Citation Performance Research Articles

Factors affecting scholarly performance by wildlife and fisheries faculty

Publication- and citation-based metrics are commonly used to summarize the productivity and impact of individuals, institutions, and journals. We examined factors hypothesized to explain variation in 5 author-based performance metrics among 437 fisheries and wildlife faculty from 33 research-extensive universities in the United States. Regression analyses revealed that the elapsed number of years since conferral of the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree (academic age) was a strong predictor of performance metrics, with non-linear age effects for Hirsch's h-index, Brown's hb-index, the annual rate of increase in h (i.e., m quotient), and number of publications. Greater performance was observed for faculty with greater research appointments. Performance did not vary between Wildlife and Fisheries disciplines but did vary across sub-disciplines; metrics indicated that genetics and disease-related sub-disciplines had the greatest positive effect sizes, social sciences and management-oriented sub-disciplines had the smallest effects, and ecology, conservation, quantitative methods, and aquatic science showed intermediate effect sizes. On average, male faculty published more articles than females, but no sex differences were evident for the other 4 performance metrics. Earlier publication relative to attainment of the Ph.D. degree (publication precocity) was associated with performance for all metrics. Regression models explained 28–54% of the deviance and may prove useful in placing reported values for performance in context of performance by peers. As an alternative point of reference, named (i.e., distinguished) faculty on average exhibited performance 31–96% greater than the performance predicted for otherwise comparable faculty. Our regression models allow for more meaningful comparison of publication and citation performance relative to peers, but they represent only one aspect of faculty performance and should not replace qualitative peer review of productivity and impact. © 2016 The Wildlife Society.

The continuing transformation of Acta Crystallographica Section E and the launch of IUCrData.

The continuing transformation of Acta Crystallographica Section E and the launch of IUCrData.

Selected Quantitative Studies of Patents in Standards

After an introduction into the principle data and methodology, this study starts by providing a quantitative overview of the general features of standard essential patents (also called SEPs). It considers the occurrence of essential patents, how their existence has developed over time, and how essential patents are distributed among SSOs, technology areas, standards, and owners (including their business models). It also considers the legal status of such patents, for example whether they are actually enforceable. The study continues with an analysis on how SEPs differ from ‘regular’ patents. To make a fair comparison, a matched control set of patents was developed. We consider and compare the citation performance, the family size, and the patent grant likelihood. The final four chapters of the study focus on a set of specific topics: (1) ‘blanket disclosures’, (2) essential patent transfer, (3) patent pools, and (4) and litigation.

The Effect of Public Funding on Research Output: The New Zealand Marsden Fund

We estimate the impact of participating in the NZ Marsden Fund on research output trajectories, by comparing the subsequent performance of funded researchers to those who submitted proposals but were not funded. We control for selection bias using the evaluations of the proposals generated by the grant selection process. We carry out the analysis in two data frames. First we consider the researcher teams behind 1263 second-round proposals submitted 2003-2008, and look at the post-proposal publication and citation performance of the team as a whole, as a function of pre-proposal performance, the ranking of the proposal by the panel, and the funding. This estimation does not deal with individual researchers’ multiple proposals and funding over time. To disentangle these effects, we consider the 1500 New Zealand researchers who appeared on any of these proposals, and estimate a model predicting annual individual performance as a function of previous performance, recent proposal activity, ranking of any recent proposals, and funding received through recent proposals. Overall, we find that funding is associated with a 6-15% increase in publications and a 22-26% increase in citation-weighted papers for research teams. For individuals, funding is associated with a 3-5% increase in annual publications, and a 5-8% increase in citation-weighted papers for 5 years after grant; however, the lag structure and persistence of this effect post-grant is difficult to pin down. Surprisingly, we find no systematic evidence that the evaluation of proposals by the Marsden system is predictive of subsequent success. We conclude that the Marsden Fund is modestly successful in increasing scientific performance, but that the selection process does not appear to be effective in discriminating among second-round proposals in terms of their likely success.

