Fei Shu

Knowledge sharing in global health research – the impact, uptake and cost of open access to scholarly literature

BackgroundIn 1982, the Annals of Virology published a paper showing how Liberia has a highly endemic potential of Ebola warning health authorities of the risk for potential outbreaks; this journal is only available by subscription. Limiting the accessibility of such knowledge may have reduced information propagation toward public health actors who were indeed surprised by and unprepared for the 2014 epidemic. Open access (OA) publication can allow for increased access to global health research (GHR). Our study aims to assess the use, cost and impact of OA diffusion in the context of GHR.MethodA total of 3366 research articles indexed under the Medical Heading Subject Heading “Global Health” published between 2010 and 2014 were retrieved using PubMed to (1) quantify the uptake of various types of OA, (2) estimate the article processing charges (APCs) of OA, and (3) analyse the relationship between different types of OA, their scholarly impact and gross national income per capita of citing countries.ResultsMost GHR publications are not available directly on the journal’s website (69%). Further, 60.8% of researchers do not self-archive their work even when it is free and in keeping with journal policy. The total amount paid for APCs was estimated at US

On the citation advantage of tweeted papers at the journal level: On the Citation Advantage of Tweeted Papers at the Journal Level

1.7 million for 627 papers, with authors paying on average US

Can Twitter increase the visibility of Chinese publications

2732 per publication; 94% of APCs were paid to journals owned by the ten most prominent publication houses from high-income countries. Researchers from low- and middle-income countries are generally citing less expensive types of OA, while researchers in high-income countries are citing the most expensive OA.ConclusionsAlthough OA may help in building global research capacity in GHR, the majority of publications remain subscription only. It is logical and cost-efficient for institutions and researchers to promote OA by self-archiving publications of restricted access, as it not only allows research to be cited by a broader audience, it also augments citation rates. Although OA does not ensure full knowledge transfer from research to practice, limiting public access can negatively impact implementation and outcomes of health policy and reduce public understanding of health issues.

Improving Exploration of Topic Hierarchies: Comparative Testing of Simplified Library of Congress Subject Heading Structures

This study investigates the effect of diffusing scientific articles on Twitter on their citation impact. For a set of 1.3 million papers covered by the Web of Science and published in 2012, normalized citation rates are compared between tweeted and non‐tweeted articles published in the same journal. The results indicate that tweeted papers, published in the same year and in the same journal received around 30% higher citation rates than papers which were not diffused on Twitter. This type of citation advantage appeared across disciplines and countries of authors, but varied in extent.

Comment to: Does China need to rethink its metrics- and citation-based research rewards policies?

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether diffusion through social media can help to improve the international visibility of Chinese papers and thus increase their citation impact. After analysing 160,233 Chinese papers published in 2012, as well as the number of tweets and citations received, the results indicate that tweeted Chinese papers published in the same year and journal received around 15% more citations than Chinese papers not mentioned on Twitter. The citation advantage of tweeted Chinese papers is also found within various disciplines and by the different citing countries.

Mapping science using Library of Congress Subject Headings

Many large digital collections are organized by sorting their items into topics and arranging these topics hierarchically, such as those displayed in a tree view. The resulting information organization structures mitigate some of the challenges of searching digital information realms; however, the topic hierarchies are often large and complex, and thus difficult to navigate. Automated techniques have been shown to produce significantly smaller, simplified versions of existing topic hierarchies while preserving access to the majority of the collection, but these simplified topic hierarchies have never been tested with human participants, and so it is not clear what effect simplification would have on the exploration and use of such structures for browsing and retrieval. This study partly addresses this gap by performing a comparative test with three groups of university students (N=62) performing ten topic hierarchy exploration tasks using one of three versions of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) hierarchy: 1) the original LCSH hierarchy, acting as a baseline, 2) a shallower version of 1), and 3) a narrower version of 2). A quantitative analysis of measures of accuracy, time, and browsing shows that participants using the simplified trees were significantly more accurate and faster than those using the unmodified tree, and the narrower, balanced tree was also faster than the shallower tree. These results show that automated topic hierarchy simplification can facilitate the use of such hierarchies, which has implications for the development of information organization theory and human-information interaction techniques for similar information structures.

