Social Justice as It Evolves in the LAM Sector

This chapter intends to explore the history of social justice in libraries, archives, and museums (LAM) in general and social inclusion in particular. The value of this chapter is in the identified indicators, also known as characteristics (e.g., title words and its relation to citation behavior) in the current literature. A profile of over 500 articles, from 2001 to 2021, is analyzed. Journal articles from 2016 to 2021 are used to test three hypotheses. The findings of this study facilitate in understanding the emerging themes and interdisciplinary areas in the field of social justice.

An analysis of top author citations in software engineering and a comparison with other fields

Ioannidis et al. provided a science-wide database of author citations. The data offers an opportunity to researchers in a field to compare the citation behavior of their field with others. In this paper, we conduct a systematic analysis of citations describing the situation in software engineering and compare it with the fields included in the data provided by Ioannidis et al. For comparison, we take the measures used by Ioannidis into consideration. We also report the top-scientists and investigate software engineering researchers’ activities in other fields. The data was obtained and provided by Ioannidis et al. based on the Scopus database. Our method for analysis focuses on descriptive statistics. We compared software engineering with other fields and reported demographic information for the top authors. The analysis was done without any modifications to the ranking. In the later analysis, we observed that 37% of researchers listed as software engineers were not in the software engineering field. On the other hand, the database included a large portion of top authors (ca. 60% to 80%) identified in other software engineering rankings. Other fields using the database are advised to review the author lists for their fields. Our research’s main risk was that researchers are listed that do not belong to our studied field.

Detecting anomalous citation groups in journal networks

The ever-increasing competitiveness in the academic publishing market incentivizes journal editors to pursue higher impact factors. This translates into journals becoming more selective, and, ultimately, into higher publication standards. However, the fixation on higher impact factors leads some journals to artificially boost impact factors through the coordinated effort of a “citation cartel” of journals. “Citation cartel” behavior has become increasingly common in recent years, with several instances being reported. Here, we propose an algorithm—named CIDRE—to detect anomalous groups of journals that exchange citations at excessively high rates when compared against a null model that accounts for scientific communities and journal size. CIDRE detects more than half of the journals suspended from Journal Citation Reports due to anomalous citation behavior in the year of suspension or in advance. Furthermore, CIDRE detects many new anomalous groups, where the impact factors of the member journals are lifted substantially higher by the citations from other member journals. We describe a number of such examples in detail and discuss the implications of our findings with regard to the current academic climate.

The aging effect in evolving scientific citation networks

The study of citation networks is of interest to the scientific community. However, the underlying mechanism driving individual citation behavior remains imperfectly understood, despite the recent proliferation of quantitative research methods. Traditional network models normally use graph theory to consider articles as nodes and citations as pairwise relationships between them. In this paper, we propose an alternative evolutionary model based on hypergraph theory in which one hyperedge can have an arbitrary number of nodes, combined with an aging effect to reflect the temporal dynamics of scientific citation behavior. Both theoretical approximate solution and simulation analysis of the model are developed and validated using two benchmark datasets from different disciplines, i.e. publications of the American Physical Society (APS) and the Digital Bibliography & Library Project (DBLP). Further analysis indicates that the attraction of early publications will decay exponentially. Moreover, the experimental results show that the aging effect indeed has a significant influence on the description of collective citation patterns. Shedding light on the complex dynamics driving these mechanisms facilitates the understanding of the laws governing scientific evolution and the quantitative evaluation of scientific outputs.

The Protocol Gap

Although peer review is considered one of the main pillars of modern science, experimental methods and protocols seem to be not a rigorous subject of this process in many papers. Commercial equipment, test kits, labeling kits, previously published concepts, and standard protocols are often considered to be not worth a detailed description or validation. Even more disturbing is the extremely biased citation behavior in this context, which sometimes leads to surrogate citations to avoid low-impact journals, preprints, or to indicate traditional practices. This article describes some of these surprising habits and suggests some measures to avoid the most unpleasant effects, which in the long term may undermine the credibility of science as a whole.

Citation behavior of Pondicherry University faculty in digital environment: a survey

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand the citation behavior of Pondicherry University faculty with a focus on their recent publication experience, indexed in Scopus. The paper endeavors to gain an insight into their pattern of citation of scientific papers and attempts to understand the underlying motive in doing so especially in an era where information resources have transitioned from print to digital. Design/methodology/approach The study adopted a judgmental sample consisting of 100 selected faculty members whose recent papers were indexed by Scopus database. A pre-defined questionnaire consisting of demographic profile and 23 items on citation trust and authority statements of citing sources was self-administered to them. Findings The findings of the study indicate that the citation behavior of faculty in Pondicherry University is complex and multi-faceted. Although majority of the faculty depicted an inclination toward normative citation behavior (concerned with the intellectual content of the work), there are others who displayed social constructivist (concerned with the social aspects of the work) citation behavior as well. However, in spite of the differences observed in the citation behavior of the faculty, it was observed that they remained traditional while making trust decisions even in the digital era. Finally, findings suggest no statistical significant difference when it comes to variables, such as gender and discipline in the citation behavior of the faculty. Originality/value Given the ever-increasing importance of citation in judging the quality of research journals, in ranking institutions and in determining the efficacy of faculty in India, author-based approach of understanding citer motivation definitely carry research value.