Abstract There is a growing expectation for academics to go public, that is, to actively engage with the media and supply policy advice for decision-makers. Data showing these interactions are scarce. By linking data from FRIS, BelgaPress, and Overton, this study reveals a first snapshot of academics’ media mentions and policy citations for all active academics from Dutch-speaking universities in Belgium. Exploratory analysis reveals distinct sector differences, with academics from Social sciences, Medical, and Health sciences being most visible. A small minority of mostly male academics featured very often in media as media figures, contrasted by much more discrete policy pillars whose publications were cited often but hardly featured in traditional media.

Abstract For the last 50 years, the journal impact factor (IF) has been the most prominent of all bibliometric indicators. Since the first Journal Citation Report was launched, the IF has been used, often improperly, to evaluate institutions, publications, and individuals. Its well-known significant technical limitations have not detracted from its popularity, and they contrast with the lack of consensus over the numerous alternatives suggested as complements or replacements. This paper presents a percentile-distribution-based proposal for assessing the influence of scientific journals and publications that corrects several of the IF’s main technical limitations using the same set of documents as is used to calculate the IF. Nearly 400 journals of Library Science and Information Science and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology categories were analyzed for this purpose. The results show that the new indicator retains many of its predecessor’s advantages and adds benefits of its own: It is more accurate, more gaming resistant, more complete, and less influenced by the citation window or extreme observations.

Abstract In this study, we aim to investigate the publishing strategies adopted by the Brazilian scientific community and how they are related to the researchers’ scientific capital. The “research productivity” grant (PQ grant) is taken as an indicator of scientific capital: The greater the PQ grant a researcher receives, the greater is their scientific capital. Personal data from 6,993 researchers linked to at least one Brazilian graduate program in biological sciences were obtained through the Sucupira Platform, data on articles published from 2000 to 2019 were retrieved from the Lattes Platform, and the Directory of Open Access Journals was consulted to classify articles as Open Access (OA). Our main findings indicate that subscription-based journals are the most prevalent publishing strategy, but the proportion of OA publications is increasing over time, mainly with article processing charges (APC). We also observed that the lower the level of PQ grant, the higher the share of articles in OA journals. Finally, we observed a growing trend in the percentage of researchers with high and mid-high adherence to OA from all levels of PQ grant, but mainly with APC. Mapping the dynamics of publishing strategies can play an important step towards driving policies oriented to the promotion of OA.

Abstract This study analyzes the adoption and use of researcher profile systems (ORCID, Scopus Author Profiles, Web of Science Researcher Profiles (formerly Publons), Google Scholar Profiles, and ResearchGate) across discipline and rank at the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg, Canada). The purpose of the study is to assess how many faculty members have registered for and use researcher profiles and whether there are any differences in use along discipline or academic rank. The adoption rate in the current study is compared with other international studies. At the University of Manitoba, there is variance in adoption between disciplines and ranks. When comparing profile systems by discipline, Google Scholar is the primary profile system for sciences and ORCID, Publons, and ResearchGate the primary profile systems for health sciences. There is variance of publication count between disciplines. Unsurprisingly, the number of publications increases as faculty are promoted. Among the studied profile systems, ORCID is not working as efficiently as it could be. Several recommendations to increase ORCID adoption are made, including mandatory public fields and suggestions for third-party integration. As part of increasing usage of profile systems, we see academic librarians as a key component of instruction and advocacy for graduate students and faculty.

Abstract Citations are increasingly being used to evaluate institutional and individual performance, suggesting a need for rigorous research to understand what behaviors citations are reflecting and what these behaviors mean for the institution of science. To overcome challenges in accurately representing the citation generation process, we use postretraction citations to test competing theories under two different citation search processes, empirically testing predictions on the spread of retracted references. We find that retracted papers are continually cited after the retraction, and that these citations are more likely to come from audiences likely to be unfamiliar with the field of the retracted paper. In addition, we find this association to be much stronger among those citing high-status journals, consistent with the behavior of scientists relying on heuristic search instead of engaged search process. While the current policy debate on misinformation in science emphasizes increasing the visibility of retraction labels to discourage the use of such publications, we argue that institutional-level interventions may be more effective, as such interventions are more consistent with the heuristic citation process. As such citation behavior may not be limited to the case of postretraction citations, we discuss the implications for current science studies as well as science policy.