A bibliometric analysis of the Journal of Membrane Science (1976-2010)

Purpose – This study aims to examine publication characteristics and development of a science journal Journal of Membrane Science (JMS) with 35 years ' history by bibliometric indicators. Design/methodology/approach – A bibliometric approach was used to identify its document types, impact factor, publication outputs, most cited articles and large contributing countries/territories and institutions. The main indicators included impact factor, CPP (citations per publication), TC2010 (number of citations from one paper’s publication to the end of 2010), C2010 (number of citations in the year of 2010), number of total articles, “single country articles” and “single institution articles”, “internationally collaborative articles” and “inter-institutionally collaborative articles”, “first author articles” and “corresponding author articles”. The annual citations of most cited articles were displayed in a table list. Findings – The two-year citation window used by impact factor is not fair for a journal which had its peak annual citations in the third or more years. JMS would get a better citation performance if impact factor can be calculated for three or four years. Impact factor is affected by the size of its subject categories. JMS showed higher impact factor rankings in both chemical engineering and polymer science category in the early twenty-first century. Furthermore, the G8 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK and the USA) contributed more than a half of the total, with higher CPP. National University of Singapore, University of Twente and Chinese Academy of Sciences were the main contributing institutions. The citation life cycles revealed the impact history of most cited articles. Originality/value – A bibliometric analysis has been carried out to analyze the characteristics of a journal with 35 years ' history. Some improved indicators including TC2010, C2010, TP, SP, CP, FP and RP have been used for the evaluation. This study provides an evidence from JMS to discuss the feasibility and limitations of impact factor.

Editorial 31(2)

In this editorial we reveal updated bibliometric data providing a snapshot of information about the current citation performance of the journal and about the articles attracting the most interest over the past year.

How does the entrepreneurial orientation of scientists affect their scientific performance? Evidence from the quadrant model

In order to identify the effect of academic entrepreneurship on science, this work compares the publication performance of entrepreneurial scientists with that of conventional scientists. Using Stokes's ‘quadrant model’, this paper examines how the entrepreneurial orientation affects scientific performance. The results on advanced materials research in Japan found that (i) entrepreneurial scientists publish more papers than conventional scientists do; (ii) the papers of conventional scientists demonstrate better citation performance than those of entrepreneurial scientists do, on average; (iii) coming to the top-cited papers, entrepreneurial scientists show higher propensity for publishing high-impact papers than conventional scientists do; and (iv) the portfolio interdisciplinarity of papers authored by entrepreneurial scientists is higher than that of conventional scientists. Although the influence of academic entrepreneurship on scientific performance is still unclear, our findings suggest that entrepreneurial scientists could make a relatively large contribution to furthering the scientific frontier by relying on innovation rather than convention.

A Falsification of the Citation Impediment in the Taxonomic Literature.

Current science evaluation still relies on citation performance, despite criticisms of purely bibliometric research assessments. Biological taxonomy suffers from a drain of knowledge and manpower, with poor citation performance commonly held as one reason for this impediment. But is there really such a citation impediment in taxonomy? We compared the citation numbers of 306 taxonomic and 2291 non-taxonomic research articles (2009–2012) on mosses, orchids, ciliates, ants, and snakes, using Web of Science (WoS) and correcting for journal visibility. For three of the five taxa, significant differences were absent in citation numbers between taxonomic and non-taxonomic papers. This was also true for all taxa combined, although taxonomic papers received more citations than non-taxonomic ones. Our results show that, contrary to common belief, taxonomic contributions do not generally reduce a journal's citation performance and might even increase it. The scope of many journals rarely featuring taxonomy would allow editors to encourage a larger number of taxonomic submissions. Moreover, between 1993 and 2012, taxonomic publications accumulated faster than those from all biological fields. However, less than half of the taxonomic studies were published in journals in WoS. Thus, editors of highly visible journals inviting taxonomic contributions could benefit from taxonomy's strong momentum. The taxonomic output could increase even more than at its current growth rate if: (i) taxonomists currently publishing on other topics returned to taxonomy and (ii) non-taxonomists identifying the need for taxonomic acts started publishing these, possibly in collaboration with taxonomists. Finally, considering the high number of taxonomic papers attracted by the journal Zootaxa, we expect that the taxonomic community would indeed use increased chances of publishing in WoS indexed journals. We conclude that taxonomy's standing in the present citation-focused scientific landscape could easily improve—if the community becomes aware that there is no citation impediment in taxonomy.

The relationship between manuscript title structure and success: editorial decisions and citation performance for an ecological journal.

