Search

Since the 1990s, an international consensus has been emerging with respect to the methods used to identify and assess geosites. These conventional methodologies generally differentiate between the intrinsic or scientific-natural dimension and the social dimension in the potential value of the geological elements. The aim of this article is to analyse the possible existence of other concepts that may underlie these criteria and that could be operating as evaluation parameters even though they are not explicitly and formally described as such in the published studies. An exhaustive analysis of articles on geosite inventories published in Science Citation Index journals in the last 15 years revealed a systematic reference to conceptions of magnitude (in the sense of degree of development and physical prominence) in geosite descriptions around the world, and in particular with respect to sites of geomorphological interest. To contrast this indication, we subjected the geosites inventory of Lanzarote (Canary Islands, Spain) to a Magnitude Rule hypothesis. This inventory is part of the Spanish Geosites Inventory (IELIG, for its initials in Spanish), which was carried out using conventional assessment procedures. Applying this rule, according to which each geosite is the most prominent example of its typology within the reference geological domain, we obtained an almost complete match. That is, geomorphological sites that were selected, a priori, according to intrinsic and social dimension were also (or one could even say 'actually') selected, implicitly, on the predominant basis of magnitude. This paper discusses why and how the magnitude parameter may be playing a key role as a subliminal non-explicit driver in the evaluation of geosite relevance, and how this finding may open new perspectives and bring methodological advantages in the inventory of geological heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we investigated whether female and male authors in the field of life sciences and biomedicine differed in their tendency for citation and citation sentiment. The data comprised two sets, cited set and citing set. Cited set comprised 17,237 articles whereas citing set comprised 115,935 articles. The cited set which is from the area Life Sciences & Biomedicine and published during 2012–2016 was retrieved from the Web of Science Medline. The citing set and its citation contexts were retrieved using the Colil database. The analysis was done using a combination of homophily analysis, regression analysis and a chi-square test. The covariates in the regression analyses were features related to authors, journal, institution, country and abstract readability. The homophily analysis showed a significant tendency for female (8%) and male (14%) authorship teams to cite papers by the same gender composition teams. In addition, the results of regression analysis (Model 1) and pairwise comparisons showed that male-authored papers received a significant higher positive sentiment compared with female-authored papers. The results of regression analysis (Model 2) showed a small significant positive association between gender similarity of cited and citing authorship teams and the sentiment score. However, further analysis using the chi-square test showed a significant lower tendency for women to use positive terms when citing the research findings of papers with the same gender composition. Men, in contrast, used significantly more positive terms when citing papers with the same gender composition. Finally, lay summary for a cited paper, country similarity and the venue of cited publication when it was a mega journal had a positive significant association with the sentiment score received. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ageing or obsolescence describes the process of declining use of a particular publication over time and can affect the results of a citation analyses as the length of citation window can change rankings. Obsolescence may not only vary across fields but also across subfields or sub-disciplines. The aim of this study is to determine the sub-disciplinary differences of obsolescence on a larger scale allowing for differences over time as well. The study presents the results of an analysis of 82,759 references across 53 healthcare and health policy topics. The references in this study are extracted from systematic reviews published from 2012 to 2016. The analyses of obsolescence include median citation age and mean citation age. This study finds that the median citation age and the mean citation age differ considerably across groups. For the latter indicator, an analysis of the confidence intervals confirms these differences. Using the subfield categorisation from Cochrane review groups, we found larger differences across subfields than in the citing half-lives published by Journal Citation Reports. Obsolescence is important to consider when setting the length of the citation windows. This study emphasises the vast differences across health sciences subfields. The length of the citation period is thus highly important for the results of a bibliometric evaluation or study covering fields with very varying obsolescence rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the citations between scientific documents are deemed as a vehicle for dissemination, inheritance and development of scientific knowledge, not all citations are well-positioned to be equal. A plethora of taxonomies and machine-learning models have been implemented to tackle the task of citation function and importance classification from qualitative aspect. Inspired by the success of kernel functions from resulting general models to promote the performance of the support vector machine (SVM) model, this work exploits the potential of combining generative and discriminative models for the task of citation importance classification. In more detail, generative features are generated from a topic model, citation influence model (CIM) and then fed to two discriminative traditional machine-learning models, SVM and RF (random forest), and a deep learning model, convolutional neural network (CNN), with other 13 traditional features to identify important citations. The extensive experiments are performed on two data sets with different characteristics. These three models perform better on the data set from one discipline. It is very possible that the patterns for important citations may vary by the fields, which disable machine-learning models to learn effectively the discriminative patterns from publications from multiple domains. The RF classifier outperforms the SVM classifier, which accords with many prior studies. However, the CNN model does not achieve the desired