Chaoqun Ni

Visualizing and comparing four facets of scholarly communication: producers, artifacts, concepts, and gatekeepers

This paper extends Borgman’s (Communication Research 16: 583, 1989) three-facet framework (artifacts, producers, concepts) for bibliometric analyses of scholarly communication by adding a fourth gatekeepers. The four-facet framework was applied to the field of Library and Information Science to test for variations in the networks produced using operationalizations of each of these four facets independently. Fifty-eight journals from the Information Science and Library Science category in the 2008 Journal Citation Report were studied and the network proximity of these journals based on Venue-Author-Coupling (producer), journal co-citation analysis (artifact), topic analysis (concept) and interlocking editorial board membership (gatekeeper) was measured. The resulting networks were examined for potential correlation using the Quadratic Assignment Procedure. The results indicate some consensus regarding core journals, but significant differences among some networks. Holistic measures of scholarly communication that take multiple facets into account are proposed. This work is relevant in an assessment-conscious and metrics-driven age.

Journal acceptance rates: A cross-disciplinary analysis of variability and relationships with journal measures

There are many indicators of journal quality and prestige. Although acceptance rates are discussed anecdotally, there has been little systematic exploration of the relationship between acceptance rates and other journal measures. This study examines the variability of acceptance rates for a set of 5094 journals in five disciplines and the relationship between acceptance rates and JCR measures for 1301 journals. The results show statistically significant differences in acceptance rates by discipline, country affiliation of the editor, and number of reviewers per article. Negative correlations are found between acceptance rates and citation-based indicators. Positive correlations are found with journal age. These relationships are most pronounced in the most selective journals and vary by discipline. Open access journals were found to have statistically significantly higher acceptance rates than non-open access journals. Implications in light of changes in the scholarly communication system are discussed.

Publish or Practice? An Examination of Librarians' Contributions to Research

This article examines authorship of LIS literature in the context of practitioner and non-practitioner production of published research. For this study, 4,827 peer-reviewed articles from twenty LIS journals published between 1956 and 2011 were examined to determine the percentage of articles written by practitioners. The study identified a decrease in the proportion of articles authored by practitioners between 2006 and 2011. Topic analysis of articles revealed subtle yet distinct differences in research subject matter between practitioner-authored and non-practitioner-authored articles. If present trends continue, the character of LIS literature may shift away from many issues relating to practical librarianship.

The academic advantage: gender disparities in patenting

We analyzed gender disparities in patenting by country, technological area, and type of assignee using the 4.6 million utility patents issued between 1976 and 2013 by the United States Patent and Trade Office (USPTO). Our analyses of fractionalized inventorships demonstrate that women’s rate of patenting has increased from 2.7% of total patenting activity to 10.8% over the nearly 40-year period. Our results show that, in every technological area, female patenting is proportionally more likely to occur in academic institutions than in corporate or government environments. However, women’s patents have a lower technological impact than that of men, and that gap is wider in the case of academic patents. We also provide evidence that patents to which women—and in particular academic women—contributed are associated with a higher number of International Patent Classification (IPC) codes and co-inventors than men. The policy implications of these disparities and academic setting advantages are discussed.

Venue-author-coupling: A measure for identifying disciplines through author communities

Conceptualizations of disciplinarity often focus on the social aspects of disciplines; that is, disciplines are defined by the set of individuals who participate in their activities and communications. However, operationalizations of disciplinarity often demarcate the boundaries of disciplines by standard classification schemes, which may be inflexible to changes in the participation profile of that discipline. To address this limitation, a metric called venue-author-coupling VAC is proposed and illustrated using journals from the Journal Citation Reports JCR library science and information science category. As JCRs are some of the most frequently used categories in bibliometric analyses, this allows for an examination of the extent to which the journals in JCR categories can be considered as proxies for disciplines. By extending the idea of bibliographic coupling, VAC identifies similarities among journals based on the similarities of their author profiles. The employment of this method using information science and library science journals provides evidence of four distinct subfields, that is, management information systems, specialized information and library science, library science-focused, and information science-focused research. The proposed VAC method provides a novel way to examine disciplinarity from the perspective of author communities.

