Spreading Clio: a quantitative analysis of the first 25 years of the European Review of Economic History

This paper traces the history of the first 25 years of the European Economic History Review (EREH) comparing its initial agenda with its actual publication record and measuring its success with citation data. We rely on a database of all articles published in the EREH and in the four other top field journals from 1997 to 2020. The EREH has been a great success becoming, as planned at its establishment, the main outlet for continental European scholars and expanding somewhat its remit. Nonetheless, EREH needs to do an extra mile to fill the remaining gap with the more established field journals.

TeamTree analysis: A new approach to evaluate scientific production

Advances in science and technology depend on the work of research teams and the publication of results through peer-reviewed articles representing a growing socio-economic resource. Current methods to mine the scientific literature regarding a field of interest focus on content, but the workforce credited by authorship remains largely unexplored. Notably, appropriate measures of scientific production are debated. Here, a new bibliometric approach named TeamTree analysis is introduced that visualizes the development and composition of the workforce driving a field. A new citation-independent measure that scales with the H index estimates impact based on publication record, genealogical ties and collaborative connections. This author-centered approach complements existing tools to mine the scientific literature and to evaluate research across disciplines.

Terry L. Erwin and the race to document biodiversity (1940–2020)

Terry Erwin’s race to document arthropod diversity inspired taxonomists, systematists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, and the conservation community at large, as his curatorial work of more than 50 years at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and prolific publication record attests. The biography compiles public records, publications, as well as personal memoirs to describe the context in which Erwin’s studies with carabid beetles evolved as formalization of concepts, such as biological diversity, megadiverse countries, biodiversity loss, and conservation biology, will become central for science in the upcoming years. Awareness to explore new frontiers such as the forest canopy and Erwin’s studies in tropical forests, his easy-going personality, and dedicated mentoring attracted colleagues, students, and the general public, making him one of the leaders of tropical biology in the world.

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. Here we analyse 10 years of grant funding by the Swiss National Science Foundation in Earth and Environmental Sciences, and compare it to the publication record of the researchers who were awarded the funds. No significant statistical correlation can be established between the publication or citation record of a researcher and the amount of money this researcher obtains in grant funding. These results imply that researchers successful in raising funds are not necessarily in a position to be more productive or produce more impactful publications. Those results should be considered for deciding whether to use grant funding as a criterion for career advancement procedures.

Identity formation of the profession in a latecomer political science community

Latecomer political science communities have faced multiple challenges in the past decades, including the very establishment of their professional identities. Based on the case study of Hungary, this article argues that publication performance is a substantial component of the identity of the political science profession. Hungary is a notable example among Central and East European (CEE) political science academia in the sense that both the initial take-off of the profession and then its increasing challenges are typical to the CEE region. In an inclusive approach, which encompasses all authors published in the field between 1990 and 2018, as well as their publication record, the analysis demonstrates that political science has undergone major expansion, quality growth and internationalisation but these performance qualities are unevenly spread. These reflect important aspects of the profession’s identity. This agency and performance-based approach to identity formation might well be used to build up identity features elsewhere and also in a comparative manner.

Enhancing Academic Recommendation Regarding Common Coauthors' Publication Records

In this chapter, the authors investigated the feasibility of any improvement in paper recommendation by recommending similar papers to an input paper from the publication record of the first author. Although there are numerous approaches for recommending academic papers, they did not consider intellectually recommending papers based on the publication record of common coauthors. Consequently, they are motivated to introduce a remedy for this shortcoming by recommending scholarly papers based on similarity of textual references to visual features which considers the similarity of text fragments of one's publication record to any of their visual features (i.e., tables and figures). Based on the results of evaluation, the proposed enhancement will increase the mean precision, recall, and accordingly, the F-measure. In addition, it increases the position of the relevant papers in the returned list of documents.

