Scholarly Impact Research Articles

From Nkrumah’s Black Star to the African Diaspora: Ghanaian Intellectual Activists and the Development of Black Studies in the Americas

After Kwame Nkrumah’s overthrow in 1966, a group of Ghanaian intellectuals brought their specific version of Pan-Africanism into the United States at precisely the moment when Black studies programs were being formed. Consequently, they shaped the trajectory of the field and linked it to a specifically African intellectual project. These Ghanaian intellectuals sought to inject an Africa-centered sense of what political education and political mobilization meant into the framework of Black studies. At the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Brown University, they worked to make Europe’s ongoing economic exploitation of Africa, the persistence of white supremacist regimes in southern Africa, and the US government’s support of these oppressive forces key parts of the otherwise US-centric curricula of Black studies programs. The role that Ghanaian intellectuals played in the United States helps us illuminate the unexplored intellectual impact of African scholars in the 1970s and 1980s outside of Africa on Black internationalism.

Predicting the Scholarly Impact of Former Ph.D. Candidates Using Personality Scales

The present research operationalized a pluralist conceptualization of scholarly impact in predicting the performance of 329 former Ph.D. candidates, who completed the “Ph.D. personality questionnaire” (PPQ) during their doctoral studies in between 2007 and 2010. The PPQ measures could be matched to scholarly impact data obtained from Elsevier’s SciVal database for 180 participants in 2019. In addition, for 170 participants it could be verified whether they actually completed their doctoral degree. Results of multiple linear regression analyses indicated that impact inside academia as indicated by higher h-indices, the field-weighted citation impact, and percentage of publications in top journals was best predicted by “research drive” – the context-specific enactment of achievement striving. Impact beyond academia, as indicated by academic-corporate collaboration was predicted by networking – the context-specific enactment of extraversion. Lastly, it appeared that both traits acted as “double-edged swords” as they simultaneously related to a lower chance of actually obtaining the doctoral degree in logistic regression analyses on degree status.

Introduction: New Critical Directions in Global South Studies

Abstract This introductory article to the special issue takes stock of the scholarly impact of the last fifteen years of Global South studies scholarship in the field of literary and cultural studies, and comparative literature in particular. It contends that the Global South offers a dynamic framework for comparison of economic, political, and cultural inequalities beyond state-centric forms of analysis, and for this reason, is uniquely germane to the interests of comparative literature. The Global South has become a significant category for the field not in spite of its conceptual indeterminacy, but precisely because the resulting lack of fixity provides an adaptive and multiscalar comparative framework. That is, it offers an opportunity to shift the scale through which we compare, in which North–South or South–South analysis may occur across national lines or from block to block. True to the relational and directional spirit of the concept, the editors understand Global South studies as a series of directions or movements, a confluence of critical currents emerging from a variety of already existing fields. Ultimately, this introduction traces those critical coordinates and points to recent and promising directions in this scholarship as it intersects with comparative literature today.

The scholarly impact of private sector research: A multivariate analysis

• We investigate the scientific impact of Italian private research as compared to public research. • We also delve into the relation between different types of research collaboration and impact of resulting publications. • We examine Italian 2010–2017 publications indexed in WoS. • 70% of publications by the Italian private sector are in collaboration public research institutions. • Industry only publications show a lower impact than that recorded for public only publications. • Public-private joint research leads to publications of greater impact. Literature about the scholarly impact of scientific research offers very few contributions on private sector research, and the comparison with public sector. In this work, we try to fill this gap examining the citation-based impact of Italian 2010–2017 publications distinguishing authorship by the private sector from the public sector. In particular, we investigate the relation between different forms of collaboration and impact: how intra-sector private publications compare to public, and how private-public joint publications compare to intra-sector extramural collaborations. Finally, we assess the different effect of international collaboration on private and public research impact, and whether there occur differences across research fields.

Predictors of academic career placement and scholarly impact in fellowship-trained rhinologists.

