Christian Gumpenberger

Bibliometric practices and activities at the University of Vienna

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe bibliometrics as an emergent field for academic libraries. There is a constant need to adapt to the ongoing changes and new demands of todays information environment, and the increasing importance of bibliometrics certainly presents a great opportunity for librarians to broaden their horizon.Design/methodology/approach – The ideas outlined here are based on supporting information derived from literature and on practical experience gained at the Vienna University Library, Austria. A rationale is given why libraries should provide bibliometric services followed by a short overview of how the Bibliometrics Department in Vienna came into being. The focus of the paper is set on a detailed description of its practices and activities.Findings – Bibliometrics is ideal for librarians to develop and provide innovative services for both academic and administrative university staff. In doing so they make sure to actively participate in the development of new strateg...

Key factors and considerations in the assessment of international collaboration: a case study for Austria and six countries

This bibliometric study on the collaboration of Austria and six target countries (Slovenia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Denmark, Switzerland and Israel) reveals the importance of differentiation between the bilateral and multilateral contingents in the assessment of international scientific collaboration. For this purpose a “degree of bilaterality” (DB) and a “citation degree of bilaterality” (CDB) are introduced. In our findings the DB and the CDB have values lower than 1/3 and 1/5, respectively. Therefore, the total collaboration is mostly shaped in its volume and impact by the multilateral contingent. Regarding the impact estimation of the collaboration publication output, a multi-faceted approach was used. It is recommended to separately analyze the following three aspects: the un-cited range, the average range and the excellence range. Considering different country specific parameters the total number of publications and citations were resized for each type of collaboration and the results discussed. Only a very weak correlation between ‘times cited’ and the number of affiliations or authors was observed at publication level. Neither the number of authors or affiliations determines impact increase. Rather internationalisation and cooperation seem to be the crucial factors.

On the impact of Gold Open Access journals

Gold Open Access (=Open Access publishing) is for many the preferred route to achieve unrestricted and immediate access to research output. However, true Gold Open Access journals are still outnumbered by traditional journals. Moreover availability of Gold OA journals differs from discipline to discipline and often leaves scientists concerned about the impact of these existent titles. This study identified the current set of Gold Open Access journals featuring a Journal Impact Factor (JIF) by means of Ulrichsweb, Directory of Open Access Journals and Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The results were analyzed regarding disciplines, countries, quartiles of the JIF distribution in JCR and publishers. Furthermore the temporal impact evolution was studied for a Top 50 titles list (according to JIF) by means of Journal Impact Factor, SJR and SNIP in the time interval 2000–2010. The identified top Gold Open Access journals proved to be well-established and their impact is generally increasing for all the analyzed indicators. The majority of JCR-indexed OA journals can be assigned to Life Sciences and Medicine. The success-rate for JCR inclusion differs from country to country and is often inversely proportional to the number of national OA journal titles. Compiling a list of JCR-indexed OA journals is a cumbersome task that can only be achieved with non-Thomson Reuters data sources. A corresponding automated feature to produce current lists “on the fly” would be desirable in JCR in order to conveniently track the impact evolution of Gold OA journals.

The ecstasy and the agony of the altmetric score

Altmetrics have gained momentum and are meant to overcome the shortcomings of citation-based metrics. In this regard some light is shed on the dangers associated with the new “all-in-one” indicator altmetric score.

The power of book reviews: a simple and transparent enhancement approach for book citation indexes

Both citations to an academic work and post-publication reviews of it are indicators that the work has had some impact on the research community. The Thomson Reuters evaluation and selection process for web of knowledge journals includes citation analysis but this is not systematically practised for evaluation of books for the book citation index (BKCI) due to the inconsistent methods of citing books, the volume of books and the variants of the titles, especially in non-English language. Despite the fact that correlations between citations to a book and the number of corresponding book reviews differ from research area to research area and are overall weak or non-existent, this study confirms that books with book reviews do not remain uncited and accrue a remarkable mean number of citations. Therefore, book reviews can be considered a suitable selection criterion for BKCIs. The approach suggested in this study is feasible and allows easy detection of corresponding books via its book reviews, which is particularly true for research areas where books play a more important role such as the social sciences, the arts and humanities.

A flexible bibliometric approach for the assessment of professorial appointments

Recruitment and professorial appointment procedures are crucial for the administration and management of universities and higher education institutions in order to guarantee a certain level of performance quality and reputation. The complementary use of quantitative and objective bibliometric analyses is meant to be an enhancement for the assessment of candidates and a possible antidote for subjective, discriminatory and corrupt practices. In this paper, we present the Vienna University bibliometric approach, offering a method which relies on a variety of basicindicators and further control parameters in order to address the multidimensionality of the problem and to foster comprehensibility. Our “top counts approach” allows an appointment committee to pick and choose from a portfolio of indicators according to the actual strategic alignment. Furthermore, control and additional data help to understand disciplinary publication habits, to unveil concealed aspects and to identify individual publication strategies of the candidates. Our approach has already been applied to 14 professorial appointment procedures (PAP) in the life sciences, earth and environmental sciences and social sciences, comprising 221 candidates in all. The usefulness of the bibliometric approach was confirmed by all heads of appointment committees in the life sciences. For the earth and environmental sciences as well as the social sciences, the usefulness was less obvious and sometimes questioned due to the low coverage of the candidates’ publication output in the traditional citation data sources. A retrospective assessment of all hitherto performed PAP also showed an overlap between the committees’ designated top candidates and the bibliometric top candidates to a certain degree.

