Umut Al

Arts and Humanities Literature: Bibliometric Characteristics of Contributions by Turkish Authors

Scholarly communication in arts and humanities differs from that in the sciences. Arts and humanities scholars rely primarily on monographs as a medium of publication whereas scientists consider articles that appear in scholarly journals as the single most important publication outlet. The number of journal citation studies in arts and humanities is therefore limited. In this article, we investigate the bibliometric characteristics of 507arts and humanities journal articles written by authors affiliated with Turkish institutions and indexed in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) between the years 1975–2003. Journal articles constituted more than 60% of all publications. One third of all contributions were published during the last 4 years (1999–2003) and appeared in 16 different journals. An overwhelming majority of contributions (91%) were written in English, and 83% of them had single authorship. Researchers based at Turkish universities produced 90% of all publications. Two thirds of references in publications were to monographs. The median age of all references was 12 years. Eighty percent of publications authored by Turkish arts and humanities scholars were not cited at all while the remaining 20% (or 99 publications) were cited 304 times (an average of three citations per publication). Self-citation ratio was 31%. Two thirds of the cited publications were cited for the first time within 2 years of their publications.

The Differences Among Disciplines in Scholarly Communication. A Bibliometric Analysis of Theses

The purpose of this paper is to express the differences and similarities of inter-disciplinary scholarly communications through the citation analysis of theses. For this purpose, a total of 29,289 citations from 391 theses between years 1968–2007 were investigated using citation analysis. Samples were chosen according to layer-sampling techniques from 16 disciplines of four basic subject areas (social sciences, pure science, engineering, and arts and humanities). It has been found out that the characteristics of citations of the theses differ among academic disciplines. The study finds that literature obsolescence, language of resources, journal or monograph use, number of citations and authors are related to the disciplines and vary according to the subject areas.

Standardization problem of author affiliations in citation indexes

Academic effectiveness of universities is measured with the number of publications and citations. However, accessing all the publications of a university reveals a challenge related to the mistakes and standardization problems in citation indexes. The main aim of this study is to seek a solution for the unstandardized addresses and publication loss of universities with regard to this problem. To achieve this, all Turkey-addressed publications published between 1928 and 2009 were analyzed and evaluated deeply. The results show that the main mistakes are based on character or spelling, indexing and translation errors. Mentioned errors effect international visibility of universities negatively, make bibliometric studies based on affiliations unreliable and reveal incorrect university rankings. To inhibit these negative effects, an algorithm was created with finite state technique by using Nooj Transducer. Frequently used 47 different affiliation variations for Hacettepe University apart from “Hacettepe Univ” and “Univ Hacettepe” were determined by the help of finite state grammar graphs. In conclusion, this study presents some reasons of the inconsistencies for university rankings. It is suggested that, mistakes and standardization issues should be considered by librarians, authors, editors, policy makers and managers to be able to solve these problems.

Technological Convergence and Social Networks in Information Management

In these times, public libraries in many countries have increasingly come under pressure from developments within the information landscape. Thus, not least because of the massive digitization of information resources, the proliferation and popularity of search engines, in particular Google, and the booming technologies of Web 2.0, public libraries find themselves in a very complex situation. In fact, the easy-to-use technologies of Web 2.0 challenge the basic principles of information services provision undertaken by libraries. The new digital information environment and social software tools such as blogs, wikis and social networking sites have fuelled a discussion of the future of public libraries as information providers. After all there seems to be a need for public libraries to reorient their aims and objectives and to redefine their service identity. At the same time search engines, and especially Google, are increasingly coming under scrutiny. Thus, analysis results referred to show that the conception of information and the underlying purpose of Google differ from those of public libraries. Further, an increasing amount of criticism is being directed at collaborative spaces (typically Wikipedia) and social networks (e.g. MySpace) and it is pointed out that these social media are not that innocent and unproblematic. In discussing the survival of public libraries and devising an updated role for libraries in the age of Google and social media, attention should be given to fleshing out a new vision for the public library as a provider of alternative information and as an institution supporting information democracy.

A content-based citation analysis study based on text categorization

Publications and citations are important components for measuring research performance. Academics receive incentives, tenures, or awards from the number of citations they receive; however, the use of citations for research/er evaluation purposes can give rise to unethical practices and manipulation. Consequently, it is necessary to change the current approach to the use of citations. The main aim of this study was to conduct a content-based citation analysis study for Turkish citations. To achieve this aim, 423 peer-reviewed articles, the associated 12,881 references, and 101,019 sentences published in library and information science literature in Turkey were thoroughly examined. The citations were divided into four main categories; citation meaning, citation purpose, citation shape, and citation array. Then, each category was further divided into sub-categories. A tagging process with inter-annotator agreement was conducted and citation categories for the citation sentences determined. Weka software was used to apply the text categorization methods. The automatic citation sentence classification achieved at least a 90% success rate for all citation classes, which proved that using computational linguistics to evaluate citation contexts developing new techniques was possible and gave more detailed results.

