[journals: ranking and inventory]

~~ via scholarship 2.o


JournalBase *- *A Comparative International Study of Scientific Journal Databases in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (SSH)

Michèle Dassa et Christine Kosmopoulos / Cybergeo, The Electronic European Journal of Geography / Dossier publié le 25 juin 2009 / Document published on 25 June 2009 / Last updated : 17 July 2009.

Presented here for the first time in a comparative table are the contents of the databases that inventory the journals in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (SSH), of the Web of Science (published by Thomson Reuters) and of Scopus (published by Elsevier), as well as of the lists European Reference Index for Humanities (ERIH) (published by the European Science Foundation and of the French Agence pour l'Evaluation de la Recherche et de l'Enseignement Supérieur (AERES).

With some 20,000 entries, this is an almost exhaustive overview of the wealth of publications in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, at last made available in this table, adopting the same nomenclature for classing the journals according to their disciplines as the one used in 27 workstations of the European Science Foundation.

The multiple assignments reveal the multidisciplinarity of the journals, which is quite frequent in SSH, but also sometimes the incoherence of databases that have not been corrected.The research was carried out in 2008 with the financial support of the TGE Adonis of the CNRS.

An updated version will soon be presented online.The final objective of this project, which concerns the entire international community of the Social Sciences and the Humanities, is to put online, in a bilingual English/French version, the database of JournalBase in interactive mode on a collaborative platform, as well as the final report of the study, so that the decision-makers, the scientists, the experts in scientific information have access to up-to-date information, and so that they may contribute to forward movement in the reflection on these questions, through the exchange of experiences and of good working practices.

JournalBase has been updated on the 17 July 2009. It includes the information on open access journals indexed in the DOAJ.

Source

[http://www.cybergeo.eu/index22492.html]

Full Text

[http://www.cybergeo.eu/pdf/22492]

[social networking conference: wolverhampton uni]

Wolverhampton Internet and Technology Society (WITS) together with the Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group are hosting the 1^st Social Networking in Cyberspace conference in April, 2010. We welcome contributions from scholars in the social and behavioural sciences and media and information disciplines, regardless of theoretical orientation.

The conference, which is to be sponsored by the Research Centre in Applied Sciences (RCAS), will be a one-day event and will take place on Friday the 23^rd of April, 2010. The Venue for the conference will be the Lighthouse Media Centre in Wolverhampton (Please click here for Map).

Call for papers

We invite potential presenters to submit an abstract (no longer than 300 words) for peer-review. The deadline for submission of the abstract is October 30^th, 2009. A decision on this abstract will be made by November 20^th, 2009 and authors will be notified via email soon after.

Abstracts should be submitted to SNIC@wlv.ac.uk

Subsequently, all presenters will be invited to prepare a paper for publication. The International Journal of Internet Science will be publishing a peer-reviewed selection of the best papers from the conference.

Papers should be submitted to SNIC@wlv.ac.uk by the 28^th of May 2010.

Postgraduate poster competition

We will be running a postgraduate poster competition on the day of the conference. Prizes will be awarded for the best posters on the day (further information to follow). We invite postgraduate students to submit an abstract by October 30^th 2009 for consideration.

Keynote Speakers

The following have been confirmed as keynote speakers at the conference:

Professor Mike Thelwall: University of Wolverhampton – “Detecting and analysing emotion in social networking sites”

Doctor Monica Whitty: Nottingham Trent University.

Fees

£80 standard rate

Discount rate for presenters (£60)

Discount rate for students (£50)

The fee includes morning and afternoon coffee and lunch.

Registration

Conference registration opens in January 2010

Important dates

Abstract submission deadline: 30^th October 2009

Notice of acceptance deadline: 20^th November 2009

Conference date: 23^rd April 2010

Full papers deadline: 28^th May 2010

contact us

If you have any enquiries or would like to contact us regarding the suitability of your research for the conference, please email us on SNIC@wlv.ac.uk

[first day of work]

Welcome to me...to the life of a *real* person and not a student (even if it was doctoral!).

