Literature retrieval based on citation context

While the citation context of a reference may provide detailed and direct information about the nature of a citation, few studies have specifically addressed the role of this information in retrieving relevant documents from the literature primarily due to the lack of full text databases. In this paper, we design a retrieval system based on full texts in the PubMed Central database. We constructed two modules in the retrieval system. One is a reference retrieval module based on citation contexts. Another is a citation context retrieval module for searching the citation contexts of a specific paper. The results of comparisons show that the reference retrieval module performed better than Google Scholar and PubMed database in terms of finding proper references based on topic words extracted from citation context. It also performed very well on searching highly cited papers and classic papers. The citation context retrieval module visualizes the topics of citation contexts as tag clouds and classifies citation contexts based on cue words in citation contexts.     

How to interpret the position of private sector institutions in bibliometric rankings of research institutions

This paper analyzes the positions of institutions from the private domain in bibliometric rankings of as many as 27,000 research institutions and highlights factors that are crucial for a proper interpretation of such positions. It was found that among the institutions with the largest output in terms of published research articles, private firms are underrepresented, whereas in the top quartile of institutions with the largest citation impact firms are overrepresented. A firm’s publication output is not a good indicator of its R&D investment: big firms in Pharmaceutics are both heavy investors in R&D and frequent publishers of scientific articles, whereas in Automobiles firms tend to invest heavily in R&D but their publication output is low. This is ascribed to the fact that the former need a validation of their results by the scientific community, while the latter do less so. Private institutions generating the largest citation impact tend to collaborate with the best public research institutions. This reflects the crucial importance of publicly funded research for the private sector.     

Using altmetrics for assessing research impact in the humanities

The prospects of altmetrics are especially encouraging for research fields in the humanities that currently are difficult to study using established bibliometric methods. Yet, little is known about the altmetric impact of research fields in the humanities. Consequently, this paper analyses the altmetric coverage and impact of humanities-oriented articles and books published by Swedish universities during 2012. Some of the most common altmetric sources are examined using a sample of 310 journal articles and 54 books. Mendeley has the highest coverage of journal articles (61 %) followed by Twitter (21 %) while very few of the publications are mentioned in blogs or on Facebook. Books, on the other hand, are quite often tweeted while both Mendeley’s and the novel data source Library Thing’s coverage is low. Many of the problems of applying bibliometrics to the humanities are also relevant for altmetric approaches; the importance of non-journal publications, the reliance on print as well the limited coverage of non-English language publications. However, the continuing development and diversification of methods suggests that altmetrics could evolve into a valuable tool for assessing research in the humanities.     

An empirical investigation of the influence of collaboration in Finance on article impact

We investigate the impact of collaborative research in academic Finance literature to find out whether and to what extent collaboration leads to higher impact articles (6,667 articles across 2001–2007 extracted from the Web of Science). Using the top 5 % as ranked by the 4-year citation counts following publication, we also follow related secondary research questions such as the relationships between article impact and author impact; collaboration and average author impact of an article; and, the nature of geographic collaboration. Key findings indicate: collaboration does lead to articles of higher impact but there is no significant marginal value for collaboration beyond three authors; high impact articles are not monopolized by high impact authors; collaboration and the average author impact of high-impact articles are positively associated, where collaborative articles have a higher mean author impact in comparison to single-author articles; and collaboration among the authors of high impact articles is mostly cross-institutional.     

A bibliometric analysis of research on Antarctica during 1993–2012

A bibliometric analysis was applied in this work to evaluate Antarctic research from 1993 to 2012 based on the Science Citation Index database. According to samples of 30,024 articles related to Antarctica, this study reveals the evolution of the scientific outputs on Antarctic research from the aspects of subject categories, major journals, international collaboration, and temporal trends in keywords focus. Antarctic research has developed rapidly in the past two decades, with an increasing amount of article output, references and citations. Geosciences multidisciplinary, oceanography, ecology, meteorology and atmospheric sciences and geography physical were the most popular subject categories. Among the 20 major journals related to Antarctic research, Polar Biology, Geophysical Research Letters and Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres ranked as the top three. With the largest quantity of articles and high citations, USA was the leading contributor to global Antarctic research and had a dominant position in collaborative networks. In addition, a keywords analysis determined that climate change, sea ice and krill were the topics that generated the most interest and concern. Because this paper reveals underlying patterns in scientific outputs, research subjects and academic collaboration, it may serve as a summary of global research history on Antarctica and a potential basis for future research.     

A bibliometric analysis of NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research

Bibliometric analysis techniques are increasingly being used to analyze and evaluate scientific research produced by institutions and grant funding agencies. This article uses bibliometric methods to analyze journal articles funded by NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research (OER), an extramural grant-funding agency focused on the scientific exploration of the world’s oceans. OER-supported articles in this analysis were identified through grant reports, personal communication, and acknowledgement of OER support or grant numbers. The articles identified were analyzed to determine the number of publications and citations received per year, subject, and institution. The productivity and citation impact of institutions in the US receiving OER grant funding were mapped geographically. Word co-occurrence and bibliographic coupling networks were created and visualized to identify the research topics of OER-supported articles. Finally, article citation counts were evaluated by means of percentile ranks. This article demonstrates that bibliometric analysis can be useful for summarizing and evaluating the research performance of a grant funding agency.     

