Ongoing problems attracting women into many Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects have many potential explanations. This article investigates whether the possible ...undercitation of women associates with lower proportions of, or increases in, women in a subject. It uses six million articles published in 1996–2012 across up to 331 fields in six mainly English-speaking countries: Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The proportion of female first- and last-authored articles in each year was calculated and 4,968 regressions were run to detect first-author gender advantages in field normalized article citations. The proportion of female first authors in each field correlated highly between countries and the female first-author citation advantages derived from the regressions correlated moderately to strongly between countries, so both are relatively field specific. There was a weak tendency in the United States and New Zealand for female citation advantages to be stronger in fields with fewer women, after excluding small fields, but there was no other association evidence. There was no evidence of female citation advantages or disadvantages to be a cause or effect of changes in the proportions of women in a field for any country. Inappropriate uses of career-level citations are a likelier source of gender inequities.
The rise of the social web and its uptake by scholars has led to the creation of altmetrics, which are social web metrics for academic publications. These new metrics can, in theory, be used in an ...evaluative role, to give early estimates of the impact of publications or to give estimates of non-traditional types of impact. They can also be used as an information seeking aid: to help draw a digital library user’s attention to papers that have attracted social web mentions. If altmetrics are to be trusted then they must be evaluated to see if the claims made about them are reasonable. Drawing upon previous citation analysis debates and web citation analysis research, this article discusses altmetric evaluation strategies, including correlation tests, content analyses, interviews and pragmatic analyses. It recommends that a range of methods are needed for altmetric evaluations, that the methods should focus on identifying the relative strengths of influences on altmetric creation, and that such evaluations should be prioritised in a logical order.
Scientists and managers using citation‐based indicators to help evaluate research cannot evaluate recent articles because of the time needed for citations to accrue. Reading occurs before citing, ...however, and so it makes sense to count readers rather than citations for recent publications. To assess this, Mendeley readers and citations were obtained for articles from 2004 to late 2014 in five broad categories (agriculture, business, decision science, pharmacy, and the social sciences) and 50 subcategories. In these areas, citation counts tended to increase with every extra year since publication, and readership counts tended to increase faster initially but then stabilize after about 5 years. The correlation between citations and readers was also higher for longer time periods, stabilizing after about 5 years. Although there were substantial differences between broad fields and smaller differences between subfields, the results confirm the value of Mendeley reader counts as early scientific impact indicators.
Este artículo evalúa si hay vacíos en la cobertura de la información académica de Wikipedia y si existen diferencias estilísticas no obvias entre los artículos de revistas académicas que los usuarios ...y editores de Wikipedia deben conocer. Para ello se analizan los términos en los títulos de artículos de revistas que están ausentes de todos los títulos de las páginas de Wikipedia en inglés para cada una de las 27 categorías temáticas de Scopus. Los resultados muestran que la Wikipedia en inglés tiene menor cobertura de los temas de interés para las naciones que no son de habla inglesa, y existen lagunas probablemente causadas por la falta de editores especialistas dispuestos en algunas áreas. También se encontraron diferencias de estilo según las disciplinas, con algunos campos que utilizan sinónimos de “análisis” que fueron ignorados en Wikipedia, y otros que usan el tiempo presente en títulos para enfatizar los resultados de la investigación. Dado que Wikipedia es muy eficaz en la cobertura de temas de investigación académica de todas las disciplinas, puede ser utilizada por personas no especializadas. Por lo tanto, los especialistas deben verificar las lagunas de cobertura dentro de sus áreas para encontrar temas útiles y los bibliotecarios deben advertir a los usuarios que pueden faltar temas importantes.
Biochemistry is a highly funded research area that is typified by large research teams and is important for many areas of the life sciences. This article investigates the citation impact and Mendeley ...readership impact of biochemistry research from 2011 in the Web of Science according to the type of collaboration involved. Negative binomial regression models are used that incorporate, for the first time, the inclusion of specific countries within a team. The results show that, holding other factors constant, larger teams robustly associate with higher impact research, but including additional departments has no effect and adding extra institutions tends to reduce the impact of research. Although international collaboration is apparently not advantageous in general, collaboration with the United States, and perhaps also with some other countries, seems to increase impact. In contrast, collaborations with some other nations seems to decrease impact, although both findings could be due to factors such as differing national proportions of excellent researchers. As a methodological implication, simpler statistical models would find international collaboration to be generally beneficial and so it is important to take into account specific countries when examining collaboration.
