Citation analysis using scientific publications on the Web as data source: A case study in the XML research area

With the primary goal of exploring whether citation analysis using scientific papers found on the Web as a data source is a worthwhile means of studying scholarly communication in the new digital environment, the present case study examines the scholarly communication patterns in XML research revealed by citation analysis of ResearchIndex data and SCI data. Results suggest that citation analysis using scientific papers found on the Web as a data source has both advantages and disadvantages when compared with citation analysis of SCI data, but is nonetheless a valid method for evaluating scholarly contributions and for studying the intellectual structure in XML research. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Disciplinary and linguistic considerations for academic Web linking: An exploratory hyperlink mediated study with Mainland China and Taiwan

The Web has become an important means of academic information exchange and can be used to give new insights into patterns of informal scholarly communication. This study develops new methods to examine patterns of university Web linking, focusing on Mainland China and Taiwan, and including language considerations. Multiple exploratory investigations into Web links were conducted between universities in these two places. Firstly, inlinks were counted to each university Web site from its national peers using four alternative Web document models. The results were shown to correlate significantly with research productivity in Taiwan but not in the Mainland, although in the latter case less reliable institutional data could have been the cause. For Taiwan, this is the first evidence of a scholarly association with academic linking for a non-English speaking region. It was then ascertained that the same link counts associated more strongly with scientific than social scientific research productivity in Taiwan. This confirms the general assumption of greater Web use by the hard sciences. We then investigated Taiwan-Mainland university cross-links, and found that although English is extensively used on the Web, there was no evidence that it was the language of preference for informal scholarly communication between the two areas. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

National and international university departmental Web site interlinking

Although many link patterns have been identified at the university level, departmental interlinking has been relatively ignored. Universities are multidisciplinary by nature and various disciplines may employ the Web differently, thus patterns identified at the university level may hide subject differences. Departments are typically subject-oriented, and departmental interlinking may therefore illustrate interesting disciplinary linking patterns, perhaps relating to informal scholarly communication. The aim of this paper is to identify whether and how link patterns differ along country and disciplinary lines between similar disciplines and similar countries. Physics, Chemistry and Biology departments in Australia, Canada and the UK have been chosen. In order to get a holistic picture of departments' Web use profiles and link patterns, five different perspectives are identified and compared for each set of departments. Differences in link patterns are identified along both national and disciplinary lines, and are found to reflect offline phenomena. Along national lines, a likely explanation for the difference is that countries with better research performances make more general use of the Web; and, with respect to international peer interlinking, countries that share more scholarly communication tend to interlink more with each other. Along disciplinary lines, it seems that departments from disciplines which are more willing to distribute their research outputs tend to make more general use of the Web, and also interlink more with their national and international peers.     

Motivations for URL citations to open access library and information science articles

Summary We define the URL citations of a Web page to be the mentions of its URL in the text of other Web pages, whether hyperlinked or not. The proportions of formal and informal scholarly motivations for creating URL citations to Library and Information Science open access journal articles were identified. Five characteristics for each source of URL citations equivalent to formal citations were manually extracted and the relationship between Web and conventional citation counts at the e-journal level was examined. Results of Google searches showed that 282 research articles published in the year 2000 in 15 peer-reviewed LIS open access journals were invoked by 3,045 URL citations. Of these URL citations, 43% were created for formal scholarly reasons equivalent to traditional citations and 18% for informal scholarly reasons. Of the sources of URL citations, 82% were in English, 88% were full text papers and 58% were non-HTML documents. Of the URL citations, 60% were text URLs only and 40% were hyperlinked. About 50% of URL citations were created within one year after the publication of the cited e-article. A slight correlation was found between average numbers of URL citations and average numbers of ISI citations for the journals in 2000. Separating out the citing HTML and non-HTML documents showed that formal scholarly communication trends on the Web were mainly influenced by text URL citations from non-HTML documents.     