Journal clustering through interlocking editorship information

This paper is an exploration of mapping journals in library and information science (LIS) through interlocking editorship information. Forty-eight LIS journals are clustered into four clusters. Possible reasons for some boundary-spanning journals and ten journals uninvolved in interlocking editorship are given. Results suggest that interlocking editorship information is useful for clustering journals in LIS, and additional suggestions regarding LIS journal re-categorization are proposed.

Forty years of gender disparities in Russian science: a historical bibliometric analysis

Gender disparities persist in several areas of society and scientific research is no exception. This study describes the evolution of the place of women in Russian science from 1973 to 2012, in terms of published research output, research productivity, international and national collaboration, and scientific impact, taking into account the socioeconomic, political and historic context of the country, which was marked by the fall of the USSR in 1991. The results show that gender parity is far from being achieved. Women remain underrepresented in terms of their contribution to research output and scientific impact in almost all disciplines, with Mathematics and Physics, research areas in which Russia is specialized, having the largest gap. Men and women show different collaboration patterns on the national and international level, whereas women are preeminent on the national scene, men are on the international one. Although the impact of women’s scientific output significantly increases after the fall of the USSR, the gap between both genders remains stable over time for most of the disciplines. As a result, this increase cannot be interpreted as an improvement of the women’s relative influence in Russian science, but rather an improvement of Russian science impact in general.

Journal impact and proximity: An assessment using bibliographic features

Journals in the Information Science & Library Science category of Journal Citation Reports (JCR) were compared using both bibliometric and bibliographic features. Data collected covered journal impact factor (JIF), number of issues per year, number of authors per article, longevity, editorial board membership, frequency of publication, number of databases indexing the journal, number of aggregators providing full-text access, country of publication, JCR categories, Dewey decimal classification, and journal statement of scope. Three features significantly correlated with JIF: number of editorial board members and number of JCR categories in which a journal is listed correlated positively; journal longevity correlated negatively with JIF. Coword analysis of journal descriptions provided a proximity clustering of journals, which differed considerably from the clusters based on editorial board membership. Finally, a multiple linear regression model was built to predict the JIF based on all the collected bibliographic features.

Journal impact and proximity

Journals in the Information Science & Library Science category of Journal Citation Reports (JCR) were compared using both bibliometric and bibliographic features. Data collected covered journal impact factor (JIF), number of issues per year, number of authors per article, longevity, editorial board membership, frequency of publication, number of databases indexing the journal, number of aggregators providing full-text access, country of publication, JCR categories, Dewey decimal classification, and journal statement of scope. Three features significantly correlated with JIF: number of editorial board members and number of JCR categories in which a journal is listed correlated positively; journal longevity correlated negatively with JIF. Coword analysis of journal descriptions provided a proximity clustering of journals, which differed considerably from the clusters based on editorial board membership. Finally, a multiple linear regression model was built to predict the JIF based on all the collected bibliographic features.

Post-interdisciplinary frames of reference: exploring permeability and perceptions of disciplinarity in the social sciences

The ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database contains records for approximately 2.3 million dissertations conferred at 1,490 research institutions across 66 countries. Despite the scope of the Dissertations and Theses database, no study has explicitly sought to validate the accuracy of the ProQuest SCs. This research examines the degree to which ProQuest SCs serve as proxies for disciplinarity, the relevance of doctoral work to doctoral graduates’ current work, and the permeability of disciplines from the perspective of the mismatch between SCs and disciplinarity. To examine these issues we conducted a survey of 2009–2010 doctoral graduates, cluster-sampled from Economics, Political Science, and Sociology ProQuest SCs. The results from the survey question the utility of traditional disciplinary labels and suggest that scholars may occupy a post-interdisciplinary space in which they move freely across disciplinary boundaries and identify with topics instead of disciplines.