Data,disciplines, and scholarly publishing

Data are becoming an essential product of scholarship, complementing the roles of journal articles, papers, and books. Research data can be reused to ask new questions, to replicate studies, and to verify research findings. Data become even more valuable when linked to publications and other related resources to form a value chain. Types and uses of data vary widely between disciplines, as do the online availability of publications and the incentives of scholars to publish their data. Publishers, scholars, and librarians each have roles to play in constructing a new scholarly information infrastructure for e‐research. Technical, policy, and institutional components are maturing; the next steps are to integrate them into a coherent whole. Achieving a critical mass of datasets in public repositories, with links to and from publisher databases, is the most promising solution to maintaining and sustaining the scholarly record in digital form.     

Can Google Scholar and Mendeley help to assess the scholarly impacts of dissertations?

Dissertations can be the single most important scholarly outputs of junior researchers. Whilst sets of journal articles are often evaluated with the help of citation counts from the Web of Science or Scopus, these do not index dissertations and so their impact is hard to assess. In response, this article introduces a new multistage method to extract Google Scholar citation counts for large collections of dissertations from repositories indexed by Google. The method was used to extract Google Scholar citation counts for 77,884 American doctoral dissertations from 2013 to 2017 via ProQuest, with a precision of over 95%. Some ProQuest dissertations that were dual indexed with other repositories could not be retrieved with ProQuest-specific searches but could be found with Google Scholar searches of the other repositories. The Google Scholar citation counts were then compared with Mendeley reader counts, a known source of scholarly-like impact data. A fifth of the dissertations had at least one citation recorded in Google Scholar and slightly fewer had at least one Mendeley reader. Based on numerical comparisons, the Mendeley reader counts seem to be more useful for impact assessment purposes for dissertations that are less than two years old, whilst Google Scholar citations are more useful for older dissertations, especially in social sciences, arts and humanities. Google Scholar citation counts may reflect a more scholarly type of impact than that of Mendeley reader counts because dissertations attract a substantial minority of their citations from other dissertations. In summary, the new method now makes it possible for research funders, institutions and others to systematically evaluate the impact of dissertations, although additional Google Scholar queries for other online repositories are needed to ensure comprehensive coverage.     

Librarians' Views of Academic Library Support for Scholarly Publishing: An Every-day Perspective

This article reports on a study of academic librarians' views of their work and possibilities regarding support for researchers' publishing. Institutional repositories and Open Access are areas being dealt with in particular. Methods used are highly qualitative; data was gathered at two Swedish university libraries over a six month period through focus group interview sessions and personal logs by informants. Findings indicate that attitudes are often in collision with practicalities in the daily work in libraries. Even though they have a high degree of knowledge and awareness of scholarly publication patterns, librarians often feel insecure in the approach of researchers. There is a felt redirection in the focus of academic librarianship, from pedagogical information seeking tasks towards a more active publication support, a change which also includes a regained prominence for new forms of bibliographical work. Although there are some challenges, proactive attitudes among librarians are felt as being important in developing further support for researchers' publishing.     

Leveraging Librarian Liaison Expertise in a New Consultancy Role

This paper presents a case study of an advisory role that librarians successfully developed with faculty editors to increase the visibility and readership of an open access scholarly publication. The study represents an example of how expertise among liaison librarians and other library service professionals can be leveraged in new consultancy roles in support of evolving library service models. It also depicts local application of a hybrid model for librarianship that combines the functional specialist and subject librarian liaison roles in implementing advisory activities and recommendations. The liaison librarians successfully used their knowledge of scholarly communications and applied innovative bibliometric analysis to help enhance the discoverability and user experience of an online journal publication. The librarians made specific recommendations for optimizing journal website content organization, search functionality, metadata standards and marketing opportunities that were subsequently implemented by the editors and platform managers. The faculty editor places a high value on these recommendations, and the librarian advisory role continues to develop. Our study also outlines many of the essential considerations that scholar-editors and librarian advisors can use to help implement open access scholarly publishing projects successfully.     

The Availability and Effectiveness of Research Supports for Early Career Academic Librarians

For many academic librarians, scholarly research is required in order to attain tenure or promotion and it is widely acknowledged that many early career librarians find this process challenging. Using a survey of >200 untenured or recently tenured academic librarians, this study investigates early career academic librarians' access to and experiences with research support activities designed to develop research skills and confidence. Specific attention is paid to informal mentoring, formal mentoring programs, and writing groups. Responses indicate that early career librarians need supports that target three dimensions of the research experience: research design and methods; work practices and accountability; and emotional elements. Despite this, survey respondents had limited access to formal research supports that offer instruction and guidance in the research process, leaving them to rely heavily on informal mentoring. This study highlights the need for libraries and library organizations to invest their resources in research supports for early career academic librarians, helping them to become more effective and confident researchers.     

