Computer Science

Interdisciplinary research has been considered as a solution to today's complex societal challenges. While its relationship with scientific impact has been extensively studied, the technological impact of interdisciplinary research remains unexplored. Here, we examine how interdisciplinarity is associated with technological impact at the paper level. We measure the degree of interdisciplinarity of a paper using three popular indicators, namely variety, balance, and disparity, and track how it gets cited by patented technologies over time. Drawing on a large sample of biomedical papers published in 18 years, we find that papers that cites more fields (variety) and whose distributions over those cited fields are more even (balance) are more likely to receive patent citations, but both effects can be offset if papers draw upon more distant fields (disparity). Those associations are consistent across different citation-window lengths. Additional analysis that focuses on the subset of papers with at least one patent citation reveals that the intensity of their technological impact, as measured as the number of patent citations, increases with balance and disparity. Our work may have policy implications for interdisciplinary research and scientific and technology impact.

In Hungary, the highest and most prestigious scientific qualification is considered to be the Doctor of Science (DSc) title being awarded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The academic performance indicators of the DSc title are of high importance in the evaluation of individuals' research performance not only when a researcher applies for obtaining a DSc title, but also during promotions and appointments at universities, and in the case of the evaluation of applications for scientific titles and degrees, and the assessment of applications for funding. In the Section of Earth Sciences encompassing nine related disciplines, rather than carrying out a straightforward bibliometric analysis, the performance indicators were designed as a result of a consensual agreement between leading academicians, each of whom represented a particular discipline. Therefore, the minimum values of the indicators, required to be fulfilled if one is applying for a DSc title, do not adequately reflect the actual discipline-specific performance of researchers. This problem may generate tension between researchers during the evaluation process. The main goal of this paper is to recalibrate the minimum values of four major performance indicators by taking the actual discipline-specific distance ratios into account. In addition, each minimum value will be defined by employing integer and fractional counting methods as well. The research outcome of this study can provide impetus for the Section of Earth Sciences to optimize the minimum values of the DSc title performance indicators by taking the specifics of each discipline into account. Because academic performance indicators are also employed in other Eastern European countries in the evaluation of individuals' research performance, the methods used in that paper can be placed into a wider geographical context.

The study investigated the use of electronic resources/information by library users in selected colleges of Solapur University. Specifically, to investigate the awareness and level of use of electronic resources; perceived reliance, benefits and impact of use of electronic resources on the research activities. The research design for the study was a survey. Questionnaire schedule was used to collect data from 1022 library users from selected colleges of Solapur University. The result revealed that preponderance of users from aided 33.51% Self financing 26.10% and Education colleges 43.24 % preferred to visit the Library once in three days. While analyzing the entire college libraries regarding the frequency of visit, users gave first preference to once in three days i.e. 27.2%. College wise analysis reveals that mainstream of users from Aided Colleges 38%, Self financing Colleges 28.3%, Engineering Colleges 43%, Education colleges 53.2% and Pharmacy Colleges 23.4% are spending their time 1-2 hrs in libraries and 40.8%visit college libraries to issue and return books and in the device usage (33.9%) of users ranked mobile phone as the second device for accessing the e-resources. It is noticeable that 24.7% of users acknowledge from Aided Colleges know about the services of the Library from website but in Self Finance Colleges 8.5% and Pharmacy College 56.4% users aware about the services from the friends it is observed that most of the web technologies are not used by the mainstream of the users due to lack of awareness, training etc.

National culture is among those societal factors which could influence research and innovation activities. In this study, we investigated the associations of two national culture models with citation impact of nations (measured by the proportion of papers belonging to the 10% and 1% most cited papers in the corresponding fields, PPtop 10% and PPtop 1%). Bivariate statistical analyses showed that of six Hofstede's national culture dimensions (HNCD), uncertainty avoidance and power distance had a statistically significant negative associa-tion, while individualism and indulgence had a statistically significant positive associationwith both citation impact indicators. The study also revealed that of two Inglehart-Welzel cultural values (IWCV), the value survival versus self-expression is statistically significantly related to citation impact indicators. We additionally calculated multiple regression analyses controlling for the possible effects of confounding factors including national self-citations, international co-authorships, invest-ments in research and development, international migrant stock, number of researchers ofeach nation, language, and productivity. The results revealed that the statistically significant associations of HNCD with citation impact indicators disappeared. But the statistically significant relationship between survivals versus self-expression values and citation impact indicators remained stable even after controlling for the confounding variables. Thus, the freedom of expression and trust in society might contribute to better scholarly communication systems, higher level of international collaborations, and further quality research.

