In Praise of Interdisciplinary Research through Scientometrics

International audienceThe BIR workshop series foster the revitalisation of dormant links between two fields in information science: information retrieval and bibliometrics/scientometrics. Hopefully, tightening up these links will cross-fertilise both fields. I believe compelling research questions lie at the crossroads of scientometrics and other fields: not only information retrieval but also, for instance, psychology and sociology. This overview paper traces my endeavours to explore these field boundaries. I wish to communicate my enthusiasm about interdisciplinary research mediated by scientometrics and stress the opportunities offered to researchers in information science

Experimenting with the partnership ability φ-index on a million computer scientists

International audienceSchubert introduced the partnership ability φ-index relying on a researcher's number of co-authors and collaboration rate. As a Hirsch-type index, φ was expected to be consistent with Schubert-Glänzel's model of h-index. Schubert demonstrated this relationship with the 34 awardees of the Hevesy medal in the field of nuclear and radiochemistry (r² = 0.8484). In this paper, we upscale this study by testing the φ-index on a million researchers in computer science. We found that the Schubert-Glänzel's model correlates with the million empirical φ values (r² = 0.8695). In addition, machine learning through symbolic regression produces models whose accuracy does not exceed a 6.1% gain (r² = 0.9227). These results suggest that the Schubert-Glänzel's model of φ-index is accurate and robust on the domain-wide bibliographic dataset of computer science

Do men and women differ in their use of tables and graphs in academic publications?

International audienceIn psychological research there is huge literature on differences between the sexes. Typically it used to be thought that women were more verbally and men more spatially oriented. These differences now seem to be waning. In this article we present three studies on sex differences in the use of tables and graphs in academic articles. These studies are based on data mining from approximately 2,000 articles published in over 200 peer-reviewed journals in the sciences and social sciences. In Study 1 we found that, in the sciences, men used 26% more graphs and figures than women, but that there were no significant differences between them in their use of tables. In Study 2 we found no significant differences between men and women in their use of graphs and figures or tables in social science articles. In Study 3 we found no significant differences between men and women in their use of what we termed 'data' and 'text' tables in social science articles. It is possible that these findings indicate that academic writing is now becoming a genre that is equally undertaken by men and women

Year after year: Tortured conference series thriving in Computer Science

The 'Problematic Paper Screener' (PPS, WCRI'22, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2210.04895) flagged 12k+ questionable articles featuring tortured phrases, such as 'glucose bigotry' instead of 'glucose intolerance.' It daily screens the literature for 'fingerprints' from a list of 4k tortured phrases known to reflect nonsensical paraphrasing with synonyms. We identified a concentration of 'tortured articles' in IEEE conferences and reported our concerns in November 2022 (https://retractionwatch.com/?p=127299). This WCRI submission unveils 'tortured conference series': questionable articles that keep being accepted in successive conference editions

An academic odyssey: Writing over time

In this paper we present and discuss the results of six enquiries into the first author's academic writing over the last fifty years. Our aim is to assess whether or not his academic writing style has changed with age, experience, and cognitive decline. The results of these studies suggest that the readability of textbook chapters written by Hartley has remained fairly stable for over 50 years, with the later chapters becoming easier to read. The format of the titles used for chapters and papers has also remained much the same, with an increase in the use of titles written in the form of questions. It also appears that the format of the chosen titles had no effect on citation rates, but that papers that obtained the highest citation rates were written with colleagues rather by Hartley alone. Finally it is observed that Hartley's publication rate has remained much the same for over fifty years but that this has been achieved at the expense of other academic activities

Fertilisation croisée anglais-informatique : parcours d'un décloisonnement dans l'enseignement supérieur français

National audienceCet article relate et analyse l'expérience innovante intitulée « SMILE 2012 » (un acronyme pour Sensibilisation à l'Enseignement d'une Matière Intégré en Langue Étrangère) mise en place au Département Informatique de l'IUT « A » Toulouse III en 2011-2012. Même si le dispositif EMILE n'est pas nouveau en soi, puisqu'il date des années 1990, il est très peu mis en oeuvre dans l'enseignement supérieur français à ce jour, du moins au niveau L (le niveau L, dans le système universitaire français L.M.D., est le premier cycle de 3 années qui mène à l'obtention d'une licence). Ce module optionnel d'enseignement a permis à un groupe d'une trentaine d'étudiants volontaires de travailler en anglais pendant une série de cinq séances sur le thème de la recherche d'informations (un cours magistral et quatre séances de travaux pratiques). La mise en place, les objectifs et enjeux de ce dispositif de décloisonnement et le retour d'expérience des étudiants seront détaillés ci-après, avant de donner un aperçu du prolongement donné à ce module dans le cadre d'un projet Bonus Qualité Formation obtenu pour trois ans, de 2012 à 2015

Fédération et amélioration des activités documentaires par la pratique d'annotation collective

