Productivity,visibility, authorship,and collaboration in library and information science journals: Central and Eastern European authors

Scientometrics - From the bibliometric point of view, little is known about the development and status of library and information science (LIS) in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries....     

Lost in citation: Vanishing visibility of senior authors

The senior author is usually last on the byline of scientific publications, yet generally has made the second most important contribution. The explosion in author number per scientific paper, has necessitated limits on the number of authors allowed in cited references, frequently resulting in senior author truncation. Would potential visibility gained from citations in top-tier journals be offset by senior author omission? We found evidence for this in a sample of 208 journals, showing significant associations between author limits in cited references and various measures of journal quality. These associations, however, differed among biological science, physical science, and interdisciplinary journals.     

Web visibility of scholars in media and communication journals

This paper examines the Web visibility of researchers in the field of communication. First, we measured the Web visibility of authors who have recently published their research in communication journals contained in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) provided by the Web of Science. Second, we identified a subset of authors based on their publication outlets and summarize those researchers with the highest Web presence. Lastly, we determined the factors affecting their Web visibility by using a set of national and linguistic variables of the individual researchers. Web data were collected by using a Bing.com advanced search tool based on the API. Web presence is defined as the number of Web (co-) mentions of each researcher. We identified the most solely-visible scholars in the entire communication webosphere and scholars with the most networked visibility based on co-mentions. There is a weak but statistically significant correlation between researchers?? Web visibility and their SSCI publication counts. Further, US-based and/or English-speaking scholars were more noticeable than others on cyberspace.     

An assessment of the impact and visibility of South African journals

Summary Recognizing the critical role played by science and technology in the development of fuel cells, this article aims to characterize the evolution of the S&T knowledge bases of fuel cells over the nineties, using data on patents and scientific publications. The field of fuel cells is particularly heterogeneous. It covers diverse sub-fields that are marked by idiosyncratic characteristics (e.g. actors, demand, and input) and different historical developments. Although this heterogeneity of the field of fuel cells is reflected in the dynamics of S&T knowledge generation within and across its sub-fields too, this article shows that it does not entail the absence of cognitive interrelations between their S&T knowledge bases. For that purpose, the article uses “simultaneous mapping' approach of their S&T knowledge bases by means of textual analysis.     

Consumption factor scores of psychology journals: Scientometric properties and qualitative implications

The Consumption Factor has been proposed as a new measure of the significance/quality of scientific journals. The scientometric properties of this measure and its relationship to other commonly used measures of journal significance were examined. The results indicate a high correlation between the two component measures used to construct the Consumption Factor and a weak relationship between the Consumption Factor and other measures traditionally used to assess journal significance. The implications of these results are discussed in the context of the need for multiple measures of the significance of scientific journals.     

The relevance of short communication in scholarly journals: An empirical study

This study aims to examine whether rapid communications exert more influence/impact on subsequent research. Citation analysis of Short Communications (SCs) and Main Articles (MAs) from 1983 and 1990 for 5 high impact biomedical journals was carried out for a five year period following publication. The mean citations cumulated for the five year period showed no consistent trend. Some journals showed more citations for SCs while some showed more for MAs. The mean citations (range) for SCs and MAs for the 1983 and 1990 papers respectively were as follows:Gene: 14.13 (0-61) and 38.79 (0-677), 9.73 (0-93) and 13.17 (0-44);Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI): 79.77 (3-202) and 27.52 (0-86), 50.52 (0-254) and 33.53 (0-151);Journal of Experimental Medicine (JEM): 39.80 (0-200) and 49.20 (0-403), 47.26 (0-258) and 50.27 (0-173); andJournal of Biological Chemistry (JBC); 36.21 (0-380) and 19.67 (0-53), 37.19 (0-273) and 26.84 (0-185). SCs ofJournal of Cell Biology (JCB) had a mean citation of 25.84 per article with a range of 0-98, while the MAs had a mean citation of 33.13 with the range 4-122 during 1983-87. The citation peak was seen about three years after publication for all the journals during both the periods. The mean cumulative citations showed a progressive increase over the five years for both types of papers, in all journals and for both the 5 year periods. The initial differences observed persisted even four years after the year of publication. No significant differences were observed in the distribution of the cumulative 5 year citations between the SCs and MAs. An index of speed of citation per article showed no substantial differences between SCs and MAs with MAs showing an edge over SCs. Both MAs and SCs of all the journals showed nearly same average time per citation per article further confirming that the SCs do not enjoy the advantage of speedier citation. The results show that the generally perceived feeling of SCs getting cited more frequently and faster does not appear to be valid. Hence, the practice of publishing SCs on a priority basis is perhaps not warranted.     

