A rational indicator of scientific creativity

A model is proposed for the creation and transmission of scientific knowledge, based on the network of citations among research articles. The model allows to assign to each article a non-negative value for its creativity, i.e. its creation of new knowledge. If the entire publication network is truncated to the first neighbors of an article (the n references that it makes and the m citations that it receives), its creativity value becomes a simple function of n and m. After splitting the creativity of each article among its authors, the cumulative creativity of an author is then proposed as an indicator of her or his merit of research. In contrast with other merit indicators, this creativity index yields similar values for the top scientists in two very different areas (life sciences and physics), thus offering good promise for interdisciplinary analyses.     

Characterizing in-text citations in scientific articles: A large-scale analysis

We report characteristics of in-text citations in over five million full text articles from two large databases – the PubMed Central Open Access subset and Elsevier journals – as functions of time, textual progression, and scientific field. The purpose of this study is to understand the characteristics of in-text citations in a detailed way prior to pursuing other studies focused on answering more substantive research questions. As such, we have analyzed in-text citations in several ways and report many findings here. Perhaps most significantly, we find that there are large field-level differences that are reflected in position within the text, citation interval (or reference age), and citation counts of references. In general, the fields of Biomedical and Health Sciences, Life and Earth Sciences, and Physical Sciences and Engineering have similar reference distributions, although they vary in their specifics. The two remaining fields, Mathematics and Computer Science and Social Science and Humanities, have different reference distributions from the other three fields and between themselves. We also show that in all fields the numbers of sentences, references, and in-text mentions per article have increased over time, and that there are field-level and temporal differences in the numbers of in-text mentions per reference. A final finding is that references mentioned only once tend to be much more highly cited than those mentioned multiple times.     

Where are citations located in the body of scientific articles? A study of the distributions of citation locations

We address issues concerning what one may learn from how citation instances are distributed in scientific articles. We visualize and analyze patterns of citation distributions in the full text of 350 articles published in the Journal of Informetrics. In particular, we visualize and analyze the distributions of citations in articles that are organized in a commonly seen four-section structure, namely, introduction, method, results, and conclusions (IMRC). We examine the locations of citations to the groundbreaking h-index paper by Hirsch in 2005 and how patterns associated with citation locations evolve over time. The results show that citations are highly concentrated in the first section of an article. The density of citations in the first section is about three times higher than that in subsequent sections. The distributions of citations to highly cited papers are even more uneven.     

An index for evaluating journals in a small domestic citation index database whose citation rate is generally very low: A test based on the Korea Citation Index (KCI) database

This study describes the meaning of and the formula for S-index, which is a novel evaluation index based on the number of citations of each article in a particular journal and the rank of the article according to the number of citations. This study compares S-index with Impact Factor (IF), which is the most well-known evaluation index, using the Korea Citation Index data. It is shown that S-index is positively correlated with the number of articles published in a journal. Tapered h-index (h_T-index), which is based on all articles of a journal like S-index, is compared with S-index. It is shown that there is a very strong positive correlation between S-index and h_T-index. Although S-index is similar to h_T-index, S-index has a slightly better differentiating power and ranks the journal with evenly cited articles higher.     

Scatter and obsolescence of journals cited in theses and dissertations of librarianship

This article analyzes the bibliometric features (the number of pages, completion years, the fields of subject, the number of citations, and their distribution by types of sources and years) of 100 theses and dissertations completed at the Department of Librarianship of Hacettepe University between 1974 and 2002. Almost a quarter (24%) of all dissertations were on university libraries, followed by public libraries (9%). Doctoral dissertations were, on average, twice as long as master's theses and contained 2.5 times more citations. Monographs received more citations (50%) than journal articles did (42%). Recently completed theses and dissertations contained more citations to electronic publications. Fourteen (or 3.2% of all) journal titles (including Türk Kütüphaneciliği, College & Research Libraries, and Journal of the American Society for Information Science) received almost half (48.9%) of all citations. Eighty percent of journal titles were cited infrequently. No correlation was found between the frequency of citations of the most frequently cited journals and their impact factors. Cited journal titles in master's and doctoral theses and dissertations overlapped significantly. Similarly, journal titles cited in dissertations also overlapped significantly with those that were cited in the journal articles published in the professional literature. The distribution of citations to foreign journal titles fit Bradford's Law of Scattering. The mean half-life of all cited sources was 9 years. Sources cited in master's dissertations were relatively more current. Single authorship was the norm in cited resources. Coupled with in-library use data, findings of the present study can be used to identify the core journal titles in librarianship as well as to evaluate the existing library collections to decide which journal titles to keep, discard, or relegate to off-site storage areas.     

