Using the H-Index to Measure Research Performance in Higher Education: A Case Study of Library and Information Science Faculty in New Zealand and Australia

<p>As academia increasingly turns to bibliometric tools to assess research impact, the question of which indicator provides the best measure of research quality is highly debated. Much emphasis has been placed on the value of the h-index, a new bibliometric tool proposed in 2005 which has quickly found favour in the scientific community. One of the first applications of the h-index was carried out by Kelly and Jennions (2006), who found a number of variables could influence the h-index scores of ecologists and evolutionary biologists. To test these findings, this study calculated the h-index scores of New Zealand and Australian researchers teaching in the field of library and information science (LIS). Publication and citation counts were generated using the Web of Science (WoS), where a number of limitations with using the database to calculate h-index scores were identified. We then considered the effect that gender, country of residence, institutional affiliation, and scientific age had on the h-index scores of LIS researchers in New Zealand and Australia. The study found a positive relationship between scientific age and h-index scores, indicating that the length of a scientist's career should be considered when using the h-index. However, analysis also showed that gender, country of residence, and institutional affiliation had no influence on h-index scores.</p>

Using the H-Index to Measure Research Performance in Higher Education: A Case Study of Library and Information Science Faculty in New Zealand and Australia

<p>As academia increasingly turns to bibliometric tools to assess research impact, the question of which indicator provides the best measure of research quality is highly debated. Much emphasis has been placed on the value of the h-index, a new bibliometric tool proposed in 2005 which has quickly found favour in the scientific community. One of the first applications of the h-index was carried out by Kelly and Jennions (2006), who found a number of variables could influence the h-index scores of ecologists and evolutionary biologists. To test these findings, this study calculated the h-index scores of New Zealand and Australian researchers teaching in the field of library and information science (LIS). Publication and citation counts were generated using the Web of Science (WoS), where a number of limitations with using the database to calculate h-index scores were identified. We then considered the effect that gender, country of residence, institutional affiliation, and scientific age had on the h-index scores of LIS researchers in New Zealand and Australia. The study found a positive relationship between scientific age and h-index scores, indicating that the length of a scientist's career should be considered when using the h-index. However, analysis also showed that gender, country of residence, and institutional affiliation had no influence on h-index scores.</p>

How Blind is Double Blind Review?

The peer-review system as a critical tool in academic processes is regarded to be essential. It is not used only to evaluate the manuscripts submitted to the journals but also in tenure decisions, academic promotions, and grant applications. However, during the last few decades, the system has also become a subject of academic research and criticized from various aspects. Many scholars studied the process and presented biases emerging due to the characteristics of the authors and reviewers. In this paper, the journals published by the faculties of economics and administrative sciences and the faculties of political sciences and indexed by TR Dizin are studied. It is observed that the language of the article, number, title, gender, and institutional affiliation of the authors do not influence the acceptance period. However, there is a difference between the average acceptance periods of the journals, which are quite similar. Moreover, being a faculty member of the publisher provides a significantly shorter acceptance period on average. The reason for such differentiation may be either the existence of a considerable extent of bias at the editorial stages of the process or the communication of the editors with the reviewers in a way that influences the process.

Two decades of European criminology: Exploring the conferences of the European Society of Criminology through topic modelling

What is European criminology about? Through topic modelling, we investigate the content of 11,724 presentations held at the annual conferences of the European Society of Criminology, the largest and most influential professional association in Europe for those who are actively engaged in research, teaching, and/or practice in criminology, from 2001 to 2019. We extract 50 topics and identify the top contributing institutions and countries based on first author institutional affiliation. In addition, we determine the most and least influential topics in European criminology. We further explore how the prominence of topics has evolved over time and identify five topics that are increasingly being addressed and three topics that have gradually declined in interest – hot and cold topics, respectively. The results are discussed in light of previous research on European criminology and current debates on its epistemology.

