Measuring open access publications: a novel normalized open access indicator

Scientometrics - The issue of open access (OA) to scientific publications is attracting growing interest within the scientific community and among policy makers. Open access indicators are being...     

Characterisation of academic journals in the digital age

Innovations in scholarly publishing have led to new possibilities for academic journals (e.g., open access), and provided scholars with a range of indicators that can be used to evaluate their characteristics and their impact. This study identifies and evaluates the journal characteristics reported in five databases: Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory (Ulrichs), Journal Citation Reports (JCR), SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SJR), Google Scholar Metrics (GS), and Cabell’s Periodical Directory (Cabells). It describes the 13 indicators (variables) that are available through these databases—scholarly impact, subject category, age, total articles, distribution medium, open access, peer review, acceptance rate, pricing, language, country, status, and issue frequency—and highlights the similarities and differences in the ways these indicators are defined and reported. The study also addresses the ways in which this kind of information can be used to better understand particular journals as well as the scholarly publishing system.     

The use of the Canberra metrics to aggregate metrics to sustainability

Sustainability metrics are a set of economic, environmental, and societal indicators specifically chosen to characterize a certain multidimensional sustainability system. The difficulty in establishing criteria to consider the multiple aspects involved in sustainability increases with the complexity of the system, in general associated to its dimension. This is particularly complicated for sustainability processes because they involve not only large dimensions but the indicators are usually expressed in different units. Aggregating these metrics into a single metric represents a model calculation for sustainability and provides a tool which can be used as a sustainability decision-support. In the present work we use the Canberra metrics to model the aggregation of the three dimensions of sustainability: economics, environmental, and societal (3D) metrics into a single sustainability metric. The Canberra metrics is adequate to establish how two states are similar or dissimilar. We used a simple model to show that the Canberra metrics is independent of any specific metric (indicator) satisfying an important requirement of sustainability metrics; it treats equally the contributions of the economic, social, and environmental indicators for the sustainability indicators. This allows equally weighting the economic, social, and environmental indicators. In order to verify the applicability of the model we have considered four previously studied industrial processes and compared the results of the Canberra metrics with three previously published results of other methods, for aggregating multidimensional sustainability metrics into a single metric. The results obtained through the comparisons indicate the adequacy of the Canberra to provide very good discrimination among the processes and to be a good model metrics for sustainability.     

The problem of indicator-latent relationship in metric models. Part 1

Metric models, i.e. formalisms describing relationships between indicators and latent variables, are discussed. In modern metric models, a latent is regarded as independent of the measuring person. It is suggested that this defect of metric models be avoided if the latent is assignment a priori by fixing a form of latent distribution.     

Bibliometric studies outside the information science and library science field: uncontainable or uncontrollable?

Scientometrics - Bibliometrics, and more generally all metric indicators, are increasingly used as research tools as well as for managing and evaluating research activities. This study analyzes the...     

Countries positioning in open access journals system: An investigation of citation distribution patterns

By their widespread availability and dissemination through open access media, scholarly outputs witness an improved visibility supposed to cause a better citation performance. However, due to the existence of the Matthew effect in science system, which affects users’ perceptions of quality, ultimate effects of the enhanced visibility on different entities are obscure. Moreover, different attitudes towards open access give rise to a more strong quality dynamics in the open access world. Aiming to explore the consequence of the interaction between visibility and quality dynamics, this study investigates countries positioning in open access journals. The results show that the world’s countries welcome open access pattern whether by submitting to or publishing open access journals. A large proportion of the enduring, prestigious open access journals are published by scientifically proficient and developing nations, emphasizing their successful commitment to maintain the undertaken role. The results of the citation analysis highlight national inequalities regarding citation distributions among countries contributing to the journals within the system and within individual disciplines in the system. Well-performing countries mainly consist of advanced ones; however, some lessdeveloped nations are found to perform well in the journal system.     