Academic research resources and academic quality: a cross-country analysis

Does devoting more academic research resources promote academic quality? This study aims to examine the influence of higher education R&D expenditure (HERD) on academic quality measured by the relative citation impact (RCI). Both the ordered Probit and panel data models are employed to implement the empirical estimation, the cross-country evidence suggests that an increase in academic R&D is positively related to academic quality. The further analyses on different academic disciplines show the HERD is more relevant to science publications. This finding is robust for various specifications.     

A bibliometric analysis of plagiarism and self-plagiarism through Déjà vu

Plagiarism is one of the most important current debates among scientific stakeholders. A separate but related issue is the use of authors’ own ideas in different papers (i.e., self-plagiarism). Opinions on this issue are mixed, and there is a lack of consensus. Our goal was to gain deeper insight into plagiarism and self-plagiarism through a citation analysis of documents involved in these situations. The Déjà vu database, which comprises around 80,000 duplicate records, was used to select 247 pairs of documents that had been examined by curators on a full text basis following a stringent protocol. We then used the Scopus database to perform a citation analysis of the selected documents. For each document pair, we used specific bibliometric indicators, such as the number of authors, full text similarity, journal impact factor, the Eigenfactor, and article influence. Our results confirm that cases of plagiarism are published in journals with lower visibility and thus tend to receive fewer citations. Moreover, full text similarity was significantly higher in cases of plagiarism than in cases of self-plagiarism. Among pairs of documents with shared authors, duplicates not citing the original document showed higher full text similarity than those citing the original document, and also showed greater overlap in the references cited in the two documents.     

Assessing obliteration by incorporation in a full-text database: JSTOR,Economics, and the concept of “bounded rationality”

To evaluate the usefulness of a full-text database as a source for assessing obliteration by incorporation (OBI), 3,707 article records including the catchphrases “bounded rationality” and/or “boundedly rational” (connected with the work of H. A. Simon) in the article text were retrieved from JSTOR, a full-text database with broad disciplinary coverage. Two subsets were analyzed—a 10 % systematic sample of all records and a set of all articles in Economics journals (with the addition of the Journal of Economic Theory). A majority of articles in the 10 % sample came from Economics and Management journals, while Psychology was poorly represented. In the 10 % sample, based on the percentage of true implicit citations between 1992 and 2009 in the 80 % of records that had a catchphrase in the body of the article, rather than just in the reference list, annual OBI ranged from 0 to 70 % (mean 33 %) with no discernible trend. The Economics articles showed a narrower range of OBI—fluctuating around 40 % implicit citations over the same time period. In both data sets, a large proportion of indirect citations were to sources that themselves cited a relevant work by Simon. Over 90 % of the articles in both the 10 % sample and the economics journal set would not have been retrieved with a database record search because they lacked the catchphrase in the record fields.     

Bibliometric analysis of diabetes mellitus research output from Middle Eastern Arab countries during the period (1996–2012)

The main objective of this study was to analyze research productivity originating from Middle East Arab (MEA) countries in the field of diabetes mellitus (DM). Data from January 1, 1996 till December 31, 2012 were searched for documents with specific words in diabetes as a “source title” and a list of 13 MEA countries as affiliation country. Research productivity was evaluated based on number of publications, citation analysis, indexing in Institute for Scientific Information and impact factor (IF). The 13 MEA countries published a total of 479 documents in 41 diabetes journals. This number represents 0.75 % of the total documents produced globally in the field of DM. The number of published documents increased by around fivefold from early 2000 to 2012. Of the 41 journal titles retrieved, 24 (58.5 %) had their IF listed in the journal citation reports 2012. Forty-two documents (14.5 %) were published in journals that had no official IF. The total number of citations for documents published from MEA countries in the field of DM, at the time of data analysis, was 5,565 with an h index of 35. The median (inter-quartile range) citation for documents from the 13 MEA countries was 4 (1–11). The top productive institution in the field of DM was United Arab Emirates University with 51 documents (10.6 %). Authors from MEA countries collaborated mostly with authors in countries like United Kingdom, USA, and Germany. The present data show promising and relatively good diabetes research productivity in MEA countries especially after 2008.     

Condensed matter physics journals

On the basis of a citation/reference criterion, 20 core journals are selected in the field of condensed matter physics. Citation data and indicators from 1980Journal Citation Reports reveal their different characteristic features such as applied orientation, communication function and longevity. The manually obtained data for the core journals are written into a matrix in order to determine an appropriate ranking parameter. The method ofPrice is used first to reduce the diagonal elements and then, following the method ofGeller, influence weights are calculated for the core journals. Influence weights are determined also for non-core journals using only the references received from the core.     