Biblioranking fundamental physics

Counting of number of papers, of citations and the h-index are the simplest bibliometric indices of the impact of research. We discuss some improvements. First, we replace citations with individual citations, fractionally shared among co-authors, to take into account that different papers and different fields have largely different average number of co-authors and of references. Next, we improve on citation counting applying the PageRank algorithm to citations among papers. Being time-ordered, this reduces to a weighted counting of citation descendants that we call PaperRank. We compute a related AuthorRank applying the PageRank algorithm to citations among authors. These metrics quantify the impact of an author or paper taking into account the impact of those authors that cite it. Finally, we show how self- and circular-citations can be eliminated by defining a closed market of Citation-coins. We apply these metrics to the InSpire database that covers fundamental physics, presenting results for papers, authors, journals, institutes, towns, countries for all-time and in recent time periods.     

Information sources in library and information science doctoral research

A citation analysis of 61 library science and information science dissertations revealed some interesting publication patterns. About 80% of the citations are to single authors, and as in analyses of periodical literature, males are cited more than females overall (about 61% to 39%). In dissertations related to school or public libraries, the male/female distribution is less disparate; for studies in academic or special libraries two thirds of the authors are male, and male authorship is 75% when only information science dissertations are analyzed. Journal articles are cited more than books, book chapters, proceedings, theses, and other formats with College & Research Libraries and Journal of the American Society for Information Science used most. Library and information science is impacted by several other disciplines, primarily education, computer science, health/medicine, psychology, communications, and business. Authors cited in dissertations represent a somewhat less parochial list in terms of citing U.S. publications than authors cited in studies analyzing journal citations; over half of all works cited were published within the last 10 years.     

The influence of missing publications on the Hirsch index

We show that usually the influence on the Hirsch index of missing highly cited articles is much smaller than the number of missing articles. This statement is shown by a combinatorial argument. We further show, by using a continuous power law model, that the influence of missing articles is largest when the total number of publications is small, and non-existing when the number of publications is very large. The same conclusion can be drawn for missing citations. Hence, the h-index is resilient to missing articles and to missing citations.     

《国际图联杂志》述评

《国际图联杂志》述评胡雅君，叶蓓蓓，赵丽莘Ａｂｓｔｒａｃｔ：ＡＳｔａｔｉｓｔｉｃａｌａｎａｌｙｓｉｓｉｓｍａｄｅｆｏｒ３６２ａｒｔｉｃｌｅｓｐｕｂｉｓｈｅｄｉｎｔｈｅＪｏｕｒａｎａｌｆｒｏｍ１９８３ｔｏ１９９３．２０６７ｃｉｔａｔｉｏｎｓａｎｄｔｈｅ...     

