins of the Southern Pannonian
Basin. Extensive andesitic and dacitic volcanism accompanied
the syn-rift deposition and caused a number of
pyroclastic intercalations. Here, we analyze two volcanic
ash layers located at the base and top of the continental
series. The lowermost ash from Mt. Kalnik yielded an
40Ar/39Ar age of 18.07 ± 0.07 Ma. This indicates that the
marine-continental transition in the Slovenia-Zagorje
Basin, coinciding with the onset of rifting tectonics in the
Southern Pannonian Basin, occurs roughly at the Eggenburgian/
Ottnangian boundary of the regional Paratethys
time scale. This age proves the synchronicity of initial
rifting in the Southern Pannonian Basin with the beginning
of sedimentation in the Dinaride Lake System. Beside
geodynamic evolution, the two regions also share a biotic
evolutionary history: both belong to the same ecoregion,
which we designate here as the Illyrian Bioprovince. The
youngest volcanic ash level is sampled at the Glina and
Karlovac sub-depressions, and both sites yield the same
40Ar/39Ar age of 15.91 ± 0.06 and 16.03 ± 0.06 Ma,
respectively. This indicates that lacustrine sedimentation in
the Southern Pannonian Basin continued at least until the
earliest Badenian. The present results provide not only
important bench marks on duration of initial synrift in the
Pannonian Basin System, but also deliver substantial
backbone data for paleogeographic reconstructions in
Central and Southeastern Europe around the Early–Middle
Miocene transition
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