performance due to small-scaled data set. Furthermore, our CIM model–based features improve further the performance for identifying important citations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bibliometric analysis of 3105 publications retrieved from the Scopus database was conducted to evaluate bibliographic content of scientific output on social sciences in Vietnam, for the 2000–2019 period. Our main findings show that the number of publications on social sciences from Vietnam has increased significantly over the last two decades, and there was a spike in the scientific output for the recent three years when the number of publications accounted for 53.76% of the collection. The most productive authors came from a few public research institutes with strong resources as the top 10 institutions participated in 44.22% of the collection. Vietnamese scholars tend not to submit their works to high-ranking journals since five Q1 journals in the top 10 publishing journals published only 6.17% of the collection. For international collaboration, Australia and the United States ranked first and second based on the number of publications and citations. Other countries in top 10 mostly located in Europe and Asia. Research topics were diverse focusing on gender, poverty, HIV, higher education and sustainable development. We suggest that supporting policies and funding need to be provided to help Vietnamese scholars improve their works, and to boost their scientific production in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, publication citation networks are regarded as acyclic, that is, no loops in the network as an earlier published article cannot cite a later published article. However, due to the accessibility of pre-print versions of articles, there might be some loops in a publication citation network. This article presents a descriptive statistic on loops in publication citation networks of computer science and physics by employing a network-based indicator, namely, strongly connected component (SCC). By employing computer science and physics disciplines publications from the Web of Science database as examples, this article examines the count of loops, how the count changes over time and how the count relates to the published year difference between publications within the loop in the citation network. Some common structural patterns are also extracted and analysed; we observe that the two disciplines share the most frequent patterns though there exist some minor differences. Moreover, we find that self-citations in terms of authors, authors' institutions and journals contribute to the formation of loops in publication citation networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research topics vary in their citation potential. In a metric-wise scientific milieu, it would be probable that authors tend to select citation-attractive topics especially when choosing open access (OA) outlets that are more likely to attract citations. Applying a matched-pairs study design, this research aims to examine the role of research topics in the citation advantage of OA papers. Using a comparative citation analysis method, it investigates a sample of papers published in 47 Elsevier article processing charges (APC)-funded journals in different access models including non-open access (NOA), APC, Green and mixed Green-APC. The contents of the papers are analysed using natural language processing techniques at the title and abstract level and served as a basis to match the NOA papers to their peers in the OA models. The publication years and journals are controlled for in order to avoid their impacts on the citation numbers. According to the results, the OA citation advantage that is observed in the whole sample still holds even for the highly similar OA and NOA papers. This implies that the OA citation surplus is not an artefact of the OA and NOA papers' differences in their topics and, therefore, in their citation potential. This leads to the conclusion that OA authors' self-selectivity, if it exists at all, is not responsible for the OA citation advantage, at least as far as selection of topics with probably higher citation potentials is concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International scientific collaboration, a fundamental phenomenon of science, has been studied from several perspectives for decades. In the spatial aspect of science, cities have generally been considered by their publication output or by their citation impact. Only a minority of scientometric studies focus on exploring collaboration patterns of cities. In this visualisation, we go beyond the well-known approaches and map international scientific collaboration patterns of the most prominent science hubs considering both the quantity and the impact of papers produced in the collaboration. The analysis involves 245 cities and the collaboration matrix contains a total number of 7718 international collaboration links. Results show that US–Europe co-publication links are more efficient in terms of producing highly cited papers than those international links that Asian cities have built in scientific collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research aims to investigate whether multi/inter-disciplinary research activities are related to research impact and publication counts of scholars. Since researchers with very high levels of multi/inter-disciplinarity might be able to target complex problems, we would expect them to receive more credits than their colleagues with a stronger disciplinary orientation. We analysed Web of Science (WoS) indexed publications of all associate and full professors from a random sample of Australian universities in physics, chemistry and biology (1980–2014). Australian Fields of Research (FoR) codes assigned to journals were used to calculate the diversification of authors' publications. The number of citations in the first 3 years, number of 10% most frequently cited papers, and citation impact percentile were used for impact assessment. A few indicators were used to measure the diversity including 'extent of diversification (ED)' (number of distinct FoR codes divided by the number of publications) and 'diversification ratio (DR)' (ratio of the publications falling outside the dominant code to the total number of publications). A total of 47.76% of biologists' publications, 35.23% of physicists' publications and 20.36% of chemists' publications were published in journals assigned to fields other than the Australian associate and full professors' fields. Publications from biologists had the largest values of diversification. Women (compared with men) and associate professors (compared with full professors) in chemistry, biology