Comments on the library and information science world
Yesterday I tried to follow a link from Twitter -courtesy to Janneke Staaks- to a reading suggestion. To na avail. It was a useful reading tip to an article on ScienceDirect. Well…. on a mobile phone with network access from a commercial operator that’s not going to work. Not yet, at least. So Elsevier and other publishers, are you ready for the mobile Web yet?
Last Friday Thomson Reuters released the 2008 edition of the Journal Citation Reports. This year it was announced by Thomson itself as a news release, that’s a good move from them. The number of journals reported in the two editions of the JCR have increased from 6417 in the Science edition to 6598 (181 more journals that is) and in Social Sciences edition the number of journals covered increased from 1865 to 1980 (an increase of 115 journals).It is still not the increase I expected on the basis of the addition of some 750 new regional journals which was announced last year, and that figure is now even advertised as an expansion of 1228 journals, but it is still an expansion of 300 journals. Albeit reading Thomson’s press releases on the 2008 JCR update I still notice some juggling with numbers that don’t really add, or don’t make sense after simple investigations when comparing the 2007 and 2008 issues.Now we have to go and figure out which were added, and more important, which journal were dropped. That’s always interesting to find out. It will take time though.The really major improvement Thomson should make, is to abolish the rather odd division between the two parts of the database. Currently I can’t find any arguments to stick to the demarcation lines between the Science edition and the Social Science edition of the JCR. I really wonder how many customers they have that subscribe to only one part of the JCR. I think it is fair to assume that by far most of the customers subscribe to both parts.For teaching it is just a pain, to have to explain students that they should start their search with choosing a database part. That is far from intuitive.
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Wikipedia als medicijn voor kennismanagementpijn View more presentations from Edwin Mijnsbergen. |
Thanks to ZBdigitaal I noted this presentation from World Bank staff, on the use of Wikipedia as a knowledge management system. Apart from the knowledge management side of the use of the Wikipedia for World Bank reports, it is a good initiative to expose the essence of kilometers of reports from the World Bank burocracy to a larger public.I wish I could encourage our researchers to make use of the Wikipedia more often. With to major objectives, to expose their ideas and findings to a larger public than acadmic peers only. Secondly to be prepared to participate in publica discussion on their theme of research with public stakeholders.Interesting move of the World Bank
The predecessor of Thomson Reuters Scientific has been responsible, for years already, for publishing the good old in-cites website. Today I was alerted on a new service by the same company. Incites?! A brand new product? Incites it is.
For me a bit confusing. Even today when I go to the old incites site a arrive here In-Cites. Okay. It carries the warning that the site has effecitvely moved to ScienceWatch.com. (In the unnoticable red bar at the top of the page). Fair enough. But the sole reason for me to use that website, or refer to in-cites is the journal lists. Follow the trail to the methdology section in Sciencewatch there you find a link to the journal list. With an additional click you end up here, where is stated:
The current Journal List is located on the archived in-cites.com Web site.
So you end up at in-cites.
What’s new at in-cites? Or what marketeer has thought up an old name from the same company for a new product?
I am interested in the new product, but at the moment I find it all a bit confusing.
As of today Wageningen UR library has integrated the RSS subscription options to the journal records in the catalogue. We borrowed these from the TicToc Project of JISC. Adding a relevant RSS option is not that much of an improvement. What is interesting about this whole issue how we finally ended up with the results from the RSS feeds. There were voices in favor to print the Table of Content article titles at the bottom of the record itself. Under the line so to say. Other voices thought that it would distract the users from the factual information presented in the record. So a compromise was struck.
Have a look at this record. The option of “show recent articles” in the right hand screen will show the titles from the most recent issue. In the TOC that shows at the bottom of the record, you can select the “show abstract” to view even more detail when that’s provided in the Feed.
Albeit an comprise, its a step in the right direction I think.
I do sincerely apologize for this boring video, a few talking heads is not the right medium to pass a message. An important message that is. But I couldn’t find any palatable alternatives on YouTube. Has nobody tried to make an attractive, short film on this subject?Anyway, a couple of bigshots from the Dutch University world passing the message on the importance of Open Access. They talk in Dutch, but this version has English sub-titles.
Today an editorial of Nature stressed -yet again- the importance for scientists to blog about their research (and what’s more, that editorial is freely available on-line). I can’t agree more and I do try to follow some Dutch scientists that blog -parts of- their research. Quite a succesful example is Lilia Efimova who’s about to finish her PhD, the other example is Anne Helmond who is just on the brink of starting her PhD research.
