In this study, we investigate different strategies for assigning MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) terms to clinical guidelines using machine learning. Features based on words in titles and abstracts are investigated and compared to features based on topics assigned to references cited by the guidelines. Two of the feature engineering strategies utilize word embeddings produced by recent models based on in the distributional hypothesis, called word2vecand fastText. The evaluation results show that reference-based strategies tend to yield a higher recall and F1 scores for MeSH terms with a sufficient amount of training instances, whereas title and abstract based features yield a higher precision.
In this study, we have started to investigate how distinguishing the role of the cited reference from the subject of the cited reference can facilitate a more nuanced way to evaluate the citation context in the referring paper. Using natural language processing methods, we have developed methods to both enrich and distinguish specific traits in the aggregated citances. In future work we intend to extend the present analysis to a larger set of publications from the corpus and to cover more disciplines to be able to evaluate the results more precisely.
In this research in progress paper we report on preliminary results from the proposed novel uses of topic modelling approaches to bibliographic references as sources for “bags-of-words” instead of actual text content in scientometric settings. The actual cited references, viewed as concept symbols for paradigmatic approaches to earlier research, could thereby be used to cluster research. We will demonstrate an explorative approach to using cited reference topics for the discovery of hidden semantic reference structures in a set of scientific articles. If found fruitful and robust, this approach could complement existing text based and citation based techniques to clustering of research that might bridge the two approaches. By approaching references as “words” and reference lists as “sentences” (or documents) of such “words”, we demonstrate that the topical structure of document collections can also be analyzed using an alternative and complementary source of content, which additionally provides an interesting perspective on bibliographic references as units of a meta language describing document content.
This work in progress aims to perform a comprehensive analysis of digital data publicly available from the Swedish parliament, such as motions, interpellations, and protocols from discussions in the plenum. To this end, we will use methods based on computational linguistics, such as topic modeling, word embeddings, and sentiment analysis, to identify prominent discourses corresponding to co-occurrence patterns of the words used. Using data from the early 1970s and onward, this project will involve a chronological examination of semantic and discursive changes with regard to topics such as equality, neutrality, the EU, the monarchy, immigration, climate change, and cultural policy. One research question that will be investigated in relation to this analysis is to what extent discursive changes can be detected within specific political parties, and what historical and political reasons can be posited to underlie these changes.Another research question focuses on scientometric aspects of how scholarly research is used to support claims made in the political discussion. With regard to this question, we will more specifically investigate the conceptual aspects of the texts surrounding citations (so-called citances) which will be mined for information such as what research is referred to in terms of individuals, position, disciplinary affiliations, and active research topics. In these citances, the significant content is often present as latent references that require further elucidation, together with an analysis of the sentiments expressed in the argumentation. This analysis will be further enhanced by investigating the usage of hedge terms that may indicate a level of uncertainty about the cited research.
We study terrorism’s shaping of STEM research through the development within engineering research of a ‘terrorismmindedness’, i.e. terrorist threat domestication through integration in research practice. This is done by a distant reading of how research in the engineering sciences is increasingly addressing terrorism-related topics. By means of an in-depth bibliometric analysis of some 3.000 terrorism-related scientific articles published 1989–2022, we construct within the subject area ‘Engineering’ in Web of Science its research subfield ‘Terrorism Related Engineering Research’. The publications are analysed by bibliometric mapping, co-occurrence text measures and ‘algorithmic historiography’ using the HistCite tool. Papers cited together are mapped using VOSviewer to identify concepts and the results are clustered according to topicality, revealing the various terrorism-related research interests among engineering scientists.
