Ukrainian Arts and Humanities research in Scopus: A Bibliometric Analysis

This article presents the results of a quantitative analysis of Ukrainian Arts and Humanities (A&H) research from 2012 to 2021, as observed in Scopus. The overall publication activity and the relative share of A&H publications in relation to Ukraine's total research output, comparing them with other countries. The study analyzes the diversity and total number of sources, as well as the geographic distribution of authors and citing authors, to provide insights into the internationalization level of Ukrainian A&H research. Additionally, the topical spectrum and language usage are considered to complete the overall picture. According to our results, the publication patterns for Ukrainian A&H research exhibit dynamics comparable to those of other countries, with a gradual increase in the total number of papers and sources. However, the citedness is lower than expected, and the share of publications in top-quartile sources is lower for 2020-2021 period compared to the previous years. The impact of internationally collaborative papers, especially those in English, is higher. Nevertheless, over half of all works remain uncited, probably due to the limited readership of the journals selected for publication.Comment: Library Hi Tech (2023

Analyses of a Virtual World

We present an overview of a series of results obtained from the analysis of human behavior in a virtual environment. We focus on the massive multiplayer online game (MMOG) Pardus which has a worldwide participant base of more than 400,000 registered players. We provide evidence for striking statistical similarities between social structures and human-action dynamics in the real and virtual worlds. In this sense MMOGs provide an extraordinary way for accurate and falsifiable studies of social phenomena. We further discuss possibilities to apply methods and concepts developed in the course of these studies to analyse oral and written narratives.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures. To appear in: "Maths Meets Myths: Complexity-science approaches to folktales, myths, sagas, and histories." Editors: R. Kenna, M. Mac Carron, P. Mac Carron. (Springer, 2016

Multilingualism of Ukrainian Humanities: how it is seen globally

This paper considers the publishing behavior of Ukrainian researchers in Humanities in respect to choosing the language of publication. The comparative analysis based on Web of Science data is performed on two different levels. On one hand, four Eastern European countries are considered: Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia. On the other hand, three humanitarian disciplines are covered for each country: Philosophy, History and Literature. The results show that Ukrainian scholars in the Humanities choose the language for their publications similarly to their colleagues from other Eastern European countries: while English is used significantly, the language spectrum is diverse

Predicting results of the Research Excellence Framework using departmental hh-Index

We compare estimates for past institutional research performances coming from two bibliometric indicators to the results of the UK's Research Assessment Exercise which last took place in 2008. We demonstrate that a version of the departmental h-index is better correlated with the actual results of that peer-review exercise than a competing metric known as the normalised citation-based indicator. We then determine the corresponding h-indices for 2008-2013, the period examined in the UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014. We place herewith the resulting predictions on the arXiv in advance of the REF results being published (December 2014). These may be considered as unbiased predictions of relative performances in that exercise. We will revisit this paper after the REF results are available and comment on the reliability or otherwise of these bibliometrics as compared with peer review.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Scientometric

Peculiarities of gender disambiguation and ordering of non-English authors’ names for Economic papers beyond core databases

Purpose: To supplement the quantitative portrait of Ukrainian Economics discipline with the results of gender and author ordering analysis at the level of individual authors, special methods of working with bibliographic data with a predominant share of non-English authors are used. The properties of gender mixing, the likelihood of male and female authors occupying the first position in the authorship list, as well as the arrangements of names are studied. Design/methodology/approach: A data set containing bibliographic records related to Ukrainian journal publications in the field of Economics is constructed using Crossref meta-data. Partial semi-automatic disambiguation of authors' names is performed. First names, along with gender-specific ethnic surnames, are used for gender disambiguation required for further comparative gender analysis. Random reshuffling of data is used to determine the impact of gender correlations. To assess the level of alphabetization for our data set, both Latin and Cyrillic versions of names are taken into account. Findings: The lack of well-structured metadata and the poor use of digital identifiers lead to numerous problems with automatization of bibliographic data pre-processing, especially in the case of publications by non-Western authors. The described stages for working with such specific data help to work at the level of authors and analyse, in particular, gender issues. Despite the larger number of female authors, gender equality is more likely to be reported at the individual level for the discipline of Ukrainian Economics. The tendencies towards collaborative or solo-publications and gender mixing patterns are found to be dependent on the journal: the differences for publications indexed in Scopus and/or Web of Science databases are found. It has also been found that Ukrainian Economics research is characterized by rather a non-alphabetical order of authors. Research limitations: Only partial authors' name disambiguation is performed in a semi-automatic way. Gender labels can be derived only for authors declared by full First names or gender-specific Last names. Practical implications: The typical features of Ukrainian Economic discipline can be used to perform a comparison with other countries and disciplines, to develop an informed-based assessment procedure at the national level. The proposed way of processing publication data can be borrowed to enrich metadata about other research disciplines, especially for non-English speaking countries. Originality/value: To our knowledge, this is the first large-scale quantitative study of Ukrainian Economic discipline. The results obtained are valuable not only at the national level, but also contribute to general knowledge about Economic research, gender issues, and authors' names ordering. An example of the use of Crossref data is provided, while this data source is still less used due to a number of drawbacks. Here, for the first time, attention is drawn to the explicit use of the features of the Slavic authors' names

