Productivity, visibility, authorship, and collaboration in library and information science journals: Central and Eastern European authors

Proceedings of the annual meetings of the association for information science and technology: analysis of two decades of published research

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to investigate the research and publication trends in the articles published in the conference proceedings of the Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) since the year 2000.

Design/methodology/approach

We analyzed two decades of ASIS&T proceedings to uncover bibliometric patterns. This study uses two bibliometric procedures applied to the publications in the ASIS&T conference proceedings – a bibliometrics analysis using three data sources (Scopus, ASIS&T proceedings website and Scimago journal ranking) and a scientific mapping analysis using VOSViewer.

Findings

We found 3,129 publications from 2000 to 2020, with more than three-quarters jointly authored. Most authors are from the United States, Canada and China. Social media and information behavior are the top-researched areas. The top-cited journals are the Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Information Processing and Management and Library and Information Science Research.

Research limitations/implications

The study will help information professionals understand patterns in recent research, which should help guide them in their future research directions.

Practical implications

The findings affirm ASIS&T’s move to an international association and point to the growing importance of collaborative work and social media.

Originality/value

ASIS&T has been holding annual meetings since the 1950s. While there have been various bibliometric studies analyzing publication trends in different journals in the field of information science, none of these studies have analyzed the ASIS&T conference proceedings.

Researcher Performance in Scopus Articles (RPSA) as a New Scientometric Model of Scientific Output: Tested in Business Area of V4 Countries

The purpose of this study is to present a new scientometric model for measuring individual scientific performance in Scopus article publications in the field of Business, Management, and Accounting (BMA). With the help of this model, the study also compares the publication performance of the top 50 researchers according to SciVal in the field of BMA, in each of the Central European V4 countries (Czech Republic; Hungary; Poland; Slovakia). To analyze the scientific excellence of a total of top 200 researchers in the countries studied, we collected and analyzed the data of a total of 1844 partially redundant and a total of 1492 cleansed BMA publications. In the scope of the study, we determined the quality of the journals using SCImago, the individual contributions to the journal articles, and the number of citations using Scopus data. A comparison of individual performance, as shown by published journal articles, can be made based on the qualities of the journals, the determination of the aggregated co-authorship ratios, and the number of citations received. The performance of BMA researchers in Hungary lags behind the average of V4s in terms of quantity, but in terms of quality it reaches this average. As for BMA journal articles, the average number of co-authors is between two and three; concerning Q4 to Q2 publications, this number typically increases. In fact, in the case of these Q journals multiple co-authorship results in higher citations, but it is not the case concerning Q1 journals.

Characterizing research leadership on geographically weighted collaboration network

Research collaborations, especially long-distance and international collaborations, have become increasingly prevalent worldwide. Recent studies highlighted the significant role of research leadership in collaborations. However, existing measures of the research leadership do not take into account the intensity of leadership in the co-authorship network. More importantly, the spatial features, which influence the collaboration patterns and research outcomes, have not been incorporated in measuring the research leadership. To fill the gap, we construct an institution-level weighted co-authorship network that integrates two types of weight on the edges: the intensity of collaborations and the spatial score (the geographical distance adjusted by the cross-linguistic-border nature). Based on this network, we propose a novel metric, namely the spatial research leadership rank, to identify the leading institutions while considering both the collaboration intensity and the spatial features. The leadership of an institution is measured by the following three criteria: (a) the institution frequently plays the corresponding rule in papers with other institutions; (b) the institution frequently plays the corresponding rule in longer distance and even cross-linguistic-border collaborations; (c) the participating institutions led by the institution have high leadership status themselves. Harnessing a dataset of 323,146 journal publications in pharmaceutical sciences during 2010-2018, we perform a comprehensive analysis of the geographical distribution and dynamic patterns of research leadership flows at the institution level. The results demonstrate that the SpatialLeaderRank outperforms baseline metrics in predicting the scholarly impact of institutions. And the result remains robust in the field of Information Science and Library Science.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11192-021-03943-w.

An Overview of the Dynamics of Relative Research Performance in Central-Eastern Europe Using a Ranking-Based Analysis Derived from SCImago Data

In recent times, rankings seem to play an increasingly important role, influencing the lives of individual researchers or academics and their institutions. Individual and institutional rankings used for promotion and research or academic funding seem to illustrate more and more the “publish or perish” mantra, relying sometimes almost exclusively on publications and their citations. Eastern Europe found itself part of this new world after a period of isolation, uneven for the countries within the area. The present study uses SCImago data to perform a regional analysis of individual and aggregated domains, for individual countries and the entire region, based on a novel “adjusted citation index”, in order to measure the performance and identify, using correlations with additional data and information, the mechanisms that can increase the research performance of a country. In a nutshell, the results indicate that the national research policies are responsible for performance. Adaptive research policies simulate a real performance, in comparison with more restrictive ones, which are more likely to stimulate unethical behaviors such as self-citations or citation stacking, especially when used for the assessment of researchers. The importance of the findings lies in the possibility of replicating the methodology, adapting it to different spatial scales.

Cross-disciplinary collaboration versus coexistence in LIS serials: analysis of authorship affiliations in four European countries

The interdisciplinary nature of library and information science (LIS) research has been highlighted for some time now. The term “interdisciplinary” is used primarily in the LIS literature as a general concept with different meanings that refer either to the coexistence of researchers from different scientific fields or to cross-disciplinary collaboration expressed in the form of coauthorship. This study analyses the disciplinary profile of LIS researchers with a view to ascertaining the actual level of cross-disciplinary collaboration and identifying all fields involved. Because of the complexity of identifying accurate affiliations at knowledge area level, the study was limited to authors from France, Germany, Spain and the UK. This analysis of authorship affiliation was performed based on research published in LIS serial titles indexed in Scopus during the 2010–2017 period. A rigorous and laborious process of identifying author affiliations was carried out. This involved checking the authorship of each paper and complementing this with information from websites, scientific social networks and other research endeavours whenever ambiguous situations arose. We observed that LIS departments produce barely a third of the research published in serial titles in the LIS subject category. Cross-disciplinary collaboration among all of the scientific fields involved is low, and even lower in LIS than in other fields. The low level of cross-disciplinary collaboration in LIS contradicts the interdisciplinary nature of LIS highlighted in the literature.