The impact of internet resources on scholarly communication: A citation analysis

The quality and credibility of Internet resources has been a concern in scholarly communication. This paper reports a quantitative analysis of the use of Internet resources in journal articles and addresses the concerns for the use of Internet resources scholarly journals articles. We collected the references listed in 35,698 articles from 14 journals published during 1996 to 2005, which resulted in 1,000,724 citations. The citation data was divided into two groups: traditional citations and Web citations, and examined based on frequencies of occurrences by domain and type of Web citation sources. The findings included: (1) The number of Web citations in the journals investigated had been increasing steadily, though the quantity was too small to draw an inclusive conclusion on the data about their impact on scientific research; (2) A great disparity existed among different disciplines in terms of using information on the Web. Applied disciplines and interdisciplinary sciences tended to cite more information on the Web, while classical and experimental disciplines cited little of Web information; (3) The frequency of citations was related to the reputation of the author or the institution issuing the information, and not to the domain or webpage types; and (4) The researchers seemed to lack confidence in Internet resources, and Web information was not as frequently cited as reported in some publications before. The paper also discusses the need for developing a guideline system to evaluate Web resources regarding their authority and quality that lies in the core of credibility of Web information.     

Knowledge communication on social media: a case study of Biomedical Science on Baidu Baike

Social media are considered perfect examples of Web 2.0 applications, which people use to communicate and collaborate together. Baidu Baike, a wiki-like online encyclopedia, is analysed as a typical example in which experts and lay Internet users collaborate. Entries in Biomedical Science section are analysed to reveal communication activities behind the construction of such scholarly entries. The composition of the related entries, references of each entry, cooperation among contributors of entries, and common interests of contributors are analysed with Altmetrics, citation analysis, co-occurrence analysis, and heterogeneous coupling. Altmetrics is used to analyse scholarly communication during the construction of entries. Citation analysis based on references in entries provides a way to establish indirect communication between citing and cited authors, namely the contributors of entries and authors of references. Co-occurrence analysis is used for the analysis of cooperation both among experts and lay Internet users and the distribution of tags of entries. Heterogeneous coupling is used to reveal the relationship among entries based on common references as well as common experts. The results show that literature is referred to during people’s online communication. The citations and tags of entries reflect the interdisciplinary specializations within Biomedical Science. The majority of experts cooperated with someone in the same affiliation but cross-unit cooperation also existed. The common interests of experts indicate that the specialists only master their own field. Moreover, as a typical general public, lay Internet users have a wide range of interests and remain enthusiastic about entry contribution.     

Long-term trends in the multidisciplinarity of some typical natural and social sciences,and its implications on the SSH versus STM distinction

Macro-level domains of the science system, usually referred to as STM and SSH disciplines, have often been contrasted from various perspectives, regarding the characteristic composition of their publication channels, referencing or communication practices, and the related consequences in research evaluation. It is also long been conjectured that social science fields (along with the humanities) are more multidisciplinary than natural science fields, regarding their patterns of scholarly communication (“multidisciplinarity thesis”). The main goal of the study reported in this paper is twofold: (1) to revisit the differences in multidisciplinarity between the SSH versus STM domain, via a long-term longitudinal survey including the most recent trends, and (2) to utilize, for this task, state-of-the-art metrics and models of Interdisciplinary Research, taking into account their limitations, that is, the data sources that most naturally feed these models (typically the Web of Science). Our conclusions provides further confirmation, from the perspective of multidisciplinarity, that the concepts of SSH and STM are mainly tools for communication, rather than empirically valid constructs.     

Book reviews in academic journals: patterns and dynamics

Book reviews play important roles in scholarly communication especially in arts and humanities disciplines. By using Web of Science’s Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index, this study probed the patterns and dynamics of book reviews within these three indexes empirically during the past decade (2006–2015). We found that the absolute numbers of book reviews among all the three indexes were relatively stable but the relative shares were decreasing. Book reviews were very common in arts and humanities, common in social sciences, but rare in natural sciences. Book reviews are mainly contributed by authors from developed economies such as the USA and the UK. Oppositely, scholars from China and Japan are unlikely to contribute to book reviews.     

The anthrax scare and the Web: A content analysis of Web pages linking to resources on anthrax

Summary The purpose of this study was to develop a method for characterizing the page and linking patterns related to dramatic events on the Web. As a specific case, we characterized Web pages linking to the set of pages on anthrax indexed by the Yahoo directory (generally acknowledged as a high quality directory). The sample of Web pages was collected shortly after anthrax became a matter of widespread concern (November 2001). The findings show that at that time the “typical' source page was either a news item or a page with a list of links. Most of the examined links were not navigational but linked to the target page in order to provide additional content. Many Web sites added hyperlinks to pages providing presumably authoritative and high quality information on anthrax rather than supplying the information themselves. The results show that Web authors link extensively to presumably “high quality' pages. The methods presented here can be utilized in order to characterize pages and linking patterns of Web pages linking to a set of predefined pages, and the findings of this specific study can serve as a basis for comparison.     

