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.     

How much is research in the top journals of industrial/organizational psychology dominated by authors from the U.S.?

Industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology, the subfield of psychology applied to the context of work, has been criticized for being dominated by U.S. authors because this dominance could prevent the generalizability of results and the enrichment of theories, paradigms, and approaches by researchers from other parts of the world. Previous estimates on the extent of the U.S. dominance are, however, likely restricted in scope, outdated, and likely biased by non-U.S. researchers who were socialized in the U.S. or received help by U.S. co-authors. As such, we measured the level of U.S. dominance by analyzing 5626 papers published from the top ten journals of the field of I/O psychology in the last eleven years and their authors. The results show that the U.S. dominance continues, although the internationalization of I/O psychology has steadily increased. An additional analysis of the gender distribution across our sample revealed that female first authorship is slightly more common among authors with no U.S. affiliation. We suggest several steps to further increase the level of internationalization.

     

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.     

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.     

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...     

Acceleration of citing behavior after the millennium? Exemplary bibliometric reference analyses for psychology journals

With reference to social constructivist approaches on citing behavior in the sciences, the hypothesis of acceleration of citing behavior after the millennium was empirically tested for a stratified random sample of exemplary psychology journal articles. The sample consists of 45 English and 45 German articles published in the years 1985 versus 1995 versus 2005 in high impact journals on developmental psychology, psychological diagnosis and assessment, and social psychology. Content analyses of the reference lists refer to the total number of references cited in the articles and the publication years of all references. In addition, the number of self-references, the number of pages, and the number of authors were determined for each article. Results show that there is no acceleration of citing behavior; rather, on the contrary, a significant trend is revealed for an increase in authors’ citing somewhat older references in the newer journal articles. Significant main effects point also at more citations of somewhat older references in the English (vs. German) journal articles as well as in articles on social psychology and psychological diagnosis (vs. on developmental psychology). Complementary analyses show that multiple authorships and the number of pages as well as the total number of references and the number of self-references increase significantly with time. However, percentage of self-references remains quite stable at about 10%. Some methodological and statistical traps in bibliometric testing the starting hypothesis are considered. Thus, the talk that has been circulating among psychology colleagues and students on the potential millennium effects on citing behavior in the sciences (which can, however, become a self-fulfilling prophecy) are not confirmed—at least for psychology journals.     

Review of the indirect citations paradigm: theory and practice of the assessment of papers,authors and journals

The family of indicators presented in this paper includes indices created by taking into account not only the direct but also the indirect impact of citations and references. Three types of citation graphs are presented, namely, the Paper-Citation graph, the Author-Citation graph and the Journal-Citation graph, along with different methods for constructing them. In addition, the concept of generations of citations is examined in detail, again by presenting various methods for defining them found in the literature. Finally, a number of indirect indicators for papers, authors and journals are discussed, which among others, include PageRank, CiteRank, indirect h-index and the EigenFactor score.     

Equal contributions and credit given to authors in anesthesiology journals during a 10-year period

To investigate the prevalence and characteristics of the practice of explicitly giving authors equal credit in publications of major anesthesiology journals. Four major anesthesiology journals (Anesthesia and Analgesia (AA), Anesthesiology, British Journal of Anaesthesia (BJA) and Pain) were searched manually to identify original research articles published between January 1st, 2001 and December 31st, 2010 with respect to equally credited authors (ECAs). It was found that all journals explicitly gave authors equal credit, and articles with ECAs accounted for a greater proportion of the total number of articles published in each journal in 2010 versus that in 2000 (AA: 3.3% vs. 0%; Anesthesiology: 7.1% vs. <1%; BJA: 5.7% vs. 0%; Pain: 11.0% vs. <1%). The number of ECAs articles tended to increase significantly yearly in all journals (P < 0.0001 for each journal). The first two authors in the byline received equal credit in most cases. Furthermore, the ECAs articles involved institutions from different countries and regions and were sponsored by various funds. However, no specific guidance concerning this practice was provided in the instructions to authors in the four journals. It is increasingly common to give authors equal credit in original research articles in major anesthesiology journals. Detailed guidelines regarding this practice are warranted in future.     

References,authors, journals and scientific disciplines underlying the sustainable development literature: a citation analysis

This paper identifies the main references, authors and journals influencing the sustainable development literature. The task is accomplished by means of a citation analysis based on the records of ISI Web of Science. We found that the core of sustainability thinking is framed by a pattern of landmark studies published around every 5 years. Only 380 publications have been cited at least ten times. References with the highest influence are those with a global dimension and large diffusion, such as Brundtland Commission’s “Our common future” (1987) and classics such as Meadows’ et al. “Limits to growth” (1972). The list of the most influential references over the period 1960–2005 is dominated by contributions from economics (particularly ecological economics) and environmental science, but includes many other disciplines such as urban planning, political sciences and sociology. References are also made to policy documents such as “Agenda 21”, one of the main outcomes of the Rio Summit in 1992. In analyzing citation trends, we found that classics, because of their high rates of citations per year, seem to have a more enduring and stable influence.