Daily activities carried out with paper documents are nowadays transposed onto their digital counterparts. A plethora of software enable people to achieve document-related activities. In particular, these comprise information retrieval used while drafting new documents. Documents may later be disseminated, exploited and organized in readers' document repositories. Our study on current systems showed two main limitations. On the one hand, any system meets only one or at most two activities. The underlying activity compartmentalization is detrimental to users—who have to master and juggle several systems—as well as to systems—having partial knowledge of users' needs. On the other hand, systems do not harness the organizational members' document-related activities. The proposed contribution is twofold. Firstly, we designed a model for federating the document-related activities through collective annotation practice. Associated with this model are collective processes intending to give each activity the benefit of the other ones. This also fosters inter-user benefit as people take advantage of the group and vice versa. Actually, the purpose of the proposed approach is twofold: simplifying document access and appropriation while anticipating individuals' needs to offer them unintrusive assistance. Secondly, our approach exploits the organizational members' document repositories. Although they do contain highly valuable information being collected with a lot of efforts, they paradoxically remain dormant. With the aim of harnessing these information sources, we designed a multi-faceted interface for accessing any organization's document resources. This interface allows the exploration of documents as well as users of these documents, according to various dimensions and granularity levels. Our proposals were validated through several experiments and the TafAnnote prototype development. They demonstrate the feasibility of our approach which federates document-related activities with collective annotation practice.Les activités documentaires couramment réalisées sur les documents papier sont aujourd'hui transposées sur leurs homologues électroniques. Ainsi, une kyrielle de systèmes permet de mener à bien les activités liées aux documents. Ils permettent notamment de rechercher de l'information utilisée pour rédiger un document qui peut être ensuite diffusé, exploité et organisé par ses lecteurs dans leur espace documentaire. Notre étude des systèmes existants a permis de révéler deux limites principales. Premièrement, un système ne répond généralement qu'à une seule, voire à deux activités. Ce cloisonnement des activités est préjudiciable à la fois pour les usagers (qui doivent maîtriser et jongler entre de nombreux outils) et pour les systèmes (qui ne possèdent qu'une représentation parcellaire des besoins des usagers). Deuxièmement, les systèmes n'exploitent pas les résultats des activités documentaires des membres organisationnels.Notre contribution comprend deux volets. Premièrement, nous proposons un modèle fédérant les activités documentaires autour de la pratique d'annotation collective. Des processus collectifs y sont associés afin d'exploiter chaque activité documentaire pour enrichir les autres, apportant ainsi une assistance à chaque individu en tirant parti du groupe, et vice versa. Le but de cette approche originale est double : simplifier l'accès et l'appropriation des documents tout en anticipant les besoins de l'usager pour lui offrir une assistance non intrusive. Deuxièmement, nous proposons d'exploiter les espaces documentaires des membres organisationnels. Bien qu'ils contiennent des informations à haute valeur pour l'organisation, collectées au prix de coûteux efforts, ces espaces demeurent paradoxalement en sommeil. Afin de tirer parti de ces espaces documentaires, nous proposons une interface multi-facettes d'accès au capital documentaire d'une organisation. Cette interface permet l'exploration des documents et individus de l'organisation selon différents axes et niveaux de granularité. Nos propositions ont été validées par différentes expérimentations ainsi que par le développement du prototype TafAnnote qui souligne la faisabilité de notre approche fédérant les activités documentaires autour de l'annotation collective

Signalement d\u27articles scientifiques non fiables par traque de marqueurs de Fake Science

Ce document aborde les sujets suivants : -Génération de tout ou partie du texte et des mathématiques -Plagiat déguisé par paraphrases -Revues parasitées par les articles problématiques -Génération de texte avec ChatGPT : les articles -Génération de texte avec ChatGPT : les reviews -Colosses aux pieds d’argile -Conséquences : pollution inacceptable -Conséquences : rétractations++ -Prévention : diminuer les incitatifs -Prévention : renforcer le gatekeeping Sachant qu\u27il faut dépolluer la littérature scientifique et se documenter sur les méconduites et correction de la science

Opinion mining: Reviewed from word to document level

International audienceOpinion mining is one of the most challenging tasks of the field of information retrieval. Research community has been publishing a number of articles on this topic but a significant increase in interest has been observed during the past decade especially after the launch of several online social networks. In this paper, we provide a very detailed overview of the related work of opinion mining. Following features of our review make it stand unique among the works of similar kind: (1) it presents a very different perspective of the opinion mining field by discussing the work on different granularity levels (like word, sentences, and document levels) which is very unique and much required, (2) discussion of the related work in terms of challenges of the field of opinion mining, (3) document level discussion of the related work gives an overview of opinion mining task in blogosphere, one of most popular online social network, and (4) highlights the importance of online social networks for opinion mining task and other related sub-tasks