Yves Gingras

Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research

Background Articles whose authors have supplemented subscription-based access to the publishers version by self-archiving their own final draft to make it accessible free for all on the web (“Open Access”, OA) are cited significantly more than articles in the same journal and year that have not been made OA. Some have suggested that this “OA Advantage” may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this we compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatory self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002–2006 in 1,984 journals. Methdology/Principal Findings The OA Advantage proved just as high for both. Logistic regression analysis showed that the advantage is independent of other correlates of citations (article age; journal impact factor; number of co-authors, references or pages; field; article type; or country) and highest for the most highly cited articles. The OA Advantage is real, independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated with quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles receive about 80% of all citations). Conclusions/Significance The OA advantage is greater for the more citable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage, from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only. It is hoped that these findings will help motivate the adoption of OA self-archiving mandates by universities, research institutions and research funders.

The place of universities in the system of knowledge production

In the last 5 years, some authors have argued that the system of knowledge production has undergone important changes, and have predicted that universities would no longer be the main locus of knowledge production. The present paper shows that though we observe a diversification of the sites of knowledge production, universities remain at the center of the system, while the growth of the other sectors (hospitals, industries and governments laboratories) is strongly linked to universities.

The place of serials in referencing practices: Comparing natural sciences and engineering with social sciences and humanities

Journal articles constitute the core documents for the diffusion of knowledge in the natural sciences. It has been argued that the same is not true for the social sciences and humanities where knowledge is more often disseminated in monographs that are not indexed in the journal-based databases used for bibliometric analysis. Previous studies have made only partial assessments of the role played by both serials and other types of literature. The importance of journal literature in the various scientific fields has therefore not been systematically characterized. The authors address this issue by providing a systematic measurement of the role played by journal literature in the building of knowledge in both the natural sciences and engineering and the social sciences and humanities. Using citation data from the CD-ROM versions of the Science Citation Index (SCI), Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), and Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) databases from 1981 to 2000 (Thomson ISI, Philadelphia, PA), the authors quantify the share of citations to both serials and other types of literature. Variations in time and between fields are also analyzed. The results show that journal literature is increasingly important in the natural and social sciences, but that its role in the humanities is stagnant and has even tended to diminish slightly in the 1990s. Journal literature accounts for less than 50% of the citations in several disciplines of the social sciences and humanities; hence, special care should be used when using bibliometric indicators that rely only on journal literature.

Canadian collaboration networks: A comparative analysis of the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities

SummaryA basic dichotomy is generally made between publication practices in the natural sciences and engineering (NSE) on the one hand and social sciences and humanities (SSH) on the other. However, while researchers in the NSE share some common practices with researchers in SSH, the spectrum of practices is broader in the latter. Drawing on data from the CD-ROM versions of the Science Citation Index, SocialSciences Citation Index and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index from 1980 to 2002, this paper compares collaboration patterns in the SSH to those in the NSE. We show that, contrary to a widely held belief, researchers in the social sciences and the humanities do not form a homogeneous category. In fact, collaborative activities of researchers in the social sciences are more comparable to those of researchers in the NSE than in the humanities. Also, we see that language and geographical proximity influences the choice of collaborators in the SSH, but also in the NSE. This empirical analysis, which sheds a new light on the collaborative activities of researchers in the NSE compared to those in the SSH, may have policy implications as granting councils in these fields have a tendency to imitate programs developed for the NSE, without always taking into account the specificity of the humanities.

Modeling a century of citation distributions

The prevalence of uncited papers or of highly cited papers, with respect to the bulk of publications, provides important clues as to the dynamics of scientific research. Using 25 million papers and 600 million references from the Web of Science over the 1900–2006 period, this paper proposes a simple model based on a random selection process to explain the “uncitedness” phenomenon and its decline over the years. We show that the proportion of cited papers is a function of (1) the number of articles available (the competing papers), (2) the number of citing papers and (3) the number of references they contain. Using uncitedness as a departure point, we demonstrate the utility of the stretched-exponential function and a form of the Tsallis q-exponential function to fit complete citation distributions over the 20th century. As opposed to simple power-law fits, for instance, both these approaches are shown to be empirically well-grounded and robust enough to better understand citation dynamics at the aggregate level. On the basis of these models, we provide quantitative evidence and provisional explanations for an important shift in citation practices around 1960. We also propose a revision of the “citation classic” category as a set of articles which is clearly distinguishable from the rest of the field.

