arXiv subjects

Henk F. Moed

Publications and source records attributed to Henk F. Moed.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2021

Bibliometric assessment of national scientific journals

Nationally oriented scientific-scholarly journals are considered from a methodological-informetric viewpoint, analysing data extracted from Scimago Journal Rank based on Scopus. An operational definition is proposed of a journal's degree of national orientation based on the geographical distribution of its publishing or citing authors, and the role of international collaboration and a country's total publication output. A comprehensive analysis is presented of trends up until 2019 in national orientation and citation impact of national journals entering Scopus, extending outcomes in earlier studies. A method to analyse national journals of given countries is applied to the set of former USSR republics and Eastern and Central European states which were under socialism, distinguishing between domestic and foreign national journals. The possible influence is highlighted of factors related to a journal's access status, publication language and subject field, international scientific migration and collaboration, database coverage policies, the size of a national research community, historical-political factors and national research assessment and funding policies.

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arXiv2020

The citation impact of social sciences and humanities upon patentable technology

This paper examines the citation impact of papers published in scientific-scholarly journals upon patentable technology, as reflected in examiner- or inventor-given references in granted patents. It analyses data created by SCImago Research Group, linking PATSTAT's scientific non-patent references (SNPRs) to source documents indexed in Scopus. The frequency of patent citations to journal papers is calculated per discipline, year, institutional sector, journal subject category, and for "top" journals. PATSTAT/Scopus-based statistics are compared to those derived from Web of Science/USPTO linkage. A detailed assessment is presented of the technological impact of research publications in social sciences and humanities (SSH). Several subject fields perform well in terms of the number of citations from patents, especially Library & Information Science, Language & Linguistics, Education, and Law, but many of the most cited journals find themselves in the interface between SSH and biomedical or natural sciences. Analyses of the titles of citing patents and cited papers are presented that shed light upon the cognitive content of patent citations. It is proposed to develop more advanced indicators of citation impact of papers upon patents, and ways to combine citation counts with citation content and context analysis.

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arXiv2020

Statistical relationships between corresponding authorship, international co-authorship and citation impact of national research systems

This paper presents a statistical analysis of the relationship between three science indicators applied in earlier bibliometric studies, namely research leadership based on corresponding authorship, international collaboration using international co-authorship data, and field-normalized citation impact. Indicators at the level of countries are extracted from the SIR database created by SCImago Research Group from publication records indexed for Elsevier's Scopus. The relationship between authorship and citation-based indicators is found to be complex, as it reflects a country's phase of scientific development and the coverage policy of the database. Moreover, one should distinguish a genuine leadership effect from a purely statistical effect due to fractional counting. Further analyses at the level of institutions and qualitative validation studies are recommended.

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arXiv2020

Do journals flipping to Gold Open Access show an OA Citation or Publication Advantage?

The effects of Open Access (OA) upon journal performance are investigated. The key research question holds: How does the citation impact and publication output of journals switching ('flipping') from non-OA to Gold-OA develop after their switch to Gold-OA? A review is given of the literature, with an emphasis on studies dealing with flipping journals. Two study sets with 119 and 100 flipping journals, derived from two different OA data sources (DOAJ and OAD), are compared with two control groups, one based on a standard bibliometric criterion, and a second controlling for a journal's national orientation. Comparing post-switch indicators with pre-switch ones in paired T-tests, evidence was obtained of an OA Citation advantage but not of an OA Publication Advantage. Shifts in the affiliation countries of publishing and citing authors are characterized in terms of countries' income class and geographical world region. Suggestions are made for qualitative follow-up studies to obtain more insight into OA flipping or reverse-flipping

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arXiv2020

Are nationally oriented journals indexed in Scopus becoming more international? The effect of publication language and access modality

