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Investigating the Division of Scientific Labor Using the Contributor Roles Taxonomy

Investigating the Division of Scientific Labor Using the Contributor Roles Taxonomy

Paper analyzes how research contributions are divided across research teams, focusing on the association between division of labor and number of authors, and authors’ position and specific contributions by using the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT).

Understanding Chinese Science: New Scientometric Perspectives

Understanding Chinese Science: New Scientometric Perspectives

This special issue covers a diversity of topics on Chinese science, ranging from scientometric analyses to studies of the Chinese science system and research assessment in China.

Towards Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Towards Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Unreliable research programmes waste funds, time, and even the lives of the organisms we seek to help and understand. Reducing this waste and increasing the value of scientific evidence require changing the actions of both individual researchers and the institutions they depend on for employment and promotion. While ecologists and evolutionary biologists have somewhat improved research transparency over the past decade (e.g. more data sharing), major obstacles remain. In this commentary, we lift our gaze to the horizon to imagine how researchers and institutions can clear the path towards more credible and effective research programmes.

Collaboration, Empathy & Change: Perspectives on Leadership in Libraries and Archives in 2020

Collaboration, Empathy & Change: Perspectives on Leadership in Libraries and Archives in 2020

Students in the organizational theory and leadership course taught by Trevor Owe at the University of Maryland’s iSchool worked together to produce this book. 

Meta-Research: Weak Evidence of Country- and Institution-Related Status Bias in the Peer Review of Abstracts

Meta-Research: Weak Evidence of Country- and Institution-Related Status Bias in the Peer Review of Abstracts

A preregistered survey experiment spanning six disciplines has found weak evidence of bias in favour of authors from high-status countries and institutions.

How Do We Share Data in COVID-19 Research? A Systematic Review of COVID-19 Datasets in PubMed Central Articles - PubMed

How Do We Share Data in COVID-19 Research? A Systematic Review of COVID-19 Datasets in PubMed Central Articles - PubMed

PubMed Central articles are an important source of COVID-19 datasets, but there is significant heterogeneity in the way these datasets are mentioned, shared, updated and cited.

Socioeconomic Roots of Academic Faculty

Socioeconomic Roots of Academic Faculty

Article investigates the representativeness of faculty childhood socioeconomic status and whether it may implicitly limit efforts to diversify the professoriate in terms of race, gender, and geography.

Scholarly Communications Harmed by Covid-19

Scholarly Communications Harmed by Covid-19

Society deserves academic discourse that is civil, cool, unbiased, and objective - but the Covid-19 pandemic has accentuated an erosion in civility in academic discourse, leading to deep divisions being played out in social, mass, and professional media.

Open Editors: A Dataset of Scholarly Journals’ Editorial Board Positions

Open Editors: A Dataset of Scholarly Journals’ Editorial Board Positions

Editormetrics analyse the role of editors of academic journals and their impact on the scientific publication system. However, such analyses would best rely on open, structured and machine-readable data on editors and editorial boards, whose availability still remains rare.

OA Diamond Journals Study. Part 1: Findings

OA Diamond Journals Study. Part 1: Findings

From June 2020 to February 2021, a consortium of 10 organisations undertook a large-scale study on open access journals across the world that are free for readers and authors, usually referred to as "OA diamond journals". This study was commissioned by cOAlition S in order to gain a better understanding of the OA diamond landscape.

The Changing Role of Funders in Responsible Research Assessment: Progress, Obstacles and the Way Ahead

The Changing Role of Funders in Responsible Research Assessment: Progress, Obstacles and the Way Ahead

A responsible research assessment would incentivise, reflect and reward the plural characteristics of high-quality research, in support of diverse and inclusive research cultures.

The Imaginary Carrot: No Correlation Between Raising Funds and Research Productivity in Geosciences

The Imaginary Carrot: No Correlation Between Raising Funds and Research Productivity in Geosciences

The ability of researchers to raise funding is central to academic achievement. However, whether success in obtaining research funds correlates with the productivity, quality or impact of a researcher is debated. The study analyses 10 years of grant funding by the Swiss National Science Foundation in Earth and Environmental Sciences.

The Unequal Impact of Parenthood in Academia

The Unequal Impact of Parenthood in Academia

Parenthood explains most of the gender productivity gap by lowering the average short-term productivity of mothers. However, the size of productivity penalty for mothers appears to have shrunk over time.

Is Preprint the Future of Science? A Thirty Year Journey of Online Preprint Services

Is Preprint the Future of Science? A Thirty Year Journey of Online Preprint Services

Preprints make scholarly communication more efficient by disseminating scientific discoveries more rapidly. The measurements presented in this study can help researchers and policymakers make informed decisions about how to effectively use and responsibly embrace a preprint culture.

Preprints in Motion: Tracking Changes Between Posting and Journal Publication

Preprints in Motion: Tracking Changes Between Posting and Journal Publication

Study utilised a combination of automatic and manual annotations to quantify how an article from early 2020 changed between the preprinted and published version.

Bibliometrics in Academic Recruitment: A Screening Tool Rather Than a Game Changer

Bibliometrics in Academic Recruitment: A Screening Tool Rather Than a Game Changer

Paper concludes that metrics were applied chiefly as a screening tool to decrease the number of eligible candidates and not as a replacement for peer review.

Transparency to Hybrid Open Access Through Publisher-provided Metadata

Transparency to Hybrid Open Access Through Publisher-provided Metadata

This study addresses the lack of transparency by leveraging Elsevier article metadata and provides the first publisher-level study of hybrid OA uptake and invoicing.