As rhinology fellowship positions outpace the availability of academic rhinology jobs, it is increasingly important to identify characteristics that are associated with academic placement after fellowship completion. In this study, we evaluated the association of academic characteristics during training with current job placement and posttraining scholarly impact. Previous rhinology fellows were identified using publicly available data. Bibliometric indices, training institutions, graduate degrees, and job placement data were used in bivariate and multivariable regression analyses to assess for association with predictors and academic trajectory. Data from 265 rhinologists, all graduating between 1991 and 2020, were included. Most surgeons (n=185, 70%) held an academic position and 80 (30%) surgeons worked in a nonacademic setting; 93.2% had a Doctor of Medicine (MD) degree and 80.3% were male. Multivariable logistic regression indicated that a designation of MD, compared with Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (DO; odds ratio [OR], 5.93; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.97-21.9), number of publications during fellowship (OR, 1.19; 95% CI, 1.02-1.41), and h-index during training (OR, 1.25; 95% CI, 1.07-1.49]) were independently predictive of academic job placement. Meanwhile, number of primary authorships during fellowship (β=1.47; 95% CI, 1.07-1.88]), h-index during training (β=0.48; 95% CI, 0.25-0.71), and PhD (β=4.16; 95% CI, 1.57-6.76) were associated with posttraining h-index. Medical school ranking; graduate degrees, including Master of Science (MS), Master of Business Administration (MBA), and Master of Public Health (MPH); and research metrics before residency were not associated with either academic placement or posttraining h-index. The predictors of academic job placement in rhinology are unclear, but h-index during training, and research productivity during fellowship may serve as indicators of an academic career.

Representing Law Faculty Scholarly Impact: Strategies for Improving Citation Metrics Accuracy and Promoting Scholarly Visibility

This article examines the new U.S. News scholarly impact ranking and its use of HeinOnline as a data source. It compares law journal and interdisciplinary scholarship citation metrics and explores how the exclusion of the latter may severely skew scholarly impact rankings against some law schools. The remainder of this article suggests strategies to improve the accuracy of citation metrics for legal scholars and to promote the visibility of their scholarship.

Design data collection tool and weighting classification of authors in their scholar outputs based on percent-contribution-indicated (PCI) method

The advancement of information technology development makes it researchers easier to read papers shortly after they are published online. A paper will be cited, usually within one to two years after the paper is published. The number of citations of a researcher’s papers is currently an indicator of his/her scholarly impact. The measurement widely used is the H-index. The calculation of the impact of the researcher using the H-index method does not calculate the weighted classification of the author’s position on each paper. The main author or co-authors score have the same weighted citation weighted of an article cited. The weighting of the number of citations obtained by the author has begun to get attention by Scientometricians in recent years. This is done to differentiate the value of the impact obtained by the main author and co-author. Since 2015, the Government of Indonesia has awarded a number of awards to Indonesian researchers who have the greatest impact value. Assessment of the impact value of researchers in Indonesia uses the Sinta Index version 1 (SI-1) which is based on the researcher’s H-index value in Scopus, GS, and WoS. Problems arise when a researcher with most of his papers as a co-author gets an award, while another researcher who has a position as the main author does not get the award, even though the number of papers and the number of citations obtained are relatively similar. In 2020, we found that Sinta Index was upgraded, namely Sinta Index version 2 (SI-2). There are some differences between versions 1 and 2. This paper will propose a mechanism for calculating the impact of researchers using the weighting of the investigator’s position based on the percent-contribution-indicated (PCI) method. The data source used was the Scopus database. To get and classified the source data, we developed a tool using API. For the rank of the researcher, we used data from the Sinta Index website. Collection software design created using PHP and Mysql. From the research results, it was found that the correlation test by Pearson’s Method of the H-index values of APW and Scopus is 0,44; APW vs GS (0,39) and GS vs Scopus is 0.95. This means that APW method has a weak correlation with the H-index values of GS and Scopus. APW is independent of the two h-index calculations.

Bibliometric analysis of multiple sclerosis nursing research based on Web of Science.