Trends of Publications (1910-2020) on Climate Change/Global Warming/Climate Emergency Versus General Climate Research

This article presents and discusses analytical data on the scientific publication record from 1910 to 2020 on two topics: "climate" and "climate change/global warming/climate emergency". The goal is to visualize how the publication record on these two topics has evolved over time, from different classification perspectives (year, country, source and organization). Three hypotheses are tested using data collected from Web of Science and various graphical representations of the data. It is found that research output related to the Earth’s contemporary changing climate overtook that of general climate research in 2011, and the publication ratio has been expanding in the last decade. There are significant differences in the publication countries and sources between the two topics, and conversely less significant differences in terms of organizations publishing these works. Differentiation factors that affect the level of research output and engagement on the climate challenge include: island versus landlocked nations, specialized versus general scientific journals, academic versus institutional organizations. The future of the publication records is discussed, such as the emergence of new terms to refer to the climate challenge, such as “climate emergency”.

Social Media Influence Does Not Reflect Scholarly or Clinical Activity in Real Life

Background: Social media has become a major source of communication in medicine. We aimed to understand the relationship between physicians’ social media influence and their scholarly and clinical activity. Methods: We identified attending US electrophysiologists on Twitter. We compared physician Twitter activity to (1) scholarly publication record (h-index) and (2) clinical volume according to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The ratio of observed versus expected (obs/exp) Twitter followers was calculated based on each scholarly (K-index) and clinical activity. Results: We identified 284 physicians, with mean Twitter age of 5.0 (SD, 3.1) years and median 568 followers (25th, 75th: 195, 1146). They had a median 34.5 peer-reviewed articles (25th, 75th: 14, 105), 401 citations (25th, 75th: 102, 1677), and h-index 9 (25th, 75th: 4, 19.8). The median K-index was 0.4 (25th, 75th: 0.15, 1.0), ranging from 0.0008 to 29.2. The median number of electrophysiology procedures was 77 (25th, 75th: 0, 160) and evaluation and management visits 264 (25th, 75th: 59, 516) in 2017. The top 1% electrophysiologists for followers accounted for 20% of all followers, 17% of status updates, had a mean h-index of 6 (versus 15 for others, P =0.3), and accounted for 1% of procedural and evaluation and management volumes. They had a mean K-index of 21 (versus 0.77 for others, P <0.0001) and clinical obs/exp follower ratio of 17.9 and 18.1 for procedures and evaluation and management ( P <0.001 each, versus others [0.81 for each]). Conclusions: Electrophysiologists are active on Twitter, with modest influence often representative of scholarly and clinical activity. However, the most influential physicians appear to have relatively modest scholarly and clinical activity.

Crossmark policy page

DECENT Database is a participating member of CrossRef, which is a multi-publisher initiative that provides a standard method for readers to locate the most updated versions of an article through CrossMark Services. The Crossmark button situated on all published digital formats (HTML, PDF and ePub) of DECENT Database indicates membership in CrossRef. Application of the CrossMark button to all articles on DECENT Database affirms a commitment to uphold publishing integrity by maintaining the content of scholarly articles and promptly registering any updates. Clicking the CrossMark icon will inform the reader of the current status of a document and may also provide additional publication record information about the document.

Collaboration via co-authorship trends in Government of Canada forestry research

As part of its long history, the Canadian Forest Service (CFS) has a mandate to collaborate and share its scientific research. Publishing peer-reviewed scientific literature is an important part of this process. Using a database of CFS publications over the past fifty years, we highlight the continuing publication record of this sector of the Canadian government. The average number of authors reported in the CFS bookstore increased from 1.4 authors per article in the 1960s and 1.5 in the 1970s to just under five authors per publication from 2010 to 2018. Our work also illustrates challenges with longitudinal analysis of citation databases. In particular, use of a popular citation database resulted in significantly fewer articles authored by one person, and significantly more articles with twenty or more authors compared to the publicly available CFS “bookstore” of publications. Based on our findings, we outline a number of recommendations for use of citation data to inform collaboration research.