Expanding Nature: Product-Line and Brand Extensions of a Scientific Journal

Academic publishers now market their most prestigious journals as commercial brands. This paper investigates this trend in the scholarly publishing market, by analyzing how the successive owners of the journal Nature have capitalized on its reputation to generate additional profits to those already accumulated through university library subscriptions. Two branding strategies of the journal Nature are analyzed: the first one, product-line extension, consists in extending the Nature brand in the same product category, by creating an ever-increasing number of derived Nature journals; the second one, brand extension, consists in extending the Nature brand to other categories of products and services, such as academic rankings, sponsored supplements, feature advertisements, or webinars and trainings. The Nature brand leveraging strategy has been imitated by many other journal publishers. These branded products and services are well suited to the particular dynamics of the scientific field, which is based on the continuous quest for recognition. They are thus sold at all stages of the research cycle, from writing grants to popularizing research results, to scientists and academic institutions competing to accumulate symbolic capital. In this respect, academic publishers that engage in scholarly journal branding contribute to the transformation of the scientific “community” into a scientific market.

Academic mobility or the Russian style networking?

Academic mobility facilitates interactions of different scientific schools and collectives, influences formation of academic relations and indirectly affects positions of universities in academic rankings. Mobility helps establish networks of professional contacts, and that might have a positive impact on the level of research, allowing efficient academic collaboration, access to results of different studies and collected data. Mobility is an important issue not only for universities, but also for researchers because their collaboration with the colleagues and participation in joint projects characterize them for other members of the academic community, and that increases the value of academic networking. However, the way of evolution of the institution of networking raises various questions about the objectivity of the recruiting process and advantages that some candidates get over their rivals. The purpose of this article is identification and analysis of those factors that force the institution of mobility in the Russian academic reality to work against general social interests and the interests of universities.

A power-critique of academic rankings: Beyond managers, institutions, and positivism

The bulk of research on academic rankings is policy-oriented, preoccupied with ‘best practices’, and seems incapable of transcending the normative discourse of ‘governance’. To understand, engage, and properly critique the operation of power in academic rankings, the rankings discourse needs to escape the gravity of ‘police science’ and embrace a properly political science of ranking. More specifically, the article identifies three pillars of the extant research from which a departure would be critically fruitful – positivism, managerialism, institutionalism – and then goes on to outline three aspects of rankings that a critical political analysis should explore, integrate, and develop into future research from the discourses of critical theory – arkhè, dispositif, and dialectik.

King Abdulaziz University Path to the Excellence

Almost all international universities focus their efforts to appear in the best positions within the different lists of Universities Academic Rankings, to be part of the World Class Universities. But universities must show, that their objective is not the ranking, but the excellence in providing students a quality education. Thus education process differs according to each region, and environment and there is a set of different factors to be considered to achieve the desired results from the institutions objectives and strategies. For that the how to select and prepare universities to fulfill these factors must converge with which is needed and necessary for the environment of the institution, being the most critical and important issue. This research work shows how KAU adapted a strategic plan, to obtain these certifications, which led it to be in the top between its academic peers in its region as in the world.

OpenRank – a novel approach to rank universities using objective and publicly verifiable data sources

PurposeAcademic rankings are facing various issues, including the use of data sources that are not publicly verifiable, subjective parameters, a narrow focus on research productivity and regional biases and so forth. This research work is intended to enhance creditability of the ranking process by using the objective indicators based on publicly verifiable data sources.Design/methodology/approachThe proposed ranking methodology – OpenRank – drives the objective indicators from two well-known publicly verifiable data repositories: the ArnetMiner and DBpedia.FindingsThe resultant academic ranking reflects common tendencies of the international academic rankings published by the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy (SRC), Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and Times Higher Education (THE). Evaluation of the proposed methodology advocates its effectiveness and quick reproducibility with low cost of data collection.Research limitations/implicationsImplementation of the OpenRank methodology faced the issue of availability of the quality data. In future, accuracy of the academic rankings can be improved further by employing more relevant public data sources like the Microsoft Academic Graph, millions of graduate's profiles available in the LinkedIn repositories and the bibliographic data maintained by Association for Computing Machinery and Scopus and so forth.Practical implicationsThe suggested use of open data sources would offer new dimensions to evaluate academic performance of the higher education institutions (HEIs) and having comprehensive understanding of the catalyst factors in the higher education.Social implicationsThe research work highlighted the need of a purposely built, publicly verifiable electronic data source for performance evaluation of the global HEIs. Availability of such a global database would help in better academic planning, monitoring and analysis. Definitely, more transparent, reliable and less controversial academic rankings can be generated by employing the aspired data source.Originality/valueWe suggested a satisfying solution for improvement of the HEIs' ranking process by making the following contributions: (1) enhancing creditability of the ranking results by merely employing the objective performance indicators extracted from the publicly verifiable data sources, (2) developing an academic ranking methodology based on the objective indicators using two well-known data repositories, the DBpedia and ArnetMiner and (3) demonstrating effectiveness of the proposed ranking methodology on the real data sources.

Can Webometrics Predict the Academic Rankings of Institutes?

Webometrics can be used for understanding the quantitative aspects of web resources. The present study investigates the role of webometrics in determining the academic ranking of the institute. The extensive research was conducted on a sample of 59 reputed academic institutes based out of India. The data was analysed using two techniques viz. linear regression and classification and regression tree. From the results of the study, it was found that among all the webometrics parameters, Alexa rank and Semrush rank of the website was found to be the most crucial factor for determining the academic ranking of the institute. The study has insights for policymakers of the institute as the results of the study can be used for devising various ways to improve the webometrics parameters in order to enhance the academic ranking of the institute.

ResearchGate Altmetric scores and Scopus bibliometric indicators among lecturers

PurposeMany researchers in ResearchGate (RG) engage in scholarly activity and share research findings. The researchers' activities in this social network may increase the probability of their works being cited. Thus, this study aims to examine the status of RG indices and the Scopus citation indicators of the allied medical sciences lecturers and their association with their academic rankings.Design/methodology/approachA cross-sectional, descriptive analytical study was performed. As a first step, the names of all 50 lecturers at the School of Allied Medical Sciences were searched through RG to find all the lecturers with profiles. Then, the h-index as well as the number of citations by them were extracted from Scopus. Spearman's correlation coefficient test was performed to explore the association of the RG score with the Scopus citation indicators and the academic rankings of the lecturers.FindingsThe findings demonstrated that there is a statistically significant relationship between the RG indices (except the question and answer indices) and the Scopus citation indicators with the academic rankings of the lecturers (p-value < 0.01).Originality/valueKnowledge of the significant relationship between the RG indices and the Scopus citation indicators may encourage the lecturers to make more efforts to be active on RG. Furthermore, policymakers can encourage their researchers and lecturers to be more active in this scientific social network, which could lead to promoting the university rankings in the global and national rankings systems.