Advanced spectrum management in wideband code division multiple access systems enabling cognitive radio usage

The authors propose a new advanced spectrum management (ASM) methodology for wideband code division multiple access systems based on the concept of coupling matrix, which is able to capture inter-cell interactions. The proposed methodology takes into account the fact that each cell can be associated to more than one carrier and aims at liberating some carriers in large geographical zones, so that they could eventually be used by, for example, secondary cognitive radio users that exploit the flexible frequency allocation and opportunistic spectrum access. Simulation results show that the proposed methodology increases spectrum efficiency while guaranteeing the requested QoS levels. Moreover, a new metric has been introduced to reflect the capability of the ASM methodology to liberate some carriers in large geographic zones. This metric has been used to compare the different approaches presented here.     

Correlation between the CiteScore and Journal Impact Factor of top-ranked library and information science journals

Scientometrics - Elsevier’s Scopus CiteScore may be a practically more useful journal-based metric than Clarivate Analytics’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) because it is open and...     

On the bibliometric nature of a foreseeable relationship: open access and education

Scientometrics - The open access (OA) publication model is evolving and gaining support in the international scientific community. However, there is no evidence regarding the open access pathways...     

The troubles of high-profile open access megajournals

Scientometrics - The rise in open access journals was followed by the proliferation of open access megajournals, which were once expected to become a major publication platform of the future. We...     

Scientometric assessment of engineering in Malaysians universities

There is a world trend for Research Performance Evaluation (RPE), developing of new scientometric indices and examining of their application. Consequently, concerns and anomalies arise about the convergent validity and reliability of these indices for the decision making purposes. This is especially prevalent in the region/countries/disciplines having less or emerging trends of publishing and getting citations. The present scientometric study addresses usefulness of the most noted metric h-index along with other selected indicators in the field of Engineering in Malaysians universities. To understand, the role of this metric if any, we examined the functional correlation, predictive value and its relationship with national assessment criteria. Results report that this indicator has good potential to work alone, ease in use and robust to get a broader snapshot for positioning and performance evaluation. However, for better decision making purpose, this can be used for broader contextual peer assessment process along with other indicators. Its validity is further checked with two size independent institutional h-indices: h_G–H and h_m.     

Assessing sustainability when data availability limits real-time estimates: using near-time indicators to extend sustainability metrics

The goal of this paper is to highlight the problem of time lags in data releases that are necessary for calculating sustainability metrics and its effect on making informed management decisions. We produced a methodology to assess whether a regional system is on a sustainable path and tested it in south-central Colorado. We identified key components of the system and selected four sustainability metrics that measure those components. Metrics included: (1) ecological footprint (i.e., environmental burden), (2) green net regional product (GNRP) (i.e., economic well-being), (3) emergy (i.e., energy flows), and (4) Fisher information (i.e., dynamic order). Having calculated these metrics, we identified future research recommendations and limitations. One limitation was the delay between when an event occurred and when data on the event were released. Given, the recent push in government agencies for calculating sustainability metrics, finding solutions for the time lag will be important. To address this limitation, we explore the potential of using both sustainability metrics and indicators that are available near-time to provide decision makers with better decision support. For the pilot study in Colorado, the metric calculations were 3 years behind present. Using near-time indicators that are publicly available before the metrics can be calculated might help to predict the path of the metric. As an example, we examine if specific near-time indicators are correlated with ecological balance (a component of ecological footprint) and GNRP. We use Spearman rank correlations and scatter plots to identify the relationship of the metrics and near-time indicators in an exploratory analysis. We offer research recommendations to consider.     

Assessing social capital in academic research teams: a measurement instrument proposal

Scientometrics - Open access mega journals (OAMJs) are broad and centralized open access journals that have come to represent profitable outlets for accumulating large volumes of research from...     

The open access usage advantage: a temporal and spatial analysis

Scientometrics - In this study, we compare the article impact in terms of article usage between open access (OA) and non-open access (Non-OA) articles from both the temporal and spatial...     