Some research has argued that recent history can be partly characterized by an ongoing switch within technology from the innovations of a military-industrial-academic complex centered on the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation to a homeland security-industrial-academic complex shaped by perceived needs to develop new technologies to combat a new existential threat from terrorist attacks (Mike Davis 2001). In line with this the proposed study is a beginning towards a history of technology of the 21st century ‘War on Terrorism’ through a study of how terrorism has shaped technology in the form of engineering research. In this the paper builds upon and extends research within history of technology that since the 1990s has devoted an increasing interest to the effect of the Cold War on engineering research and technological development. Some stellar examples are Donald MacKenzie’s Inventing Accuracy (1990), Stuart Leslie’s The Cold War and American Science (1993), Gabrielle Hecht’s The Radiance of France (1998) and Janet Abbate’s Inventing the Internet (1999). As a start towards such a contemporary history of technology of terrorism we will provide quantitative estimates and qualitative examples of how research in the engineering sciences during 1989-2013 have shifted towards increasingly addressing issues related to terrorism. In this we continue and extend previous research (Fridlund & Nelhans 2011; Moreno 2012) that demonstrated the existence of a ‘9/11-effect’ on research through more in-depth detailed and qualitative historical research going beyond our previous primarily quantitative study. Our study use two distinct sets of material. The first pertains to engineering research in the form of a bibliometric study of published scientific articles identified in Thomson Reuters Science Citation Index and the Conference Proceedings Citation Index between the years 1989 and 2013 of about almost 2.000 items within the research area of ‘Engineering’ having the term *terroris* within its title, abstract or author generated keywords. These publications will be bibliometrically mapped according to topical properties, (bibliographic coupling at the journal level) where papers citing similar sources will be clustered more closely together in the visualization, thus suggesting papers having more in common than other papers citing different literatures, that are not found close to the cluster. The resulting visualizations will be investigated both quantitatively and qualitatively, where key publications identified in a specific cluster in the visualization will be selected for close readings to elucidate the qualitative historical effects of the 9/11-effect on engineering research.
In this study, we demonstrate how to collect Twitter conversations emanating from or referring to scientific papers. We propose segmenting the conversational threads into smaller segments and then compare them using information retrieval techniques, in order to find differences and similarities between discussions and within discussions. While the method still can be improved, the study shows that it is possible to collect larger conversations about research on Twitter, and that these are suitable for various automated methods. We do however identify a need to analyse these with qualitative methods as well.
This paper aims to study what type of research seems to interest the users of a social network platform and then complement the data with data from an open catalogue for research, exemplifying with Twitter and Open Alex. The basic idea is to get an overview of the stories the platform content tells during three months regarding topics, disciplines, and open access status. The findings suggest that the picture look very different between the approaches to map the topics, especially when looking at the articles most mentioned compared to the ones that are most retweeted. The study mainly highlights the methodological opportunities of combining text analysis and link relationships to explore the content and public interest in academic research.
The use of bibliometric indicators on individual and national levels has gathered considerable interest in recent years, but the application of bibliometric models for allocating resources at the institutional level has so far gathered less attention. This article studies the implementation of bibliometric measures for allocating resources at Swedish universities. Several models and indicators based on publications, citations, and research grants are identified. The design of performance-based resource allocation across major universities is then analysed using a framework from the field of evaluation studies. The practical implementation, the incentives as well as the ‘ethics’ of models and indicators, are scrutinized in order to provide a theoretically informed assessment of evaluation systems. It is evident that the requirements, goals, possible consequences, and the costs of evaluation are scarcely discussed before these systems are implemented. We find that allocation models are implemented in response to a general trend of assessment across all types of activities and organizations, but the actual design of evaluation systems is dependent on size, orientation, and the overall organization of the institution in question.
One way to dignify academic recognition and visibility for theresearcher and the higher education institutions (HEIs) is throughthe award of the Docent title, lending its holder the right toindependently conduct research and supervise doctoral students.The Docent (associate professor) title is an important step in theacademic career in several countries, yet there are - at least inSweden - no national guidelines for Docent evaluation. Instead atthe faculty level, each HEI has its own regulations andguidelines. Based on guidelines for docent promotion, wedeveloped a taxonomy of evaluation criteria, identifying authorposition, specimen, publication channel, impact, and volume asimportant factors in the assessment of publication merits(Joelsson, Nelhans & Helgesson, 2020). The assessment ofmerits for the Docent title generally includes the applicants’research, teaching, and third stream activities, where the researchdimension is awarded the highest merit value. In this research,we contribute to the understanding of the national tradition ofevaluation criteria for the docent title by focusing on differentdisciplinary domains on the one hand, and different types ofHEIs, on the other. A comparison between broad-based(comprehensive) established universities, specialised universities,new universities, and university colleges will be performed. 74guidelines from Swedish higher education institutions werecollected and subjected to qualitative data analysis with the aid ofthe computer software ATLAS.ti.