Preprint is a version of a scientific paper that is publicly distributed preceding formal peer review. Since the launch of arXiv in 1991, preprints have been increasingly distributed over the Internet as opposed to paper copies. It allows open online access to disseminate the original research within a few days, often at a very low operating cost. This work overviews how preprint has been evolving and impacting the research community over the past thirty years alongside the growth of the Web. In this work, we first report that the number of preprints has exponentially increased 63 times in 30 years, although it only accounts for 4% of research articles. Second, we quantify the benefits that preprints bring to authors: preprints reach an audience 14 months earlier on average and associate with five times more citations compared with a non-preprint counterpart. Last, to address the quality concern of preprints, we discover that 41% of preprints are ultimately published at a peer-reviewed destination, and the published venues are as influential as papers without a preprint version. Additionally, we discuss the unprecedented role of preprints in communicating the latest research data during recent public health emergencies. In conclusion, we provide quantitative evidence to unveil the positive impact of preprints on individual researchers and the community. Preprints make scholarly communication more efficient by disseminating scientific discoveries more rapidly and widely with the aid of Web technologies. The measurements we present in this study can help researchers and policymakers make informed decisions about how to effectively use and responsibly embrace a preprint culture.

This study compares publication pattern dynamics in the social sciences and humanities in five European countries. Three are Central and Eastern European countries that share a similar cultural and political heritage (the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland). The other two are Flanders (Belgium) and Norway, representing Western Europe and the Nordics, respectively. We analysed 449,409 publications from 2013-2016 and found that, despite persisting differences between the two groups of countries across all disciplines, publication patterns in the Central and Eastern European countries are becoming more similar to those in their Western and Nordic counterparts. Articles from the Central and Eastern European countries are increasingly published in journals indexed in Web of Science and also in journals with the highest citation impacts. There are, however, clear differences between social science and humanities disciplines, which need to be considered in research evaluation and science policy.

Journal ranking is becoming more important in assessing the quality of academic research. Several indices have been suggested for this purpose, typically on the basis of a citation graph between the journals. We follow an axiomatic approach and find an impossibility theorem: any self-consistent ranking method, which satisfies a natural monotonicity property, should depend on the level of aggregation. Our result presents a trade-off between two axiomatic properties and reveals a dilemma of aggregation.

Citing data and software is a means to give scholarly credit and to facilitate access to research objects. Citation principles encourage authors to provide full descriptions of objects, with stable links, in their papers. As Jupyter notebooks aggregate data, software, and other objects, they may facilitate or hinder citation, credit, and access to data and software. We report on a study of references to Jupyter notebooks in astronomy over a 5-year period (2014-2018). References increased rapidly, but fewer than half of the references led to Jupyter notebooks that could be located and opened. Jupyter notebooks appear better suited to supporting the research process than to providing access to research objects. We recommend that authors cite individual data and software objects, and that they stabilize any notebooks cited in publications. Publishers should increase the number of citations allowed in papers and employ descriptive metadata-rich citation styles that facilitate credit and discovery.

Statistics Netherlands (CBS) hosted a huge amount of data not only on the statistical level but also on the individual level. With the development of data science technologies, more and more researchers request to conduct their research by using high-quality individual data from CBS (called CBS Microdata) or combining them with other data sources. Making great use of these data for research and scientific purposes can tremendously benefit the whole society. However, CBS Microdata has been collected and maintained in different ways by different departments in and out of CBS. The representation, quality, metadata of datasets are not sufficiently harmonized. The project converts the descriptions of all CBS microdata sets into one knowledge graph with comprehensive metadata in Dutch and English using text mining and semantic web technologies. Researchers can easily query the metadata, explore the relations among multiple datasets, and find the needed variables. For example, if a researcher searches a dataset about "Age at Death" in the Health and Well-being category, all information related to this dataset will appear including keywords and variable names. "Age at Death" dataset has a keyword - "Death". This keyword will lead to other datasets such as "Date of Death". "Cause of Death", "Production statistics Health and welfare" from Population, Business categories, and Health and well-being categories. This will tremendously save time and costs for the data requester but also data maintainers.

Unlike other academic bibliographic databases, Google Scholar intentionally operates in a way that does not maintain coverage stability: documents that stop being available to Google Scholar's crawlers are removed from the system. This can also affect Google Scholar's citation graph (citation counts can decrease). Furthermore, because Google Scholar is not transparent about its coverage, the only way to directly observe coverage loss is through regular monitorization of Google Scholar data. Because of this, few studies have empirically documented this phenomenon. This study analyses a large decrease in coverage of documents in the field of Astronomy and Astrophysics that took place in 2019 and its subsequent recovery, using longitudinal data from previous analyses and a new dataset extracted in 2020. Documents from most of the larger publishers in the field disappeared from Google Scholar despite continuing to be available on the Web, which suggests an error on Google Scholar's side. Disappeared documents did not reappear until the following index-wide update, many months after the problem was discovered. The slowness with which Google Scholar is currently able to resolve indexing errors is a clear limitation of the platform both for literature search and bibliometric use cases.