and overall were more probably to publish diversely. ED was negatively correlated with output and citation impact. DR also had a negative but weak correlation with the number of publications and 10% most frequently cited paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article approaches the question of Anglo-American hegemony in urban studies by examining publication and citation patterns. The past one or two decades have witnessed critical arguments about how knowledge production in social sciences is characterised by centre–periphery relations, and risks universalising US–American and European knowledge and epistemology. While not much systematic analysis has been done to address the extent to which urban knowledge has been shaped by Anglo-American centrism, it is not difficult to tell that the field is dominated by the Anglophone world in terms of authorship, institutional affiliation, the cities under scrutiny, and the urban theories arising. This article undertakes systematic analysis by collecting papers published between 1990 and 2010, in journals indexed by the categories 'Geography' and 'Urban Studies' in the ISI Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) database. We develop a series of analyses by examining the sites of knowledge production, contributors, key research interests, and the circulation/impact of works. We also single out research on urban China to explore questions such as the place of research on non-Anglo-American contexts in international forums. In all, this article argues that the dominant position of the Anglophone world in the production and circulation of urban knowledge is clearly discernible. But the Anglophone dominance does not necessarily mean that other research interests and orientations have not found a footing. Instead, we suggest that the growing but still small niche of urban China research presents tremendous opportunities for generating cross-context dialogues. The potential has not been fully delivered, as yet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate citation practices are important, from both an ethical and a scientific point of view. Using an easily reproducible, previously published method, we assess citation accuracy in 120 articles published in the first half of 2011 and listed under ‘Physical Geography’ in Thomson Reuters’ ISI Web of Knowledge Science Citation Index. Our results indicate that at least 19% of citations in physical geography do not provide clear support for the statements they are meant to support. These results are in line with previously published findings for ‘field-orientated’ sciences. We propose that both authors and editors help remedy this problem, by employing more rigorous writing and editing practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses a metaphor of social cybernetics to explain the neoliberal science politics manifest in the deployment of information technology to homogenize, centralize and globalize scholarly performance criteria, a development that benefits the developed regions of the world that already have a competitive advantage in the use of the technologies. The international citation indexes collect, organize and analyse skewed proportions of the world's scholarly publications mainly from the North and make generalizations about the state and structure of global scientific knowledge, thus exerting undue control and discipline on global intellectual discourse. The databases do not accord any deference to the global diversity and complexity in human and other resources. However, autonomous databases that have regional, national and organizational focuses are beginning to emerge, but such an infrastructure is not yet available in Africa and many other developing regions. It is envisaged, however, that the current African Citation Index Project of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa will contribute in bridging this gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have developed simple algorithms that allow adjacency and proximity searching in Google and the Science Citation Index (SCI). The SCI algorithm exploits the fact that SCI stopwords in a search phrase function as a placeholder. Such a phrase serves effectively as a fixed adjacency condition determined by the number n of adjacent stopwords (i.e. retrieve all records where word A and word B are separated by n words in at least one location). The algorithm integrates over search phrases with different numbers of adjacent stopwords to provide a flexible adjacency or proximity capability (i.e. retrieve all records where word A and word B are separated by n or fewer words in at least one location, where n is the maximum separation desired between A and B in at least one location). The Google algorithm exploits the fact that asterisks (in Google) separating words in a phrase function like word wildcards. The difference between two such phrases (the first phrase containing one fewer asterisk than the second phrase) serves effectively as a fixed adjacency or proximity condition, with the number of separating words equal to the number of asterisks in the first phrase. The algorithm integrates over these phrase differentials to provide a flexible adjacency or proximity capability (i.e. retrieve all records where word A and word B are separated by n or fewer words in at least one location, where n is the maximum separation desired between A and B in at least one location). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effectiveness of the analytical tools used for the evaluation of scientific activity has been enhanced by the availability of bibliographic databases, in particular the standard-selling Institute for Scientific Information databases, whose operating rules are widely accepted by the scientific community. One of these rules is the availability in a single field of the institutional affiliations of all the authors of a paper. In practice this rule has been replaced by another, resulting from the inclusion of a new option, whereby records can be retrieved by the author's reprint address (Reprint Address field). The outcome is diversity in the information on affiliation that may generate some degree of uncertainty in connection with institutional attribution when discrepancies arise between the information contained in the two fields, mainly when the only option available is the reprint address. The present study found a high degree of uncertainty, however, essentially for the period prior to Web of Science, in particular for scientific evaluation in peripheral countries such as Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a citation index published in the March 2002 issue of the 'Journal of Bioactive and Compatible Polymers.'