The expansion of Google Scholar versus Web of Science: a longitudinal study

Web of Science (WoS) and Google Scholar (GS) are prominent citation services with distinct indexing mechanisms. Comprehensive knowledge about the growth patterns of these two citation services is lacking. We analyzed the development of citation counts in WoS and GS for two classic articles and 56 articles from diverse research fields, making a distinction between retroactive growth (i.e., the relative difference between citation counts up to mid-2005 measured in mid-2005 and citation counts up to mid-2005 measured in April 2013) and actual growth (i.e., the relative difference between citation counts up to mid-2005 measured in April 2013 and citation counts up to April 2013 measured in April 2013). One of the classic articles was used for a citation-by-citation analysis. Results showed that GS has substantially grown in a retroactive manner (median of 170 % across articles), especially for articles that initially had low citations counts in GS as compared to WoS. Retroactive growth of WoS was small, with a median of 2 % across articles. Actual growth percentages were moderately higher for GS than for WoS (medians of 54 vs. 41 %). The citation-by-citation analysis showed that the percentage of citations being unique in WoS was lower for more recent citations (6.8 % for citations from 1995 and later vs. 41 % for citations from before 1995), whereas the opposite was noted for GS (57 vs. 33 %). It is concluded that, since its inception, GS has shown substantial expansion, and that the majority of recent works indexed in WoS are now also retrievable via GS. A discussion is provided on quantity versus quality of citations, threats for WoS, weaknesses of GS, and implications for literature research and research evaluation.     

Near-white light luminescent material from Eu(III) complexes encapsulated in silica/PMMA matrices

A novel ternary molecular hybrid material has been obtained by immobilization of Eu-Salen complex into silica matrix and poly (methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) matrix. Here, the Salen-type Schiff-base ligand H₂Salen (N,N′-bis(salicylidene)ethylenediamine) which has been successfully modified by 3-(triethoxysilyl)-propyl isocyanate (TESPIC) has been used as a flexible linker and the antenna. The obtained solid hybrid material shows not only the characteristic red emission of Eu³⁺ but also the blue emission of Salen-Si host arising from the inefficient energy transfer from antenna to Eu³⁺, leading to the unexpected near-white light color of the material. For comparison, the binary hybrid without PMMA has also been prepared. Photoluminescent spectra suggest that the introduction of PMMA can enhance the emission intensity whereas the chromaticity nearly has not been changed. Moreover, thermal analysis has revealed the good thermal stability of the ternary hybrid material. X-ray diffraction patterns demonstrate the amorphous structure of both hybrid materials.     

Can the technological impact of academic journals be evaluated? The practice of non-patent reference (NPR) analysis

Journal rankings and journal ratings are important to governments, research institutes, and scientific research in general, and they frequently serve as the criteria for evaluating research performance to determine whether specific researchers will receive promotions and/or earn research grants. However, the only widely adopted journal assessment method is known as impact factor (IF), which focuses on citations in academic journals. However, IF disregards the technological applications and value of academic journals. In this article, we propose a method to rank academic journals that utilizes non-patent references in patent documents. We also compare the differences between journal rankings derived by using IF with those derived from the Intellectual Property Citation Index (IPCI) across different fields; moreover, some fields contain positive and significant correlations between IF and the IPCI. The results of this study offer a new perspective from which to assess the technological value of academic journals, particularly those in the technological and scientific fields. This study considers linkages among science and technology and the needs of the stakeholders in journal assessment to shed light on journal assessment and journal ranking methods.     

A Study on the EURAMET Comparison of Time Interval Measurement

At April 2003 there were 25 National Metrology Institutes in 25 countries that are members in the European Association of National Metrology Institutes (EURAMETs) agreed to participate in an inter-laboratory comparison for time interval measurement (TIM). The main target of this comparison, as mentioned by EURAMET, was to support the current calibration measurement capabilities for TI and to gain better understanding of the TIM. Cable delay measurement was taken as an example. The time delay of three different length coaxial cables (short, medium, and long) was measured. The majority of the laboratories used the Counter Method. There was a large span between the measurements for all cables (about 1 ns). Consequently, the measurement results that had been published at 2007 were not satisfied for the participant laboratories. In this article, we study the probable reasons for this considerable span between the different measurements for the same artifact.     

Early Mendeley readers correlate with later citation counts

Counts of the number of readers registered in the social reference manager Mendeley have been proposed as an early impact indicator for journal articles. Although previous research has shown that Mendeley reader counts for articles tend to have a strong positive correlation with synchronous citation counts after a few years, no previous studies have compared early Mendeley reader counts with later citation counts. In response, this first diachronic analysis compares reader counts within a month of publication with citation counts after 20 months for ten fields. There are moderate or strong correlations in eight out of ten fields, with the two exceptions being the smallest categories (n?=?18, 36) with wide confidence intervals. The correlations are higher than the correlations between later citations and early citations, showing that Mendeley reader counts are more useful early impact indicators than citation counts.