A bibliometric analysis which are widely used to gauge the scholarly impact of any scientific publication was conducted to give a basic overview of research publications on multiple sclerosis nursing. Publications on multiple sclerosis nursing were retrieved by using a bibliometric method based on the Web of Science database [1900-2018]. A total of 825 papers collected from 49 countries were retrieved in this study. The number of publications on multiple sclerosis nursing has increased steadily since 1999, and the top 12 research institutions publishing articles and nine of the ten most prolific authors were from the United States. Articles were most frequently published in the Journal of Neuroscience Nursing, and the key words of the top 10 highly cited papers changed from quality of life (QOL) and symptoms to terms including social support, psychological problems, rehabilitation treatment, cognitive impairment, and nursing intervention. While nursing practice and neuroscience nursing were the focus of research, other topics included QOL, functional rehabilitation, symptom management, nursing intervention, and support schemes. Research into multiple sclerosis nursing in China is at an early stage. Greater attention to the research focus and results of top institutions and core journals, and a focus on highly cited papers are needed to advance the field.

Introduction to Michelene Chi's Rumelhart Paper.

The Rumelhart Prize was awarded to Professor Michelene (Micki) T. H. Chi in 2019. In honor of that award and its recipient, we are pleased to publish the paper which was inspired by her Rumelhart address at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. In that paper, she asks three core questions: (1) why decades of research have made only minor impacts on classroom teaching and learning, (2) whether this is a problem of diagnoses or application, and (3) what can be done, at this point in history, to close the gap between research findings and classroom implementation. Micki's beginnings as a researcher were contemporaneous with the beginnings of Cognitive Science itself—both began in the early 1970s. Early in her graduate career, she published her first paper, Chi and Chase (1972), “Effects of modality and similarity on context recall” in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. Her 1981 paper, “Categorization and representation of physics problems by experts and novices” (Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser, 1981), has become a citation classic with 2,984 citations to date. Indeed, of her five most cited papers, four have been cited more than 1,000 times each. However, as the past Executive Editor of Topics in Cognitive Science I am pleased that I solicited her fifth most cited paper for the first issue of this journal in January 2009. As this Chi (2009) paper is 12 years younger than any other of her top five, we are pleased that it has been cited 736 times. Indeed, we look forward to having that paper, as well as her newest paper, surpass all of her current top four papers in scholarly impact! Micki's research has focused on different issues across the decades. The 1970s were her period of looking at differences in basic cognitive processes between children and adults. With the 1980s, newer techniques and questions arose which reflected the modern beginnings of cognitive science. In this period, her above-mentioned 1981 paper, published in our sister journal Cognitive Science, captured the zeitgeist of the times and, as of May 2021, has also captured 2,985 citations. A less well cited but an equally good representative of the explosion of new questions and new directions was the Chi and Koeske (1983) paper titled “Network representation of a child's dinosaur knowledge,” which focuses on a single subject—a 4-year old boy, with an encyclopedic knowledge of over 40 different types of dinosaurs. The 1990s began with a shift in Micki's work towards the topic of “self-explanations.” This topic arrived with a roar in her 1989 paper titled “Self-explanations: How students study and use examples in learning to solve problems” (Chi, Bassok, Lewis, Reimann, & Glaser, 1989). A series of papers on self-explanation followed, including seminal work on the role of self-explanation in learning (e.g., Chi, 1997, 2005, 2009, 2011; Chi & VanLehn, 1991; Chi & Wylie, 2014; Chi et al., 2018; Chi, De Leeuw, Chiu, & Lavancher, 1994; Chi, Roscoe, Slotta, Roy, & Chase, 2012; Chi, Siler, Jeong, Yamauchi, & Hausmann, 2001; Chi, Slotta, & De Leeuw, 1994; Hashem, Chi, & Friedman, 2003; VanLehn, Jones, & Chi, 1992). This annotated history of Chi's work brings us more or less to the present. The stream of her life's work, especially in the past 20 years, has shown that theory can be applied to improve teaching and learning. However, knowing what produces results is a very different type of knowledge than is knowing how to get others to understand what they must do to produce results—especially when each class of students, each classroom teacher, and each set of classroom resources differ one from the other. How can the key insights gained by laboratory research and the occasional, classroom implementation of laboratory insights, be brought to bear in the everyday world of primary and secondary school teaching? How can the research be packaged so as to avoid what might seem to be vacuous generalities while enabling classroom elementary and high school teachers to first understand and then harness the insights of cognitive science theory for everyday classroom practice? That is the question which Michelene T. H. Chi addresses in her current work and that is the focus of her Rumelhart Paper published in this invited paper of topiCS.