Focuses on the evolution of World Wide Web (WWW)-based citation indexing and bibliometrics. Extension of bibliometric techniques to open publishing applications; Advantages of citation indexing using hypertextual character; Problems associated with fraud and honorific authorship.

Attempts to characterize international scientific cooperation in South Korea through the numbers of internationally co-authored papers covered by the Science Citation Index CD-ROM, 1994-1996. International cooperation by type of Korean research institution; Foreign institutional affiliations; Korean Government's support for activities aimed at enhancing the scientific potential of South Korea.

Investigates the knowledge claims in literature on the sociology of knowledge using citation analysis. Pointing out epistemic foundations for authors' citation of previous work; Evaluation of journal articles as well as the citations in those articles; Classifying citations according to epistemic uses of the cited work; Individualistic approach used by the study.

Gives information on a study on the results of a comparative analysis between Social Sciences Citation Index (SCCI) and a locally created Polish Sociology Citation Index. Reference to social and economic changes in Central and Eastern Europe; Methodology used in the study; Conclusions reached

Examines criticisms on citation indexes. History and differences; Discussion on acknowledgment indexes and their ecnomic viability; Presentation of a citation study; Validity of citation studies; Caution in usage.

Examines the usefulness of the retrieval software of the hosts for scientometric studies in Citation Index databases produced by the Institute for Scientific Information. Frequency distribution of publications and citations; Co-author and co-citation analysis; Method of bibliographic coupling; Practical problems.

The article announces the selection of the "International Journal of Bilingualism" (IJB) for coverage in Thomson Scientific's products in the U.S. According to journal publisher Kingston Press, the periodical's Journal Citation Index from Volume 11, Number 1 of the 2007 will be included. Thomson Scientific was formerly called as the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and releases a range of citation indices. The author explains that the impact of the journal's coverage will be available in 2008.