Current Trends in Research Resources from Russia,Eastern Europe,and Eurasia: Implications for Reference Services and Resource Sharing

ABSTRACT

In the last 20 years, national, regional, and academic libraries and other cultural institutions in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia have introduced subject portals, research databases, journal repositories, digital collections, research guides, and indexing resources, which scholarly communities outside these regions rely on to advance their research portfolios. In order to address the significant developments in scholarly communication and the proliferation of academic content, this article discusses recent trends in online research resources and strategies for incorporating these resources into research consultations. In addition, as these extensive networks of online resources continue to proliferate, possible models for collaboration with national and regional libraries are needed to strengthen existing partnerships with Slavic librarians outside these regions.     

Open Access to Research Outputs—Institutional Policies and Researchers' Views: Results From Two Complementary Surveys

This paper presents the results of two complementary surveys undertaken in 2008 as part of a wider project investigating the effects and impact of open access to research outputs in the UK. The institutional view, from a survey of academic librarians, is compared to researchers' perceptions and practices. Researchers were largely unaware of their institutions' policies with regard to open access, or whether they had an institutional repository. Reasons for making research outputs available on open access, or not doing so, were sought, and the role of open access material as a research resource investigated. The surveys found that many researchers maintained a suspicion of open access publications, both as authors and as users of scholarly material, together with a degree of ignorance about open access and the role of institutional repositories. This suggests that a degree of culture change may be needed, as institutions develop repositories with a view to future research assessment requirements, and more funders adopt open access mandates for the outputs from research which they fund.     

How research becomes impact: Librarians helping faculty use scholarly metrics to select journals

Many librarians support faculty with the publishing process, which includes journal selection and evaluating the impact of their scholarly output. While large universities have the resources for entire departments devoted to bibliometrics, the authors of this article give strategies for faculty publishing support at a smaller liberal arts university. The authors created a LibGuide with publishing resources and presented the initiative to several academic divisions. Faculty were surveyed, and the results indicated that the majority of respondents were interested in assessing journal quality and viewed the library as a resource for help with the publishing process.     

Beginning the Conversation: Discussing Scholarly Communication

Since the earliest scholarly journals began, journal literature answered a need to communicate scholarly and scientific findings and preserve a validated scholarly record of accomplishments and areas for further research. Scholars are profoundly interested in the transformation of scholarship and the implications for their disciplines. Librarian expertise within the digital serials realm and partnering with faculty to prioritize learning in the library will imaginatively create opportunities for learning with library resources. Discussing scholarly communication changes and traditions provides excellent common ground for serials librarians to begin conversations with disciplinary faculty.     

The preferences of authors of Chinese library and information science journal articles in citing Internet sources

The preferences of the authors of Chinese library and information science (LIS) journal articles in citing Internet sources were investigated using eight premium Chinese LIS journals from Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (the observation group) and 10 journals in other disciplines (the control group) from the same database from 1999 to 2008. A total of 252,881 citations were analyzed in terms of count, domain name, and citing purposes. The results show that (a) in comparison to the disciplines in the control group, LIS articles in Chinese journals indicated a strong preference for citing Internet sources, and this preference is increasing; (b) LIS articles did not seem to discriminate against domain names when citing Internet sources; and (c) LIS articles cited more Internet sources as evidence to support research results and conclusions. Excessive dependency on Internet sources may raise concerns over the quality, research ethics, and credibility of research publications. Chinese LIS researchers should place more emphasis on the disadvantages of Internet sources as supporting material. Guidelines and criteria to help researchers, journal editors, students, and librarians assess information on the Web need to be developed.     

Librarians as Research Partners: Their Contribution to the Scholarly Endeavour Beyond Library and Information Science

Academic libraries are increasingly called upon to demonstrate their value to their home institutions. Research collaboration with faculty resulting in the co-authorship of scholarly output is one possible way to demonstrate the alignment of the library with the institutional mission. Involvement in research also improves librarians' skills in offering research support services. This study explores the contribution of librarians to scholarly journals in fields other than Library and Information Science (LIS) as well as their collaboration practices with researchers in those fields. Results show an increasing number of papers published by library-affiliated authors in non-LIS journals between 2006 and 2015. The papers fall broadly into four areas: articles on topics related to LIS published in non-LIS journals; higher education and information literacy; systematic reviews and meta-analysis; and research collaboration in the faculty's areas of expertise. The study is limited by the difficulty in properly retrieving the scholarly output of librarians from bibliographic databases and the difficulty in ascertaining their contributions to published articles.     

