scholarly journals The impact of open access on the medical literature: a review of current literature

2017 ◽  
Vol 85 (11-12) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nana Turk

Background: the aim of the article is to conduct an overview of the impact of OA on the medical articles based on 3-part categorization.Methods: Data were identified by a search strategy with eight combinations of keywords (open access, citation impact, citation advantage, citation count, article download, article usage, social media attention, altmetrics) and searched in three different databases.Results: the analysis was conducted on 107 studies dealing with citations, downloads and social impact. Sixty-seven of them simply employed the counting citations to OA and non-OA articles; nineteen articles compared the downloads and citations counts; and twenty-one articles investigated the social impact of OA articles. Twenty-five articles investigated the citations, download counts, and social impact of medical articles.Conclusions: The studies investigating the citation impact mostly showed citation advantages. Those that employed citation and download counts of medical articles using randomized controlled trials showed that OA articles were downloaded significantly more frequently, but found no evidence of a citation advantage for open access articles. The citation advantage from open access might be caused by other factors. Results of the studies comparing the social media attention and citations/downloads of the medical articles are often diametrically opposed.

2015 ◽  
Vol 53 (1(105)) ◽  
pp. 7-19
Author(s):  
David Nicholas

PURPOSE: The research upon which this article is largely based comes from a year-long international study of trustworthiness in scholarly Communications in the digital age, Essentially, the main thrust of the project was to determine the impact of the digital transition and the new products it has ushered in, such as open access publications and the social media, on academic researchers’ scholarly practices. This paper focuses and reflects further on the disciplinary differences of scholarly researchers when it comes to using, citing and publishing and, especially, whether arts and humanities researchers are any different in the way they think and behave to their counterparts in the sciences and social sciences. APPROACH/METHODS: An international survey of over 3650 academic researchers examined how trustworthiness is determined when making decisions on scholarly reading, citing, and publishing in the digital age. The survey asked respondents whether or not they agreed with comments and ąuotes about scholarly behaviour obtained from pre-survey focus groups and interviews. Data from focus groups, interviews and the published literature are also used to explain further the results of the survey. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: In generał, it was found that traditional methods and criteria remain important across the board. That is, researchers have moved inexorably from a print-based system to a digital system, but have not significantly changed the way they decide what to trust, where to publish, what to cite or use. Social media outlets and (non-peer reviewed) open access publications are not fully trusted. However, there were some significant differences according to the discipline of the respondent and this papers focuses upon these differences by comparing the views and behaviour of arts and humanities researchers with those from other disciplines. The main findings were: a) journals and the metrics that surround them are clearly not so important to humanities scholars, but nevertheless still pretty important; b) humanities researchers take a lot more care about what they use and where content comes from; c) humanities researchers look slightly more favourably on the social media. Originality/value: As far as it is known this is the first comprehensive study of digital humanities researchers and their decisions on what they use and cite and where they choose to publish.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Metwaly Ali Mohamed Edakar ◽  
Ahmed Maher Khafaga Shehata

Purpose The rapid spread and severity of the coronavirus (COVID-19) virus have prompted a spate of scholarly research that deals with the pandemic. The purpose of this study is to measure and assess the coverage of COVID-19 research on social media and the engagement of readers with COVID-19 research on social media outlets. Design/methodology/approach An altmetric analysis was carried out in three phases. The first focused on retrieving all papers related to COVID-19. Phase two of the research aimed to measure the presence of the retrieved papers on social media using altmetric application programming interface (API). The third phase aimed to measure Mendeley readership categories using Mendeley API to extract data of readership from Mendeley for each paper. Findings The study suggests that while social media platforms do not give accurate measures of the impact as given by citations, they can be used to portray the social impact of the scholarly outputs and indicate the effectiveness of COVID-19 research. The results confirm a positive correlation between the number of citations to articles in databases such as Scopus and the number of views on social media sites such as Mendeley and Twitter. The results of the current study indicated that social media could serve as an indicator of the number of citations of scientific articles. Research limitations/implications This study’s limitation is that the studied articles’ altmetrics performance was examined using only one of the altmetrics data service providers (altmetrics database). Hence, future research should explore altmetrics on the topic using more than one platform. Another limitation of the current research is that it did not explore the academic social media role in spreading fake information as the scope was limited to scholarly outputs on social media. The practical contribution of the current research is that it informs scholars about the impact of social media platforms on the spread and visibility of COVID-19 research. Also, it can help researchers better understand the importance of published COVID-19 research using social media. Originality/value This paper provides insight into the impact of COVID-19 research on social media. The paper helps to provide an understanding of how people engage with health research using altmetrics scores, which can be used as indicators of research performance.


