59 research outputs found
On the shoulders of students? The contribution of PhD students to the advancement of knowledge
Using the participation in peer reviewed publications of all doctoral
students in Quebec over the 2000-2007 period this paper provides the first
large scale analysis of their research effort. It shows that PhD students
contribute to about a third of the publication output of the province, with
doctoral students in the natural and medical sciences being present in a higher
proportion of papers published than their colleagues of the social sciences and
humanities. Collaboration is an important component of this socialization:
disciplines in which student collaboration is higher are also those in which
doctoral students are the most involved in peer-reviewed publications. In terms
of scientific impact, papers co-signed by doctorate students obtain
significantly lower citation rates than other Quebec papers, except in natural
sciences and engineering. Finally, this paper shows that involving doctoral
students in publications is positively linked with degree completion and
ulterior career in research.Comment: 41 pages, 7 figures, forthcoming in Scientometric
On the relationship between interdisciplinarity and scientific impact
This paper analyzes the effect of interdisciplinarity on the scientific
impact of individual papers. Using all the papers published in Web of Science
in 2000, we define the degree of interdisciplinarity of a given paper as the
percentage of its cited references made to journals of other disciplines. We
show that, although for all disciplines combined there is no clear correlation
between the level of interdisciplinarity of papers and their citation rates,
there are nonetheless some disciplines in which a higher level of
interdisciplinarity is related to a higher citation rates. For other
disciplines, citations decline as interdisciplinarity grows. One characteristic
is visible in all disciplines: highly disciplinary and highly interdisciplinary
papers have a low scientific impact. This suggests that there might be an
optimum of interdisciplinarity beyond which the research is too dispersed to
find its niche and under which it is too mainstream to have high impact.
Finally, the relationship between interdisciplinarity and scientific impact is
highly determined by the citation characteristics of the disciplines involved:
papers citing citation intensive disciplines are more likely to be cited by
those disciplines and, hence, obtain higher citation scores than papers citing
non citation intensive disciplines.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, 1 table. Forthcoming in JASIS
The weakening relationship between the Impact Factor and papers' citations in the digital age
Historically, papers have been physically bound to the journal in which they
were published but in the electronic age papers are available individually, no
longer tied to their respective journals. Hence, papers now can be read and
cited based on their own merits, independently of the journal's physical
availability, reputation, or Impact Factor. We compare the strength of the
relationship between journals' Impact Factors and the actual citations received
by their respective papers from 1902 to 2009. Throughout most of the 20th
century, papers' citation rates were increasingly linked to their respective
journals' Impact Factors. However, since 1990, the advent of the digital age,
the strength of the relation between Impact Factors and paper citations has
been decreasing. This decrease began sooner in physics, a field that was
quicker to make the transition into the electronic domain. Furthermore, since
1990, the proportion of highly cited papers coming from highly cited journals
has been decreasing, and accordingly, the proportion of highly cited papers not
coming from highly cited journals has also been increasing. Should this pattern
continue, it might bring an end to the use of the Impact Factor as a way to
evaluate the quality of journals, papers and researchers.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure
Estimating Open Access Mandate Effectiveness: The MELIBEA Score
MELIBEA is a Spanish database that uses a composite formula with eight
weighted conditions to estimate the effectiveness of Open Access mandates
(registered in ROARMAP). We analyzed 68 mandated institutions for publication
years 2011-2013 to determine how well the MELIBEA score and its individual
conditions predict what percentage of published articles indexed by Web of
Knowledge is deposited in each institution's OA repository, and when. We found
a small but significant positive correlation (0.18) between MELIBEA score and
deposit percentage. We also found that for three of the eight MELIBEA
conditions (deposit timing, internal use, and opt-outs), one value of each was
strongly associated with deposit percentage or deposit latency (immediate
deposit required, deposit required for performance evaluation, unconditional
opt-out allowed for the OA requirement but no opt-out for deposit requirement).
