Open access publications in sciences and social sciences: A comparative analysis

In this paper, we conduct a comparative analysis to examine the characteristics and evolutionary trends of open access (OA) publications in natural and social sciences. We use data recorded by Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Journal Citation Reports during 2001–2015 as the main source. We then comparatively analyse the characteristics of natural and social sciences in terms of historical evolution, main contributors, and distribution of OA journals and publications across different languages, disciplines, and impact factor quartiles. Our results suggest that both natural and social sciences experienced dramatic growth of OA journals since 2009, but the share of social science OA journals within journal impact factor quartile 1 is much lower than that of natural sciences. While natural and social sciences share some similarities in OA publishing activities, such as main countries of contribution, they differ greatly in dimensions such as OA ratio across specific disciplines, countries, and publishing languages. We acknowledge that OA publishing offers a level playing field for traditionally disadvantaged languages, countries, and scientific disciplines, but meanwhile, the advancement of high‐quality OA publishing needs more targeted and sophisticated approaches to tackle differences in natural and social sciences.     

The presence of academic health sciences libraries on Facebook: the relationship between content and library popularity

Social networks such as Facebook allow libraries to be proactive in reaching their users. While some libraries have popular Facebook pages, it remains unclear what attracts users to these pages. This study evaluates relationships between libraries' Facebook page content and popularity. An analysis of 72 academic health sciences libraries' Facebook pages showed positive correlations between number of library fans and number of tabs, photos, events, and wall posts on Facebook. Libraries posting videos had significantly more fans than libraries without them. This study contributes to an understanding of correlations between content and popularity on Facebook, with implications for library outreach.     

Identification of potential young talented individuals in the natural and life sciences: A bibliometric approach

Identification of young talented individuals based on bibliometric data is not an easy task. Citation-based data usually need too long to accrue. In this study, we propose a method for the identification of potential young talented individuals which is not citation-based. Since potential talent is defined in this study in terms of early publication performance, three different indicators and their combinations were used: We not only used (1) the number of papers in high-impact journals, but also (2) the total number of papers, and (3) the number of papers as a corresponding author. An older cohort including potential talents with their first publication between 1999 and 2003 was used to find the most suitable indicator combination. Two additional indicators were used for the validation step: (1) The citation impact on the level of individual papers and (2) the number of papers that are linked to grants. The best performing indicator combination was applied to the time period 2007–2011 for identifying young potentially talented individuals who published their first paper within this time period. We produced a set of 46,200 potentially talented individuals that can be downloaded free of charge.     

Identification of highly-cited papers using topic-model-based and bibliometric features: the consideration of keyword popularity

The number of received citations have been used as an indicator of the impact of academic publications. Developing tools to find papers that have the potential to become highly-cited has recently attracted increasing scientific attention. Topics of concern by scholars may change over time in accordance with research trends, resulting in changes in received citations. Author-defined keywords, title and abstract provide valuable information about a research article. This study performs a latent Dirichlet allocation technique to extract topics and keywords from articles; five keyword popularity (KP) features are defined as indicators of emerging trends of articles. Binary classification models are utilized to predict papers that were highly-cited or less highly-cited by a number of supervised learning techniques. We empirically compare KP features of articles with other commonly used journal-related and author-related features proposed in previous studies. The results show that, with KP features, the prediction models are more effective than those with journal and/or author features, especially in the management information system discipline.     

Putting theory into practice: social sciences needs analysis

Needs analysis is a systematic process whereby information concerning a service agency and its environment is gathered by a variety of data collection methods. The information collected is then utilized for assessment and planning purposes. This paper discusses the application of needs analysis to a social science discipline utilizing three data collection methods: syllabi study, journal scatter study, and content analysis. The results of the needs analysis are triangulated and discussed, and the feasibility of needs analysis in an academic library setting is assessed.     