Föreliggande rapport är resultatet av ”Studie för att undersöka hur frågor om publiceringskanaler och OA hanteras i meritvärdering på olika lärosäten och i olika discipliner med särskilt fokus på docentvärdering”. Undersökningen är en del av Kungliga bibliotekets utredningar om öppen tillgång till vetenskapliga publikationer. Den utgör ett av underlagen för utredningen om Meriterings- och medelstilldelningssystemen i relation till incitament för öppen tillgång. Vi vill tacka Björn Hammarfelt för värdefulla kommentarer på manuskriptet under arbetets gång och Lisa Olsson, Stockholms universitetsbibliotek som granskade manuskriptet före tryck. Vi riktar också ett tack till Beate Eellend, samt Kungliga biblioteket för samordningen av uppdraget. Kungliga biblioteket har gett ekonomiskt bidrag till delar av rapportförfattandet.
We describe ongoing research where the aim is to apply recent results from the research field of information fusion to bibliometric analysis and information retrieval. We highlight the importance of ‘uncertainty’ within information fusion and argue that this concept is crucial also for bibliometrics and information retrieval. More specifically, we elaborate on three research strategies related to uncertainty: uncertainty management methods, explanation of uncertainty and visualization of uncertainty. We exemplify our strategies to the classical problem of author name disambiguation where we show how uncertainty can be modeled explained and visualized using information fusion. We show how an information seeker can benefit from tracing increases/decreases of uncertainty in the reasoning process. We also present how such changes can be explained for the information seeker through visualization techniques, which are employed to highlight the complexity involved in the process of modeling and managing uncertainty in bibliometric analysis. Finally we argue that a further integration of information fusion approaches in the research area of bibliometrics and information retrieval may results in new and fruitful venues of research.
This article analyses a series of negotiations on how to measure welfare and quality of life in Sweden beyond economic indicators. It departs from a 2015 Government Official Report that advanced a strong recommendation to measure only ‘objective indicators’ of quality of life, rather than relying on what is referred to as ‘subjective indicators’ such as life satisfaction and happiness. The assertion of strictly ‘objective’ indicators falls back on a sociological perspective developed in the 1970s, which conceived of welfare as being measurable as ‘levels of living’, a framework that came to be called ‘the Scandinavian model of welfare research’. However, in the mid-2000s, objective indicators were challenged scientifically by the emerging field of happiness studies, which also found political advocates in Sweden who argued that subjective indicators should become an integral part of measuring welfare. This tension between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ measurements resulted in a controversy between several actors about what should count as a valuable measurement of welfare. As a consequence, we argue that the creation of such value meters is closely intertwined with how welfare is defined, and by what measures welfare should be carried through.
This article analyzes "happiness studies" as an emerging field of inquiry throughout various scientific disciplines and research areas. Utilizing four operationalized search terms in the Web of Science; "happiness", "subjective well-being", "life satisfaction" and "positive affect", a dataset was created for empirical citation analysis. Combined with qualitative interpretations of the publications, our results show how happiness studies has developed over time, in what journals the citing papers have been published, and which authors and researchers are the most productive within this set. We also trace various trends in happiness studies, such as the social indicators movement, the introduction of positive psychology and various medical and clinical applications of happiness studies. We conclude that "happiness studies" has emerged in many different disciplinary contexts and progressively been integrated and standardized. Moreover, beginning at the turn of the millennium, happiness studies has even begun to shape an autonomous field of inquiry, in which happiness becomes a key research problem for itself. Thus, rather than speaking of a distinct "happiness turn", our study shows that there have been many heterogeneous turns to happiness, departing in a number of different disciplines.
Syftet med denna artikel är att presentera en övergripande bibliometrisk utforskning och analys av konversationer inom lärarutbildningsforskning och hur denna komplexa verksamhet organiserar sig i form av forskningsproblem, kunskapsintressen och intellektuella traditioner. Analyserna behandlar de noder och nätverk som formas av länkar mellan publikationer genom konversationer i forskarsamhället. I fokus står svensk lärarutbildningsforskning och hur denna länkas till internationell forskning inom området. Undersökningarna bygger på de resurser som citeringsdatabasen Web of Science och analysverktyget VOSviewer erbjuder. Vi identifierade 23 866 publikationer totalt, varav 358 hade anknytning till Sverige. En omfattande expansion av publikationer har skett under senare år – såväl inom svensk som internationell lärarutbildningsforskning – med en påtaglig anglo-saxisk dominans inom området. Explorativa klusteranalyser utifrån länkar mellan publikationer gav olika forskningsfronter med skilda problem och ansatser som behandlades i skilda nätverk. Vi kunde också identifiera särskilda intellektuella traditioner och förgrundsfigurer i olika nätverk. Svensk och internationell forskning uppvisade här åtskilliga likheter i sin organisering. Våra studier visar på ett fragmenterat forskningsfält positionerat i olika sammanhang och kunskapsintressen. Forskarsamhället behöver reflektera över skillnader i inriktning och lokalisering av forskningsproblem inom fältet samt analysera varför dessa uppstår liksom innebörder av att lärarutbildning förflyttas mellan olika forskningsfronter och traditioner.