Author(s):  
Daniel Torres-Salinas ◽  
Nicolas Robinson-Garcia ◽  
Pedro A. Castillo-Valdivieso

AbstractWe present an analysis on the uptake of open access on COVID-19 related literature as well as the social media attention they gather when compared with non OA papers. We use a dataset of publications curated by Dimensions and analyze articles and preprints. Our sample includes 11,686 publications of which 67.5% are openly accessible. OA publications tend to receive the largest share of social media attention as measured by the Altmetric Attention Score. 37.6% of OA publications are bronze, which means toll journals are providing free access. MedRxiv contributes to 36.3% of documents in repositories but papers in BiorXiv exhibit on average higher AAS. We predict the growth of COVID-19 literature in the following 30 days estimating ARIMA models for the overall publications set, OA vs. non OA and by location of the document (repository vs. journal). We estimate that COVID-19 publications will double in the next 20 days, but non OA publications will grow at a higher rate than OA publications. We conclude by discussing the implications of such findings on the dissemination and communication of research findings to mitigate the coronavirus outbreak.


2021 ◽  
pp. 016555152199863
Author(s):  
Wei Mingkun ◽  
Quan Wei ◽  
Sadhana Misra ◽  
Russell Savage

With the development of Web 2.0, social media dialogue has been increasingly important within the world of open access (OA), striving for more user-generated content and ease of use. In this article, we analysed the impact of OA articles published by both Chinese and the American researchers using PLOS ONE. Papers published in the same year, using citation and social media metrics, were all used to analyse the correlation between the level of social media metrics and citation. Overall, the impact of OA articles published within the United States is higher than OA articles published in China. The results showed that citations and number of Mendeley readers have a significant correlation, which reflect the similar impact in evaluation of OA articles. However, most social media metrics did not have an obvious correlation with impact evaluation, which indicates the social media metrics are useful when paired with citations, but not irreplaceable to citations. Social media metrics appear to be a useful alternative metrics to accurately reflecting the impact of OA articles within the scientific community.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Tuncay Şur ◽  
Betül Yarar

This paper seeks to understand why there has been an increase in photographic images exposing military violence or displaying bodies killed by military forces and how they can freely circulate in the public without being censored or kept hidden. In other words, it aims to analyze this particular issue as a symptom of the emergence of new wars and a new regime of their visual representation. Within this framework, it attempts to relate two kinds of literature that are namely the history of war and war photography with the bridge of theoretical discussions on the real, its photographic representation, power, and violence.  Rather than systematic empirical analysis, the paper is based on a theoretical attempt which is reflected on some socio-political observations in the Middle East where there has been ongoing wars or new wars. The core discussion of the paper is supported by a brief analysis of some illustrative photographic images that are served through the social media under the circumstances of war for instance in Turkey between Turkish military troops and the Kurdish militants. The paper concludes that in line with the process of dissolution/transformation of the old nation-state formations and globalization, the mechanism and mode of power have also transformed to the extent that it resulted in the emergence of new wars. This is one dynamic that we need to recognize in relation to the above-mentioned question, the other is the impact of social media in not only delivering but also receiving war photographies. Today these changes have led the emergence of new machinery of power in which the old modern visual/photographic techniques of representing wars without human beings, torture, and violence through censorship began to be employed alongside medieval power techniques of a visual exhibition of tortures and violence.