Global Libraries impact planning and assessment progress

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report on performance measurement and impact assessment progress made in 14 countries as part of the Global Libraries initiative, starting with the early country grants in Mexico and Chile. For the mature grants in Bulgaria, Botswana, Poland, Romania, Ukraine and Viet Nam which were recently completed or are approaching completion, the nature of the country program is outlined, before the impact assessment work is described and some recent results and conclusions are reported. A similar approach is adopted with pilot and new grants in Colombia, Indonesia, South Africa, Turkey and Lithuania. Design/methodology/approach – The country reports are presented as a series of case studies, in some cases supplementing those in an earlier special issue of this journal. Findings – Where appropriate, recent country-specific survey findings are reported. Practical implications – This paper shares Global Libraries IPA learning at country level with people in other countries who...

E-Science and Information Management

This presentation will set out the eScience agenda by explaining the current scientific data deluge and the case for a “Fourth Paradigm” for scientific exploration. Examples of data intensive science will be used to illustrate the explosion of data and the associated new challenges for data capture, curation, analysis, and sharing. The role of cloud computing, collaboration services, and research repositories will be discussed. Bio. Before joining Microsoft, Dr. Hey served as director of the U.K.’s eScience Initiative, managing the government’s efforts to provide scientists and researchers with access to key computing technologies. Before leading this initiative, Dr. Hey was head of the school of electronics and computer science, and dean of engineering and applied science at the University of Southampton. As corporate vice president of Microsoft Research, Dr. Tony Hey is responsible for Microsoft’s collaborative research with universities and research community to speed research, improve education and foster innovation. Dr. Hey is a fellow of the U.K.’s Royal Academy of Engineering and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in the U.S. He is also a fellow of the British Computer Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Engineering and Technology, and the Institute of Physics. He was awarded a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to science in 2005.

Publication lag and early view effects in information science journals

Purpose A major problem in today’s scholarly publishing process is the long tails for the assignment of volume and issue numbers for approved articles. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which information science journals offer early view features and the effects of these features. Design/methodology/approach The study addresses three basic questions: Do the articles approved for publication in information science journals appear in the online platforms of these journals before the assignment of volume and issue numbers? How long do the articles wait in the online platforms before they get the volume and issue numbers? Is there a statistically significant relationship between the online accessing numbers of the articles before they are published and bibliometric indicators? Findings More than half of the information science journals complete the editorial process in reasonable durations and share new articles with their readers before publishing them. In some journals, there are articles that wait for more than a year to be assigned volume and issue numbers after the completion of the editorial process. There are statistically significant differences, in terms of both their impact factor and immediacy index values, between the journals that offer early view features and those that do not. Both the impact factor and the immediacy index values of the journals that provide early view are higher than the others. Practical implications Adopting the early view policy may significantly help increase the impact factor and immediacy index values of the journals, as well as the visibility of their contents Originality/value The answers to this study’s research questions offer a new perspective to overcome the challenges in the processes through which scientific products meet with their users.

Public libraries in Turkey: A retrospective look and the present state

The present study offers an overview of the public library system in Turkey and evaluates the libraries from various aspects in the context of the past decade. Public libraries in Turkey are governed by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. As of the end of 2013, there are 1118 public libraries in Turkey with more than one million registered users which is only 1.3% of the total population of the country. The total number of staff in the 1118 public libraries is approximately 3400, of which only 15% are graduates of librarianship programs. As regards collection size, it is observed that there has been a consistent increase in the number of books in public library collections. When considered together with the rate of increase in the total number of registered public library users, however, there has been a major decrease in the number of books per registered public library user in the past decade. The budget allocated for public libraries in Turkey has been consistently greater each year. The public libraries in Turkey offer their services in buildings that vary significantly in terms of architectural design. In general, public libraries in Turkey have been on a developing trend in recent years. On the other hand, the comparisons made in this study with other European countries suggest that there are a number of issues related to public libraries in Turkey that need to be improved.

Relationship between Economic Development and Intellectual Production

The level of economic development affects the design of different systems. At the country level, scientific outputs are related to the research and developmentexpenditures.In this study,the relationship between economic development and intellectual production was investigated. In this study following research questions were addressed: 1. Is there any meaningful relationship between GDP and the number of patents? 2. Is there any meaningful relationship between GDP and the number of scientific publications? 3. Is there any correlation between R&D expenditures and patent production? 4. Is there any correlation between R&D expenditures and the number of scientific publications?In addition to these research questions, this paper focuses on the changes of economic development and intellectual production indicators throughout time. As a result, it was seen that countries show continuous improvement in years, both for economic development indicators and intellectual production indicators.Findings also showed that Luxembourg, USA, Switzerland, Norway and Israel are far beyond form other countries in terms of national income per person, Scandinavian countries distinctively separated from other countries especially in terms of the number of national patents per population and Switzerland, Sweden, Israel, Denmark and Finland share the first rows in the number of publications per population ranking.