This article explores the broad and undefined research field of the social impact of the arts. The effects of art and culture are often used as justification for public funding, but the research on these interventions and their effects is unclear. Using a co-word analysis of over 10,000 articles published between 1990 and 2020, we examined the characteristics of the field as we have operationalised it through our searches. We found that since 2015 this research field has expanded and consists of different epistemologies and methodologies, summarised in largely overlapping subfields belonging to the social sciences, humanities, arts education, and arts and health/therapy. In formal or informal learning settings, studies of theatre/drama as an intervention to enhance skills, well-being, or knowledge among children are most common in our corpus. A study of the research front through the bibliographic coupling of the most cited articles in the corpus confirmed the co-word analysis and revealed new themes that together form the ground for insight into research on the social impact of the arts. This article can therefore inform discussions on the social value of culture and the arts.
The study reports on the practices of illegal file sharing in Sweden during the period 2007-2012. More than 1.000 posts in response to the question “You guys who download stuff illegally, don’t you ever feel guilty?” where analyzed with regard to the respondents’ expressed senses of guilt, whether file sharing was right or wrong, if they buy media, together with dimensions of stakeholders and media genres. Preliminary results suggest that no changes in feelings of guilt were detected during the time period. However, more posts report to now buy media, while at there at the same time seem to be an increase in posts expressing file sharing, despite its current illegal status, is a right thing to do. A qualitative analysis is needed to further understand the complexity of current changes in file sharers justifications for what content to acquire through illegal file sharing, what they choose to pay for – and why.
Welcome to an open lecture on questionable scientific publishing. The researcher Gustaf Nelhans has studied how widespread this type of publishing is at Swedish universities and presents the results in this lecture, which is given in English. The library will also briefly provide information on how you as a researcher can avoid deceptive or “predatory” journals.
In recent years, rogue actors, often called "predatory publishers", have appeared in the publishing market. These actors take advantage of the open access model where journals and publishers cover their costs through publication fees. The business idea of these publishers is to publish and charge for as many articles as possible, usually without peer-review. In the lecture "Alleged questionable publishing at the Higher Education Institute (HEI) level in Sweden - what should be counted as a problematic share?" Gustaf Nelhans presents the results of a study he recently conducted.
Gustaf Nelhans is a senior lecturer in library and information science at the University of Borås. His research places emphasis on the use of bibliometrics and citation analysis for both research information and resource allocation.
The open lecture is arranged by the SLU University Library, which also in connection with the lecture briefly tells you how you as a researcher can avoid deceptive or “predatory” journals.
