Ranking authors in academic social networks: a survey

Social networks in Iranian academic libraries: complementary or antagonistic tools?

Purpose

The present study aimed to investigate the impact of social networks on the use of academic libraries by university students.

Design/methodology/approach

The method used in the present study was a survey. The statistical population included 461 university students. The data collection tool was a questionnaire. The result of the Cronbach test was equal to 0.726 indicating the acceptable reliability of the questionnaire. For data analysis, descriptive statistical methods and inferential statistical methods using SPSS 21 software were employed.

Findings

The findings showed that 243 of the participants used social networks for 4–6 h a day, 192 students never used university libraries and 229 used the university library only once in a month. Communication with friends was also reported to be one of the main goals in using social networks. The results of regression analysis also indicated that four predictor variables including information retrieval, social influence, trust and attractiveness of social networking environment were statistically able to explain the variance of reluctance to use university libraries.

Originality/value

The present study is one of the few studies that has examined the negative impact of social networks on visiting university libraries.

Anatomising the impact of ResearchGate followers and followings on influence identification

Influence analysis, derived from Social Network Analysis (SNA), is extremely useful in academic literature analytic. Different Academic Social Network Sites (ASNS) have been widely examined for influence analysis in terms of co-authorship and co-citation networks. The impact of other network-based features, such as followers and followings, provided by ASNS such as ResearchGate (RG) and Academia is yet to be anatomised. As proven in ingrained social theories, the followers and followings have significant impact in influence prorogation. This research aims at examining the same in one of the widely adopted ASNS, RG. The rendering process is developed to render real-time RG information, which is modelled into graph. Standard centrality measures are implemented to identify influential users from the constructed RG graph. Each centrality measure gives a list of top- k influential RG users. The results are compared with RGScore and Total Research Interest (TRI) to discover the most effective centrality measure. Betweenness and closeness centrality measures have shown the outperforming results compared with others. A procedure is established to discover influential RG users that are commonly present in all top- k centrality results to identify dominant skills, affiliations, departments and locations from the rendered data.

Synergistic networks of COVID-19’s top papers

Purpose

Synergy indicators and social network analysis (SNA), as practical tools, provide the possibility of explaining the pattern of scientific collaboration and visualization of network relations. Recognition of scientific capacities is the basis of synergy. The present study aims to measure and discover the synergistic networks of COVID-19’s top papers at the level of co-authorship, countries, journals, bibliographic couples and titles.

Design/methodology/approach

The synergy indicator, co-authorship co-citation network analysis methods were applied. The research population comprises COVID-19’s top papers indexed in Essential Science Indicator and Web of Science Core Collection 2020 and 2021. Excel 2016, UCINET 6.528.0.0 2017, NetDraw, Ravar Matrix, VOSviewer version 1.6.14 and Python 3.9.5 were applied to analyze the data and visualize the networks.

Findings

The findings indicate that considering the three possible possibilities for authors, countries and journals, more redundancy and information are created and potential for further cooperation is observed. The synergy of scientific collaboration has revealed that “Wang, Y,” “USA” and “Science of the Total Environment” have the most effective capabilities and results. “Guan (2020b)” and “Zhou (2020)” are bibliographic couplings that have received the most citations. The keywords “CORONAVIRUS DISEASE 2019 (COVID-19)” were the most frequent in article titles.

Originality/value

In a circumstance that the world is suffering from a COVID-19 pandemic and all scientists are conducting various researches to discover vaccines, medicines and new treatment methods, scientometric studies, and analysis of social networks of COVID-19 publications to be able to specify the synergy rate and the scientific collaboration networks, are not only innovative and original but also of great importance and priority; SNA tools along with the synergy indicator is capable of visualizing the complicated and multifaceted pattern of scientific collaboration in COVID-19. As a result, analyses can help identify existing capacities and define a new space for using COVID-19 researchers’ capabilities.

Investigating the citation advantage of author-pays charges model in computer science research: a case study of Elsevier and Springer

Purpose

Citation is an important measure of quality, and it plays a vital role in evaluating scientific research. However, citation advantage varies from discipline to discipline, subject to subject and topic to topic. This study aims to compare the citation advantage of open access and toll access articles from four subfields of computer science.

Design/methodology/approach

This research studies the articles published by two prestigious publishers: Springer and Elsevier in the author-pays charges model from 2011 to 2015. For experimentation, four sub-domains of computer science are selected including (a) artificial intelligence, (b) human–computer interaction, (c) computer vision and graphics, and (d) software engineering. The open-access and toll-based citation advantage is studied and analyzed at the micro level within the computer science domain by performing independent sample t-tests.

Findings

The results of the study highlight that open access articles have a higher citation advantage as compared to toll access articles across years and sub-domains. Further, an increase in open access articles has been observed from 2011 to 2015. The findings of the study show that the citation advantage of open access articles varies among different sub-domains of a subject. The study contributed to the body of knowledge by validating the positive movement toward open access articles in the field of computer science and its sub-domains. Further, this work added the success of the author-pays charges model in terms of citation advantage to the literature of open access.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the citation advantage of the author-pays charges model at a subject level (computer science) along with four sub-domains of computer science.

Academic social networks and collaboration patterns

Purpose

This study attempts to use a new source of data collection from open government data sets to identify potential academic social networks (ASNs) and defines their collaboration patterns. The purpose of this paper is to propose a direction that may advance our current understanding on how or why ASNs are formed or motivated and influence their research collaboration.