A poorly chosen article title may make a paper difficult to discover or discourage readership when discovered, reducing an article's impact. Yet, it is unclear how the structure of a manuscript's title influences readership and impact. We used manuscript tracking data for all manuscripts submitted to the journal Functional Ecology from 2004 to 2013 and citation data for papers published in this journal from 1987 to 2011 to examine how title features changed and whether a manuscript's title structure was predictive of success during the manuscript review process and/or impact (citation) after publication. Titles of manuscripts submitted to Functional Ecology became marginally longer (after controlling for other variables), broader in focus (less frequent inclusion of genus and species names), and included more humor and subtitles over the period of the study. Papers with subtitles were less likely to be rejected by editors both pre- and post-peer review, although both effects were small and the presence of subtitles in published papers was not predictive of citations. Papers with specific names of study organisms in their titles fared poorly during editorial (but not peer) review and, if published, were less well cited than papers whose titles did not include specific names. Papers with intermediate length titles were more successful during editorial review, although the effect was small and title word count was not predictive of citations. No features of titles were predictive of reviewer willingness to review papers or the length of time a paper was in peer review. We conclude that titles have changed in structure over time, but features of title structure have only small or no relationship with success during editorial review and post-publication impact. The title feature that was most predictive of manuscript success: papers whose titles emphasize broader conceptual or comparative issues fare better both pre- and post-publication than do papers with organism-specific titles.

Publication performance and research output of Neurology and Neurosurgery training institutes in India: A 5-year analysis.

Scientific publications are a reflection of the quality of the clinical and academic work being carried out in an institute. Training in the process of research and scientific writing are important components of the residency curriculum. The publication performance and research output of institutes training residents in neurology and neurosurgery were evaluated. Internet-based study. This study was based on the data available on the websites of the Medical Council of India and the National Board of Examinations. The PubMed search interface was used to determine the publication output of institutes over the past 5 years (2010-2014). Google Scholar was used to determine the citation performance of each paper. The publication parameters were normalized to the number of faculty members in each institute as listed on the institutional web page. The normalized publication performance for an institute was computed by comparing the figures for that institute with the national average. Institutes could be ranked on several criteria. There was a high degree of clustering of output from the top 5% of the institutes. About 13% of the neurology intake and 30.9% of neurosurgery intake over the past 5 years has been into the institutes that have not published a single paper during this period. This evaluation of the publication performance and research output of neurology and neurosurgery training institutes would serve as a baseline data for future evaluations and comparisons. The absence of any publication and research output from several training institutes is a matter of concern.

The scientific impact of nations: journal placement and citation performance.

International collaboration is becoming increasingly important for the advancement of science. To gain a more precise understanding of how factors such as international collaboration influence publication success, we divide publication success into two categories: journal placement and citation performance. Analyzing all papers published between 1996 and 2012 in eight disciplines, we find that those with more countries in their affiliations performed better in both categories. Furthermore, specific countries vary in their effects both individually and in combination. Finally, we look at the relationship between national output (in papers published) and input (in citations received) over the 17 years, expanding upon prior depictions by also plotting an expected proportion of citations based on Journal Placement. Discrepancies between this expectation and the realized proportion of citations illuminate trends in performance, such as the decline of the Global North in response to rapidly developing countries, especially China. Yet, most countries' show little to no discrepancy, meaning that, in most cases, citation proportion can be predicted by Journal Placement alone. This reveals an extreme asymmetry between the opinions of a few reviewers and the degree to which paper acceptance and citation rates influence career advancement.

Analysing robustness and uncertainty levels of bibliometric performance statistics supporting science policy. A case study evaluating Danish postdoctoral funding

We present main results from the bibliometric part of a recent evaluation of two different postdoctoral (postdoc)-funding instruments used in Denmark. We scrutinize the results for robustness, stability, and importance, and eventually come out questioning the official conclusions inferred from these results. Acknowledging the deficiencies of non-randomized designs and modelling of such data, we apply matching procedures to establish comparable groups and reduce systematic bias. In the absence of probability sampling, we refrain from using statistical inference. We demonstrate the usefulness of robustness analyses and effect size estimation in non-random, but carefully designed, descriptive studies. We examine whether there is a difference in long-term citation performance between groups of researchers funded by the two instruments and between the postdocs and a control group of researchers that has not received postdoc funding, but are otherwise comparable with the postdoc groups. The results show that all three groups perform well above the database average impact. We conclude that there is no difference in citation performance between the two postdoc groups. There is, however, a difference between the postdoc groups and the control group, but we argue that this difference is ‘trivial’. Our conclusion is different from the official conclusion given in the evaluation rapport, where the Research Council emphasizes the success of their funding programmes and neglects to mention the good performance of the basically tenure-tracked control group.

Do the best scholars attract the highest speaking fees? An exploration of internal and external influence

This study investigates whether academics can capitalize on their external prominence (measured by the number of pages indexed on Google, TED talk invitations or New York Times bestselling book successes) and internal success within academia (measured by publication and citation performance) in the speakers' market. The results indicate that the larger the number of web pages indexing a particular scholar, the higher the minimum speaking fee. Invitations to speak at a TED event, or making the New York Times Best Seller list is also positively correlated with speaking fees. Scholars with a stronger internal impact or success also achieve higher speaking fees. However, once external impact is controlled, most metrics used to measure internal impact are no longer statistically significant.