Web 2.0 and its dimensions in the scholarly world

A bibliometric analysis was performed on a set of 1718 documents relating to Web 2.0 to explore the dimensions and characteristics of this emerging field. It has been found that Web 2.0 has its root deep in social networks with medicine and sociology as the major contributing disciplines to the scholarly publications beyond its technology backbone — information and computer science. Terms germane to Web 2.0, extracted from the data collected in this study, were also visualized to reflect the very nature of this rising star on the Internet. Web 2.0, according to the current research, is of the user, by the user, and more importantly, for the user.     

Validating online reference managers for scholarly impact measurement

This paper investigates whether CiteULike and Mendeley are useful for measuring scholarly influence, using a sample of 1,613 papers published in Nature and Science in 2007. Traditional citation counts from the Web of Science (WoS) were used as benchmarks to compare with the number of users who bookmarked the articles in one of the two free online reference manager sites. Statistically significant correlations were found between the user counts and the corresponding WoS citation counts, suggesting that this type of influence is related in some way to traditional citation-based scholarly impact but the number of users of these systems seems to be still too small for them to challenge traditional citation indexes.     

ICMPTend: Internet Control Message Protocol Covert Tunnel Attack Intent Detector

The Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) covert tunnel refers to a network attack that encapsulates malicious data in the data part of the ICMP protocol for transmission. Its concealment is stronger and it is not easy to be discovered. Most detection methods are detecting the existence of channels instead of clarifying specific attack intentions. In this paper, we propose an ICMP covert tunnel attack intent detection framework ICMPTend, which includes five steps: data collection, feature dictionary construction, data preprocessing, model construction, and attack intent prediction. ICMPTend can detect a variety of attack intentions, such as shell attacks, sensitive directory access, communication protocol traffic theft, filling tunnel reserved words, and other common network attacks. We extract features from five types of attack intent found in ICMP channels. We build a multi-dimensional dictionary of malicious features, including shell attacks, sensitive directory access, communication protocol traffic theft, filling tunnel reserved words, and other common network attack keywords. For the high-dimensional and independent characteristics of ICMP traffic, we use a support vector machine (SVM) as a multi-class classifier. The experimental results show that the average accuracy of ICMPTend is 92%, training ICMPTend only takes 55 s, and the prediction time is only 2 s, which can effectively identify the attack intention of ICMP.     

An exploration of link-based knowledge map in academic web space

The World Wide Web has become an important source of academic information. The linking feature of the Web has been used to study the structure of academic web, as well as the presence of academic and research institutes on the Web. In this paper, we propose an integrated model for exploring the subject macrostructure of a specific academic topic on the Web and automatically depicting the knowledge map that is closer to what a domain expert would expect. The model integrates a hyperlink-induced topic search (HITS)-based link network extending strategy and a semantic based clustering algorithm with the aid of co-link analysis and social network analysis (SNA) to discover subject-based communities in the academic web space. We selected to use websites as analytical units rather than web pages because of the subject stability of a website. Compared with traditional techniques in Webometrics and SNA that have been used for such analyses, our model has the advantages of working on open web space (capability to explore unknown web resources and identify important ones) and of automatically building an extendable and hierarchical web knowledge map. The experiment in the area of Information Retrieval shows the effectiveness of the integrated model in analyzing and portraying of subject clustering phenomenon in academic web space.     

Web visibility of scholars in media and communication journals

This paper examines the Web visibility of researchers in the field of communication. First, we measured the Web visibility of authors who have recently published their research in communication journals contained in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) provided by the Web of Science. Second, we identified a subset of authors based on their publication outlets and summarize those researchers with the highest Web presence. Lastly, we determined the factors affecting their Web visibility by using a set of national and linguistic variables of the individual researchers. Web data were collected by using a Bing.com advanced search tool based on the API. Web presence is defined as the number of Web (co-) mentions of each researcher. We identified the most solely-visible scholars in the entire communication webosphere and scholars with the most networked visibility based on co-mentions. There is a weak but statistically significant correlation between researchers?? Web visibility and their SSCI publication counts. Further, US-based and/or English-speaking scholars were more noticeable than others on cyberspace.     