Data credit distribution: A new method to estimate databases impact

It is widely accepted that data is fundamental for research and should therefore be cited as textual scientific publications. However, issues like data citation, handling and counting the credit generated by such citations, remain open research questions.Data credit is a new measure of value built on top of data citation, which enables us to annotate data with a value, representing its importance. Data credit can be considered as a new tool that, together with traditional citations, helps to recognize the value of data and its creators in a world that is ever more depending on data.In this paper we define data credit distribution (DCD) as a process by which credit generated by citations is given to the single elements of a database. We focus on a scenario where a paper cites data from a database obtained by issuing a query. The citation generates credit which is then divided among the database entities responsible for generating the query output. One key aspect of our work is to credit not only the explicitly cited entities, but even those that contribute to their existence, but which are not accounted in the query output.We propose a data credit distribution strategy (CDS) based on data provenance and implement a system that uses the information provided by data citations to distribute the credit in a relational database accordingly.As use case and for evaluation purposes, we adopt the IUPHAR/BPS Guide to Pharmacology (GtoPdb), a curated relational database. We show how credit can be used to highlight areas of the database that are frequently used. Moreover, we also underline how credit rewards data and authors based on their research impact, and not merely on the number of citations. This can lead to designing new bibliometrics for data citations.     

Time-aware PageRank for bibliographic networks

In the past, recursive algorithms, such as PageRank originally conceived for the Web, have been successfully used to rank nodes in the citation networks of papers, authors, or journals. They have proved to determine prestige and not popularity, unlike citation counts. However, bibliographic networks, in contrast to the Web, have some specific features that enable the assigning of different weights to citations, thus adding more information to the process of finding prominence. For example, a citation between two authors may be weighed according to whether and when those two authors collaborated with each other, which is information that can be found in the co-authorship network. In this study, we define a couple of PageRank modifications that weigh citations between authors differently based on the information from the co-authorship graph. In addition, we put emphasis on the time of publications and citations. We test our algorithms on the Web of Science data of computer science journal articles and determine the most prominent computer scientists in the 10-year period of 1996–2005. Besides a correlation analysis, we also compare our rankings to the lists of ACM A. M. Turing Award and ACM SIGMOD E. F. Codd Innovations Award winners and find the new time-aware methods to outperform standard PageRank and its time-unaware weighted variants.     

Librarianship and Information Science in Islamic East Africa 1966–1999: An Annotated Bibliography

This work is an annotated bibliography that consists of articles, books, conference papers, dissertations, and reports, etc. published in various library and information science forums on the subject of librarianship in Islamic East Africa. The goal of preparing this work is to provide a list of citations with abstracts that librarians, library students, and library scholars can use to perform research within this subject area and further the body of knowledge. The research methodology that was used to find these citations involved searching the database versions of ERIC, Dissertations Abstracts Online, and Library Literature within the online public access catalog of the Auburn University library system. It also involved searching the online databases of Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA), British Education Index, and Education Abstracts within the DIALOG database as well as the respective print copies of these resources. While this work is by no means an exhaustive analysis of the entire East African library literature, it does strive to be comprehensive in terms of its country-by-country breakdown of librarianship within the region. Islamic East Africa for the purposes of this work incorporates the nations of Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, and Tanzania. In providing a citation for a non-English language work, the English equivalent of the title of that work will be given next to the non-English title.     

How does duplicate tweeting boost social media exposure to scholarly articles?

Duplicate tweeting is a kind of behavior that a user posts the same or substantially similar original tweets to one or several topics multiple times in a row, which is commonly used to boost social media exposure to online information. However, how this behavior boosts social media exposure to online information, especially to scientific publications, is still unclear. In this study, we use the number of retweets an article received as a proxy for social media exposure to the article. Based on the duplicate tweeting records of 12,263 users on Twitter from 2011 to 2017, we find that social media exposure to scholarly articles has a significant marginal effect as the number of duplicate tweeting (k) increases. It ramps up a peak value when k is between 2 and 4 and goes down when k takes a greater value. We also find that a longer posting interval can sharply reduce social media exposure to scholarly articles, and posting non-duplicate content can significantly improve the exposure. Our findings not only help scientists and journal publishers effectively improve the social impact of their research outputs but also advance the understanding of the diffusion processes of scholarly articles.     