When we updated the initial values and weights of the MELIBEA formula for
mandate effectiveness to reflect the empirical association we had found, the
score's predictive power doubled (.36). There are not yet enough OA mandates to
test further mandate conditions that might contribute to mandate effectiveness,
but these findings already suggest that it would be useful for future mandates
to adopt these three conditions so as to maximize their effectiveness, and
thereby the growth of OA.Comment: 27 pages, 13 figures, 3 tables, 40 references, 7761 word
On the prevalence and scientific impact of duplicate publications in different scientific fields (1980-2007)
The issue of duplicate publications has received a lot of attention in the
medical literature, but much less in the information science community. This
paper aims at analyzing the prevalence and scientific impact of duplicate
publications across all fields of research between 1980 and 2007, using a
definition of duplicate papers based on their metadata. It shows that in all
fields combined, the prevalence of duplicates is one out of two-thousand
papers, but is higher in the natural and medical sciences than in the social
sciences and humanities. A very high proportion (>85%) of these papers are
published the same year or one year apart, which suggest that most duplicate
papers were submitted simultaneously. Furthermore, duplicate papers are
generally published in journals with impact factors below the average of their
field and obtain a lower number of citations. This paper provides clear
evidence that the prevalence of duplicate papers is low and, more importantly,
that the scientific impact of such papers is below average.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure
The impact factor's Matthew effect: a natural experiment in bibliometrics
Since the publication of Robert K. Merton's theory of cumulative advantage in
science (Matthew Effect), several empirical studies have tried to measure its
presence at the level of papers, individual researchers, institutions or
countries. However, these studies seldom control for the intrinsic "quality" of
papers or of researchers--"better" (however defined) papers or researchers
could receive higher citation rates because they are indeed of better quality.
Using an original method for controlling the intrinsic value of
papers--identical duplicate papers published in different journals with
different impact factors--this paper shows that the journal in which papers are
published have a strong influence on their citation rates, as duplicate papers
published in high impact journals obtain, on average, twice as much citations
as their identical counterparts published in journals with lower impact
factors. The intrinsic value of a paper is thus not the only reason a given
paper gets cited or not; there is a specific Matthew effect attached to
journals and this gives to paper published there an added value over and above
their intrinsic quality.Comment: 7 pages, 2 table
On the lack of women researchers in the Middle East & North Africa
Recent gender policies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have
improved legal equality for women with noticeable effects in some countries.
The implications of these policies on science, however, is not well-understood.
This study applies a bibliometric lens to describe the landscape of gender
disparities in scientific research in MENA. Specifically, we examine 1.7
million papers indexed in the Web of Science published by 1.1 million authors
from MENA between 2008 and 2020. We used bibliometric indicators to analyse
potential disparities between men and women in the share of authors, research
productivity, and seniority in authorship. The results show that gender parity
is far from being achieved in MENA. Overall, men authors obtain higher
representation, research productivity, and seniority. But some countries
standout: Tunisia, Lebanon, Turkey, Algeria and Egypt have higher shares or
women researchers compared to the rest of MENA countries. The UAE, Qatar, and
Jordan have shown progress in terms of women participation in science, but
Saudi Arabia lags behind. We find that women are more likely to stop publishing
than men and that men publish on average between 11% and 51% more than women,
with this gap increasing over time. Finally, men, on average, achieved senior
positions in authorship faster than women. Our longitudinal study contributes
to a better understanding of gender disparities in science in MENA which is
catching up in terms of policy engagement and women representation. However,
the results suggest that the effects of the policy changes have yet to
materialize into distinct improvement in women's participation and performance
in science.Comment: 29 pages, 11 figures, 4 table
Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness
We have now tested the Finch Committee's Hypothesis that Green Open Access
Mandates are ineffective in generating deposits in institutional repositories.
With data from ROARMAP on institutional Green OA mandates and data from ROAR on
institutional repositories, we show that deposit number and rate is
significantly correlated with mandate strength (classified as 1-12): The
stronger the mandate, the more the deposits. The strongest mandates generate
deposit rates of 70%+ within 2 years of adoption, compared to the un-mandated
deposit rate of 20%. The effect is already detectable at the national level,
where the UK, which has the largest proportion of Green OA mandates, has a
national OA rate of 35%, compared to the global baseline of 25%. The conclusion
is that, contrary to the Finch Hypothesis, Green Open Access Mandates do have a
major effect, and the stronger the mandate, the stronger the effect (the Liege
ID/OA mandate, linked to research performance evaluation, being the strongest
mandate model). RCUK (as well as all universities, research institutions and
research funders worldwide) would be well advised to adopt the strongest Green
OA mandates and to integrate institutional and funder mandates.Comment: 6 pages, 1 table, 4 figure
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