Design/methodology/approach

This study first reviews the open data sets in Taiwan, which is ranked as the first state in Global Open Data Index published by Open Knowledge Foundation to select the data sets that expose the government’s R&D activities. Then, based on the theory review of research collaboration, potential ASNs in those data sets are identified and are further generalized as various collaboration patterns. A research collaboration framework is used to present these patterns.

Findings

Project-based social networks, learning-based social networks and institution-based social networks are identified and linked to various collaboration patterns. Their collaboration mechanisms, e.g., team composition, motivation, relationship, measurement, and benefit-cost, are also discussed and compared.

Originality/value

In traditional, ASNs have usually been known as co-authorship networks or co-inventorship networks due to the limitation of data collection. This study first identifies some ASNs that may be formed before co-authorship networks or co-inventorship networks are formally built-up, and may influence the outcomes of research collaborations. These information allow researchers to deeply dive into the structure of ASNs and resolve collaboration mechanisms.

Uncovering diffusion trends in computer science and physics publications

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to trace the knowledge diffusion patterns between the publications of top journals of computer science and physics to uncover the knowledge diffusion trends.

Design/methodology/approach

The degree of information flow between the disciplines is a measure of entropy and received citations. The entropy gives the uncertainty in the citation distribution of a journal; the more a journal is involved in spreading information or affected by other journals, its entropy increases. The citations from outside category give the degree of inter-disciplinarity index as the percentage of references made to papers of another discipline. In this study, the topic-related diffusion across computer science and physics scholarly communication network is studied to examine how the same research topic is studied and shared across disciplines.

Findings

For three indicators, Shannon entropy, citations outside category (COC) and research keywords, a global view of information flow at the journal level between both disciplines is obtained. It is observed that computer science mostly cites knowledge published in physics journals as compared to physics journals that cite knowledge within the field.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that traces knowledge diffusion trends between computer science and physics publications at journal level using entropy, COC and research keywords.

The means-end cognitions of perceived information quality in academic social networking sites

Academic social networking sites (ASNS) have received substantial attention in recent years. The information quality of academic resources is vital to users. In order to improve the users’ information quality experience, it is necessary to understand how users perceive information quality in ASNS and what factors or relations affect their results of information quality perception. Drawing on the approach of the means-end chain, our study implemented a laddering interviews with ASNS users. We both elucidated various factors influencing information quality perception and constructed a hierarchical value map, all of the complex relationships were quantitatively calculated and represented in a hierarchical structure. The results showed that 13 factors were identified and 18 relations were described. This study contributes by addressing the process of users’ information quality perception in the ASNS and by giving a deep and nuanced understanding of the factors affecting information quality. This is different from prior research that mainly focused on information quality evaluation. The results not only enrich the information quality research but also can be used to guide ASNS’ platform design and management.

Correlational analysis of topic specificity and citations count of publication venues

Purpose

Citation analysis is an important measure for the assessment of quality and impact of academic entities (authors, papers and publication venues) used for ranking of research articles, authors and publication venues. It is a common observation that high-level publication venues, with few exceptions (Nature, Science and PLOS ONE), are usually topic specific. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the claim correlation analysis between topic specificity and citation count of different types of publication venues (journals, conferences and workshops).

Design/methodology/approach

The topic specificity was calculated using the information theoretic measure of entropy (which tells us about the disorder of the system). The authors computed the entropy of the titles of the papers published in each venue type to investigate their topic specificity.

Findings

It was observed that venues usually with higher citations (high-level publication venues) have low entropy and venues with lesser citations (not-high-level publication venues) have high entropy. Low entropy means less disorder and more specific to topic and vice versa. The input data considered here were DBLP-V7 data set for the last 10 years. Experimental analysis shows that topic specificity and citation count of publication venues are negatively correlated to each other.

Originality/value

This paper is the first attempt to discover correlation between topic sensitivity and citation counts of publication venues. It also used topic specificity as a feature to rank academic entities.

Multimodal ensemble approach to identify and rank top-k influential nodes of scholarly literature using Twitter network

Scholarly literature is an immense network of activities, linked via collaborations or information propagation. Analysing such network can be leveraged by harnessing rich semantic meaning of scholarly graph. Identifying and ranking top- k influential nodes from various domains of scholarly literature using social media data are still infancy. Social networking sites like Twitter provide an opportunity to create inventive graph-based measures to identify and rank influential nodes such as scholars, articles, journal, information spreading media and academic institutions of scholarly literature. Many network-based models such as centrality measures have been proposed to identify influential nodes. The empirical annotation shows that centrality measures for finding influential nodes are high in computational complexity. In addition, notion of these measures have high variance, which signifies an influential node deviation with change in application and nature of information flows in the network. The research aims to propose an ensemble learning approach based on multimodal majority voting influence (MMMVI) to identify and weighted multimodal ensemble average influence (WMMEAI) to rank top- k influential nodes in Twitter network data set of well-known three influential nodes, that is, academic institution, scholar and journal. The empirical analysis has been accomplished to learn practicability and efficiency of the proposed approaches when compared with state-of-the-art approaches. The experimental result shows that the ensemble approach using surface learning models (SLMs) can lead to better identification and ranking of influential nodes with low computational complexity.