An exploratory, descriptive analysis is presented of the national orientation of scientific, scholarly journals as reflected in the affiliations of publishing or citing authors. It calculates for journals covered in Scopus an Index of National Orientation (INO), and analyses the distribution of INO values across disciplines and countries, and the correlation between INO values and journal impact factors. The study did not find solid evidence that journal impact factors are good measures of journal internationality in terms of the geographical distribution of publishing or citing authors, as the relationship between a journal's national orientation and its citation impact is found to be inverse U-shaped. In addition, journals publishing in English are not necessarily internationally oriented in terms of the affiliations of publishing or citing authors; in social sciences and humanities also USA has their nationally oriented literatures. The paper examines the extent to which nationally oriented journals entering Scopus in earlier years, have become in recent years more international. It is found that in the study set about 40 per cent of such journals does reveal traces of internationalization, while the use of English as publication language and an Open Access (OA) status are important determinants.

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arXiv2018

Assessment and support of emerging research groups

The starting point of this paper is a desktop research assessment model that does not take properly into account the complexities of research assessment, but rather bases itself on a series of highly simplifying, questionable assumptions related to the availability, validity and evaluative significance of research performance indicators, and to funding policy criteria. The paper presents a critique of this model, and proposes alternative assessment approaches, based on an explicit evaluative framework, focusing on preconditions to performance or communication effectiveness rather than on performance itself, combining metrics and expert knowledge, and using metrics primarily to set minimum standards. Giving special attention to early career scientists in emerging research groups, the paper discusses the limits of classical bibliometric indicators and altmetrics. It proposes alternative funding formula of research institutions aimed to support emerging research groups.

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arXiv2018

Disentangling Gold Open Access

This chapter focuses on the analysis of current publication trends in gold Open Access (OA). The purpose of the chapter is to develop a full understanding on country patterns, OA journals characteristics and citation differences between gold OA and non-gold OA publications. For this, we will first review current literature regarding Open Access and its relation with its so-called citation advantage. Starting with a chronological perspective we will describe its development, how different countries are promoting OA publishing, and its effects on the journal publishing industry. We will deepen the analysis by investigating the research output produced by different units of analysis. First, we will focus on the production of countries with a special emphasis on citation and disciplinary differences. A point of interest will be identification of national idiosyncrasies and the relation between OA publication and research of local interest. This will lead to our second unit of analysis, OA journals indexed in Web of Science. Here we will deepen on journals characteristics and publisher types to clearly identify factors which may affect citation differences between OA and traditional journals which may not necessarily be derived from the OA factor. Gold OA publishing is being encouraged in many countries as opposed to Green OA. This chapter aims at fully understanding how it affects researchers' publication patterns and whether it ensures an alleged citation advantage as opposed to non-gold OA publications.

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arXiv2018

Trends in Russian research output indexed in Scopus and Web of Science

Trends are analysed in the annual number of documents published by Russian institutions and indexed in Scopus and Web of Science, giving special attention to the time period starting in the year 2013 in which the Project 5-100 was launched by the Russian Government. Numbers are broken down by document type, publication language, type of source, research discipline, country and source. It is concluded that Russian publication counts strongly depend upon the database used, and upon changes in database coverage, and that one should be cautious when using indicators derived from WoS, and especially from Scopus, as tools in the measurement of research performance and international orientation of the Russian science system.

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arXiv2017

Applied Evaluative Informetrics: Part 1

This manuscript is a preprint version of Part 1 (General Introduction and Synopsis) of the book Applied Evaluative Informetrics, to be published by Springer in the summer of 2017. This book presents an introduction to the field of applied evaluative informetrics, and is written for interested scholars and students from all domains of science and scholarship. It sketches the field's history, recent achievements, and its potential and limits. It explains the notion of multi-dimensional research performance, and discusses the pros and cons of 28 citation-, patent-, reputation- and altmetrics-based indicators. In addition, it presents quantitative research assessment as an evaluation science, and focuses on the role of extra-informetric factors in the development of indicators, and on the policy context of their application. It also discusses the way forward, both for users and for developers of informetric tools.