Library of congress subject heading (LCSH) browsing and natural language searching

In a paper published recently in Scientometrics, Teixeira da Silva (2017) (doi:10.1007/ s11192-017-2430-y) suggested that China should rethink its metricsand citation-based research rewards policies. However, the author presented an incomplete landscape of research rewards for academics in China, which will be addressed by this letter. I also disagree with the recommendation using altmetrics for evaluating academic and journal quality in China. Teixeira da Silva (2017) indicates that Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) plays a crucial role in the research reward system in China but does not mention another key player: Ministry of Education (MOE) that administers most Chinese universities. In history, Chinese research institutions were responsible for scientific research while Chinese universities focused on teaching and training. Since 1980s, with the national strategy of invigorating the country through science, technology and education, Chinese universities have been getting involved in the research and development (R&D). Nowadays, Chinese universities play the dominant role in China’s scientific research output, contributing 82.8% of monographs and 73.4% of journal articles, including 83.0% of WoS papers (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2015). MOE is responsible for designing research programs for higher education institutions. Such programs as 985 project, 211 project, tenure system reform heavily influence the university research activities, which cannot be ignored when discussing the research reward system in China. Teixeira da Silva (2017) infers that China’s JIF-based reward policies lead to unethical behaviour, which results in recent Chinese paper retractions. I agree that the abusive use of bibliometric indicators in China’s research reward policies brings some negative effects (Quan et al. 2017), but no causation between the JIF-based reward policies and the paper retractions was found in any previous studies. Indeed, from 1997 to 2016, a total of 827

The Landscape of LIS Research and Teaching Area: iSchools versus non-iSchools in North America

Maps of scientific knowledge are generally created by analyzing scientific literature including journal articles, conference proceedings, books, and monographs. Although citation analysis is the most popular method for generating maps of science from scientific journal articles and their citations, other relationships between scientific topics can be used to map science. This study offers a map of science generated from examining non-fiction book topics and their relationships as defined by Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) co-assignments. The resulting map reveals which sub-disciplines of science must be learned together, showing that Physics and Mathematics are the central topics required to practice science, which is not revealed by previous studies. This novel LCSH-based science map reveals new relations between the major sub-disciplines of science to produce a more complete representation of scientific domains and how they interact.

On the Evolution of Library and Information Science Doctoral Dissertation Topics in North America (1960-2013)

Controlled topical vocabularies (CVs) are built into information systems to aid browsing and retrieval of items that may be unfamiliar, but it is unclear how this feature should be integrated with standard keyword searching. Few systems or scholarly prototypes have attempted this, and none have used the most widely used CV, the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), which organizes monograph collections in academic libraries throughout the world. This paper describes a working prototype of a Web application that concurrently allows topic exploration using an outline tree view of the LCSH hierarchy and natural language keyword searching of a real‐world Science and Engineering bibliographic collection. Pilot testing shows the system is functional, and work to fit the complex LCSH structure into a usable hierarchy is ongoing. This study contributes to knowledge of the practical design decisions required when developing linked interactions between topical hierarchy browsing and natural language searching, which promise to facilitate information discovery and exploration.

Portraying the Landscape of Canadian Library and Information Science Research

The purpose of this study is to investigate the differences and similarities in terms of research area and teaching area between the iSchools faculty members and non-iSchools faculty members within the traditional LIS schools offering a master’s programs accredited by the American Library Association (ALA) in the United States and Canada. The results indicate that iSchool faculty members have more interests on information system and retrieval while non-iSchool colleagues focus more on services on user populations, in both research area and teaching area.