Open access in ethics research: an analysis of open access availability and author self-archiving behaviour in light of journal copyright restrictions

The current state of open access to journal publications within research areas belonging to the humanities has received relatively little research attention. This study provides a detailed mapping of the bibliometric state of open access to journal publications among ethicists, taking into account not only open access publishing in journals directly, but also where and in what form ethicists make their journal articles available elsewhere on the web. As part of the study 297 ethicists affiliated with top-ranking philosophy departments were identified and their journal publication information for the years 2010–2015 were recorded (1682 unique articles). The journal articles were then queried for through Google Scholar in order to establish open access status (web locations, document versions) of each publication record. Publication records belonging to the 20 most frequently used journal outlets (subset of 597 unique articles) were put under closer inspection with regards to alignment with publisher copyright restrictions as well as measuring unused potential to share articles. The results show that slightly over half of recent journal publications are available to read for free. PhilPapers and academic social networks (Academia.edu and ResearchGate) were found to be key platforms for research dissemination in ethics research. The representation of institutional repositories as providers of access was found to be weak, receiving the second lowest frequency rating among the eight discrete web location categories. Further, the study reveals that ethicists are at the same time prone to copyright infringement and undersharing their scholarly work.     

Frequency domain interpretation of power ratio metric for cognitive radio systems

Software radio (SWR) is an enabling technology for cognitive radio (CR) systems which promises to (de) modulate any signal, at any frequency. SWR signal therefore is composed of different standard's signals, and each standard's signal is either multicarrier or multiplex of single carriers. This combination leads to high temporal fluctuations and thus SWR signal inherits high peak to average power ratio (PAPR) or simply high power ratio (PR). Nonlinear analogue components (amplifiers, converters etc.) cause distortions (in and out of band distortion) for high PR signals which result in system performance degradation. Usually PR problem is addressed in time domain, and here frequency domain interpretation of PR which is more appropriate in SWR context is presented. Gaussian equivalence between SWR signal and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal is proved first to accentuate high PR issue in SWR as OFDM suffers the same problem. Then frequency domain interpretation of PR metric is discussed which results in a PR upper bound. This PR upper bound depends only upon spectral values of the signal thus associates spectrum with PR. As a result this bound assists in spectrum access for CR systems by providing PR metric information related to any available bandwidth. Thus bandwidth allocation in a spectrum access scenario under PR constraint is simplified.     

Challenges in the study of Cuban scientific output

Cuban scientific output at macro level has not been frequently studied in the literature on scientometrics. The current paper explores the different metric approaches to the Cuban scientific activity carried out by national and international authors. Also, the article develops a scientometric study of the Cuban scientific production as included in Scopus during the period 1996–2007, using socio-economic indicators combined with bibliometric indicators supported by the SCImago Journal & Country Rank. Web of Science and Scopus are compared as information sources. Results confirm the possibility to use Scopus to obtain an objective picture of the Cuban science behaviour during the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the XXI century. The SCImago Journal & Country Rank, in this case, offers an important set of indicators. The combination of these indicators with those related to socio-economic aspects of activities in Science and Technology, allow the authors to show a perspective of the Cuban science system evolution during the period analyzed. The inclusion in Scopus of less-cited journals published in Spanish language and its impact on productivity and citation-based indicators is also discussed. Our investigation found an increasing growth of the Cuban scientific production during the whole period, which is in correspondence to the country efforts and expenditures in Research and Development activities.     

Dependability analysis of systems modeled by non-homogeneous Markov chains

The case of time non-homogeneous Markov systems in discrete time is studied in this article. In order to have measures adapted to this kind of systems, some reliability and performability measures are formulated, such as reliability, availability, maintainability and different time variables including new indicators more dedicated to electrical systems like instantaneous expected load curtailed and the expected energy not supplied on a time interval. The previous indicators are also formulated in the case of cyclic chains where asymptotic results can be obtained. The interest of taking into account hazard rate time variation, is to get more accurate and more instructive indicators but also be able to access new performability indicators that cannot be obtained by classical methods. To illustrate this, an example from an Electricité De France electrical substation is solved.