Today is my first day of work and I've already found the stationary closet and have piled my desk with a myriad of fluorescent highlighters, coloured pens, pink and yellow post-its and even, yes, a pencil! I've located the coffee maker and the fridge and have settled in nicely. Now that those important first-day things are out of the way, I'm diving into the minefield of scholarly publishing - issues about open access, electronic or not or both, impact factors, citations and the like. Through my browsing I've come across The Scholarly Kitchen, an excellent blog on, well, all things scholarly and publishing. Today's blog post at the Kitchen hits a major question in academia today: what to watch. Should academics (publishers, researchers, writers) keep an eye on issues like those I mentioned above or should the focus move to the reader, funding bodies, "author talent" and the like?

Kent Anderson, author of this post at Scholarly Kitchen, mentions an article I read recently in Science on the nature of electronic publishing. That Science article noted that readers *use* (key word here) online resources rather differently from print ones:

"Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled. But because they are used differently than print—scientists and scholars tend to search electronically and follow hyperlinks rather than browse or peruse—electronically available journals may portend an ironic change for science. Using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005), I show that as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles. The forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship. Searching online is more efficient and following hyperlinks quickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon."

Anderson has picked out some responses to the Science article and it's interesting to see the high value readers/users are putting on notions of accessibility, usability and personalisation:

"I]f a paper isn’t on G[oogle] S[cholar], and I haven’t seen it in another publication, as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t exist. . . .

Basically, if I can’t download a “free” pdf, the paper doesn’t get referenced. I do go from time to time to the library for mission critical papers, but the time it takes to get a paper is on the order of 30 min to an hour. A massive waste of time.

[O]ften older papers aren’t worth referencing, the 80’s and 90’s probably saw more invalidation of old research than the entire preceding century in total (in the biological sciences anyway). And this decade will probably be more than the 80’s and 90’s combined, the pace of research is just that much faster, and that many more people doing it. You don’t reference a 1970’s paper that is half wrong, you reference the 1998 paper that examined the 70’s one and refined the concepts."

I wonder how these kinds of comments affect impact factors/"mono-metrics" and what this means for the new generation RAE which is supposed to be more fair.

[rae & metrics 2.0]

The other day I posted about Stevan Harnad's "Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise" and today I've seen the "New-Media Scholars' Place in 'the Pool' Could Lead to Tenure" artile in the Chronical of Higher Ed. In the article Andrea Foster tells us about "Re:Poste, a Web application that encourages academics to pick apart online articles from the mass media." To those in the know Re:Poste is "the Pool," and might well help new media scholars and practitioners "measure" their imput levels. Gerry McKiernan at Scholarship 2.0 says "No college is yet using the site as a way to evaluate professors" but "once open to the public, could be a good barometer of a scholar's influence."

A bit about Pool:

"Titles of new-media projects are plotted on a two-dimensional graph. People log in and post the reviews of projects, rating their appearance, function, and concept on a scale from 1 to 10. As works garner more reviews, they move from left to right on the graph. If reviews become more positive, the works move toward the top.

Accordingly, the most highly regarded and widely reviewed works migrate to the upper right corner of the graph.

The program calculates the ratings and takes into account the credibility of the reviewers. If a reviewer receives a low appearance rating for his own projects, then his assessment of how others' projects look will not be given much weight.

The Pool also allows visitors to bore deep into a project via hyperlinks, in many cases viewing its evolution from conception to finish. They can see its creator or creators and read how others rated the project. They can see the works that inspired it and the works it inspired. Basic information about a project is posted by the developers."

There's more at the Chronicle on how tagging works in Pool and check out Scholarship 2.0 for an idea of future instantiations including maps of how articles fit into the larger landscape.

[rae, metrics & open source]

Maintaining an academic career means paying close attention to your publishing record and its effect on the RAE. I'm not up on the metrics and specific weighting of kinds of publications and how that might differ across disciplines but I've just come across this interesting paper: "Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise" by Stevan Harnad. In this article Harnad gives us an idea of how metrics and open source might work as an alternative to the usual "academic bean-counting of publications for performance evaluation and funding."