Impact of collaborative research on academic science

Over the past 15 years, we have witnessed, according to some analysts, a trend toward greater heterogeneity in scientific research and a growing affiliation of university researchers with extra-university partners. To this end, governments have actively promoted through diverse policy mechanisms greater collaboration and exchange between universities, businesses and governments. This paper assesses the extent to which collaborative research in Canada influences the nature of scientific production and the level of international scientific collaboration. Beliefs that collaborative research is detrimental to academic research do not seem empirically grounded. However the situation must continue to be monitored. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Sex differences in research funding, productivity and impact: an analysis of Québec university professors

Using the entire population of professors at universities in the province of Quebec (Canada), this article analyzes the relationship between sex and research funding, publication rates, and scientific impact. Since age is an important factor in research and the population pyramids of men and women are different, the role of age is also analyzed. The article shows that, after they have passed the age of about 38, women receive, on average, less funding for research than men, are generally less productive in terms of publications, and are at a slight disadvantage in terms of the scientific impact (measured by citations) of their publications. Various explanations for these differences are suggested, such as the more restricted collaboration networks of women, motherhood and the accompanying division of labour, women’s rank within the hierarchy of the scientific community and access to resources as well as their choice of research topics and level of specialization.

What is scientific and technological culture and how is it measured? A multidimensional model:

In the last decade, scientific culture has become a theme much discussed at all levels of public discourse. All scientific and technological policies developed in the last few years in OECD countries have included scientific culture as one of their aims, principles, or objectives. Despite the ubiquity of the term “scientific culture,” there is little agreement on its content. Definitions and understandings of what a scientific culture is vary across countries, groups, and individuals. There is also no consensus on how to measure scientific culture. The present paper addresses the question “what is a scientific culture?”. It presents a multidimensional model wherein scientific culture is defined as having two dimensions: individual and social. It then discusses how the model can be used to define indicators of scientific culture and to understand recent developments regarding the role of scientists in the diffusion of scientific culture.

A small world of citations? The influence of collaboration networks on citation practices.

This paper examines the proximity of authors to those they cite using degrees of separation in a co-author network, essentially using collaboration networks to expand on the notion of self-citations. While the proportion of direct self-citations (including co-authors of both citing and cited papers) is relatively constant in time and across specialties in the natural sciences (10% of references) and the social sciences (20%), the same cannot be said for citations to authors who are members of the co-author network. Differences between fields and trends over time lie not only in the degree of co-authorship which defines the large-scale topology of the collaboration network, but also in the referencing practices within a given discipline, computed by defining a propensity to cite at a given distance within the collaboration network. Overall, there is little tendency to cite those nearby in the collaboration network, excluding direct self-citations. These results are interpreted in terms of small-scale structure, field-specific citation practices, and the value of local co-author networks for the production of knowledge and for the accumulation of symbolic capital. Given the various levels of integration between co-authors, our findings shed light on the question of the availability of ‘arms length’ expert reviewers of grant applications and manuscripts.

Team size matters: Collaboration and scientific impact since 1900

This article provides the first historical analysis of the relationship between collaboration and scientific impact using three indicators of collaboration (number of authors, number of addresses, and number of countries) derived from articles published between 1900 and 2011. The results demonstrate that an increase in the number of authors leads to an increase in impact, from the beginning of the last century onward, and that this is not due simply to self‐citations. A similar trend is also observed for the number of addresses and number of countries represented in the byline of an article. However, the constant inflation of collaboration since 1900 has resulted in diminishing citation returns: Larger and more diverse (in terms of institutional and country affiliation) teams are necessary to realize higher impact. The article concludes with a discussion of the potential causes of the impact gain in citations of collaborative papers.