Hidden connections: Network effects on editorial decisions in four computer science journals

This paper aims to examine the influence of authors’ reputation on editorial bias in scholarly journals. By looking at eight years of editorial decisions in four computer science journals, including 7179 observations on 2913 submissions, we reconstructed author/referee-submission networks. For each submission, we looked at reviewer scores and estimated the reputation of submission authors by means of their network degree. By training a Bayesian network, we estimated the potential effect of scientist reputation on editorial decisions. Results showed that more reputed authors were less likely to be rejected by editors when they submitted papers receiving negative reviews. Although these four journals were comparable for scope and areas, we found certain journal specificities in their editorial process. Our findings suggest ways to examine the editorial process in relatively similar journals without recurring to in-depth individual data, which are rarely available from scholarly journals.     

Microsoft Academic automatic document searches: Accuracy for journal articles and suitability for citation analysis

Microsoft Academic is a free academic search engine and citation index that is similar to Google Scholar but can be automatically queried. Its data is potentially useful for bibliometric analysis if it is possible to search effectively for individual journal articles. This article compares different methods to find journal articles in its index by searching for a combination of title, authors, publication year and journal name and uses the results for the widest published correlation analysis of Microsoft Academic citation counts for journal articles so far. Based on 126,312 articles from 323 Scopus subfields in 2012, the optimal strategy to find articles with DOIs is to search for them by title and filter out those with incorrect DOIs. This finds 90% of journal articles. For articles without DOIs, the optimal strategy is to search for them by title and then filter out matches with dissimilar metadata. This finds 89% of journal articles, with an additional 1% incorrect matches. The remaining articles seem to be mainly not indexed by Microsoft Academic or indexed with a different language version of their title. From the matches, Scopus citation counts and Microsoft Academic counts have an average Spearman correlation of 0.95, with the lowest for any single field being 0.63. Thus, Microsoft Academic citation counts are almost universally equivalent to Scopus citation counts for articles that are not recent but there are national biases in the results.     

Can Microsoft Academic assess the early citation impact of in-press articles? A multi-discipline exploratory analysis

Many journals post accepted articles online before they are formally published in an issue. Early citation impact evidence for these articles could be helpful for timely research evaluation and to identify potentially important articles that quickly attract many citations. This article investigates whether Microsoft Academic can help with this task. For over 65,000 Scopus in-press articles from 2016 and 2017 across 26 fields, Microsoft Academic found 2–5 times as many citations as Scopus, depending on year and field. From manual checks of 1122 Microsoft Academic citations not found in Scopus, Microsoft Academic’s citation indexing was faster but not much wider than Scopus for journals. It achieved this by associating citations to preprints with their subsequent in-press versions and by extracting citations from in-press articles. In some fields its coverage of scholarly digital libraries, such as arXiv.org, was also an advantage. Thus, Microsoft Academic seems to be a more comprehensive automatic source of citation counts for in-press articles than Scopus.     

Stalking the Micro‐politics of Schools in Pursuit of a Realistic Research Agenda

The last decade has witnessed a period of endemic reform within educational systems and schools. In particular, changes have been implemented that may entail different configurations of decision‐making at the site level with significant reverberations for the workplace environment of the school. This paper suggests that because of the ubiquity of reform, rich opportunities have been provided for researching educational change. Nevertheless, in order to develop a holistic understanding of the effect of change in schools a perspective is required that takes Into account the socio‐political and cultural context of an organisation. For this purpose, the micro‐political perspective may be able to convey a more realistic depiction organisational behaviour than conventional theory has been able to offer. Therefore, this paper elucidates the major ideas of some prominent micro‐political theorists and makes recommendations for future research into aspects of life in schools. It is hoped that the paper may contribute to a revival of the micro‐political perspective in conducting educational research.