The author’s ignorance on the publication fees is a source of power for publishers

Scientometrics - How much does it cost to publish a research article in a scholarly journal? Different academic publishers have widely varying levels of publication fees to help to fund editorial...     

The impact of a paper’s new combinations and new components on its citation

Scientometrics - A paper’s novelty enhances its impact and citation. In this paper, we examine two dimensions of a paper’s novelty: new combinations and new components. We define new...     

Unsupervised author disambiguation using Dempster–Shafer theory

The name ambiguity problem presents many challenges for scholar finding, citation analysis and other related research fields. To attack this issue, various disambiguation methods combined with separate disambiguation features have been put forward. In this paper, we offer an unsupervised Dempster–Shafer theory (DST) based hierarchical agglomerative clustering algorithm for author disambiguation tasks. Distinct from existing methods, we exploit the DST in combination with Shannon’s entropy to fuse various disambiguation features and come up with a more reliable candidate pair of clusters for amalgamation in each iteration of clustering. Also, some solutions to determine the convergence condition of the clustering process are proposed. Depending on experiments, our method outperforms three unsupervised models, and achieves comparable performances to a supervised model, while does not prescribe any hand-labelled training data.     

Ockham’s index of citation impact

Scientometrics - We demonstrate that by using a triple of simple numerical summaries: an author’s productivity, their overall impact, and a single other bibliometric index that aims to...     

Usage,content and citation in open access publication: any interaction effects?

Scientometrics - This study aims to validate an empirical model, at document level, that explains the interaction among content, usage, and citation within open access publications. The...     

Examining the influence of open access on journals’ citation obsolescence by modeling the actual citation process

Scientometrics - This paper aims to quantify and analyze the impact of open access (OA) on the obsolescence characteristics of journals. A total of 15 journals that changed their status from closed...     

Credit where credit’s due: accounting for co-authorship in citation counts

I propose a new method (Pareto weights) to objectively attribute citations to co-authors. Previous methods either profess ignorance about the seniority of co-authors (egalitarian weights) or are based in an ad hoc way on the order of authors (rank weights). Pareto weights are based on the respective citation records of the co-authors. Pareto weights are proportional to the probability of observing the number of citations obtained. Assuming a Pareto distribution, such weights can be computed with a simple, closed-form equation but require a few iterations and data on a scholar, her co-authors, and her co-authors’ co-authors. The use of Pareto weights is illustrated with a group of prominent economists. In this case, Pareto weights are very different from rank weights. Pareto weights are more similar to egalitarian weights but can deviate up to a quarter in either direction (for reasons that are intuitive).     

The Hydra battle and Cichon’s principle

In rewriting the Hydra battle refers to a term rewrite system proposed by Dershowitz and Jouannaud. To date, withstands any attempt to prove its termination automatically. This motivates our interest in term rewrite systems encoding the Hydra battle, as a careful study of such systems may prove useful in the design of automatic termination tools. Moreover it has been an open problem, whether any termination order compatible with has to have the Howard–Bachmann ordinal as its order type, i.e., the proof theoretic ordinal of the theory of one inductive definition. We answer this question in the negative, by providing a reduction order compatible with , whose order type is at most , the proof theoretic ordinal of Peano arithmetic.     

‘Seed + expand’: a general methodology for detecting publication oeuvres of individual researchers

The study of science at the individual scholar level requires the disambiguation of author names. The creation of author’s publication oeuvres involves matching the list of unique author names to names used in publication databases. Despite recent progress in the development of unique author identifiers, e.g., ORCID, VIVO, or DAI, author disambiguation remains a key problem when it comes to large-scale bibliometric analysis using data from multiple databases. This study introduces and tests a new methodology called seed + expand for semi-automatic bibliographic data collection for a given set of individual authors. Specifically, we identify the oeuvre of a set of Dutch full professors during the period 1980–2011. In particular, we combine author records from a Dutch National Research Information System (NARCIS) with publication records from the Web of Science. Starting with an initial list of 8,378 names, we identify ‘seed publications’ for each author using five different approaches. Subsequently, we ‘expand’ the set of publications in three different approaches. The different approaches are compared and resulting oeuvres are evaluated on precision and recall using a ‘gold standard’ dataset of authors for which verified publications in the period 2001–2010 are available.     

The usage of ‘theory’ and ‘model’ in scientific conceptualization

The results of a survey are reported and interpreted, pertaining to the way scientists use the terms theory and model to conceptualize the scientific information and ideas they deal with. Initially the assessment of the importance of a new theoretical approach in science is done to a large extent on the basis of the conceptual structure of the new approach, but later the predictive power plays an increasingly more important role. It is suggested that results like those in this study might perhaps be used to critically evaluate new theoretical approaches in science even at the time of their conception.     

The mathematical review system: does reviewer status play a role in the citation process?

This paper revisits an aspect of citation theory (i.e., citer motivation) with respect to the Mathematical Review system and the reviewer’s role in mathematics. We focus on a set of journal articles (369) published in Singularity Theory (1974–2003), the mathematicians who wrote editorial reviews for these articles, and the number of citations each reviewed article received within a 5 year period. Our research hypothesis is that the cognitive authority of a high status reviewer plays a positive role in how well a new article is received and cited by others. Bibliometric evidence points to the contrary: Singularity Theorists of lower status (junior researchers) have reviewed slightly more well-cited articles (2–5 citations, excluding author self-citations) than their higher status counterparts (senior researchers). One explanation for this result is that lower status researchers may have been asked to review ‘trendy’ or more accessible parts of mathematics, which are easier to use and cite. We offer further explanations and discuss a number of implications for a theory of citation in mathematics. This research opens the door for comparisons to other editorial review systems, such as book reviews written in the social sciences or humanities.     