A regression analysis of researchers’ social network metrics on their citation performance in a college of engineering

Abstract Previous research shows that researchers’ social network metrics obtained from a collaborative output network (e.g., joint publications or co-authorship network) impact their performance determined by g-index. We use a richer dataset to show that a scholar's performance should be considered with respect to position in multiple networks. Previous research using only the network of researchers’ joint publications shows that a researcher's distinct connections to other researchers, a researcher's number of repeated collaborative outputs, and a researchers’ redundant connections to a group of researchers who are themselves well-connected has a positive impact on the researchers’ performance, while a researcher's tendency to connect with other researchers who are themselves well-connected (i.e., eigenvector centrality) had a negative impact on the researchers’ performance. Our findings are similar except that we find that eigenvector centrality has a positive impact on the performance of scholars. Moreover, our results demonstrate that a researcher's tendency toward dense local neighborhoods and the researchers’ demographic attributes such as gender should also be considered when investigating the impact of the social network metrics on the performance of researchers.

Empirical study of L-Sequence: The basic h-index sequence for cumulative publications with consideration of the yearly citation performance

Most current h-type indicators use only a single number to measure a scientist's productivity and impact of his/her published works. Although a single number is simple to calculate, it fails to outline his/her academic performance varying with time. We empirically study the basic h-index sequence for cumulative publications with consideration of the yearly citation performance (for convenience, referred as L-Sequence). L-Sequence consists of a series of L factors. Based on the citations received in the corresponding individual year, every factor along a scientist's career span is calculated by using the h index formula. Thus L-Sequence shows the scientist's dynamic research trajectory and provides insight into his/her scientific performance at different periods. Furthermore, L∝, summing up all factors of L-Sequence, is for the evaluation of the whole research career as alternative to other h-index variants. Importantly, the partial factors of the L-Sequence can be adapted for different evaluation tasks. Moreover, L-Sequence could be used to highlight outstanding scientists in a specific period whose research interests can be used to study the history and trends of a specific discipline.

How Should Journal Quality be Ranked?An Application to Agricultural, Energy, Environmental and Resource Economics

The Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science citations database (hereafter ISI) category of Economics has one of the largest numbers of journals, at 304 (as of 2011) and 333 (as of 2013), of any ISI discipline, and hence has wide coverage. The paper analyses the leading international journals in the Economics sub-disciplines of Agricultural, Energy, Environmental and Resource Economics using quantifiable Research Assessment Measures (RAMs),and highlights the similarities and differences in alternative RAMs.The RAMs are based on alternative transformations of citations and influence taken from the ISI database. Alternative RAMs may be calculated annually or updated daily to answer the perennial questions as to When, Where and How (frequently) published papers are cited. The RAMs include the most widely used RAM, namely the classic 2-year impact factor including journal self citations (2YIF), 2-year impact factor excluding journal self citations (2YIF*), 5-year impact factor including journal self citations (5YIF), Immediacy (or zero-year impact factor (0YIF)), Eigenfactor, Article Influence, C3PO (Citation Performance Per Paper Online), h-index, PI-BETA (Papers Ignored - By Even The Authors), 2-year Self-citation Threshold Approval Ratings (2Y-STAR),HistoricalSelf-citation Threshold Approval Ratings (H-STAR), Impact Factor Inflation (IFI), and Cited Article Influence (CAI). As data are not available for 5YIF, Article Influence and CAI for one of the 20 journals considered, 13 RAMsare analysed for 19 highly-cited journals in Agricultural, Energy, Environmental and Resource Economics in the ISI category of Economics. The harmonic mean of the ranksof the 13 RAMs for the 19 highly-cited journals are also presented. It is shown that emphasizing the 2-year impact factor of a journal, which partly answers the question as to When published papers are cited, to the exclusion of other informative RAMs, which answer Where and How (frequently) published papers are cited, can lead to a distorted evaluation of journal impact and influence relative to the harmonic mean of the ranks. The 'age' effect of journals, that is, the number of years for which the journals have been included in ISI, on the RAMs is also examined to check whether the RAMs are being compared fairly.

