A generic lexical URL segmentation framework for counting links,colinks or URLs

Large sets of Web page links, colinks, or URLs sometimes need to be counted or otherwise summarized by researchers to analyze Web growth or publishing. Computing professionals also use them to evaluate Web sites or optimize search engines. Despite the apparently simple nature of these types of data, many different summarization methods have been used in the past. Some of these methods may not have been optimal. This article proposes a generic lexical framework to unify and extend existing methods through abstract notions of link lists and URL lists. The approach is built upon decomposing URLs by lexical segments, such as domain names, and systematically characterizing the counting options available. In addition, counting method choice recommendations are inferred from a very general set of theoretical research assumptions. The article also offers practical advice for analyzing raw data from search engines.     

Is research with qualitative data more prevalent and impactful now? Interviews,case studies,focus groups and ethnographies

With qualitative research apparently threatened by big data, researchers, editors, educators, librarians, and publishers need to understand the mix of research methods used in their field to guide decision making. In response, this study assesses the prevalence and citation impact of academic research between 1996 and 2019 that reports one of four common methods to gather qualitative data: interviews, focus groups, case studies, and ethnography. With minor exceptions, the prevalence of qualitative data has increased, often substantially, since 1996. In addition, all 27 broad fields (as classified by Scopus) now publish some qualitative research, with interviewing being by far the most common approach. The citation impact of interview and focus group research mostly decreased over time, whereas of case study citation impact increased, and ethnography was above average in its two core subject areas. This suggests that methods teachers, researchers, editors, librarians, and publishers should be increasingly open to the value of qualitative data.     

Finding and tracking subjects within an ongoing debate

This paper describes a new algorithm for finding and tracking different subjects within an ongoing debate. The algorithm finds blocks of co-occurring terms, representing subjects, including blocks for which the term co-occurrence pattern forms a ring topology. We used short online debate forum data and longer summary bulletins to assess the extent to which the algorithm could correctly detect subjects, according to the judgements of human evaluators. The results show that it could normally detect subject-shifting and track different subjects over time in online debate forums and with adjustments could find subjects in bulletins, but could not track the subjects in the bulletins because the interlinking between subjects was too dense in the longer documents.     

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.     

Do females create higher impact research? Scopus citations and Mendeley readers for articles from five countries

There are known gender imbalances in participation in scientific fields, from female dominance of nursing to male dominance of mathematics. It is not clear whether there is also a citation imbalance, with some claiming that male-authored research tends to be more cited. No previous study has assessed gender differences in the readers of academic research on a large scale, however. In response, this article assesses whether there are gender differences in the average citations and/or Mendeley readers of academic publications. Field normalised logged Scopus citations and Mendeley readers from mid-2018 for articles published in 2014 were investigated for articles with first authors from India, Spain, Turkey, the UK and the USA in up to 251 fields with at least 50 male and female authors. Although female-authored research is less cited in Turkey (?4.0%) and India (?3.6%), it is marginally more cited in Spain (0.4%), the UK (0.4%), and the USA (0.2%). Female-authored research has fewer Mendeley readers in India (?1.1%) but more in Spain (1.4%), Turkey (1.1%), the UK (2.7%) and the USA (3.0%). Thus, whilst there may be little practical gender difference in citation impact in countries with mature science systems, the higher female readership impact suggests a wider audience for female-authored research. The results also show that the conclusions from a gender analysis depend on the field normalisation method. A theoretically informed decision must therefore be made about which normalisation to use. The results also suggest that arithmetic mean-based field normalisation is favourable to males.