Are Academics Willing to Forgo Citations to Publish in High‐Status Journals? Examining Preferences for 4* and 4‐Rated Journal Publication Among UK Business and Management Academics

AbstractAcademics often judge themselves and are judged by others according to the status of the journals in which they publish. Little is known about whether individual scholars would choose to publish a paper in a high‐status journal if it would garner similar or lower levels of scholarly impact than a paper published in a lower‐status journal. Drawing upon status theory, we explore whether and how much business school academics are willing to ‘pay’, as captured by a hypothetical level of ‘forfeited’ citations, to publish in high‐status 4* journals rather than leading specialized 4‐rated journals. Using choice‐set design and survey data from UK business and management scholars, we suggest and empirically demonstrate that the willingness to forgo citations to publish in 4* journals is strongest among academics who have already published in 4* and/or 4‐rated journals. Contrary to our expectations, we find that an individual's existing scholarly impact, as captured by prior citations, has no effect on this preference. We also show that academics working in high‐ranked institutions would give up more citations for 4* journal publication than those working at lower‐ranked institutions. We explore the implications of these findings for theories of academic status, journal rankings and research assessment systems.

Potential index: Revealing the future impact of research topics based on current knowledge networks

• The relationship between the impact of a research topic and its knowledge structure is investigated. • Potential index, an immediate indicator based on the current knowledge network structure, is proposed to model the future impact of research topics. • Knowledge novelty and diversity, quantified by the betweenness centrality and network entropy, are considered two major driving fore of topic impact. • The proposed indicator is highly correlated with the topic impact and fits the developing trend well. It serves as a promising predictor for the scholarly impact of research topics. As the volume of scientific publications has been growing at an increasingly rapid speed, it is important to identify prominent research trends for scientists and institutions. While a considerable number of researchers have attempted to map the current state of scientific research, more efforts should be made to reveal potentially influential research topics. In this study, we investigate the relationship between the scientific impact of a research topic and the structure of its knowledge network. A novel indicator, potential index , is proposed to model topic impact based on the structural information. It is an immediate indicator with two components: knowledge novelty and diversity, which are operationalized using the concepts of betweenness centrality and network entropy. The empirical results show that potential index serves as a good predictor of future topic impact, with a high R 2 and positive correlation. Its superiority sustains when used as the input feature of regression models. Moreover, the proposed index achieves better results, and the differences between it and other features become more prominent as the model complexity increases. Quantitative and qualitative analysis on the topic evolution process is also conducted to explain the change in the proposed indicator. This study contributes to the research of scientific impact modeling by establishing an explicit relationship between the impact of topics and the knowledge structure, and is thus helpful in predicting the potential impact of research topics.

Effect of Medical Student Contributions on Academic Productivity: Analysis of Student Authorship Over Time.

IntroductionUnderstanding the trend of student authorship is crucial in determining its correlation to scholarly impact for corresponding authors. Our objective is to investigate student authorship rates over time in articles published in JAMA Internal Medicine (IM), as well as to examine potential effects student authors have on scholarly impact scores of corresponding authors via H-index measures.MethodsAuthorship data including student authors (SA), first student authors, and corresponding authors (CA) from prior JAMA IM publications between 2010 and 2018 were collected, with a total of 701 studies. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and independent sample t-tests were performed to assess for differences in the mean by publishing year and student authorship, respectively.ResultsOf 4591 total authors, 683 (14.9%) were considered student authors. The percentage of student authorship increased from 46.3% to 58.0% between 2010 and 2018, respectively. No difference in average H-indices of CA between SA and non-SA groups (overall NSA Hi mean: 30.2, vs SA Hi mean: 32.1, p=0.371) was noted.DiscussionStudent participation in research is not a disadvantage to scholarly impact for corresponding authors. Increased student authorship reflects a promising trend towards greater student participation in research within the field of medicine.

