Enhancing access to scholarly publications with surrogate resources

Scientometrics - Digital libraries containing scholarly publications are common today. They are an invaluable source of information to students, researchers, and practitioners. However, many...     

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...     

Scholarly publications beyond pay-walls: increased citation advantage for open publishing

First, we aim to determine the total amount of scholarly articles freely available on the internet. Second, we aim to prove whether there exists a citation advantage for open publishing. The total scholarly publication output of Norway is indexed in Cristin, the Current Information System in Norway. Based on these data, we searched Google Scholar by either DOIs or titles and denoted a document as open available (OAv), when a link to a full-text was provided. We analysed the extracted data by publishing year, citations, availability and provider. Based on additional information indexed in Cristin, we furthermore analysed the data by year, institution, publisher and discipline. We find that the total share of freely available articles is 68%. Articles not available belong to prestigious publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Routledge and Universitetsforlaget (the largest Norwegian academic publisher), which may be particularly essential for scholars worldwide. The largest provider, according to Google Scholar’s main link provision, is ResearchGate. In addition, institutional repositories play a major role in posting free article versions. Articles belonging to natural sciences and technology, and medicine and health were more likely to be open than articles belonging to the social sciences and humanities. Their respective OAv-shares are 72, 58 and 55%. We find a clear citation advantage for open publishing; on average, these documents received twice as many citations, indicating that open access is the future in publishing. This study is limited to scholarly articles only. Books and book chapters, which are usual publication formats for the humanities and social sciences, are excluded. Results do therefore not adequately reflect the situation for these disciplines. Furthermore, this study is limited to documents freely available on the internet, independent of the “legal” status of the posted full-text. With the data at hand, we were not able to distinguish between gold, green, hybrid, purely pay-walled and illicitly posted documents. Usually, articles indexed in Web of Science or SCOPUS are objects of investigation. However, these databases do not sufficiently cover the humanities and social sciences, and therefore cannot be representative of the total scholarly article output. This study captures the total article output of a country, independent on discipline and provides new insight into open publishing.     

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.     

Some recent results and open issues on interface modeling in civil engineering structures

Interfaces between different materials deeply influence the mechanical performance of load-bearing structures in several engineering fields. A reliable predictive ability of this performance thus requires a sound mechanical understanding of the interfacial behavior and of its implications on macroscopic design-related quantities such as strength, stiffness and ductility. This paper focuses on three interface-related topics, with special emphasis on the civil engineering context: (i) modeling of debonding at interfaces between fiber-reinforced polymer strengthening systems, in the form of externally bonded laminates or near-surface mounted reinforcement, and the structural member to be strengthened, be it a beam or an arch; (ii) modeling of impact at interfaces between voussoirs in masonry arches under ground accelerations; (iii) novel computational methods to improve the numerical treatment of interfaces undergoing contact or debonding. The paper provides an overview of some of the author’s contributions on the aforementioned aspects, and outlines some possible directions for further research.     

Examples of impact and impulsive loading in the field of civil engineering

Materials and Structures -     

The impact of internet resources on scholarly communication: A citation analysis

The quality and credibility of Internet resources has been a concern in scholarly communication. This paper reports a quantitative analysis of the use of Internet resources in journal articles and addresses the concerns for the use of Internet resources scholarly journals articles. We collected the references listed in 35,698 articles from 14 journals published during 1996 to 2005, which resulted in 1,000,724 citations. The citation data was divided into two groups: traditional citations and Web citations, and examined based on frequencies of occurrences by domain and type of Web citation sources. The findings included: (1) The number of Web citations in the journals investigated had been increasing steadily, though the quantity was too small to draw an inclusive conclusion on the data about their impact on scientific research; (2) A great disparity existed among different disciplines in terms of using information on the Web. Applied disciplines and interdisciplinary sciences tended to cite more information on the Web, while classical and experimental disciplines cited little of Web information; (3) The frequency of citations was related to the reputation of the author or the institution issuing the information, and not to the domain or webpage types; and (4) The researchers seemed to lack confidence in Internet resources, and Web information was not as frequently cited as reported in some publications before. The paper also discusses the need for developing a guideline system to evaluate Web resources regarding their authority and quality that lies in the core of credibility of Web information.     