The thesis investigates the scientific citation and its various functions in the scientific community and develops it as a tool for research in theory of science, scientometrics and science studies. Through empirical and theoretical studies that utilize both quali-tative and quantitative methods the citation’s history, method, as well as its use in research policy is examined. Through a historical study the thesis shows three stages of development as re-quired for the construction of the citation as an indicator of intrinsic aspects of sci-ence. These consisted of a) citations as technology, within the citation index, b) the citation as a research method as theorised within Mertonian sociology of science, and c) the citation as a research subject. Following this the “citation debate” in Science and Technology Studies (STS) is described and analysed, which questions the use of gen-eralized quantitative methods. Inspired by an STS approach a performative model of “the mangle of the citation practice” is developed. This aims to understand the cita-tion existing in a context where researchers, articles and the citation index are mutu-ally creating and recreating each other. The thesis uses the HistCite scientometrics tool to develop a novel methodology that highlights local dynamics of citation prac-tices between scientific authors and texts using a visual approach of identifying pat-terns of citations in graphic representations of articles and their citation patterns. For this a “citation typology” is created to identify specific patterns and phenomenon in HistCite graphic representations. The last empirical study is of the introduction of quantitatively based performance-based models for funding of research in Norwegian and Swedish research policy 2003-2010 which problematizes the part played by the citation in a research policy setting as “unobtrusive” indicators of scientific practice. The thesis demonstrates the significance of the citation in research through its de-sign as a reflection of the scientific reference, and result of it being constructed – and used – as an indicator of scientific quality. Furthermore, it shows an emerging awareness in the scientific community that quantifiable indicators of scientific achievement – of which the citation is perhaps the main element – has gained a prominent role in both internal and external domains of scientific practice
The presentation's focus is the Swedish science policy debates on bibliometrics used for the national funding allocation system for higher education and how it is torn between two qualitatively different systems of research impact measures. At present, the national Swedish bibliometric model recognizes and measure research quality as equivalent of publication and of ”being cited”– how well researchers make themselves cite-able in citation based metrics. However, a public inquiry last year proposed a new model similar to the “Norwegian model” of impact based metrics where high quality is seen as equivalent to the prestige of the publication channels, i.e. the status of the scientific journals and publishers. This model is proposed to be implemented from 2014, barely five years after the introduction of the current model. What are the consequences of such a constant reorganization of funding practices and how does it influence the publishing and research practices of scientists? To discuss this, Swedish humanities research will be used as a case, as it during the last years appears - erroneously it will be argued - to have made a great increase in publication rates in Web of Science. In addition I will discuss the lack of transparency and comparability between the various quantitative models of performance indicators such as the bibliometrics models used at faculty and national levels. All in all, the aim is to provide grounds for discussing how citations as well as other bibliometric variables not just reflect but actually effect the quality of research – how bibliometrics is performative.
REPLIK DN Debatt 10/9. Mats Alvesson och Roland Paulsen skriver om sitt eget vetenskapsområdes svaga relevans för samhället. Det är lätt att instämma att vi befinner oss i en publiceringsexplosion av exponentiella mått, något som har diskuterats i åtminstone ett halvsekel inom naturvetenskaperna. Men det är svårt att se hur denna ökning är ett problem i sig, skriver Gustaf Nelhans, fil dr i vetenskapsteori.
Om mätbarhet och vad som är värt att mäta
Gustaf Nelhans, Högskolan i Borås, 2015-01-13
När scientometriker tillfrågas om relationen mellan citeringar och vetenskaplig kvalitet resonerar de ofta kring hur citeringar kan betraktas som indikatorer på användning av forskning och att detta i sin tur implicerar dess användbarhet och inverkan på annan forskning. Detta betraktas i sin tur som ett argument för att begagna sådana indikatorer som kvalitetsindikatorer.
I detta paper problematiserar jag den implicita lagbundenheten i en sådan ”linjär modell” att representera kvalitet med kvantitativa mått utifrån ett antal ståndpunkter:
På ett övergripande plan kan man utifrån teorier i vetenskaps- och teknikstudier argumentera för att den ovan nämnda utvecklingen av scientometriska indikatorer och värdering av vetenskapens kvaliteter är samproducerad. Med detta avses att utvecklingen av prestationsbaserade indikatorer och vad som betraktas som hög kvalitet kan komma att befinnas på en ökande grad av korrelation med varandra. Detta är en konsekvens av det performativa idiomet. En avgörande fråga blir då hur man i detta sammanhang kan förstå förhållandet mellan vad som är mätbart och vad som är värt att mäta (för att travestera Håkan Törnebohm)?
This chapter aims to critically engage with the performative nature of bibliometric indicators and explores how they influence scholarly practice at the macro, meso, and individual levels. It begins with a comparison between two national performance-based funding systems in Sweden and Norway at the macro level, within universities at the meso level, down to the micro level where individual researchers must relate these incentives to knowledge building within their specialty. I argue that the common-sense “representational model of bibliometric indicators” is questionable in practice, since it cannot capture the qualities of research in any unambiguous way. Furthermore, a performative notion on scientometric indicators needs to be developed that takes into account the variability and uncertainty of the aspects of research that is to be evaluated.