Impacts of government website information on social sciences and humanities in China: A citation analysis

The purpose of this research is to investigate the current state and trend of government website information cited by social science and humanities (SS&H) journal articles in China. The Chinese Social Science Citation Index (CSSCI) was used as the benchmark and the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) journals as the reference samples. It analyzed 204,019 web citations (N = 5,063,237) found in 925,506 articles that were published in CSSCI journals during the 1998–2009 period. The findings unveil that web citations accounted for only 4.03% of the total number of citations (N = 5,063,237), and that citations of Chinese government websites constituted 6.6% of the total number of web citations (N = 204,019). The study disclosed detailed information regarding citations derived from ministries and commissions directly under the State Council websites (N = 69), government online media (N = 7), government website citation subjects (N = 21), and various types of government website information (N = 5). Although government website information has limited influence on SS&H, their impact is currently growing rapidly. In comparison with international research community, influence of government web information on Chinese social science is higher, while its influence on humanities is lower. Essentially, Chinese scholars put emphasis on citing information from authoritative central government websites or highly visible state-owned media information as supporting evidences in their articles. In general, the citation of information from Chinese government website tends to hot social issues of society. Finally, it is necessary to promote the visibility of local government websites, to develop policies and guidelines to encourage the disclosure and the diversity of data, so that there will be more citation balances between social and technological topics.     

社会科学查新工作指标体系的结构模型与价值分析

本文针对社会科学查新对象的特殊性 ,借鉴国家科技部《科技查新规范》中的有关规定 ,以文献的“新颖性”为基本指标 ,从“事实”、“观点”、“解释”、“体系”、“方法”五个维度 ,构建了社会科学查新工作指标体系的结构模型 ,并从实际推动查新工作、进行起步阶段的规范化引导、通过“行动研究”加以证实三个方面 ,分析了构建这一指标体系的实践意义。     

Financing innovation: A bibliometric analysis of the field

This article presents a bibliometric analysis of the financing of innovation during the period 2001–2016. Among the most prominent journals in the field are Research Policy, Technovation and Small Business Economics; among the most influential authors are Petersen, Hall, Himmelberg, Lerner and Brown; and the most connected documents are those by Hall (2002) and Brown, Fazzari, and Petersen (2009). The field is fragmented and uses a variety of financial theoretical models. Salient topics in the field are financial constraints, funding sources (internal and external), capital structure, venture capital and financing of technology companies.     

Straddling the humanities and social sciences: The research process of music scholars

Few research projects have focused on the information needs of the music scholar. What is known about the information needs of the music scholar has been gathered through large-scale studies of various humanistic disciplines. This article describes a six-stage model of the music scholar’s research process. The model was constructed contextually through interviews with 30 music scholars who were asked to describe a recently completed research project. Research activities pertaining to specific stages in the research process are identified and described. This study compares existing models of the research process of other humanities scholars and explores the implications for library and information science professionals.     

The relationships between distance factors and international collaborative research outcomes: A bibliometric examination

Increasingly, scholars have been conducting team-based research with multinational collaborators to carry out internationally relevant studies, generate global impact, and promote academic exchanges. In this paper, we examine how four types of distance, i.e., geographic, political, cultural, and economic, relate to the output of international research collaborations. We analyze a bibliometric data set derived from four leading marketing journals spanning the 2001–2016 time frame. Among other insights, our results show that in the context of international collaborative research efforts, co-authors from countries with wider economic distances and narrower political distances have published fewer articles and received fewer citations compared to those from countries with narrower economic distances and wider political distances.     

Patterns of Iranian co-authorship networks in social sciences: A comparative study

Collaboration in science is a process in which two or more authors share their ideas, resources and data to create a joint work. This research compares coauthorship networks of Iranian articles in library and information science (LIS), psychology (PSY), management (MNG), and economics (ECO) in the ISI Web of Knowledge database during 2000–2009, and uses network analysis for the visualization of coauthorship networks. Data include all articles with at least one Iranian author and indexed in ISI's Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) for the fields of LIS, PSY, MNG, and ECO. Indicators such as the Collaborative Index (CI), Degree of Collaboration (DC) and Collaboration Coefficient (CC) were calculated for each discipline. Results show that two or three authors were the most common number of authors per paper, and authors of PSY tended to have more multi-authored articles, compared to the other disciplines. LIS had the lowest rank regarding CC. MNG had the densest coauthorship network, and PSY had the sparsest. Iranian authors in the field of PSY mostly collaborated with those in the U.S., while LIS and MNG authors tended to collaborate with U.K. authors, and ECO authors tended to collaborate with Canadians.     