Toward a Sustainable Method for Core Journal Lists: A Test Case Using Journals in Social Work

Determining the core journals in a discipline serves an important role for both academic librarians and departmental faculty. In addition to helping librarians build or weed journal collections, especially in difficult budget years, core lists help departments seeking accreditation, committees evaluating a candidate’s scholarship for tenure and promotion, and faculty choosing publications for their research. They also assist faculty guiding student research in the discipline. However, because of the inexorable changes that have occurred, and will continue to occur, in scholarly communication, no such list can be considered immutable. The purpose of this study is to identify a method by which individual librarians and/or libraries can create a list of journals considered important to a discipline, one that accurately reflects the state of scholarly communication in a field as it relates to the currency and quality of journal literature, and that is sustainable over time. More specifically, our purpose is twofold. First, to develop a sustainable method for defining the universe of potential core titles; and, second, to identify the core titles within that universe. As the result of discussions on this issue with a social work faculty member, the authors used social work journals for developing a methodology that may be applied to other disciplines.     

The significance of an impact factor: implications for the publishing community

The journal impact factor, as a metric developed in the mid‐1960s by Dr Eugene Garfield and Dr Irving Sher, represents the influence that an ‘average article’ published in a specific journal has on the scholarly discipline and audience that it serves. Originally intended to serve as an equalizer for use by the Institute for Scientific Information® (ISI®) in making comparative evaluations of large and small journals in a particular discipline, the impact factor now has numerous applications for publishers, librarians, and researchers. Ideally, the journal impact factor should be seen by publishers as a useful tool in gauging the effectiveness of their publication product in serving the needs of a particular scholarly community. The significance of a journal impact factor, its appropriate usage by the scholarly publishing community and its extension into the electronic environment are discussed.     

An Institutional Repository Experience at a Large Health Care System

Institutional repositories (IRs) collect, preserve, and disseminate the scholarly output of an organization. Though common in academic settings, they are less so in hospitals or health care systems. The librarians for Aurora Health Care decided to create a primarily citation-level IR to organize and promote the scholarly output of Aurora faculty, residents, and fellows using the proprietary software Digital Commons, a product of the company bepress. The repository also hosts a newly published peer-reviewed journal and includes digitized historical images and institutional memorabilia. Suggested alternatives are given for hospitals or health care systems that may not currently be able to pursue a full-fledged IR.     

Where in the World Is My Librarian? Creating Cross-Campus Collaborations to Seamlessly Connect with Students When Librarians,Students, and Faculty Are in Different Locations

Research librarians often have a specialty in certain discipline, and many academic libraries thrive on this type of arrangement to support their researchers. But more often, new interdisciplinary programs are developed that require the expertise of more than one subject expert for support. In particular, students in a Master of Education in the Health Professions (MEHP) program have unique, complicated research challenges that can only be addressed with careful collaboration amongst multiple subject experts. However, this program and the library saw the need for additional expertise to support their students, and began a collaboration with the medical library, bringing a clinical informationist onto the library support team. Together, the education librarian, clinical informationist, and program faculty collaborate to provide excellent services to help students in their research throughout the program.     

Access to Research: the experience of implementing a pilot in public libraries

The Access to Research project is a collaboration between scholarly publishers and librarians to provide free licensed access to research journals via terminals in public libraries. The project is an element of the ‘balanced package’ proposed by the Finch Working Group on how to expand access to published research in the UK, which reported its recommendations to the UK government in June 2012. We describe the setting up of the project and the findings from a three‐month technical pilot prior to the launch of a two‐year national pilot in February 2014. The project has already attracted support from the major scholarly publishers, with about 8,400 journal titles now available. The access platform has been shown to be usable by public librarians and library patrons. We are now addressing the challenge of understanding how the public will make use of the system and exploring how best to provide training and education for librarians and users.     

The publishing imperative: the pervasive influence of publication metrics

This article summarizes the effects of the increasing global trend towards measuring research quality and effectiveness through, in particular, publication‐based metrics, and its effects on scholarly communication. Such metrics are increasingly influencing the behaviour patterns of administrators, publishers, librarians, and researchers. Impact and citation measures, which often rely solely on Thomson Scientific data, are examined in the context of university league tables and research assessment exercises. The need to establish alternate metrics, particularly for the social sciences and humanities, is emphasized, as is an holistic approach to scholarly communication agenda.     

Text Mining 101: What You Should Know

ABSTRACT

Scholars increasingly use text and data mining (TDM) methods to discover trends and relationships within complex digital data sets. In order to support this development in scholarly communication, librarians and publishers need to be knowledgeable about TDM methods, build partnerships with TDM researchers, and address challenges related to licensing and access to large document sets. The presenters of this NASIG session shared their experiences of supporting TDM as a library subject liaison, acquisitions librarian, and publisher representatives. Audience members discussed issues involving TDM of data from multiple publishers, local hosting of data sets and TDM activity by undergraduate students.