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arXiv2016

A critical comparative analysis of five world university rankings

To provide users insight into the value and limits of world university rankings, a comparative analysis is conducted of 5 ranking systems: ARWU, Leiden, THE, QS and U-Multirank. It links these systems with one another at the level of individual institutions, and analyses the overlap in institutional coverage, geographical coverage, how indicators are calculated from raw data, the skewness of indicator distributions, and statistical correlations between indicators. Four secondary analyses are presented investigating national academic systems and selected pairs of indicators. It is argued that current systems are still one-dimensional in the sense that they provide finalized, seemingly unrelated indicator values rather than offering a data set and tools to observe patterns in multi-faceted data. By systematically comparing different systems, more insight is provided into how their institutional coverage, rating methods, the selection of indicators and their normalizations influence the ranking positions of given institutions.

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arXiv2016

A new methodology for comparing Google Scholar and Scopus

A new methodology is proposed for comparing Google Scholar (GS) with other citation indexes. It focuses on the coverage and citation impact of sources, indexing speed, and data quality, including the effect of duplicate citation counts. The method compares GS with Elsevier's Scopus, and is applied to a limited set of articles published in 12 journals from six subject fields, so that its findings cannot be generalized to all journals or fields. The study is exploratory, and hypothesis generating rather than hypothesis-testing. It confirms findings on source coverage and citation impact obtained in earlier studies. The ratio of GS over Scopus citation varies across subject fields between 1.0 and 4.0, while Open Access journals in the sample show higher ratios than their non-OA counterparts. The linear correlation between GS and Scopus citation counts at the article level is high: Pearson's R is in the range of 0.8-0.9. A median Scopus indexing delay of two months compared to GS is largely though not exclusively due to missing cited references in articles in press in Scopus. The effect of double citation counts in GS due to multiple citations with identical or substantially similar meta-data occurs in less than 2 per cent of cases. Pros and cons of article-based and what is termed as concept-based citation indexes are discussed.

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arXiv2016

Iran's scientific dominance and the emergence of South-East Asian countries as scientific collaborators in the Persian Gulf Region

A longitudinal bibliometric analysis of publications indexed in Thomson Reuters' Incites and Elsevier's Scopus, and published from Persian Gulf States and neighbouring Middle East countries, shows clear effects of major political events during the past 35 years. Predictions made in 2006 by the US diplomat Richard N. Haass on political changes in the Middle East have come true in the Gulf States' national scientific research systems, to the extent that Iran has become in 2015 by far the leading country in the Persian Gulf, and South-East Asian countries including China, Malaysia and South Korea have become major scientific collaborators, displacing the USA and other large Western countries. But collaborations patterns among Persian Gulf States show no apparent relationship with differences in Islam denominations.

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arXiv2015

Comprehensive indicator comparisons intelligible to non-experts: The case of two SNIP versions

A framework is proposed for comparing different types of bibliometric indicators, introducing the notion of an Indicator Comparison Report. It provides a comprehensive overview of the main differences and similarities of indicators. The comparison shows both the strong points and the limitations of each of the indicators at stake, rather than over-promoting one indicator and ignoring the benefits of alternative constructs. It focuses on base notions, assumptions, and application contexts, which makes it more intelligible to non-experts. As an illustration, a comparison report is presented for the original and the modified SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) indicator of journal citation impact.

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arXiv2015

On full text download and citation distributions in scientific-scholarly journals

A statistical analysis of full text downloads of articles in Elseviers ScienceDirect covering all disciplines reveals large differences in download frequencies, their skewness, and their correlation with Scopus-based citation counts, between disciplines, journals, and document types. Download counts tend to be two orders of magnitude higher and less skewedly distributed than citations. A mathematical model based on the sum of two exponentials does not adequately capture monthly download counts. The degree of correlation at the article level within a journal is similar to that at the journal level in the discipline covered by that journal, suggesting that the differences between journals are to a large extent discipline specific. Despite the fact that in all study journals download and citation counts per article positively correlate, little overlap may exist between the set of articles appearing in the top of the citation distribution and that with the most frequently downloaded ones. Usage and citation leaks, bulk downloading, differences between reader and author populations in a subject field, the type of document or its content, differences in obsolescence patterns between downloads and citations, different functions of reading and citing in the research process, all provide possible explanations of differences between download and citation distributions.

