A profile of research on the parasitic trypanosomatids and the diseases they cause

The parasitic trypanosomatids cause lethal and debilitating diseases, the leishmaniases, Chagas disease, and the African trypanosomiases, with major impacts on human and animal health. Sustained research has borne fruit by assisting efforts to reduce the burden of disease and by improving our understanding of fundamental molecular and cell biology. But where has the research primarily been conducted, and which research areas have received the most attention? These questions are addressed below using publication and citation data from the past few decades.

Scientometric engineering: Exploring citation dynamics via arXiv eprints

Scholarly communications have been rapidly integrated into digitised and networked open ecosystems, where preprint servers have played a pivotal role in accelerating the knowledge transfer processes. However, quantitative evidence is scarce regarding how this paradigm shift beyond the traditional journal publication system has affected the dynamics of collective attention on science. To address this issue, we investigate the citation data of more than 1.5 million eprints on arXiv (https://arxiv.org) and analyse the long-term citation trend for each discipline involved. We find that the typical growth and obsolescence patterns vary across disciplines, reflecting different publication and communication practices. The results provide unique evidence on the attention dynamics shaped by the research community today, including the dramatic growth and fast obsolescence of Computer Science eprints, which has not been captured in previous studies relying on the citation data of journal papers. Subsequently, we develop a quantitatively-and-temporally normalised citation index with an approximately normal distribution, which is useful for comparing citational attention across disciplines and time periods. Further, we derive a stochastic model consistent with the observed quantitative and temporal characteristics of citation growth and obsolescence. The findings and the developed framework open a new avenue for understanding the nature of citation dynamics. Peer Review https://publons.com/publon/10.1162/qss_a_00174

PUBLONS BASED PROFILING OF TURKISH REVIEWERS AND ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONS

Introduction: Publons is the most prestigious and well-organized platform that allows to evaluate peer review metrics. It also provides publication and citation data as it is synchronized with the Web of Science. There are socio-cultural ties between Central Asian countries and Turkey, and these countries can take Turkey as a model for scientific development. Therefore, it will be useful for Central Asian countries to summarize Turkey's Publons activities. In this study, we used Publons database to list the top institutions, researchers and reviewers in Turkey. Methods: Publons database was used to export the data on October 10, 2021. The top 20 researchers were identified in terms of the number of verified reviews. Additionally, the top 20 institutions were determined in terms of the number of researchers, number of verified reviews and top reviewers. Results: On Publons, 57464 registered researchers from Turkey were found (ranked 7th) and 484 of these researchers had top reviewer status (ranked 16th). A total of 175644 verified reviews were detected from Turkey-based researchers (ranked 16th) and of which 45835 were performed in the last 12 months (ranked 14th). Based on the total number of researchers, four institutions from Turkey were in the top 100 in the world rankings (Hacettepe University, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul University-Cerrahpasa, and Cukurova University). There were no institutions from Turkey among the top 100 in the lists created according to the number of verified reviews and top reviewers. Conclusion: Turkey has a considerable number of researchers registered with Publons. However, Turkey should follow a scientific route in terms of verified reviews. Turkey and Central Asian countries can create scientific collaborations and cooperative projects. Thus, Central Asian countries will benefit from Turkey's experiences.

Scholar Metrics Scraper (SMS): automated retrieval of citation and author data

Academic departments, research clusters and evaluators analyze author and citation data to measure research impact and to support strategic planning. We created a tool, Scholar Metrics Scraper (SMS), to automate the retrieval of this bibliometric data for our research team. The project contains Jupyter notebooks (publicly-shared here) that take a list of researchers as an input to export a CSV file of citation metrics from Google Scholar and figures to visualize the group's impact. SMS is a scalable, open and publicly-accessible solution for automating the retrieval of citation data over time for a group of researchers.

La cobertura de los índices de citas abiertos se acerca a la de Web of Science y Scopus