In this study, professional impact is defined as the academic literature that is cited in the literature that is used by professions in order to pursue skilled activities that are specific to their expertise. Specifically, we are focusing on the clinical guidelines that are used in the many health and medical professions that are issued by government bodies at national and international levels to ensure a certain quality level and to make results comparable at the national level.To date, more than 50.000 references have been identified in about 500 Swedish clinical guidelines issued by the above mentioned governmental bodies in Sweden. Of these, 73 % of the references have been matched to a PubMed id.The goal of this project is to develop a conceptual and theoretical contribution to the development of indicators for measuring the impact of research outside of the specifically academic literature.
When scientometricians are asked about the relationship between citations and quality, they often argue along the lines that citations could be seen as indicators of use and that that this implies usefulness and impact on other research, which in turn is an argument for using them as indicators of quality. This paper questions the implicit linearity of such a ‘one-dimensional model’ of representing quality by quantity from a number of standpoints. First, the use of citations as well as any indicator that is used is performative in the sense that those getting measured by them, i.e. researchers or university administrators, will adapt their behavior to perform well on the scales that are used, either for recognition or for monetary reward. Second, equating citation counts with quality might imply a notion that they scale together such that low citation rates equals low quality and that a high rate implies high quality. Third, and most important, drawing from theories in STS it could be argued that scientometric indicators and measures of scientific achievement are co-produced, in the sense that development of performance based or results based indicators and what is to be regarded as high quality will be found to increasingly coincide with each other as a consequence of the performative idiom mentioned above. It is suggested that more work on the qualitative aspects of scientometric data and is called for.
Parallel Session A.2: Questionable publishing across countries.
This session will present ongoing work relating to questionable (a.k.a. ‘predatory’) publishing from a scientometric perspective and the ways in which it is recognized and addressed in different localities, thus stimulating exchange of expertise and mutual learning. The topic will be addressed from three different positions: the researcher perspective, both as authors who choose venues to publish in and their roles in peer review; the professional perspective (library staff and bibliometricians who face recommending using metrics for evaluating if a journal is reputable); as well as the research evaluation issues such as white-/blacklisting as well as criteria for identification of questionable publish while, at the same time publishing practices are in constant flux.
Chair: Gustaf Nelhans, Senior Lecturer, University of Borås Speakers:
• Jakaria Rahman, Bibliometric Analyst, Chalmers University of Technology• Raf Guns, Coordinator of ECOOM-Antwerp, University of Antwerp• Janne Pölönen, Head of Planning, Federation of Finnish Learned Societies• Tove Faber Frandsen, Professor, University of Southern Denmark• Gunnar Sivertsen, Research Professor, Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education
Vad som behövs är ett starkare etos i forskarsamhället där vi i stället för att räkna pinnar erkänner att sakkunniggranskning handlar om att bedöma kvalitet. Det skriver Gustaf Nelhans, lektor i Biblioteks och informationsvetenskap, i en replik till Dan Larhammar.
Introduction. This paper deals with what academic texts and datasets are referred to and discussed on Twitter. We used document object identifiers as references to these items. Method. We streamed tweets from the Twitter application programming interface including the strings "dx" and "doi" while simultaneously streaming tweets posted by and to the authors of the tweets captured. By doing so we were able to capture tweets referring to a digital object as well as the replies to these tweets. Analysis. The captured tweets were analysed in different ways, both quantitatively and qualitatively. 1) Bibliometric analyses were made on the digital object identifiers, 2) the thirty of thesee most mentioned and retweeted were analysed and 3) the conversations with at least ten tweets were analysed using content analysis. Results. Research from the natural sciences was most prominent, as was research published in open access journals. Different types of conversations relating to the digital objects were found, both when looking at them qualitative and their visual structure in terms of nodes and arcs. The conversations involved academics but were not always academic in nature. Conclusions. Digital object identifiers were mainly referred to for self-promotion, as conversation starters or as arguments in discussions.
The overall scope of this study is an attempt at a methodological framework for matching publication lists at the national level against a combined set of blacklists for questionable publishing. Using the total verified set of publications from Swedish Higher Education Institutions (HEI) as a case, we examined the number, distribution, and proportion of publishing in questionable journals at the national level. Journal publication data was extracted from the national SwePub database and matched against three curated blacklists of questionable publishing. For the period 2012–2017, we identified 1,743 published papers in blacklisted journals, equal to an average of 0.5–0.9% of the total publications from Swedish HEIs. There was high variability between different HEI categories, with more established universities at the lower end of the spectrum, while university colleges and new universities had a much higher proportion (∼2%). There was a general decreasing trend during the study period (ρ = 0.83) for all categories of HEI:s. The study presents a methodology to identify questionable publishing in academia which could be applied to other countries with similar infrastructure. Thus, it could serve as a starting point for the development of a general framework for cross-national quantitative estimation of questionable publishing.