An examination of “citation circles” for social sciences journals in Eastern European countries

This study aims to explore the effects of both journal self citations and mutual citations within a group of journals on the increase in the impact factors (IFs) for social sciences journals published in Eastern Europe. We found that the practice of mutual citations is prevalent among the new journals, a trend that raises questions about possible manipulation of the IF and potential isolation of the recent journals from the international network of scholarly communication.     

Mapping communication and collaboration in heterogeneous research networks

The aim of this mainly methodological paper is to present an approach for researching the triple helix of university-industry-government relations as a heterogeneous and multi-layered communication network. The layers included are: the formal scholarly communication in academic journals, the communication network based on project collaborations, and finally the communication of information over the 'virtual' network of web links. The approach is applied on typical 'Mode 2' fields such as biotechnology, while using a variety of data sources. We present some of the initial findings, which indicate the different structures and functions of the three layers of communication.     

The interdisciplinary structure of research on intercultural relations: a co-citation network analysis study

This study aims to map the content and structure of the knowledge base of research on intercultural relations as revealed in co-citation networks of 30 years of scholarly publications. Source records for extracting co-citation information are retrieved from Web of Science (1980–2010) through comprehensive keyword search and filtered by manual semantic coding. Exploratory network and content analysis is conducted (1) to discover the development of major research themes and the relations between them over time; (2) to locate representative core publications (the stars) that are highly co-cited with others and those (the bridges) connecting more between rather than within subfields or disciplines. Structural analysis of the co-citation networks identifies a core cluster that contains foundational knowledge of this domain. It is well connected to almost all the other clusters and covers a wide range of subject categories. The evolutionary path of research themes shows trends moving towards (e.g. psychology and business and economics) and away from (e.g. language education and communication) the core cluster over time. Based on the results, a structural framework of the knowledge domain of intercultural relations research is proposed to represent thematic relatedness between topical groups and their relations.     

The big challenge of Scientometrics 2.0: exploring the broader impact of scientific research in public health

In the present study we discuss the challenge of “Scientometrics 2.0” as introduced by Priem and Hemminger (2010) in the light of possible applications to research evaluation. We use the Web of Science subject category public, environmental and occupational health to illustrate how indicators similar to those used in traditional scientometrics can be built, and we also discuss their opportunities and limitations. The discipline under study combines life sciences and social sciences in a unique manner and provides usable metrics reflecting both scholarly and wider impact. Nonetheless, metrics reflecting social media attention like tweets, retweets and Facebook likes, shares or comments are still subject to limitations in this research discipline as well. Furthermore, Usage metrics clearly point to the manipulation proneness of this measure. Although the counterparts of important bibliometric indicators proved to work for several altmetrics too, their interpretation and application to research assessment requires proper context analysis.

     

The scientific impact and partner selection in collaborative research at Korean universities

This study seeks to bridge the gap between scientometrics literature on scientific collaboration and science and technology management literature on partner selection by linking scientists’ collaborator preferences to the marginal advantage in citation impact. The 1981–2010 South Korea NCR (National Citation Report), a subset of the Web of Science that includes 297,658 scholarly articles, was used for this research. We found that, during this period, multi-author scientific articles increasingly dominated single-author articles: multi-university collaboration grew significantly; and the numbers of research publications produced by teams working within a single institution or by a single author diminished. This study also demonstrated that multi-university collaboration produces higher-impact articles when it includes “Research Universities,” that is, top-tier university schools. We also found that elite universities experienced impact degradation of their scientific results when they collaborated with lower-tier institutions, whereas their lower-tier partners gained impact benefits from the collaboration. Finally, our research revealed that Korean universities are unlikely to work with other universities in the same tier. This propensity for cross-tier collaboration can be interpreted as strategic partner selection by lower-tier schools seeking marginal advantage in citation impact.     

Can Microsoft Academic be used for citation analysis of preprint archives? The case of the Social Science Research Network

Preprint archives play an important scholarly communication role within some fields. The impact of archives and individual preprints are difficult to analyse because online repositories are not indexed by the Web of Science or Scopus. In response, this article assesses whether the new Microsoft Academic can be used for citation analysis of preprint archives, focusing on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). Although Microsoft Academic seems to index SSRN comprehensively, it groups a small fraction of SSRN papers into an easily retrievable set that has variations in character over time, making any field normalisation or citation comparisons untrustworthy. A brief parallel analysis of arXiv suggests that similar results would occur for other online repositories. Systematic analyses of preprint archives are nevertheless possible with Microsoft Academic when complete lists of archive publications are available from other sources because of its promising coverage and citation results.