Relative visibility of authors’ publications in different information services

Labor productivity, labor impact, and co-authorship of research institutions: publications and citations per full-time equivalents

Indicators of productivity and impact of research institutions are based on counts of the institution members’ publications and the citations those publications attracted. How can scientometricians count publications and citations on the meso-level (here, institution level)? There are three variables: the institution’s scientific staff in the observed time frame, their publications in that time, and the publications’ citations. Considering co-authorship of the publications, one can count 1 for every author (whole counting) or 1/n for n co-authors (fractional counting). One can apply this procedure to publications as well as citations. New in this article is the consideration of complete lists of scientific staff members, which include the exact extent of employment, to calculate the labor input based on full-time equivalents (FTE) and also of complete lists of publications by those staff members. This approach enables a size-independent calculation of labor productivity (number of publications per FTE) and labor impact (number of citations per FTE) on the meso-level. Additionally, we experiment with the difference and the quotient between summarizing values from the micro-level (person level) and aggregating whole counting values directly on the meso-level as an indicator for the institution’s predominant internal or external co-authorship.

The growing trend of India's participation in planetary science research

Purpose

The present investigation aims to present the status of planetary science research in India using different scientometric indicators, as reflected in the Web of Science Core Collection database.

Design/methodology/approach

The researcher adopted systematic approaches to retrieve the data from the Web of Science Core Collection database for 20 years by using AAS Astronomical subject keywords. A total of 1,504 Indian publications and 55,572 World's publications were considered for analysis. The data were analyzed using the biblioshiny application of bibliometrix to investigate the most productive countries/territories, institutions, authors, research fields, journals, keywords, and h, g-index. The VOSviewer program is used to construct and visualize scientometric networks and analyze the co-occurrence of terms. “Webometric Analyst 2.0” is used to retrieve the Altmetric attention scores for the articles.

Findings

The results revealed that the publications on planetary science research has increased over time, with an annual growth rate of 9.66%. The study also revealed the prolific authors and institutions, productive journals and most frequently cited journals. The USA was the major collaborating partner of India. The results also provided valuable information on the citations made to these papers on planetary science, including a total number of citations, average citations per item, cited rate and h-index. There were 28,086 citations to 1,504 papers. The top 67 citation papers were the h-core papers on planetary science in India. Altmetric score for planetary science articles ranged from 1 to 2,418. Twitter (69%), news outlets (16%), blogs (6%), and Facebook (6%) were the most popular Altmetric data resources.

Originality/value

This investigation is the first attempt to employ scientometrics and visualization techniques to planetary science research in India.

Möglichkeiten zur Steuerung der Ergebnisse einer Forschungsevaluation

Ein Leistungsvergleich zwischen den (ehemaligen) Instituten für Informationswissenschaft der Universitäten Düsseldorf und Graz auf Basis der Forschungsleistung für einen Zeitraum von zehn Jahren zeigt, wie sehr die Ergebnisse einer Forschungsevaluation gesteuert werden können. Durch die Wahl „geeigneter“ Indikatoren gelingt es – je nach Wunsch – entweder das eine oder das andere Institut an die erste Stelle zu bringen. Hält man sich dagegen an das wissenschaftliche Gebot der Unparteilichkeit, führt dies im hier gezeigten Anwendungsbeispiel zu gemischten Ergebnissen.

Do researchers know what the h-index is? And how do they estimate its importance?

The h-index is a widely used scientometric indicator on the researcher level working with a simple combination of publication and citation counts. In this article, we pursue two goals, namely the collection of empirical data about researchers’ personal estimations of the importance of the h-index for themselves as well as for their academic disciplines, and on the researchers’ concrete knowledge on the h-index and the way of its calculation. We worked with an online survey (including a knowledge test on the calculation of the h-index), which was finished by 1081 German university professors. We distinguished between the results for all participants, and, additionally, the results by gender, generation, and field of knowledge. We found a clear binary division between the academic knowledge fields: For the sciences and medicine the h-index is important for the researchers themselves and for their disciplines, while for the humanities and social sciences, economics, and law the h-index is considerably less important. Two fifths of the professors do not know details on the h-index or wrongly deem to know what the h-index is and failed our test. The researchers’ knowledge on the h-index is much smaller in the academic branches of the humanities and the social sciences. As the h-index is important for many researchers and as not all researchers are very knowledgeable about this author-specific indicator, it seems to be necessary to make researchers more aware of scholarly metrics literacy.