Abstract Inequality prevails in science. Individual inequality means that most perish quickly and only a few are successful, and gender inequality implies that there are differences in achievements for women and men. Using large-scale bibliographic data and following a computational approach, we study the evolution of individual and gender inequality for cohorts from 1970 to 2000 in the whole field of computer science as it grows and becomes a team-based science. We find that individual inequality in productivity (publications) increases over a scholar’s career but is historically invariant, whereas individual inequality in impact (citations), albeit larger, is stable across cohorts and careers. Gender inequality prevails regarding productivity, but there is no evidence for differences in impact. The Matthew Effect is shown to accumulate advantages to early achievements and to become stronger over the decades, indicating the rise of a “publish or perish” imperative. Only some authors manage to reap the benefits that publishing in teams promises. The Matthew Effect then amplifies initial differences and propagates the gender gap. Women continue to fall behind because they continue to be at a higher risk of dropping out for reasons that have nothing to do with early-career achievements or social support.

Abstract An article recently published in Quantitative Science Studies proposed an apparently elegant solution to go past the alleged limits of “observational approaches” and “simple statistical associations” when it comes to the study of gender disparities in scientific funding (Cruz-Castro & Sanz-Menéndez, 2023, p. 594). A randomized experiment, it was claimed, would finally allow us to “measure the effects of a cause,” that is “the effect of the gender of the principal investigator (PI) on the score of a research funding application” (Cruz-Castro & Sanz-Menéndez, 2023, p. 594). And the finding of this trial was as clear as its formulation: there was no indication whatsoever that women’s applications had been evaluated differently than that of men. Peer Review https://www.webofscience.com/api/gateway/wos/peer-review/10.1162/qss_c_00300

Abstract Experts from 17 consortia are collaborating on the Human Reference Atlas (HRA) which aims to map the human body at single cell resolution. To bridge across scales—from the meter size human body to the micrometer size single-cell level—organ experts are constructing anatomical structures, cell types plus biomarkers (ASCT+B) tables, and associated spatial reference objects. The 3rd HRA (v1.2) release features 26 organ-specific ASCT+B tables that cite 456 scholarly papers and are linked to 61 spatial reference objects and Organ Mapping Antibody Panels (OMAPs); it is authored by more than 120 experts. This paper presents the first analyses and visualizations showcasing what data and scholarly evidence exist for which organs and how experts relate to the organs covered in the HRA. To identify potential HRA authors and reviewers, we queried the Web of Science database for authors who work on the 33 organs targeted for the next HRA release (v1.3). To provide scientific evidence for the HRA, we identified 620 high-quality, single-cell experimental data sets for 58 organs published in 561 unique papers. The results presented are critical for understanding and communicating the quality of the HRA, planning for future tissue data collection, and inviting leading experts to contribute to the evolving atlas.

Abstract OpenCitations Meta is a new database for open bibliographic metadata of scholarly publications involved in the citations indexed by the OpenCitations infrastructure, adhering to Open Science principles and published under a CC0 license to promote maximum reuse. It presently incorporates bibliographic metadata for publications recorded in Crossref, DataCite, and PubMed, making it the largest bibliographic metadata source using Semantic Web technologies. It assigns new globally persistent identifiers (PIDs), known as OpenCitations Meta Identifiers (OMIDs) to all bibliographic resources, enabling it both to disambiguate publications described using different external PIDS (e.g., a DOI in Crossref and a PMID in PubMed) and to handle citations involving publications lacking external PIDs. By hosting bibliographic metadata internally, OpenCitations Meta eliminates its former reliance on API calls to external resources and thus enhances performance in response to user queries. Its automated data curation, following the OpenCitations Data Model, includes deduplication, error correction, metadata enrichment, and full provenance tracking, ensuring transparency and traceability of data and bolstering confidence in data integrity, a feature unparalleled in other bibliographic databases. Its commitment to Semantic Web standards ensures superior interoperability compared to other machine-readable formats, with availability via a SPARQL endpoint, REST APIs, and data dumps.

Abstract Authorship is associated with scientific capital and prestige, and corresponding authorship is used in evaluation as a proxy for scientific status. However, there are no empirical analyses on the validity of the corresponding authorship metadata in bibliometric databases. This paper looks at differences in the corresponding authorship metadata in Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus to investigate how the relationship between author position and corresponding authors varies by discipline and country and analyzes changes in the position of corresponding authors over time. We find that both WoS and Scopus have accuracy issues when it comes to assigning corresponding authorship. Although the number of documents with a reprint author has increased over time in both databases, WoS indexed more of those papers than Scopus, and there are significant differences between the two databases in terms of who the corresponding author is. Although metadata is not complete in WoS, corresponding authors are normally first authors with a declining trend over time, favoring middle and last authors, especially in the Medical, Natural Sciences, and Engineering fields. These results reinforce the importance of considering how databases operationalize and index concepts such as corresponding authors, this being particularly important when they are used in research assessment.