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arXiv2015

Altmetrics as traces of the computerization of the research process

I propose a broad, multi-dimensional conception of altmetrics, namely as traces of the computerization of the research process. Computerization should be conceived in its broadest sense, including all recent developments in ICT and software, taking place in society as a whole. I distinguish four aspects of the research process: the collection of research data and development of research methods; scientific information processing; communication and organization; and, last but not least, research assessment. I will argue that in each aspect, computerization plays a key role, and metrics are being developed to describe this process. I propose to label the total collection of such metrics as Altmetrics. I seek to provide a theoretical foundation of altmetrics, based on notions developed by Michael Nielsen in his monograph Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science. Altmetrics can be conceived as tools for the practical realization of the ethos of science and scholarship in a computerized or digital age.

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arXiv2014

International Scientific Migration and Collaboration Patterns Following a Bibliometrics Line of Investigation

A bibliometric approach is explored to tracking international scientific migration, based on an analysis of the affiliation countries of authors publishing in peer reviewed journals indexed in Scopus. The paper introduces a model that relates base concepts in the study of migration to bibliometric constructs, and discusses the potentialities and limitations of a bibliometric approach both with respect to data accuracy and interpretation. Synchronous and asynchronous analyses are presented for 10 rapidly growing countries and 7 scientifically established countries. Rough error rates of the proposed indicators are estimated. It is concluded that the bibliometric approach is promising provided that its outcomes are interpreted with care, based on insight into the limits and potentialities of the bibliometric approach, and combined with complementary data, obtained, for instance, from researchers Curricula Vitae or survey or questionnaire based data. Error rates for units of assessment with indicator values based on sufficiently large numbers are estimated to be fairly below 10 per cent, but can be expected to vary substantially among countries of origin, especially between Asian countries and Western countries.

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arXiv2014

The Multidimensional Assessment of Scholarly Research Impact

This article introduces the Multidimensional Research Assessment Matrix of scientific output. Its base notion holds that the choice of metrics to be applied in a research assessment process depends upon the unit of assessment, the research dimension to be assessed, and the purposes and policy context of the assessment. An indicator may by highly useful within one assessment process, but less so in another. For instance, publication counts are useful tools to help discriminating between those staff members who are research active, and those who are not, but are of little value if active scientists are to be compared one another according to their research performance. This paper gives a systematic account of the potential usefulness and limitations of a set of 10 important metrics including altmetrics, applied at the level of individual articles, individual researchers, research groups and institutions. It presents a typology of research impact dimensions, and indicates which metrics are the most appropriate to measure each dimension. It introduces the concept of a meta-analysis of the units under assessment in which metrics are not used as tools to evaluate individual units, but to reach policy inferences regarding the objectives and general setup of an assessment process.

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arXiv2010

The Source-Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) is a valid and sophisticated indicator of journal citation impact

This paper is a reply to the article "Scopus's Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) versus a Journal Impact Factor based on Fractional Counting of Citations", published by Loet Leydesdorff and Tobias Opthof (arXiv:1004.3580v2 [cs.DL]). It clarifies the relationship between SNIP and Elsevier's Scopus. Since Leydesdorff and Opthof's description of SNIP is not complete, it indicates four key differences between SNIP and the indicator proposed by the two authors, and argues why the former is more valid than the latter. Nevertheless, the idea of fractional citation counting deserves further exploration. The paper discusses difficulties that arise if one attempts to apply this principle at the level of individual (citing) papers.

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