"Open Access. Until now, the reference metadata and cited references of the top 25% of the c. 24,000 peerreviewed journals published worldwide, across disciplines and languages, have been systematically fed (by the journal publishers) to the Institutite for Scientific Information (ISI), to be extracted and stored. But soon this is will change. It has been discovered (belatedly) that the Web makes it possible to make the full-text (not just the reference metadata and cited reference) of every single one of the 2.5 million articles published annually in those 24,000 journals (not just the top 25%) freely accessible online to all users (not just those that can afford
paid access to the journals and the ISI dtabase).

[...]

Lawrence (one of the co-inventors of Citeseer) published a study in Nature
in 2001, showing that articles that were made freely available on the Web were cited more than twice as much as those that were not ; yet most researchers still did not rush to self-archive. The finding of an OA citation impact advantage was soon extended beyond computer science, first to physics (Harnad & Brody 2004), and then also to all 10 of the biological, social science, and humanities disciplines so far tested (Hajjem et al 2005) ; yet the worldwide spontaneous self-archiving rate continued to hover around 15%.
If researchers themselves were not very heedful of the benefits of OA, however, their institutions and research funders – co-beneficiaries of their research impact – were: To my knowledge, the department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at University of Southampton was the first to mandate self-archiving for all departmental research articles published: These had to be deposited in the department’s own Institutional Repository (IR) (upgraded using the first free, open source software for creating OA IRs, likewise created at
Southampton and now widely used worldwide)."

Interesting...

As Harnad says, the RAE is "a very cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive undertaking, for the researchers as well as the assessors" so we should really be looking into other possibilities.

"The data-mining potential of an OA corpus is enormous, not just for research evaluation by performance assessors, but for search and navigation by reseacher-users, students, and even the general public."

I wonder how this kind of OS metrics might fit in with the new RAE:

• 2008 will mark the final appearance of traditional peer review systems for the UK research assessment exercise (RAE)
• The UK government has announced plans to use a metrics system to assess research quality and guide funding
• A metrics system could fit well to chemistry but some worry that an element of peer review will need to be retained for areas such as theoretical chemistry
  

[social media: metrics and analysis]

As we gear up for the upcoming (June) NLab conference on Social Networks and Business I'm more than ever on the prowl for interesting posts/tweets/rss updates that tackle these issues. (nb: find NLab on facebook and upcoming) I've just come across Ryan MacMillan's (a digital marketing consultancy) "Contagious Report" on social media, methods and metrics.

Some interesting parts:

"The four qualities of Social Capital The similarity to economic capital only goes so far. SC has the following four qualities:
Utility through Accumulation: Like economic capital, the more SC an individual accumulates, the more easily that individual is able to affect their environment.
Inequality of Distribution: Like economic capital, SC is differently available. Some individuals have a lot,others less.
Expiration through Under-Use: Unlike economic capital, which expires through over-use, SC expires through under-use. 'Use it or lose it'.
Based Upon Trust: Regular capital is merely the exchange of agreed values as
guaranteed by a central authority. SC, however, is a stockpile of trust, which is
guaranteed only by the exercise of reciprocal actions between
diffuse individuals within a social network."

"Measuring Social Capital Any planned social media activity by a brand within an OSN must be measurable by the way in which it increases or depletes the brand's SC. Measuring a brand's SC, particularly in reference to their online SC, can be
achieved through analysis of online sentiment and influence.This in effect is a measure of the 'tone of voice' that online conversations about a brand have. Sentiment metrics describe the level of the 'stockpile' of trust which constitutes SC: how trustworthy is the brand understood to be, and how useful or desirable is its
content or activity?

Influence metrics describe the efficacy with which a brand is able to make use of that trust in order to (positively) affect their environment: how easily is a brand able to share its knowledge around its social networks?"

Read the whole report here.