Impact beyond the impact factor

The journal impact factor is an annually calculated number for each scientific journal, based on the average number of times its articles published in the two preceding years have been cited. It was originally devised as a tool for librarians and publishers to provide information about the citation performance of a journal as a whole, but over the last few decades it has increasingly been used to assess the quality of specific articles and the research performance of individual investigators, institutions, and countries. In addition to this clear abuse of the journal impact factor, several conceptual and technical issues limit its usability as a measure of journal reputation, especially when journals are compared across different fields. An author's decision regarding the suitability of a scholarly journal for publication should, therefore, be based on the impact that this journal makes in the field of research, rather than on the journal impact factor.

A bibliometric analysis of publications by the School of Biological Sciences, Seoul National University, South Korea

This study presents an in-depth survey of research and citation performance of the School of Biological Sciences (SBS) 39-member faculty at Seoul National University (SNU), the most prestigious university in South Korea, for the years 2004---2009. Thirty-nine faculty members published a total of 640 publications during the period, representing an average of 16.4 publications per scientist. Among the 640 publications, 521 (81.4 %) were cited 9,204 times, an average of 14.4 citations per publication. More publications co-authored by the SBS faculty with foreign researchers (mostly from the U.S.A.) were published in mainstream journals than publications by three other co-authorship types. Accordingly, publications by international co-authorships received more citations compared to citation levels of three other co-authorship types in terms of the average citations per publication. The study has found a concentration effect, whereby quite a small number of publications received approximately one-third of the citation performance generated by the SBS faculty at SNU. The results demonstrate that the citation performance of the SBS at SNU can be influenced considerably by the presence and productivity of `star' scientists.

WHAT DO EXPERTS KNOW ABOUT FORECASTING JOURNAL QUALITY? A COMPARISON WITH ISI RESEARCH IMPACT IN FINANCE

Experts possess knowledge and information that are not publicly available. The paper is concerned with forecasting academic journal quality and research impact using a survey of international experts from a national project on ranking academic finance journals in Taiwan. A comparison is made with publicly available bibliometric data, namely the Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science citations database (hereafter ISI) for the Business–Finance (hereafter Finance) category. The paper analyses the leading international journals in Finance using expert scores and quantifiable Research Assessment Measures (RAMs), and highlights the similarities and differences in the expert scores and alternative RAMs, where the RAMs are based on alternative transformations of citations taken from the ISI database. Alternative RAMs may be calculated annually or updated daily to answer the perennial questions as to When, Where and How (frequently) published papers are cited (see Chang et al., 2011a,b,c). The RAMs include the most widely used RAM, namely the classic 2-year impact factor including journal self citations (2YIF), 2-year impact factor excluding journal self citations (2YIF*), 5-year impact factor including journal self citations (5YIF), Immediacy (or zero-year impact factor (0YIF)), Eigenfactor, Article Influence, C3PO (Citation Performance per Paper Online), h-index, PI-BETA (Papers Ignored — By even the Authors), 2-year Self-citation Threshold Approval Ratings (2Y-STAR), Historical Self-citation Threshold Approval Ratings (H-STAR), Impact Factor Inflation (IFI), and Cited Article Influence (CAI). As data are not available for 5YIF, Article Influence and CAI for 13 of the leading 34 journals considered, 10 RAMs are analysed for 21 highly-cited journals in Finance. The harmonic mean of the ranks of the 10 RAMs for the 34 highly-cited journals are also presented. It is shown that emphasizing the 2-year impact factor of a journal, which partly answers the question as to When published papers are cited, to the exclusion of other informative RAMs, which answer Where and How (frequently) published papers are cited, can lead to a distorted evaluation of journal impact and influence relative to the Harmonic Mean rankings. A linear regression model is used to forecast expert scores on the basis of RAMs that capture journal impact, journal policy, the number of high quality papers, and quantitative information about a journal. The robustness of the rankings is also analyzed.

Citation Performance of Malaysian Scholarly Journals in the Web of Science, 2006–2010

There are several ways for the international scientific community to recognize the quality of a scholarly journal. Although controversial, the most widely used and reliable methodology to identify the importance of a journal is through the citation it receives. This paper identifies the performance of scholarly journals published by Malaysian publishers in the Web of Science and reports the number of citations to Malaysian journals in terms of the cited and the citing journals. A search using the Thomson-Reuters citation database (Web of Science) was performed to identify highly cited Malaysian journals from 2006 to 2010. We identified 212 cited journals that received 9675 cited-papers, and a total of 9427 articles contributing to the 3184 journals citing Malaysian journals. More than fifty percent of all the articles that cited Malaysian journals were published in journals ranked in the first or second quartile by the Journal Citation Report. Further analysis was done on the top 50 cited and citing journal titles. A steady growth of citations with a total increase of 56.9% was evident between the five year period examined.