The success-index: an alternative approach to the h-index for evaluating an individual’s research output

Among the most recent bibliometric indicators for normalizing the differences among fields of science in terms of citation behaviour, Kosmulski (J Informetr 5(3):481?C485, 2011) proposed the NSP (number of successful paper) index. According to the authors, NSP deserves much attention for its great simplicity and immediate meaning??equivalent to those of the h-index??while it has the disadvantage of being prone to manipulation and not very efficient in terms of statistical significance. In the first part of the paper, we introduce the success-index, aimed at reducing the NSP-index??s limitations, although requiring more computing effort. Next, we present a detailed analysis of the success-index from the point of view of its operational properties and a comparison with the h-index??s ones. Particularly interesting is the examination of the success-index scale of measurement, which is much richer than the h-index??s. This makes success-index much more versatile for different types of analysis??e.g., (cross-field) comparisons of the scientific output of (1) individual researchers, (2) researchers with different seniority, (3) research institutions of different size, (4) scientific journals, etc.     

Investigating different types of research collaboration and citation impact: a case study of Harvard University’s publications

This study aims to investigate the influence of different patterns of collaboration on the citation impact of Harvard University’s publications. Those documents published by researchers affiliated with Harvard University in WoS from 2000–2009, constituted the population of the research which was counted for 124,937 records. Based on the results, only 12% of Harvard publications were single author publications. Different patterns of collaboration were investigated in different subject fields. In all 22 examined fields, the number of co-authored publications is much higher than single author publications. In fact, more than 60% of all publications in each field are multi-author publications. Also, the normalized citation per paper for co-authored publications is higher than that of single author publications in all fields. In addition, the largest number of publications in all 22 fields were also published through inter-institutional collaboration and were as a result of collaboration among domestic researchers and not international ones. In general, the results of the study showed that there was a significant positive correlation between the number of authors and the number of citations in Harvard publications. In addition, publications with more number of institutions have received more number of citations, whereas publications with more number of foreign collaborators were not much highly cited.     

A lots-dependent variables sampling plan considering supplier’s process loss and buyer’s stipulated specifications requirement

A well-established scheme and mechanism for deciding product acceptance is perceived as a win-win situation for the long-term supplier–buyer relationship. In this paper, we develop a lots-dependent variables sampling scheme for product acceptance determination. The dependent state is based on the sample information of the process capability index that incorporates the supplier’s process loss and the buyer’s demanded specifications requirement. This main scheme is implemented by a three-rule process that accepts or rejects a related lot conditional on the sample results of past lots. The plan-operational parameters satisfying the desired quality levels and constraining the supplier–buyer risks are determined by a non-linear optimisation model. In performance comparisons, our proposed plan demonstrated higher cost effectiveness and discriminatory power than the traditional variables single sampling plan. Finally, industrial applicability of our recommended sampling plans was investigated in a case study.     

Multiple regression analysis of a patent’s citation frequency and quantitative characteristics: the case of Japanese patents

Although many studies have been conducted to clarify the factors that affect the citation frequency of “academic papers,” there are few studies where the citation frequency of “patents” has been predicted on the basis of statistical analysis, such as regression analysis. Assuming that a patent based on a variety of technological bases tends to be an important patent that is cited more often, this study examines the influence of the number of cited patents’ classifications and compares it with other factors, such as the numbers of inventors, classifications, pages, and claims. Multiple linear, logistic, and zero-inflated negative binomial regression analyses using these factors are performed. Significant positive correlations between the number of classifications of cited patents and the citation frequency are observed for all the models. Moreover, the multiple regression analyses demonstrate that the number of classifications of cited patents contributes more to the regression than do other factors. This implies that, if confounding between factors is taken into account, it is the diversity of classifications assigned to backward citations that more largely influences the number of forward citations.     

Reputation,research and reality: The publication records of UK Departments of Politics, 1978–1984

This article contributes some data on the relative research performance of university departments, a topic of growing interest. It analyses the total published andper capita publication rates of 52 UK Politics Departments from 1978 to 1984. The main findings are that 1) departmentalper capita publication rates vary enormously: 2) a department's relative productivity is strongly correlated across all types of publication; 3) a few departments are substantially more productive then the rest; 4) among highly productive departments, one can usefully distinguish between those with collective and those with individual strength 5) a department's productivity is not related to its size. Various rankings are compiled and compared with theTHES peer review and the UGC's classification of research quality.     

hα: An index to quantify an individual’s scientific leadership

Scientometrics - The $$\alpha$$ person is the dominant person in a group. We define the $$\alpha$$ -author of a paper as the author of the paper with the highest h-index among all the coauthors,...     

How collaboration type,publication place,funding and author’s role affect citations received by publications from Africa: A bibliometric study of LIS research from 1996 to 2015

Scientometrics - This study investigated if collaboration type, publication place, funding and author’s role affect citations received by publications from Africa. Library and Information...