Availability of digital object identifiers (DOIs) in Web of Science and Scopus

This study aims to shed light on the implementation of the digital object identifier (DOI) in the two most important multidisciplinary databases, namely Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus, within the last decade (2005–2014). The results show a generally increased percentage of items with DOI in all the disciplines in both databases, which provide very similar numbers and trends. While the percentage of citable items with a DOI has already reached 90% in the Sciences and the Social Sciences in 2014, it has remained much lower in the Arts & Humanities, exceeding 50% only since 2013. The observed values for Books and Proceedings are even lower despite the importance of these document types, particularly for the Social Sciences and the Arts & Humanities. The fact that there are still journals with a large number of items still lacking DOIs in 2014 should be alarming for the corresponding editors and should give them reason to enhance the formal quality and visibility of their journals. Finally, scientists are also encouraged to review their publication strategies and to favour publication channels with established DOI assignments.

Galton 2011 revisited: a bibliometric journey in the footprints of a universal genius

Commemorating the 100th death anniversary of Francis Galton, this paper is a bibliometric impact analysis of the works of this outstanding scientist and predecessor of scientometrics. Citation analysis was done in Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar (Publish or Perish) in order to retrieve the most cited books and journal articles. Additionally references were identified where Galton was rather mentioned than cited in order to analyze the phenomenon of obliteration by incorporation. Finally occurrence counts of Galton’s works in obituaries, Festschrift, the website Galton.org, major encyclopaedias and biographical indexes were compared to citation counts. As an outcome Galton’s works are increasingly cited or mentioned. Obliteration (use of eponyms) applies to one-third of Galton’s works and seems to be typical for fields like mathematics or statistics, whereas citations are more common in psychology. The most cited books and journal articles are also the most mentioned with remarkable correlation. Overall citation analysis and occurrence counting are complementary useful methods for the impact analysis of the works of “giants”.

Exploring the bibliometric and semantic nature of negative results

Negative results are not popular to disseminate. However, their publication would help to save resources and foster scientific communication. This study analysed the bibliometric and semantic nature of negative results publications. The Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine (JNRBM) was used as a role model. Its complete articles from 2002–2009 were extracted from SCOPUS and supplemented by related records. Complementary negative results records were retrieved from Web of Science in “Biochemistry” and “Telecommunications”. Applied bibliometrics comprised of co-author and co-affiliation analysis and a citation impact profile. Bibliometrics showed that authorship is widely spread. A specific community for the publication of negative results in devoted literature is non-existent. Neither co-author nor co-affiliation analysis indicated strong interconnectivities. JNRBM articles are cited by a broad spectrum of journals rather than by specific titles. Devoted negative results journals like JNRBM have a rather low impact measured by the number of received citations. On the other hand, only one-third of the publications remain uncited, corroborating their importance for the scientific community. The semantic analysis relies on negative expressions manually identified in JNRBM article titles and abstracts and extracted to syntactic patterns. By using a Natural Language Processing tool these patterns are then employed to detect their occurrences in the multidisciplinary bibliographical database PASCAL. The translation of manually identified negation patterns to syntactic patterns and their application to multidisciplinary bibliographic databases (PASCAL, Web of Science) proved to be a successful method to retrieve even hidden negative results. There is proof that negative results are not only restricted to the biomedical domain. Interestingly a high percentage of the so far identified negative results papers were funded and therefore needed to be published. Thus policies that explicitly encourage or even mandate the publication of negative results could probably bring about a shift in the current scientific communication behaviour.

The influence of European Framework Programmes on scientific collaboration in nanotechnology

This study deals primarily with the effect of certain European Framework Programmes on EU-27 member states’ publication output in nanotechnology, with a focus on their scientific collaboration over the last ten years. The study was conducted at three levels (category, journal and publication). The aim was to verify whether the newly launched category is sufficiently complete, as well as to identify the most prominent journals and compare the EU-27 member states’ output to world production. Snapshots of European networking are also provided for three key dates (2001, 2006 and 2011) to ascertain the positions of emerging and central countries and analyse their variations over time. The results confirm the speedy development in the field and the importance of the EU-27s world role. They corroborate the close correlation between funding and increased output and the intensification of collaboration among member states. Finally, the information contained in the “Funding Agency” field in the Web of Science database was also compiled, with a view to substantiating the validity of the estimated impact of EU-funding programmes on member states’ scientific output.