Open Science

Your guide to Open Access publishing and Open Science

Tag: bibliometrics

Kudos – evidence based approach to your research work promotion

Did you get an email inviting you to Kudos from your publisher? Well, if so, now you are probably wondering if it is worth spending some time on setting up another personal researcher profile on the web. So lets have a look at Kudos, what it is and what are its strong points and downsides? Kudos is an on-line platform for academic researchers. This doesn’t sound too original nowadays, right? The platform is owned by a privately held company, founded by a group of publishing professionals and was launched in April 2014. It came with a new wave of multiple […]

How Does Open Science Change the Research Evaluation in Humanities and Social Sciences?

The digital landscape has brought new opportunities and challenges to the evaluation of research across different academic disciplines. How does open science influence this already complex landscape? Is there any difference in evaluating research in different disciplines? Milena Dobreva* looks at historical developments and then at some recent projects which seek to better understand the changes which open science is bringing to the research evaluations. Introduction The monitoring and measuring of academic outputs developed gradually and took shape in the sixties of the 20th century when Scientometrics consolidated as a knowledge area. Our timeline illustrates some of the developments in this […]

The rise and fall of the impact factor

How will a “post-impact factor” world look like? I hope that scholars will not be forced to choose between journals that guarantee career advancement and open access any more. More than 3 years ago a group of researchers, publishers and representatives of the academic associations issued a set of recommendations called the San Francisco Declaration of Research Assessments (DORA). This declaration aimed to prevent further usage of journal impact factor as a proxy of quality of individual papers and their authors. It has been signed to date by 825 research organizations and more than 12 thousand individuals. In fact, DORA […]

Open access and citations – do we know anything for sure?

For 74 Taiwanese researchers, the mean citation score is 1,29 time higher for their works published in open access journals than for those submitted in traditional venues. It would be good to confirm this output for a big sample of researchers working in various countries and disciplines. Citations are the currency of modern, competitive academia. Authors want them, journal editors and publishers want them for their authors, heads of faculties want them for their researchers. “Can open access bring more citations to this particular article?” – this is one of the questions which is frequently asked by representatives of each […]

What is the impact of the Impact Factor?

Thomson Reuters unfairly targets small journals and niche titles. This policy can result in the quicker death of some research topics that could otherwise thrive. Thomson Reuters can suppress a journal from the Journal Citation Report for one review article it has published. How is this possible? A review article can frequently include hundreds of citations. If some of them link to a specialized, niche title that covers the topic of the review article, they may represent a substantial share of all the citations received by this small journal. And this might be treated as “citation stacking” and result in […]

Should you care about your h-index and if so, how to improve it?

Should you care about your h-index, and if so, how to improve it?

If the career opportunities, research funding and awards of Claude Shannon had depended on his h-index, he would have been in serious trouble. Even though his works were absolutely revolutionary and he created the basis for the recent digital revolution, he did not like to write too much, and would have probably faced hardships in academia today. Nevertheless, now, in the competitive “publish or perish” environment it is important to publish, and to publish in the right way. A career in science depends more and more on quantitative measures that aim to evaluate the efficiency of work and the future […]