Author-team diversity and the impact of scientific publications: Evidence from physics research at a national science lab

In the second half of the 20th century, scientific research in physics, chemistry, and engineering began to focus on the use of large government-funded laboratories. This shift toward so-called big science also brought about a concomitant change in scientific work itself, with a sustained trend toward the use of highly specialized scientific teams, elevating the role of team characteristics on scientific outputs. The actual impact of scientific knowledge is commonly measured by how often peer-reviewed publications are, in turn, cited by other researchers. Therefore, how characteristics such as author team seniority, affiliation diversity, and size affect the overall impact of team publications was examined. Citation information and author demographics were reviewed for 123 articles published in Physical Review Letters from 2004 to 2006 and written by 476 scientists who used the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory's facilities. Correlation analysis indicated that author teams that were more multi-institutional and had homogeneous seniority tended to have more senior scientists. In addition, the analysis suggests that more mixed seniority author teams were likely to be less institutionally dispersed. Quantile regression was used to examine the relationships between author-team characteristics and publication impact. The analysis indicated that both weighted average seniority and average seniority had a negative relationship with the number of citations the publication received. Furthermore, the analysis also showed a positive relationship between first-author seniority and the number of citations, and a negative relationship between the number of authors and the number of citations.     

Contributing factors to long‐term citation count in marine and freshwater biology articles

Researchers have investigated factors thought to affect the total number of citations in various academic disciplines, and some general trends have emerged. However, there are still limited data for many fields, including aquatic sciences. Using papers published in 2003–2005 (n = 785), we investigated marine and freshwater biology articles to identify factors that may contribute to the probability of citation and for cumulative citation counts over 10 years. We found no relationships with probability of citation; however, we found evidence that for those that were cited at least once, cumulative citations were related to several factors. Articles cited by books received more citations than those never cited by books, which we hypothesized to be indicative of the impact an article may have in the field. We also found that articles first cited within 2 years of publication received more cumulative citations than those first cited after 2 years. We found no evidence that self‐citation (as the first citation) had a significant effect on total citations. Our findings were compared with previous studies in other disciplines, and it was found that aquatic science citation patterns are comparable to fields in science and technology but less so to humanities and social sciences.     

Characteristics of the Literature Used by Arab Authors in Library and Information Science: a Bibliometric Study

This paper attempts to shed some light on the scientific communication behavior of Arab authors in library and information science by studying the characteristics of the literature used by these authors. A bibliometric study by way of citation analysis was conducted on the articles published from 1978 to 1988 in Maktabat Al-Idarah, an elite Arab scholarly journal in the field. It was concluded from this study that English literature is the main source of information for Arab authors in library and information science. They rely on English literature that is between 5 and 15 years of age more than on their own literature and use books more than any other form of publication. They cover almost all areas of the field with special emphasis on technical services as represented by cataloging, classification and aquisition, library administration and library education. Local materials published in their own country were also important.     

The Web impact of open access social science research

For a long time, Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) journal citations have been widely used for research performance monitoring of the sciences. For the social sciences, however, the Social Sciences Citation Index® (SSCI®) can sometimes be insufficient. Broader types of publications (e.g., books and non-ISI journals) and informal scholarly indicators may also be needed. This article investigates whether the Web can help to fill this gap. The authors analyzed 1530 citations from Google™ to 492 research articles from 44 open access social science journals. The articles were published in 2001 in the fields of education, psychology, sociology, and economics. About 19% of the Web citations represented formal impact equivalent to journal citations, and 11% were more informal indicators of impact. The average was about 3 formal and 2 informal impact citations per article. Although the proportions of formal and informal online impact were similar in sociology, psychology, and education, economics showed six times more formal impact than informal impact. The results suggest that new types of citation information and informal scholarly indictors could be extracted from the Web for the social sciences. Since these form only a small proportion of the Web citations, however, Web citation counts should first be processed to remove irrelevant citations. This can be a time-consuming process unless automated.     

2005—2009《数字图书馆论坛》载文统计与分析

章对2005年至2009年《数字图书馆论坛》中的载文、关键词、作者、引文、基金文章等指标进行了统计分析,根据数据统计出的结果揭示了《数字图书馆论坛》创刊五年来的发展趋势。