The infosphere of social sciences: Structure,boundaries, and functions

This paper discusses the concept of the infosphere and proposes a set of issues that define the structure of this concept and a model for determining the boundaries of the infosphere with respect to the tasks of its management. It considers the expediency of the system organization of the infosphere, including the restoration of the SSSTI. A possible list of functions is presented whose centralization could facilitate the transformation of the infosphere into a system.     

Op. cit.: publishing in the humanities and social sciences

Do the humanities and social sciences have the same publishing requirements as the sciences? What can be done to counter perceptions that acquisition funds have migrated away from publications in the fields of the humanities and social sciences to meet the escalating cost of electronic and print journals in the natural and applied sciences? With university presses, non-profit publishers, and the academy itself under strain, we examine the problems, discuss the continuing requirements of scholarship, the implications for funding strategies, and the role of technology, and give examples of new ventures that suggest possible solutions to the problems. We conclude that the primary values that scholars in the humanities and social sciences hold are not dramatically different from those of other academic disciplines and make recommendations for building a broader base of support for scholarship in these areas.     

AIDS in Haiti: a bibliometric analysis

OBJECTIVES: In Haiti, AIDS has become the leading cause of death in sexually active adults. Increasingly, AIDS has become a disease of women and children. Previous bibliometric studies have shown the emergence of Haiti as a leading country in the production of AIDS literature in the Latin American and Caribbean regions. No information exists, however, regarding the type of publications produced, the collaboration patterns used, or the subject content analysis of this production. The purpose of this study was to gain insight into the construction of this literature production. METHODS: A bibliometric analysis regarding Haitian AIDS research was conducted in the AIDSLINE database for the period 1980 to 1998. An attempt was made to identify the patterns of the growth in AIDS literature, as well as the types of documents published, authorship, institutional affiliations of authors, and subject content. RESULTS: Results indicated that most documents were published in periodicals. The International Conference on AIDS obtained the highest frequency. The United States, Haiti, and Canada were the main productive countries. CONCLUSIONS: While nearly 40% of the records corresponded to ethnology-related articles, HIV infections, sex behavior, pregnancy, and substance-related disorders headed the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) found. Main aspects of AIDS papers focused on epidemiology, complications, and trends issues.     

Fifteen years of e-government research in Ibero-America: A bibliometric analysis

In this article it is presented a bibliometric analysis of e-government research in the Ibero-American (IA) Community. Data from the Scopus® database relating to 1129 research documents published between 2003 and 2017 was used. Presented analyzes include the most productive and impacting researchers, institutions and countries; determinants for country results; most relevant subject areas and specific research themes; and international cooperation patterns, namely within the IA Community. Contrary to what happens worldwide, e-government research production is still rising in IA. Besides the general heterogeneity, there are four relatively homogenous groups of countries to what concerns production and impact: leading, evolving, emerging, and expectant countries. IA has distinctive characteristics that make it interesting as an object of study and that constitute an opportunity for further development. Nevertheless, for results to continue to evolve, it is relevant that public policies related to e-government development and the promotion of research continue to be developed and that cooperation among IA researchers is properly promoted and supported.     

再析中国社会科学生产力--社会科学论文的学科、地区结构(2001年)

本文以<中文社会科学引文索引>(2001)所发表的学术论文为指标,对我国社会科学生产力及其结构、分布作了系统研究,并给出了我国社会科学生产力的学科结构、地区结构,以及地区--学科分布.文章最后对我国社会科学生产力作了较为深入的分析.     

The relationship between unemployment in society and the popularity of crime drama on TV

This research explores the hypothesis that social stress, as indexed by rising unemployment in society, leads to increased preference for crime drama on TV. This hypothesis is tested by relating the unemployment rates in the U.S., Canada, and Germany over several years with national trends for the relative popularity of crime drama (i. e., as compared to the popularity of other program categories). Support for this hypothesis is found in the U.S. and in Canada.     

社会科学核心网站的评价标准与方法

文章在介绍国内外网站评价研究的基础上,指出了当前网站评价研究之不足,结合社会科学类网站的特点,论述了网站评价的三大原则,提出了包括内容质量、系统设计、网站管理三大指标的社会科学核心网站评价指标体系和评价方法。