Toward an understanding of open access trends in business schools: A bibliometric analysis of the open access faculty publications of accounting departments at three universities

This paper examines the outcomes of a bibliometric analysis of open access (OA) and non-open access (non-OA) publications from the accounting departments of the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and Auburn University. The research illustrates the extent of the faculties’ OA and non-OA publications and their relative scholarly impact and metrics from 2013 to 2018. OA articles have continued to increase in volume gradually in all three academic institutions. The findings suggest that professors of accounting are slowly embracing OA articles, and bibliometric data may strengthen strategic initiatives for librarians to assist faculties and university libraries with collective decision-making processes.

Using Alternative Bibliometric Indices to Characterize High-Impact Articles Published in the Field of Facial Plastic Surgery

Background: Conventional measures of scholarly impact derived from citation count do not account for academic readership and do not measure impact on the nonacademic audience (ie, the general population that does not engage in scholarship). To more broadly characterize attention received by research articles, alternative measures have been developed, including Mendeley readership and Altmetric Attention scores. Together, these metrics reflect academic readership and the effects of research in mainstream media. Characterizing articles that score highly according to these alternative measures is of interest to facial plastic surgeons, especially those who aim to disseminate their work to broad audiences. Objectives: To identify characteristics of facial plastic surgery articles associated with increased attention from both academic and nonacademic audiences. Methods: The top 50 most-cited articles with a facial plastics focus published since 2009 were categorized according to various themes. Article attention was assessed using conventional and alternative bibliometric indices. Pearson correlation matrix assessed associations between indices. Rank order congruence between indices was also assessed. MANOVAs assessed the overall effect of article theme on scholarly impact. Multiple one-way ANOVAs assessed effect of theme on individual indices. Results: Citation count, Mendeley readership, and Altmetric mentions all showed significant positive correlation with citations per year ( P < .05, P < .01, P < .01, respectively). Citations/year was most congruent with total citations (50% congruence). Articles focused on “lower face” received significantly more Mendeley readership than those focused on “head and neck” ( P = .009). Articles focused on “cosmetics” had significantly more citations/year ( P = .018) and Altmetric mentions ( P = .015) than those focused on “reconstruction.” Conclusion: The facial plastic research articles that received the most attention from both academic and nonacademic audiences were those focused on cosmetics. Additionally, articles pertaining to the lower face received more academic attention than those pertaining to head and neck.

Analysis of the scientific literature's abstract writing style and citations

PurposeThe citation counts are an important indicator of scholarly impact. The purpose of this paper is to explore the correlation between citations of scientific articles and writing styles of abstracts in papers and capture the characteristics of highly cited papers' abstracts.Design/methodology/approachThis research selected 10,000 highly cited papers and 10,000 zero-cited papers from the WOS (2008-2017) database. The Coh-Metrix 3.0 textual cohesion analysis tool was used to quantify the 108 language features of highly cited and zero-cited paper abstracts. The differences of the indicators with significant differences were analyzed from four aspects: vocabulary, sentence, syntax and readability.FindingsThe abstracts of highly cited papers contain more complex and professional words, more adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions and personal pronouns, but fewer nouns and verbs. The sentences in the abstracts of highly cited papers are more complex and the sentence length is relatively longer. The syntactic structure in abstracts of highly cited papers is relatively more complex and syntactic similarities between sentences are fewer. Highly cited papers' abstracts are less readable than zero-cited papers' abstracts.Originality/valueThis study analyses the differences between the abstracts of highly cited and those of zero-cited papers, reveals the common external and deep semantic features of highly cited papers in abstract writing styles, provide suggestions for researchers on abstract writing. These findings can help increase the scientific impact of articles and improve the review efficiency as well as the researchers' abstract writing skills.

Mapping bias: A rhizomatic critique of the National Literacy Panel Report

ABSTRACT The Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth was designed to be a definitive review of research on the literacy development of language-minoritized students. We adopt conceptual methods from rhizomatic mapping to replicate the report’s literature searches and critically examine studies eliminated based on the panel’s inclusion criteria. Our analyses demonstrate that epistemological bias disproportionately excluded small-scale, qualitative studies, and mapping citation patterns of scholarly impact demonstrates ongoing stratification and territorialization of scholarship since the report was published.

