arXiv subjects

Cassidy R. Sugimoto

Publications and source records attributed to Cassidy R. Sugimoto.

24 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2015

Big data, bigger dilemmas: A critical review

The recent interest in Big Data has generated a broad range of new academic, corporate, and policy practices along with an evolving debate amongst its proponents, detractors, and skeptics. While the practices draw on a common set of tools, techniques, and technologies, most contributions to the debate come either from a particular disciplinary perspective or with an eye on a domain-specific issue. A close examination of these contributions reveals a set of common problematics that arise in various guises in different places. It also demonstrates the need for a critical synthesis of the conceptual and practical dilemmas surrounding Big Data. The purpose of this article is to provide such a synthesis by drawing on relevant writings in the sciences, humanities, policy, and trade literature. In bringing these diverse literatures together, we aim to shed light on the common underlying issues that concern and affect all of these areas. By contextualizing the phenomenon of Big Data within larger socio-economic developments, we also seek to provide a broader understanding of its drivers, barriers, and challenges. This approach allows us to identify attributes of Big Data that need to receive more attention--autonomy, opacity, and generativity, disparity, and futurity--leading to questions and ideas for moving beyond dilemmas.

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arXiv2015

Social media in scholarly communication

Social media metrics - commonly coined as "altmetrics" - have been heralded as great democratizers of science, providing broader and timelier indicators of impact than citations. These metrics come from a range of sources, including Twitter, blogs, social reference managers, post-publication peer review, and other social media platforms. Social media metrics have begun to be used as indicators of scientific impact, yet the theoretical foundation, empirical validity, and extent of use of platforms underlying these metrics lack thorough treatment in the literature. This editorial provides an overview of terminology and definitions of altmetrics and summarizes current research regarding social media use in academia, social media metrics as well as data reliability and validity. The papers of the special issue are introduced.

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arXiv2014

Tweets as impact indicators: Examining the implications of automated bot accounts on Twitter

This brief communication presents preliminary findings on automated Twitter accounts distributing links to scientific papers deposited on the preprint repository arXiv. It discusses the implication of the presence of such bots from the perspective of social media metrics (altmetrics), where mentions of scholarly documents on Twitter have been suggested as a means of measuring impact that is both broader and timelier than citations. We present preliminary findings that automated Twitter accounts create a considerable amount of tweets to scientific papers and that they behave differently than common social bots, which has critical implications for the use of raw tweet counts in research evaluation and assessment. We discuss some definitions of Twitter cyborgs and bots in scholarly communication and propose differentiating between different levels of engagement from tweeting only bibliographic information to discussing or commenting on the content of a paper.

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arXiv2014

The role of handbooks in knowledge creation and diffusion: A case of science and technology studies

Genre is considered to be an important element in scholarly communication and in the practice of scientific disciplines. However, scientometric studies have typically focused on a single genre, the journal article. The goal of this study is to understand the role that handbooks play in knowledge creation and diffusion and their relationship with the genre of journal articles, particularly in highly interdisciplinary and emergent social science and humanities disciplines. To shed light on these questions we focused on handbooks and journal articles published over the last four decades belonging to the research area of Science and Technology Studies (STS), broadly defined. To get a detailed picture we used the full-text of five handbooks (500,000 words) and a well-defined set of 11,700 STS articles. We confirmed the methodological split of STS into qualitative and quantitative (scientometric) approaches. Even when the two traditions explore similar topics (e.g., science and gender) they approach them from different starting points. The change in cognitive foci in both handbooks and articles partially reflects the changing trends in STS research, often driven by technology. Using text similarity measures we found that, in the case of STS, handbooks play no special role in either focusing the research efforts or marking their decline. In general, they do not represent the summaries of research directions that have emerged since the previous edition of the handbook.

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arXiv2013

Tweeting biomedicine: an analysis of tweets and citations in the biomedical literature

Data collected by social media platforms have recently been introduced as a new source for indicators to help measure the impact of scholarly research in ways that are complementary to traditional citation-based indicators. Data generated from social media activities related to scholarly content can be used to reflect broad types of impact. This paper aims to provide systematic evidence regarding how often Twitter is used to diffuse journal articles in the biomedical and life sciences. The analysis is based on a set of 1.4 million documents covered by both PubMed and Web of Science (WoS) and published between 2010 and 2012. The number of tweets containing links to these documents was analyzed to evaluate the degree to which certain journals, disciplines, and specialties were represented on Twitter. It is shown that, with less than 10% of PubMed articles mentioned on Twitter, its uptake is low in general. The relationship between tweets and WoS citations was examined for each document at the level of journals and specialties. The results show that tweeting behavior varies between journals and specialties and correlations between tweets and citations are low, implying that impact metrics based on tweets are different from those based on citations. A framework utilizing the coverage of articles and the correlation between Twitter mentions and citations is proposed to facilitate the evaluation of novel social-media based metrics and to shed light on the question in how far the number of tweets is a valid metric to measure research impact.

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arXiv2013

arXiv e-prints and the journal of record: An analysis of roles and relationships

Since its creation in 1991, arXiv has become central to the diffusion of research in a number of fields. Combining data from the entirety of arXiv and the Web of Science (WoS), this paper investigates (a) the proportion of papers across all disciplines that are on arXiv and the proportion of arXiv papers that are in the WoS, (b) elapsed time between arXiv submission and journal publication, and (c) the aging characteristics and scientific impact of arXiv e-prints and their published version. It shows that the proportion of WoS papers found on arXiv varies across the specialties of physics and mathematics, and that only a few specialties make extensive use of the repository. Elapsed time between arXiv submission and journal publication has shortened but remains longer in mathematics than in physics. In physics, mathematics, as well as in astronomy and astrophysics, arXiv versions are cited more promptly and decay faster than WoS papers. The arXiv versions of papers - both published and unpublished - have lower citation rates than published papers, although there is almost no difference in the impact of the arXiv versions of both published and unpublished papers.

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