2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 198-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eliza Hixson

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the social impact that two events, the Adelaide Fringe Festival and the Clipsal 500, have on young residents (16-19 years old) of Adelaide. The purpose of this paper is to examine how young people participate in these events and how this affects their sense of involvement in the event and contributes to their identity development. Design/methodology/approach – A mixed methods approach was adopted in which focus groups and questionnaires were conducted with secondary school students. As an exploratory study, focus groups (n=24) were conducted in the first stage of the research. The results of the focus groups were used to develop a questionnaire that resulted in 226 useable responses. The final stage of the research explored one event in further depth in order to determine the influence of different participation levels. Findings – This study found that young people demonstrated more involvement in the Adelaide Fringe Festival and their identities were more influenced by this event. Further investigation of the Adelaide Fringe Festival also indicated that level of participation affects the social outcomes gained, with those participating to a greater degree achieving higher involvement and increased identity awareness. This is demonstrated through a model which aims to illustrate how an event impact an individual based on their role during the event. Originality/value – This paper applies two leisure concepts in order to analyse the impact of events. Activity involvement is a concept which examines the importance of the activity in the participant's life. Also of importance to young people is how activities contribute to their identities, especially because they are in a transitional period of their lives.


Author(s):  
Hans Ottosson ◽  
Emma Hirschi ◽  
Christopher A. Mattson ◽  
Eric Dahlin

In this paper we present a starting point for designing for and/or assessing the social impact of engineered products. The starting point is a set of tables comprising products, their general functional characteristics, and the accompanying social impacts. We have constructed these tables by first extracting a set of social impact categories from the literature, then 65 products were qualitatively reviewed to find their social impact. The resulting product impact tables can be used at either the beginning of the product development process to decide what social impact to design for and discover product functions that lead to it, or later to qualitatively assess the social impact of a product being designed and/or to assess the impact of an existing product.


2021 ◽  
pp. 104973232110018
Author(s):  
Sarah O’Neill ◽  
Christina Pallitto

The health consequences of female genital mutilation (FGM) have been described previously; however, evidence of the social consequences is more intangible. To date, few systematic reviews have addressed the impact of the practice on psycho-social well-being, and there is limited understanding of what these consequences might consist. To complement knowledge on the known health consequences, this article systematically reviewed qualitative evidence of the psycho-social impact of FGM in countries where it is originally practiced (Africa, the Middle East, and Asia) and in countries of the diaspora. Twenty-three qualitative studies describing the psycho-social impact of FGM on women’s lives were selected after screening. This review provides a framework for understanding the less visible ways in which women and girls with FGM experience adverse effects that may affect their sense of identity, their self-esteem, and well-being as well as their participation in society.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mazzini Muda ◽  
Muhammad Iskandar Hamzah

PurposeIn spite of the increasing organic and interactive marketing activities over social media, a general understanding of the source credibility of voluntary user-generated content (UGC) is still limited. In line with the social identity theory, this paper examines the effects of consumers' perceived source credibility of UGC in YouTube videos on their attitudes and behavioral intentions. Additionally, source homophily theory is included to predict the antecedent of source credibility.Design/methodology/approachThree hundred and seventy two Generation Y respondents were interviewed using snowball sampling. Data were analyzed with component-based structural equation modeling technique of partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).FindingsFindings confirmed that perceived source credibility indirectly affects purchase intention (PI) and electronic word-of-mouth via attitude toward UGC. Besides, perceived source credibility mediates the effect of perceived source homophily on attitude toward UGC.Practical implicationsSince today's consumers have begun to trust and rely more on UGC than company-generated content on social media when making purchase decisions, companies may reconsider democratizing certain aspects of their branding strategies. Firms may fine-tune their marketing communication budgets – not only just by sponsoring public figures and celebrities but also by nurturing coproductive engagements with independent content creators who are ordinary consumers. Endowed with their imposing credibility, these micro-influencers and prosumers have high potentials to be uplifted to brand ambassadors.Originality/valueWhile consumers' purchase outcome can be measured easily using metrics and analytics, the roles of source homophily in stages leading up to the purchase is still elusive. Drawing on the rich theoretical basis of source homophily may help researchers to understand not only how credibility and attitude are related to PI but also how this nexus generates positive word of mouth among UGC followers within the social media circles.


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