'Nepotistic Journals': a Survey of Biomedical Journals

'Nepotistic Journals': a Survey of Biomedical Journals

Context Convergent analyses in different disciplines support the use of the Percentage of Papers by the Most Prolific author (PPMP) as a red flag to identify journals that can be suspected of questionable editorial practices. We examined whether this index, complemented by the Gini index, could be useful for identifying cases of potential editorial bias, using a large sample of biomedical journals. Methods We extracted metadata for all biomedical journals referenced in the National Library of Medicine, with any attributed Broad Subject Terms, and at least 50 authored (i.e. by at least one author) articles between 2015 and 2019, identifying the most prolific author (i.e. the person who signed the most papers in each particular journal). We calculated the PPMP and the 2015-2019 Gini index for the distribution of articles across authors. When the relevant information was reported, we also computed the median publication lag (time between submission and acceptance) for articles authored by any of the most prolific authors and that for articles not authored by prolific authors. For outlier journals, defined as a PPMP or Gini index above the 95th percentile of their respective distributions, a random sample of 100 journals was selected and described in relation to status on the editorial board for the most prolific author. Results 5 468 journals that published 4 986 335 papers between 2015 and 2019 were analysed. The PPMP 95th percentile was 10.6% (median 2.9%). The Gini index 95th percentile was 0.355 (median 0.183). Correlation between the two indices was 0.35 (95CI 0.33 to 0.37). Information on publication lag was available for 2 743 journals. We found that 277 journals (10.2%) had a median time lag to publication for articles by the most prolific author(s) that was shorter than 3 weeks, versus 51 (1.9%) journals with articles not authored by prolific author(s). Among the random sample of outlier journals, 98 provided information about their editorial board. Among these 98, the most prolific author was part of the editorial board in 60 cases (61%), among whom 25 (26% of the 98) were editors-in-chief. Discussion In most journals publications are distributed across a large number of authors. Our results reveal a subset of journals where a few authors, often members of the editorial board, were responsible for a disproportionate number of publications. The papers by these authors were more likely to be accepted for publication within 3 weeks of their submission. To enhance trust in their practices, journals need to be transparent about their editorial and peer review practices.

AI-Assisted Peer Review

AI-Assisted Peer Review

Many platforms have already started to use automated screening tools, to prevent plagiarism and failure to respect format requirements. Some tools even attempt to flag the quality of a study or summarise its content, to reduce reviewers' load.

Universities without walls – A vision for 2030

Universities without walls – A vision for 2030

This seminal document is the result of extensive consultations and deliberations with EUA members and partners over a six-month period in 2020. It sets out a vision of resilient and effective universities, serving Europe's societies towards a better future.

Do Open Access Journal Articles Experience a Citation Advantage? Results and Methodological Reflections of an Application of Multiple Measures to an Analysis by WoS Subject Areas

Do Open Access Journal Articles Experience a Citation Advantage? Results and Methodological Reflections of an Application of Multiple Measures to an Analysis by WoS Subject Areas

Study finds that OA journal articles experience a citation advantage in very few subject areas and, in most of these subject areas, the citation advantage was found on only a single measure of citation advantage, namely whether the article was cited at all.

Analysis of the Evolution and Collaboration Networks of Citizen Science Scientific Publications

Analysis of the Evolution and Collaboration Networks of Citizen Science Scientific Publications

The term citizen science refers to a broad set of practices developed in a growing number of areas of knowledge and characterized by the active citizen participation in some or several stages of the research process. Definitions, classifications and terminology remain open, reflecting that citizen science is an evolving phenomenon, a spectrum of practices whose classification may be useful but never unique or definitive. The aim of this article is to study citizen science publications in journals indexed by WoS, in particular how they have evolved in the last 20 years and the collaboration networks which have been created among the researchers in that time. In principle, the evolution can be analyzed, in a quantitative way, by the usual tools, such as the number of publications, authors, and impact factor of the papers, as well as the set of different research areas including citizen science as an object of study. But as citizen science is a transversal concept which appears in almost all scientific disciplines, this study becomes a multifaceted problem which is only partially modelled with the usual bibliometric magnitudes. It is necessary to consider new tools to parametrize a set of complementary properties. Thus, we address the study of the citizen science expansion and evolution in terms of the properties of the graphs which encode relations between scientists by studying co-authorship and the consequent networks of collaboration. This approach - not used until now in research on citizen science, as far as we know- allows us to analyze the properties of these networks through graph theory, and complement the existing quantitative research. The results obtained lead mainly to: (a) a better understanding of the current state of citizen science in the international academic system-by countries, by areas of knowledge, by interdisciplinary communities-as an increasingly legitimate expanding methodology, and (b) a greater knowledge of collaborative networks and their evolution, within and between research communities, which allows a certain margin of predictability as well as the definition of better cooperation strategies.

How Is Science Clicked on Twitter? Click Metrics for Bitly Short Links to Scientific Publications

How Is Science Clicked on Twitter? Click Metrics for Bitly Short Links to Scientific Publications

Study analyses the click metrics of over 1.1 million links referring to Web of Science publications.

Fostering Interdisciplinary Data Cultures through Early Career Development: The RDA/US Data Share Fellowship

Fostering Interdisciplinary Data Cultures through Early Career Development: The RDA/US Data Share Fellowship

In this paper we discuss interdisciplinarity through data as a way to create research environments that are more flexible and, as a result, more amenable to change. We report our findings from facilitating and evaluating a data-oriented early-career fellowship program that was administered as part of the Research Data Alliance (RDA), a global organization that aims to enable open sharing and re-use of data.