On the fate of social networking sites of deceased academics in the Covid-19 era and beyond

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about unprecedented death, and among those touched by this virus are academics who have, at some point in their career, lost their lives, or academic institutes or countries who have lost valuable intellectual contributors. In the shadows of their deaths, it is incumbent upon us - as members of academia and the public - to somberly reflect on the realities of living close to, or alongside, death. One aspect that has not been widely discussed, but that seems to be more pertinent now than ever, is the fate of social media accounts, institutional websites, social networking sites, and other publicly available sites of deceased academics. A deceased academic continues to have responsibilities beyond their death because their work and legendary status may be posthumously challenged at any point in the future. Faced with challenges, absent an active voice that might be able to offer a suitable response, and considering the "fallible" nature of science, that legendary status and literature could change, for example, via the postmortem correction or retraction of their academic papers. While many academics have likely not reflected too deeply - or at all - on this issue, they would do well to ponder on this topic now, especially in these unprecedented times of Covid-19.

Truebounded, Overbounded, or Underbounded? Scientists’ Personal Publication Lists versus Lists Generated through Bibliographic Information Services

A truebounded publication list of a scientific author consists of exactly all publications that meet two criteria: (1) they are formally published (e.g., journal article or proceeding paper); (2) they have scientific, scholarly, or academic content. A publication list is overbounded if it includes documents which do not meet the two criteria (such as novels); a publication list is underbounded if it is incomplete. Are authors’ personal publication lists, found on their personal sites on the Internet or in institutional repositories, truebounded, overbounded, or underbounded? And are the respective publication lists generated through bibliographic information services truebounded, overbounded, or underbounded? As case studies, publications of nine International Society of Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) Committee members (published between 2007 and 2016) were collected to create preferably complete personal publication lists according to the two criteria. We connect the “relative visibility of an author” with the concepts of truebounded, overbounded, and underbounded publication lists. The authors’ relative visibility values were determined for the information services Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, and Google Scholar and compared to the relative visibility of the authors’ personal publication lists. All results of the bibliographic information services are underbounded. Relative visibility is highest in Google Scholar, followed by Scopus and WoS.

Researcher and Author Profiles: Opportunities, Advantages, and Limitations

Currently available online profiling platforms offer various services for researchers and authors. Opening an individual account and filling it with scholarly contents increase visibility of research output and boost its impact. This article overviews some of the widely used and emerging profiling platforms, highlighting their tools for sharing scholarly items, crediting individuals, and facilitating networking. Global bibliographic databases and search platforms, such as Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, and Google Scholar, are widely used for profiling authors with indexed publications. Scholarly networking websites, such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu, provide indispensable services for researchers poorly visible elsewhere on the Internet. Several specialized platforms are designed to offer profiling along with their main functionalities, such as reference management and archiving. The Open Researcher and Contributor Identification (ORCID) project has offered a solution to the author name disambiguation. It has been integrated with numerous bibliographic databases, platforms, and manuscript submission systems to help research managers and journal editors select and credit the best reviewers, and other scholarly contributors. Individuals with verifiable reviewer and editorial accomplishments are also covered by Publons, which is an increasingly recognized service for publicizing and awarding reviewer comments. Currently available profiling formats have numerous advantages and some limitations. The advantages are related to their openness and chances of boosting the researcher impact. Some of the profiling websites are complementary to each other. The underutilization of various profiling websites and their inappropriate uses for promotion of 'predatory' journals are among reported limitations. A combined approach to the profiling systems is advocated in this article.