bibliometrics
cpikas | June 5, 2010 Kevin Zelnio of Deep Sea News tweeted the title of this piece and sent my mind going over the various theories of citation, what citations mean, studies showing how people cite without reading (pdf) (or at least propagate obvious citation errors), and also how people use things but don't cite them in certain fields... I was also thinking, I know what inappropriate touching is, but what's inappropriate citing? So let's take a look at the article:
Todd, P., Guest, J., Lu, J., & Chou, L. (2010). One in four citations in marine biology papers is inappropriate Marine Ecology Progress Series…
cpikas | April 25, 2010 Mixed methods are always attractive, but many researchers give up because each method typically requires some epistemology which often conflicts with the epistemology of other methods. When mixed methods are done, they are often done in sequence. For example, qualitative work to understand enough about a phenomenon to develop a survey or interviewing survey respondents to get richer information about their responses. Network methods are neither quantitative* nor qualitative and it's not typical to combine them with qualitative methods - hence my interest in this piece. Of course I'm also…
cpikas | February 21, 2010I ran across this piece again just now after having read it when it first came out in 20056:
Foster, I. (2005). Service-Oriented Science. Science, 308(5723), 814-817. doi:10.1126/science.1110411
It's a good piece and quite helpful. Google Scholar says it's been cited 209 times, so that's not terribly surprising. But here are some things that are at least mildly surprising.
The widget that uses the Web of Science api to provide number of citations directly on the HTML page for the article shows that the piece has been cited 23 times. When you click through that to Web of Science - if your…
cpikas | January 9, 2010In most of the discussions of using usage as a metric of scholarly impact, the example of the clinician is given. The example goes that medical articles might be heavily used and indeed have a huge impact on practice (saving lives), but be uncited. There are other fields that have practitioners who pull from the literature, but do not contribute to it.
So it was with interest that I read this new article by the MacRoberts:
MacRoberts, M., & MacRoberts, B. (2009). Problems of citation analysis: A study of uncited and seldom-cited influences Journal of the American Society for…
cpikas | December 17, 2009One of the open problems in article level metrics is how to automate, quantify, and describe the exposure an article has had in popular science pieces in newspapers and general science magazines. Peter Binfield (PLoS) and Alexis-Michel Mugabushaka. (European Research Council) both brought this up at the NSF Workshop I attended yesterday.
I agree that this is needed. The old models of communication in science that either describe scholarly communication among scientists or popular communication with non-scientists are not enough. Lewenstein [1] and Paul [2] (among others) each describe…
cpikas | December 17, 2009stream of consciousness notes from this meeting I attended in DC, Wednesday December 16, 2009
Final panel
Oren Beit-Arie (Ex Libris Group), Todd Carpenter (NISO),Lorcan Dempsey (OCLC),Tony Hey (Microsoft Research),Clifford Lynch (CNI),Don Waters (Andrew W. Mellon foundation)
introduction from Cliff Lynch - gets requests for tenure reviews - he takes these very seriously. Got one that had a whole bibliometric survey of the work - with all of the citing papers, etc., about 40 pages. Things that were intended to provide insight are now used for evaluation.
Could we get access streams/patterns…
cpikas | December 17, 2009Continuing stream of consciousness notes from this workshop held in DC, Wednesday December 16, 2009
Alexis-Michel Mugabushaka. (European Research Council) - intertwined research funding structures at national and European level.
At the national level two main funding modes - institutional (block research funding of higher ed institutions), and competitive.
Orgs structured at European level - like CERN or EMBL. Joint research funding ESF or bi or multilateral. Research Frameworks. ERC
ERC Scientific Council - 22 eminent scientists. Executive Agency (where he works). 2 programs: starting grants…
cpikas | December 17, 2009this continues my stream of consciousness notes from the workshop held in DC, December 16, 2009.
Peter Binfield (PLOS) - article level metrics. Not talking about OA, not talking about journal level. Journal is just packaging, and shouldn't necessarily judge articles by the packaging. PLoS ONE has half a percent to all the publications that appear in PubMed.
Evaluating an article after publication instead of before so article level metrics are of interest. JIF measures the journal and not the article (or the person). Some things that could be used: citations, web usage, expert ratings, social…
cpikas | December 17, 2009Continuing my stream of consciousness notes from this meeting in DC, Wednesday, December 16, 2009.
Jevin D West (U Washington, Eigenfactor) - biology and bibliometrics. biology has a lot of problems that are studied looking at networks. From ecosystems to genomes. They want to take these huge networks and be able to tell stories. The citation network is a model for information flow that they can then use in biology. WoS 8k journals, 15 years, 60M citations. Goals of eigenfactor: develop tools to comprehend large networks in all areas of science - employ these tools to understand scholarly…
cpikas | December 17, 2009I attended this one-day workshop in DC on Wednesday, December 16, 2009. These are stream of consciousness notes.
Herbert Van de Sompel (LANL) - intro - Lots of metrics: some accepted in some areas and not others, some widely available on platforms in the information industry and others not. How are these metrics selected? Why are some more attractive than others?
Two other points: informal science communication on the web - it's being adopted rapidly - scholars immediately reap the benefits. Lots of metrics: views, downloads, "favorites", followers. So our current metrics are impoverished (…