Publication and cooperation patterns of the authors of neuroscience journals

Characteristics of publication activity and co-authorship in neurosciences are analysed. The present study aims at describing the common, as well as the distinguishing features of productivity and co-publication patterns of four types of authors. For this purpose, authors are classified according to their anterior and posterior records. The role of the author types in the process of documented scientific communication, the relation between co-authorship and publication activity, as well as collaboration between the four types is studied. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Epistemic community formation: a bibliometric study of recurring authors in medical journals

Scientometrics - Using a selection of general science journals, general medical journals and specialized medical journals, this paper analyses four indicators of epistemic community formation:...     

Impact and visibility of Norwegian,Finnish and Spanish journals in the fields of humanities

Scientometrics - This article analyses the impact and visibility of scholarly journals in the humanities that are publishing in the national languages in Finland, Norway and Spain. Three types of...     

The effect of collaboration with large publishers on the internationality and influence of open access journals for research institutions

Scientometrics - Many academic societies and universities entrust the publication of their open access journals to large publishers, and this collaboration strengthens the presence of these...     

The scholarly impact of articles published by men and women in psychology journals

In considering whether men and women produce research of equal quality, it needs to be asked not whether similar numbers of important contributions come from men and women (since numerically there have been more men than women among researchers), but whether the proportion of women active in research who make important contributions is the same as the proportion of men active in research who make important contributions. A search of entries in the 1985 edition ofSocial Sciences Citation Index located 564 articles from psychology journals which had attracted 15 or more citations. The sex ratio among senior authors of these high-impact articles was compared with the sex-ratio among senior authors of low-impact articles published in the same journals. The majority of high-impact articles had been published by men, but so had most low-impact articles. When allowance was made for the different numerical representation of the two sexes among authors, there was no evidence that men and women differ in terms of the impact of articles they publish. The results are discussed in the context of methodological issues in evaluation of sex differences in scientific performance, as well as with reference to the limited recognition that women so far have gained for research achievement in psychology.     

Toward a classification of Spanish scholarly journals in social sciences and humanities considering their impact and visibility

Scientometrics - The characteristics of the production and dissemination of scientific activity in social sciences and humanities make such endeavours less visible than other areas in international...     

Comparative analysis of book citations in social science journals by Central and Eastern European authors

Scientometrics - This study aims to assess the role of authored and edited books in scholarly communication through citation analysis. It focuses on social science journal articles written by...     

Characteristics of papers published in journals: an analysis of open access journals,country of publication,and languages used

This study explores how the citation of open access (OA) journal articles occurs by analyzing the impact of certain journal characteristics, namely, whether the journal is OA and whether its country of publication is the same as the affiliation of a paper’s author. As the language of a paper is an important factor contributing to paper citations, this study uses papers in English. This analysis included publications from 77 countries from 2010 to 2012. This analysis included 19,530 journals and 3,215,742 papers without duplication. The results showed that papers published in OA and international journals were cited in more countries than non-OA and domestic journals, and a higher percentage of these were being cited by foreign countries. From these findings, it was determined that the more widely accessible OA journals were effectively being accessed by researchers from multiple countries. However, of the top 10% most cited papers in international journals, a higher percentage of these came from non-OA compared to OA journals. Among domestic journals, no such difference was found. Papers published in non-OA international journals were most cited in foreign countries with a large number of published papers. Hence, the effect of OA’s expanded accessibility, while having an apparent effect on heightening the interest of foreign readership, has a limited impact in terms of increasing citations.