In the search to secure funding, researchers must now respond to requests by governments and non-government organisations about how to measure the societal and professional impact of their research. While case studies and reports of interventions may provide grounds for qualitative evaluation, bibliometric methodology is emerging as an important quantitative supplement to these evaluations.
In clinical practice, treatment recommendations and clinical guidelines provide traces of clinical and professional practice that can be used to identify and measure research impact. To understand how these traces emerge the research reported here explores documents issued by the three main Swedish agencies who produce recommendations for clinical practice. In particular it examines the cited references within the documents to explore size distribution, reference age, and geographical aspects, in addition to the similarities of the cited reference structure between the producers of the documents.
The overall goal of this ongoing project is to gain insights into citation practice and distribution of publications in professional practice to provide grounds for developing indicators of clinical impact. Future applications with regard to the broader area of professional impact based on references found in the literature of a wide range of professions, e.g. the health sector, social welfare, engineering and the environmental realm are considered.
Adding the semantic content of texts to the study of citations opens for new means of research in the field. Words can be used in specific or more general terms. Their meaning changes through use. Correspondingly, the meaning of a cited reference is defined by its use. Furthermore, the meaning of the reference changes as it is used in different contexts. Using ‘word embeddings’ we create a conceptual space of references using a window of text around the references. The model is trained on a set of 2 million full-text articles derived from EuroPMC. We measure the length of the journey of the cited references in this space to determine how much their semantic meaning changes over time. Furthermore, we study the topical heterogeneity of the citation contexts inferred to the references by the citing documents.
In this explorative work we investigate to what degree the semantic meaning of a cited reference can be recognized. In the end, we explore the possibility to generate a dynamic classification of research based on its use, rather than on their content. This would make it possible to identify similar works irrespectively of manifest citation links (bibliographic coupling or co-citation) or identical content of words (co-word analysis).
Since many databases lack relevance ranking, a citation-based approach can be a valuable complement since it is possible to use citation-based data to indicate centrality, relevance, or visibility in the research community. However, using bibliometric methods in the humanities is often challenging since a lot of the research literature is not indexed in the traditional citation databases that we generally use for bibliometric mapping.
We introduce a combined bibliometric and semantic approach to extend a network of bibliographic records by incorporating a larger set of records lacking bibliometric features based on the semantic similarities between their titles. In order to expand the set of identified relevant articles, we used the Universal Sentence Encoder (USE) algorithm developed by Google Research to generate semantic vectors for the titles.
We searched several different databases, of which some include citation data, to create a pool C of candidate documents within the selected subject area. A set A of documents was obtained from a citation database to generate the initial network of articles. We then calculated the bibliographic coupling of articles as quantified by their shared references.
We manually selected a small set S1 ⊂ A of documents representing different topical clusters as a seed for the expansion based on semantic similarities. For each document d ∈ S1, we ranked the documents in C in ascending order according to their cosine distance to the title vector assigned to d, then selecting the k documents closest to d. This procedure gave us a set S2 ⊂ C of documents to read.
The results were evaluated using qualitative analysis to determine they were thematically relevant to the present information needs.
Recent medial discussion on “fake-news” underlines the importance of evidence-baseddecision-making. To gather, analyze and interpret “facts” is, however, in our information-densedigital times, not always easy. Activities such as information seeking, knowledge building andevaluation in scholarly practice are often performed using bibliometric/informetric methods.The increased interest in bibliometrics also opens for new questions on how data sources arebeing used and what kind of challenges and/or possibilities that warrant further investigation. In this session for interaction and engagement, we invite participants to explore both means ofanalyzing already available data sources using machine-learning technology, as well as toinclude new sets of data that could augment the different views of grasping research activitiesusing algorithms. Such data could be both content-intensive (as text), time-sensitive (as events), contextual (in terms of links between different properties) or multi-modal, meaning that othersources, such as imagery, sound, and video – even material objects may constitute possiblecontributions as data as impact.
