Martin Wieland

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...

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.

Multi-authored publications: their influence in the distribution of the financing costs in world licenses

Due to the rising costs of periodicals and the necessity of assuring access to the research results of the scientific community, new publishing models are required. Most of them are based on the distribution of financing costs among all participating authors, affiliations or countries according to the number of their scientific publications. Thus the distribution of costs may depend very much on the manner in which the problem of multi-authorship is handled. Our study focuses on the dependence of the distribution of financing costs on multi-authorship handling for a case study: the hypothetical Austrian participation in the world project SCOAP. Our results show that the distributions of costs differ widely. We also survey whether there is any correlation between the number of full-text downloads operated by several universities with the number of their publications in these journals. The correlation results vary depending on the type of journal: broader or specific journals. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Monitoring the Broader Impact of the Journal Publication Output on Country Level: A Case Study for Austria

This study provides an example of a monitoring practice concerning the broader impact of the journal publication output on country level. All Austrian publications of the last three publication years indexed in WoS Core Collection and mapped to a DOI were analysed in PlumX. The metrics traced in the different data sources were compared for six main knowledge areas. The results reinforce the importance of the usage metrics especially in disciplines related to the area “Arts & Humanities”. The highest data coverage is provided by the number of readers in Mendeley. The percentage of publications with social media scores, especially tweets, has been significantly increasing within the last three years, in agreement with the increasing popularity of these tools in recent years. The highest values for social media are reported for the Health and Life Sciences, followed very closely by the Social Sciences. The relative insignificance in the Arts & Humanities’ is noteworthy. Our study confirms very low correlation values between the different measures traced in PlumX and supports the hypothesis that these metrics should rather be considered as complementary sources. High correlations between the same measures or metrics originating from different data sources were only reported for citations, but not for usage data. Medium correlation values were observed between usage and citation counts in WoS Core Collection. No association of the number of co-authors or co-affiliations with any of the measures considered in this study could be found, except for a low correlation between the number of affiliations and captures or citations.