Today Anne had a post that really did make me wonder. In her post of Anne is… for which she apperently searched in Google, which should actually read Anne Helmond is…The first hit is
Which statement really amazes me. Certainly for social scientists. If the research question was phrased differently, such as “are Bloggers (really) working for Google?”, then it was a valid research question. But if the research question is stated as it is, it takes me actually by surprise. Value free research? I know that sounds idealistic, but we have to keep up to some ideals.
The facts are, that certainly on my Dutch blog I have build an audience for whom I am writing. Combined with the direct visitors they combine for half of the blog visitors. And yes indeed, the other 50% of the visitors, do stop by because of maily Google. And they are more than wellcome.
This morning I had to look up the citations to an article. It did no show up in WoS immediately so I had to look a bit around to trace it’s exact details. I found the article as an open access article on Highwire. No problem.
However, I was struck by the extensive and confusing copyright statements at the top of the abstract. On the first line is has the classic copyright sign © which indicates to me “all rights reserved” in this case to the CBS fungal biodiversity Centre. But the all rights reserved sign was followed immediately with their own worded Creative Commons license. CC 3.0 in this case.
I was little bemused by the third clause “”You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work”. Isn’t that what science is all about? Building on previous work?
Another annoying fact is that the DOI is not working. But this is the link to the abstract, there are plenty of similar examples in this “Studies in Mycology” to be found.
It is odd to say, but for researcher the journal as an entity is disappearing. Scientist search for information in online databases and select from title and abstract information whether the article suits their needs. The days that scientists visited the library and browsed the table of contents of the most important journals to keep up with their field have long gone .
Still there is a lot of emotion around journals titles. Scientist want to publish their research in the best possible journal. Earlier this year the NOWT (2008) published a report on the performance of Dutch universities and there it was clearly shown that field normalized citation impact for each university correlated positively with the field normalized journal quality.
Looking at this graph it is clear that there is considerable reason to selected the best journals in their field to publish your results. However, until recent the only widely available journal quality indicator has been the journal impact factor. There has been a lot of criticism on the uses and abuses of impact factors, but they have stood their time. All scientists are at least aware of impact factors. For years ISI, Thomson Reuters were in fact the sole gate keepers of journal quality rankings.
Over the last years a number of products, free and fee based, have tried to come up with new and competing journal ranking measures. SicmagoJR (based on Scopus data), journal analyzer from Scopus, Eigenfactor.org and the data from Thomson’s own Essential Science Indicators of course.
This week Thomson Reuters announced that they will update the journal citation report. From the 1st of February we get a entirely new Journal Citation Report. From the press release:
It is highly unusual to see two updates per year for JCR. But it is interesting to to note how they are moving under the pressure of some competition.
Literature:
NOWT (2008). Wetenschaps- en Technologie- Indicatoren 2008. Maastricht, Nederlands Observatorium van Wetenschap en Technologie (NOWT). http://www.nowt.nl/docs/NOWT-WTI_2008.pdf (in Dutch)
In a very extensive article van Raan has studied the effect of self citations on the total citations to a groups’ work. In the concluding paragraph van Raan writes:
[] external citations are enhanced by self-citations, so that we have the “chain reaction:” Larger size leads to more self-citations, which lead to more external citations. This mechanism is strongest for the lower impact journals—they “make size work”—as well as for higher performance groups. In other words, lower impact journals enable research groups more than do higher impact journals to “advertise” their other work by means of self-citations.
Most interesting to note about this article was that van Raan cited himself 11 times out of 28 in total. It may seem to be a bit excessive, but stresses his point excellently.
Another point that I always stress within the theme of publication strategy is to consider Open Acces publishing. Since the last few years I have noted that van Raan is publishing his articles in OA on Arxiv. His group has not (yet) demonstrated the advantage of OA publishing on citation impact scientifically yet, but the master of scientometrics is putting it into practice anyway. Something to be considered by every researcher very seriously.
Reference
van Raan, A. F. J. (2008). Self-citation as an impact-reinforcing mechanism in the science system. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(10): 1631-1643. http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0801/0801.0524.pdf
The photo in the header is the street where we live. You can actually see our house, it is behind the completely brown cow. An old brick house, in a row of 4 houses, built in 1931 or thereabout. The photo has been taken from the floodplains of the Rhine. These are flooded on a regular basis. Between the cows and the street there is a small water which a kind of artificial creek.
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