Scientific Online Communication

This paper presents the results of research aimed at studying the interrelations of scientists' online communications and their real academic achievements using the example of ResearchGate (RG). The goals of the study are to discover the spectrum of communication practices of RG users and define the influence of institutional factors and demographic characteristics on the users' network activity. The sample consisting of 4800 RG profiles is composed using a web scraping approach. Cluster analysis of the data reveals three clusters of RG users according to these practices (‘representation' and ‘exchange'). The study found that neither age nor status influence the network activity. However, ranking the institutional affiliation of users demonstrated the influence of institutional factors on their network behaviour. The verified results of the present research essentially contribute to the understanding of how a scientist should use the advantages of the network in his/her professional activity, and how to overcome institutional limits which inhibit academic advancement.

Getting Published in Top Journals: Is the Deck Stacked Against You?

We examine the challenges of publishing in top academic journals. We introduce a new data set summarizing 30 years of articles at the three top finance journals. We quantify the issue by first examining the number of articles and authors per year at each journal then comment on the impact of repeat authors and institutional affiliation. Our results show that a small number of academics and institutions dominate the available publishing space in these journals. We then shift the focus to the potential impact of choice of research area on publication success by investigating trends in the coverage of behavioral finance in these journals. Our results suggest an editorial bias against this arguably important field of study.

Collegial Relationships

Although collegial relationships are among the most prevalent types of interpersonal relationships in our lives, they have not been the subject of much philosophical study. In this paper, we take the first step in the process of developing an ethics of collegiality by establishing what qualifies two people as colleagues and then by determining what it is that gives value to collegial relationships. We argue that A and B are colleagues if both exhibit sameness regarding at least two of the following three features: (i) the same work content or domain of activity; (ii) the same institutional affiliation or common purpose; and/or (iii) the same status or level of responsibility. Moreover, we describe how the potential value of collegial relationships is grounded in the relationship goods that two colleagues have reason to generate qua colleagues, namely, collegial solidarity and collegial recognition. Two interesting conclusions that can be drawn from our analysis are that one has to be proficient at one’s work if one is to be considered a good colleague and that we are also more likely to be better colleagues if we regard the work we do as valuable. Finally, we draw special attention to the working conditions that are conducive to the generation of good collegial relationships and suggest some policies to promote them.

My Intersecting Quests as a Disabled Independent Scholar

This colloquy, by graduate-student-led collective Project Spectrum, attempts to map out existing discussions around inclusion and equity in music academia, with a specific focus on identifying and analyzing the structures in academia that work against minoritized and historically excluded scholars. Tekla Babyak asks us to re-imagine what is on the other side of the pipeline. In her colloquy contribution, she shares her advocacy experience in fighting for both independent scholars’ and disabled scholars’ seat at the proverbial table. She imagines an academic discipline that would readily accept, acknowledge, and uplift independent scholars—instead of considering them half- or failed scholars for their lack of institutional affiliation. And she imagines an academic discipline that would readily include disabled scholars, not for their exceptionality in achieving scholarship, but for their ability to contribute to a more diverse and inclusive intellectual milieu. She critiques the ableism endemic to the academic pipeline, an ableism that veils the physical and also emotional, mental, and spiritual obstructions in our discipline’s path to so-called success.

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN THE NIGERIAN JOURNAL OF ANIMAL PRODUCTION

Using the articles published in the volume 10-14 (1983-1987) of the Nigerian Journal of Animal Production (NJAP), articles profiles and authors' livestock training background were determined. Eighty-one (81) out of 226 were single authored and the balance authored by two or more people. Twelve (12) authors represent the core authors of the journal. This figure appears rather low, from a total of 226 authors. Poultry production is the most authored field in animal production studies; while Nsukka, Zaria, Ibadan and Vom produced the highest number of animal scientists that authored the articles in the volumes 10-14 of NJAP. This group accounts for more than 74% of the institutional affiliation of authors to the journal.

Who Publishes in Economic Education? A Bibliographic Analysis of the First 50 Years of the Journal of Economic Education

We examined the characteristics of the authors who published academic articles in the Journal of Economic Education ( JEE) during its first 50 years and identify those economists who were most productive in developing economic education as a specialized field. Employing bibliometric data, we review trends in the salient characteristics of authorship with special attention paid to gender, geography, institutional affiliation, and other factors. We also explore the JEE’s impact on the development of teaching-related research through citation analysis over the course of the journal’s various editorial regimes. The results reveal the relative impacts of authors and their economic education scholarship over the past half century and provide some insight into the possible future of the field. JEL Classifications: A20, A14