Finding new ways to help researchers and administrators understand academic fields is an important task for information scientists. Given the importance of interdisciplinary research, it is essential ...to be aware of disciplinary differences in aspects of scholarship, such as the significance of recent changes in a field. This paper identifies potential changes in 25 subject categories through a term comparison of words in article titles, keywords and s in 1 year compared to the previous 4 years. The scholarly influence of new research issues is indirectly assessed with a citation analysis of articles matching each trending term. While topic‐related words dominate the top terms, style, national focus, and language changes are also evident. Thus, as reflected in Scopus, fields evolve along multiple dimensions. Moreover, while articles exploiting new issues are usually more cited in some fields, such as Organic Chemistry, they are usually less cited in others, including History. The possible causes of new issues being less cited include externally driven temporary factors, such as disease outbreaks, and internally driven temporary decisions, such as a deliberate emphasis on a single topic (e.g., through a journal special issue).
Scientometric research often relies on large-scale bibliometric databases of academic journal articles. Long-term and longitudinal research can be affected if the composition of a database varies ...over time, and text processing research can be affected if the percentage of articles with abstracts changes. This article therefore assesses changes in the magnitude of the coverage of a major citation index, Scopus, over 121 years from 1900. The results show sustained exponential growth from 1900, except for dips during both world wars, and with increased growth after 2004. Over the same period, the percentage of articles with 500+ character abstracts increased from 1% to 95%. The number of different journals in Scopus also increased exponentially, but slowing down from 2010, with the number of articles per journal being approximately constant until 1980, then tripling due to megajournals and online-only publishing. The breadth of Scopus, in terms of the number of narrow fields with substantial numbers of articles, simultaneously increased from one field having 1,000 articles in 1945 to 308 fields in 2020. Scopus’s international character also radically changed from 68% of first authors from Germany and the United States in 1900 to just 17% in 2020, with China dominating (25%).
Scientists and managers using citation‐based indicators to help evaluate research cannot evaluate recent articles because of the time needed for citations to accrue. Reading occurs before citing, ...however, and so it makes sense to count readers rather than citations for recent publications. To assess this,
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endeley readers and citations were obtained for articles from 2004 to late 2014 in five broad categories (agriculture, business, decision science, pharmacy, and the social sciences) and 50 subcategories. In these areas, citation counts tended to increase with every extra year since publication, and readership counts tended to increase faster initially but then stabilize after about 5 years. The correlation between citations and readers was also higher for longer time periods, stabilizing after about 5 years. Although there were substantial differences between broad fields and smaller differences between subfields, the results confirm the value of
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endeley reader counts as early scientific impact indicators.
Many webometric studies have used hyperlinks to investigate links to or between specific collections of websites to estimate their impact or identify connectivity patterns. Whilst major commercial ...search engines have previously been used to identify hyperlinks for these purposes, their hyperlink search facilities have now been shut down. In response, a range of alternative sources of link data have been suggested, but all have limitations. This article introduces a new type of link that can be identified from commercial search engines, linked title mentions. These can be found by querying title mentions in a search engine and then removing those not associated with a relevant hyperlink. Results of a proof of concept test on 51 U.S. library and information science schools and four other sets of schools suggest that linked title mentions may tend to give better results than title mentions in some cases when used for site inlinks but may not always be an improvement on URL citations. For links between or co-inlinks to specified pairs of academic websites, linked title mentions do not generally provide an improvement over title mentions, but they do over URL citations in some cases. Linked title mentions may also be useful for sets of non-academic websites when the alternatives give too few or misleading results.
Biochemistry is a highly funded research area that is typified by large research teams and is important for many areas of the life sciences. This article investigates the citation impact and
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...endeley readership impact of biochemistry research from 2011 in the Web of Science according to the type of collaboration involved. Negative binomial regression models are used that incorporate, for the first time, the inclusion of specific countries within a team. The results show that, holding other factors constant, larger teams robustly associate with higher impact research, but including additional departments has no effect and adding extra institutions tends to reduce the impact of research. Although international collaboration is apparently not advantageous in general, collaboration with the
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tates, and perhaps also with some other countries, seems to increase impact. In contrast, collaborations with some other nations seems to decrease impact, although both findings could be due to factors such as differing national proportions of excellent researchers. As a methodological implication, simpler statistical models would find international collaboration to be generally beneficial and so it is important to take into account specific countries when examining collaboration.
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