Statistical reliability of comparisons based on the citation impact of scientific publications

A method for estimating the standard error of mean citation rates per publication is proposed and examplified on journal impact factors. The use of the standard error values in statistical tests is also illustrated.     

Evaluating the relationship between the academic and social impact of open access books based on citation behaviors and social media attention

Scientometrics - Open access academic achievements include not only papers and journals, but also books, which have become an important achievement for scholars and can be regarded as scholarly...     

Do types of collaboration change citation? Collaboration and citation patterns of South African science publications

Bibliographic records are extensively used in the study of citations. Based on ISI data, this paper examines citation patterns of the publications of South African scientists in recent years. In particular, the focus of this paper is on citations as to the collaborative dimensions of South African scientists in their publications. The study reveals that the number of citations received by a publication varies not only according to the collaboration but also to the types of collaboration of the authors who are involved in its production. Furthermore, it emerges that the impact of citations on publications differs from discipline to discipline, and affiliating sector to sector, regardless of collaboration.     

Analysis of citation and co-citation in chemical engineering

This paper presents the results of the citation study in 24 leading journals on chemical engineering for 1987. The selective methodology or the analysis of co-citation limited only to this discipline is based on relatively low thresholds of citation and co-citation. The established research fronts refer mostly to basic research. The flow of information and knowledge to chemical engineering is determined to the extent of 70–90% by the works in this very field, as is indicated by the analysis of citations. The geography of research fronts was determined. The USSR has a very low fraction of frontal papers. This can be explained by the publication of papers in Russian and by a large number of secondary and applied research. This type of research is revealed by frequent citation of books and a small fraction of highly cited papers.     

Participation of women in software engineering publications

To the best of our knowledge, no works analyzing the participation of women as authors and editors in software engineering research publications currently exist. We have therefore followed a well-defined procedure in order to conduct an empirical study of female participation in 12 leading software engineering journals. We have analyzed the gender of the authors, editorial board members, associate editors and editors-in-chief over a two-year period in order to analyze, on the one hand, the rate of participation of women as authors and as editors in software engineering publications, and on the other, whether women are underrepresented. We have also analyzed the female distribution of authors and editors according to the geographical location of their institutions. This was done by first selecting the journals to be used as the population for data collection which then allowed us to identify female authors of papers and female editors, including the country in which their institutions are located. This eventually led to an analysis of female participation in order to understand representation rates. We analyzed 3,546 authors of 1,266 papers in 61 different countries, and 363 members of editorial boards in 30 different countries. The results of this analysis provide quantitative data concerning the participation of women as authors and editors in major software engineering journals including their distribution per country, in which important differences have been found. The results obtained were first used to compare the participation of women as authors and editors and were then used to carry out a series of simulations in order to be able to statistically confirm whether women are underrepresented. The study shows, amongst other things, that women are not underrepresented as editorial boards members and as editors-in-chief of the journals studied, although their representation as editors-in-chief is low.     

Evaluating scientific impact of publications: combining citation polarity and purpose

Citation counts are commonly used to evaluate the scientific impact of a publication on the general premise that more citations probably mean more endorsements. However, two questionable assumptions underpin this idea: a) that all authors contributed equally to the paper; and b) that the endorsement is positive. Obviously, neither of these assumptions hold true. Hence, with this study, we examine two components of citations—their purpose, i.e., the reason for the citation, and polarity, being the author’s attitude toward the cited work. Our findings provide a new perspective on the scientific impact of highly-cited publications. Our methodology consists of three steps. Firstly, a pre-trained model composed of a Word2Vec—a well-known word embedding approach—and a convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to identify citation polarity and purpose. Secondly, in a set of highly-cited papers, we compare eight categories of purpose from foundational to critical and three categories of polarity: positive, negative, and neutral. We further explore how different types of papers—those discussing discoveries or those discussing utilitarian topics—influence the evaluation of scientific impact of papers. Finally, we mine and discover the knowledge (e.g. method, concept, tool or data) to explain the actual scientific impact of a highly-cited paper. To demonstrate how combining citation polarity with purpose can provide far greater details of a paper’s scientific impact, we undertake a case study with 370 highly-cited journal articles spanning “Biochemistry & Molecular Biology” and “Genetics & Heredity”. The results yield valuable insights into the assumption about citation counts as a metric for evaluating scientific impact.