Detta arbete har sin bakgrund i ett långtgående intresse för kvalitetsvärdering och bibliometriska indikatorers roll i forskningens praktiker samt mer generellt hur forskningens styrformer och genomförande samproduceras i den senmoderna perioden som karakteriserar vår tid. Dessutom hämtar det näring i intresset för bibliotekets och i synnerhet bibliotekariens roll i denna process. Inriktningen på denna studie initierades på uppdrag från rektor vid Högskolan i Borås som ett led i en omvärldsanalys och som underlag för internt utredningsarbete, men kom under arbetets gång att utvecklas till ett fördjupat arbete att mer generellt beskriva hur bibliometriska fördelningsmodeller används vid svenska lärosäten. Arbetet har också bidragit till vidare forskning i vilken fördelningsmodeller vid samtliga svenska lärosäten som innehar forskarutbildningsrättigheter studeras.
Introduction. The aim of the article is to convey an overall picture of the research conducted at Swedish School of Library and Information Science (SSLIS).
Method. The documents for the analyses were found in the DiVA – a national publication registry of Swedish universities and in the international citation database Web of Science. The authors have searched DiVA for publications indexed under the Department and performed a manual review of authors’ names. Searches were made for authors’ names directly in Web of Science.
Analysis. A portrait of research production was created using descriptive statistics and more sophisticated analysis was used for 240 publications found in the Web of Science.
Results. The results present the production and cooperation patterns of SSLIS researchers, the subjects covered by them, the relations between researchers, journals and research contents.
Conclusion. Overall, SSLIS appears as a broad and dynamic environment where research follows firmly established tracks and simultaneously explores current phenomena and practices.
This paper traces how subjective measures of welfare were transformed from a marginal issue in the social sciences to a valuation of welfare of nations. The co-production of social science and politics is analysed in a case study of negotiations of subjective and objective indicators in Sweden.
Since the 1970s social scientists have strived towards finding a replacement for the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as an indicator of welfare in nations. Over the years, various political actors have attempted to make such measurements comply with their ideas of what constitutes a good society. This paper traces the co-production of social scientific knowledge and the political process of attempting to establish a new standardized way of measuring welfare in Sweden.
As GDP and other purely economic indicators have dominated how value is ascribed to nations, the various attempts of challenging this form of measurement have taken place at the margins of the social sciences. However, during the past two decades, the negotiations of finding alternative measures of welfare have dramatically moved forward their positions, entering mainstream science and politics.
Drawing from a variety of source documents (political proposals, influential reports, mass media accounts and scientific literature), this article connects and analyses multiple modes of veridiction that are the subjects of controversies and negotiations in the construction of a proposed valuemeter of welfare in Sweden. As a result, we show how two major social scientific conceptions of welfare measurements, based either on subjective or objective indicators, relate (without being reduced) to political proposals.
In this case study we analyzed the traces of spontaneous reactions of Youtube users when confronted with the short clip ’You wouldn’t Steal a Car’, that was used by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to influence people not to download copyrighted material from the Internet. This film has become an important cultural icon, which to a certain degree has shaped a whole generation of film viewers. The aim of this study was to provide an example of how anti piracy initiatives are received and understood by the receivers of the message. This was performed by collecting and analyzing the users spontaneous reactions as entered as comments on the Youtube page for the clip by qualitatively categorizing the contents using a bottom up approach. The results suggest that people practicing Internet-based culture consumption (IBCC) do this in more nuanced ways than is assumed in the film, where they are polarized as either “common thieves” or “good citizens”.
In 2014, the European Commission initiated a process to strengthen science 2.0 as a core research policy concept. However, this turned into a substantial ideational shift. The concept of science 2.0 was dropped. Instead, open science became established as one of the three pillars of the €94 billion research framework programme Horizon Europe. This article scrutinises the official narrative regarding the shift of concepts, identifying transparency issues, specifically misrepresentation of concepts and data, and the redaction of key material. This can be characterised as problems of input legitimacy. A public consultation did take place, but numerous transparency issues can be found. From science 2.0 to open science, the ideational shift was portrayed as simply a matter of exchanging two synonymous concepts. However, science 2.0 is a descriptive concept referring to science being transformed by digitalisation. In contrast, open science involves normative assumptions about how science should work and be governed.