The information sources that are often used to monitor and to obtain a better understanding of the system of scholarly communication (such as Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar) have historically been distributed under restrictive use licenses. However, in a scenario where science and scientific communication are undergoing a process of digital transformation, these models do not facilitate the development of new infrastructure that is better adapted to current and future needs. At the same time, these models hamper reproducibility. In recent years, a variety of open data sources, such as Microsoft Academic, Crossref, and others, have become available, providing easy access to large collections of metadata that were previously only available from closed sources. Citation data are one type of metadata provided by these open data sources. This study documents the significant growth in coverage of open citation data that has taken place between 2019 and 2021, and the events that have led to this point. These collections of open scholarly metadata have kick-started the development of a new ecosystem of scholarly information services. However, their fragility still poses a risk for downstream applications. Academic libraries could become important allies of open scholarly metadata initiatives. Resumen Históricamente, las fuentes de información utilizadas para observar y comprender el funcionamiento del sistema de comunicación científica han sido distribuidas bajo licencias de uso restrictivas (Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar). En el contexto actual, caracterizado por un proceso de transformación digital de la ciencia y de la comunicación científica, estos modelos no facilitan el desarrollo de infraestructuras y herramientas de información científica adaptadas a nuevas necesidades, e impiden la realización de análisis reproducibles. Afortunadamente, en los últimos años han aparecido diversas colecciones de metadatos de investigación distribuidas bajo licencias abiertas, como las ofrecidas por Microsoft Academic, Crossref y otros. Un tipo de metadato ofrecido por estas fuentes abiertas que anteriormente solo estaba disponible desde fuentes cerradas son las relaciones de citación entre documentos académicos. Este trabajo muestra el significativo crecimiento que se ha producido entre 2019 y 2021 en la cobertura de citas disponible en fuentes abiertas, así como los pasos que han sido necesarios para llegar hasta este punto. Estas colecciones de metadatos abiertas han estimulado el desarrollo de un nuevo ecosistema de herramientas de información científica, pero su fragilidad representa un riesgo de cara al futuro. Las bibliotecas académicas podrían convertirse en importantes aliadas de estas iniciativas.

Are Conference Posters Being Cited?

We present a small case study on citations of conference posters using poster collections from both Figshare and Zenodo. The study takes into account the years 2016–2020 according to the dates of publication on the platforms. Citation data was taken from DataCite, Crossref and Dimensions. Primarily, we want to know to what extent scientific posters are being cited and thereby which impact posters potentially have on the scholarly landscape and especially on academic publications. Our data-driven analysis reveals that posters are rarely cited. Citations could only be found for 1% of the posters in our dataset. A limitation in this study however is that the impact of academic posters was not measured empirical but rather descriptive.

Mind the Wikidata Gap

Wikidata, a community-curated knowledge base related to Wikipedia, affects our access to information, wielding more power than many realize. Seeing an opportunity for improving access to knowledge and promoting their collections, libraries, archives, and other cultural heritage institutions have been experimenting with Wikidata in various ways. One burgeoning area of activity is in Wikidata’s scholarly citation data, but that participation has largely concentrated in the sciences, leaving a gap in its theological and religious studies coverage. This presentation demonstrates how this gap matters to theological libraries and shows how you can contribute to efforts to fill it, even in small ways. Delving into Wikidata can be intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. As long as you have basic computer skills, you can find a way to participate.

Inequalities in COVID-19 Research from Sub-Saharan Africa: Differences in the Prestige of Journal Articles with Internal and External Lead Authors, Collaborations and Publishers

Inequality in health research in Sub-Saharan Africa existed before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic because of the dearth of research resources. The onset of COVID-19 has exacerbated inequality because of the changes in workplace settings. This study presents an insight into the extent of inequalities during the first year of COVID-19 using citation data of Sub-Saharan African countries' COVID-19 research. Citation data of all the 46 Sub-Saharan Africa countries was collected from Scopus, Web of Science and PubMed. After data cleaning and removal of duplicate records, collaboration type and publishers' country information was coded. Author processing charges of the Open Access articles were obtained from publishers' websites. CiteScore data was collected using Publish or Perish software and Scopus CiteScore report. Only 13.4% of the publishers are in Sub-Saharan African countries, and 21.14% of the articles were published in Sub-Saharan African journals. USA (20.92%) and the UK (13.73%), and India (6.21%) house the highest number of publishers. Publishers from the Netherlands (30.72%), the UK (24.23%) and the USA (14.81%) published the highest number of journals. The CiteScore of journals and mega journals published outside Sub-Saharan Africa was five and twenty-five times more prestigious than those published in the region, respectively. More equitable research practices that will recognize local authors from Sub-Saharan Africa as lead authors in studies about or in Sub-Saharan Africa and journals that are published in the region as a choice for important research may reduce the imbalances as observed in this study.

Further Improvements on Estimating the Popularity of Recently Published Papers

As the number of published scientific papers continuously increases, the need to assess their impact becomes more valuable than ever. In this work, we focus on the problem of estimating the expected citation-based popularity (or short-term impact) of papers. State-of-the-art methods for this problem attempt to leverage the current citation data of each paper. However, these methods are prone to inaccuracies for recently published papers, which have a limited citation history. In this context, we previously introduced ArtSim, an approach that can be applied on top of any popularity estimation method to improve its accuracy. Its power originates from providing more accurate estimations for the most recently published papers by considering the popularity of similar, older ones. In this work, we present ArtSim+, an improved ArtSim adaptation that considers an additional type of paper similarity and incorporates a faster configuration procedure, resulting in improved effectiveness and configuration efficiency.

Open Citation Data reach critical Milestone

Last Friday the OpenCitations blog published a guest post by Alberto Mart??n-Mart??n that describes the coverage by COCI and other open citation data compared to subscription citation indexes. This is an important blog post, ...