Characterizing research leadership on geographically weighted collaboration network.

Research collaborations, especially long-distance and international collaborations, have become increasingly prevalent worldwide. Recent studies highlighted the significant role of research leadership in collaborations. However, existing measures of the research leadership do not take into account the intensity of leadership in the co-authorship network. More importantly, the spatial features, which influence the collaboration patterns and research outcomes, have not been incorporated in measuring the research leadership. To fill the gap, we construct an institution-level weighted co-authorship network that integrates two types of weight on the edges: the intensity of collaborations and the spatial score (the geographical distance adjusted by the cross-linguistic-border nature). Based on this network, we propose a novel metric, namely the spatial research leadership rank, to identify the leading institutions while considering both the collaboration intensity and the spatial features. The leadership of an institution is measured by the following three criteria: (a) the institution frequently plays the corresponding rule in papers with other institutions; (b) the institution frequently plays the corresponding rule in longer distance and even cross-linguistic-border collaborations; (c) the participating institutions led by the institution have high leadership status themselves. Harnessing a dataset of 323,146 journal publications in pharmaceutical sciences during 2010–2018, we perform a comprehensive analysis of the geographical distribution and dynamic patterns of research leadership flows at the institution level. The results demonstrate that the SpatialLeaderRank outperforms baseline metrics in predicting the scholarly impact of institutions. And the result remains robust in the field of Information Science and Library Science.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11192-021-03943-w.

The impact of Economics and Finance research published in Central and Eastern Europe

Research quality dictates the reputation of faculty, colleges, and universities, regardless of their location. In order to shed some light on the quality construct, this research reports on the scholarly impact of economics and finance journals published in countries of Central and Eastern Europe. A comparison of coverage by Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, and Cabell’s, three scholarly databases, reveals the lesser coverage of CEE journals within WoS and Scopus. Examination of E&F journals published in Poland, Romania, and the remainder of CEE, as defined by the Journal of Eastern European and Central Asian Research, discloses that the level of quality varies by nation. There are variations across the popular CiteScore, SJR, SNIP, and percentage of articles cited bibliometric measures. Furthermore, this research documents the existence of impact variation between journals focused on Eastern Europe published in Eastern Europe and published elsewhere in the world.

Publication Output with Citation based Performance of Selected DBT Institutes in India

This scientometric study examines the publication outputs from six institutes of the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) in India as cited in the Scopus database over the past 24 years, 1996-2019. Research in biotechnology and other allied areas were analysed in terms of their chronological growth, activity index, collaborations, preferred journals for publication, country collaborators, popular keywords and scholarly impact. Scientists from the six institutes published 6, 076 journal articles representing 73.65 per cent of nationally collaborated articles and 25.03 per cent of internationally collaborated articles. Of the DBT institutes, the National Institute of Immunology (NII) published the highest number of articles and the Institute of Life Sciences (ILS) shared most patents. Publication frequency was the highest for Plos One journal and the countries with which scientists collaborated included the United States, Germany, United Kingdom and France in that order. The publishing outputs of DBT institutes suggest a need for greater international collaborative research in order to gain scientific competency and increase the quality of research outputs. Also this study may be helpful to government officials and policy makers in determining allocation of resources to boost the scholarly outputs of DBT institutes.

Hein, U.S. News, and How to Increase Citations

Using nearly 250,000 law review articles published on HeinOnline in a five-year period, the authors analyze citation patterns and characteristics of the articles such as title length, number of authors, article length, publication format, and more. The authors describe past citation studies and best practices in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The authors find that factors beyond article quality likely impact scholarly citations. Drawing from the lessons in the citation patterns, article characteristics, and SEO best practices, the authors offer techniques to increase the article citation counts of articles published in U.S. law journals. Based on data pulled from Hein, U.S. News will introduce a new scholarly impact ranking later this year. While this new ranking has the potential to improve the overall law school rankings, it opens the door to a wide range of potential issues from citation cartels to keyword stuffing to less focus on important but less well-known areas of the law. Using lessons from the SEO world, the authors conclude with a detailed discussion of these potential problems.