Academic research groups: evaluation of their quality and quality of their evaluation

In recent years, evaluation of the quality of academic research has become an increasingly important and influential business. It determines, often to a large extent, the amount of research funding flowing into universities and similar institutes from governmental agencies and it impacts upon academic careers. Policy makers are becoming increasingly reliant upon, and influenced by, the outcomes of such evaluations. In response, university managers are increasingly attracted to simple indicators as guides to the dynamics of the positions of their various institutions in league tables. However, these league tables are frequently drawn up by inexpert bodies such as newspapers and magazines, using rather arbitrary measures and criteria. Terms such as "critical mass' and "metrics" are often bandied about without proper understanding of what they actually mean. Rather than accepting the rise and fall of universities, departments and individuals on a turbulent sea of arbitrary measures, we suggest it is incumbent upon the scientific community itself to clarify their nature. Here we report on recent attempts to do that by properly defining critical mass and showing how group size influences research quality. We also examine currently predominant metrics and show that these fail as reliable indicators of group research quality.Comment: Presented at the International Conference on Computer Simulation in Physics and Beyond in Moscow, 2015. The Proceedings will appear in Journal of Physics: Conference Series (JPCS

Ukrainian Arts and Humanities research in Scopus: A Bibliometric Analysis

This article presents the results of a quantitative analysis of Ukrainian Arts and Humanities (A&H) research from 2012 to 2021, as observed in Scopus. The overall publication activity and the relative share of A&H publications in relation to Ukraine's total research output, comparing them with other countries. The study analyzes the diversity and total number of sources, as well as the geographic distribution of authors and citing authors, to provide insights into the internationalization level of Ukrainian A&H research. Additionally, the topical spectrum and language usage are considered to complete the overall picture. According to our results, the publication patterns for Ukrainian A&H research exhibit dynamics comparable to those of other countries, with a gradual increase in the total number of papers and sources. However, the citedness is lower than expected, and the share of publications in top-quartile sources is lower for 2020-2021 period compared to the previous years. The impact of internationally collaborative papers, especially those in English, is higher. Nevertheless, over half of all works remain uncited, probably due to the limited readership of the journals selected for publication

Data Mining in Scientometrics:Usage Analysis for Academic Publications

We perform a statistical analysis of scientific-publication data with a goal to provide quantitative analysis of scientific process. Such an investigation belongs to the newly established field of scientometrics: a branch of the general science of science that covers all quantitative methods to analyze science and research process. As a case study we consider download and citation statistics of the journal `Europhysics Letters' (EPL), as Europe's flagship letters journal of broad interest to the physics community. While citations are usually considered as an indicator of academic impact, downloads reflect rather the level of attractiveness or popularity of a publication. We discuss peculiarities of both processes and correlations between them.Comment: The paper will be presented during DSMP'2018 conferenc

Big fish and small ponds:why the departmental h-index should not be used to rank universities

The size-dependent nature of the so-called group or departmental h-index is reconsidered in this paper. While the influence of unit size on such collective measures was already demonstrated a decade ago, institutional ratings based on this metric can still be found and still impact on the reputations and funding of many research institutions. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the fallacy of this approach to collective research-quality assessment in a simple way, focusing on the h-index in its original form. We show that randomly reshuffling real scientometric data (varying numbers of citations) amongst institutions of varying size, while maintaining the volume of their research outputs, has little effect on their departmental h-index. This suggests that the relative position in ratings based on the collective h-index is determined not only by quality (impact) of particular research outputs but by their volume. Therefore, the application of the collective h-index in its original form is disputable as a basement for comparison at aggregated levels such as to research groups, institutions or journals. We suggest a possible remedy for this failing which is implementable in a manner that is as simple and understandable as the h-index itself