arXiv subjects

Isabella Peters

Publications and source records attributed to Isabella Peters.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Evaluation of a Provenance Management Tool for Immersive Virtual Fieldwork

Ensuring reproducibility of research is an integral part of good scientific practice. One way to support this is through provenance: information about research workflows from data gathering to researchers' sensemaking processes leading to published results. This is highly important in disciplines such as geosciences, where researchers use software for interactive and immersive visualizations of geospatial data, doing virtual measurements in simulated fieldwork on 3D models. We evaluated a provenance management tool, which allows recording of interactions with a virtual fieldwork tool and annotating different states of the visualization. The user study investigated how researchers used this Digital Lab Book (DLB) and whether perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness differed between groups in immersive or non-immersive settings. Participants perceived the DLB as both useful and easy to use. While there were indications of differences in perceived ease of use (higher for immersive setting), usage patterns showed no significant group differences.

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arXiv2024

Virtual Fieldwork in Immersive Environments using Game Engines

Fieldwork still is the first and foremost source of insight in many disciplines of the geosciences. Virtual fieldwork is an approach meant to enable scientists trained in fieldwork to apply these skills to a virtual representation of outcrops that are inaccessible to humans e.g. due to being located on the seafloor. For this purpose we develop a virtual fieldwork software in the game engine and 3D creation tool Unreal Engine. This software is developed specifically for a large, spatially immersive environment as well as virtual reality using head-mounted displays. It contains multiple options for quantitative measurements of visualized 3D model data. We visualize three distinct real-world datasets gathered by different photogrammetric and bathymetric methods as use cases and gather initial feedback from domain experts.

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arXiv2024

Scientific discourse on YouTube: Motivations for citing research in comments

YouTube is a valuable source of user-generated content on a wide range of topics, and it encourages user participation through the use of a comment system. Video content is increasingly addressing scientific topics, and there is evidence that both academics and consumers use video descriptions and video comments to refer to academic research and scientific publications. Because commenting is a discursive behavior, this study will provide insights on why individuals post links to research publications in comments. For this, a qualitative content analysis and iterative coding approach were applied. Furthermore, the reasons for mentioning academic publications in comments were contrasted with the reasons for citing in scholarly works and with reasons for commenting on YouTube. We discovered that the primary motives for sharing research links were (1) providing more insights into the topic and (2) challenging information offered by other commentators.

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arXiv2023

The Emergence of Preprints: Comparing Publishing Behaviour in the Global South and the Global North

Purpose: The recent proliferation of preprints could be a way for researchers worldwide to increase the availability and visibility of their research findings. Against the background of rising publication costs caused by the increasing prevalence of article processing fees, the search for other ways to publish research results besides traditional journal publication may increase. This could be especially true for lower-income countries. Design/methodology/approach: Therefore, we are interested in the experiences and attitudes towards posting and using preprints in the Global South as opposed to the Global North. To explore whether motivations and concerns about posting preprints differ, we adopted a mixed-methods approach, combining a quantitative survey of researchers with focus group interviews. Findings: We found that respondents from the Global South were more likely to agree to adhere to policies and to emphasise that mandates could change publishing behaviour towards open access. They were also more likely to agree posting preprints has a positive impact. Respondents from the Global South and the Global North emphasised the importance of peer-reviewed research for career advancement. Originality: The study has identified a wide range of experiences with and attitudes towards posting preprints among researchers in the Global South and the Global North. To our knowledge, this has hardly been studied before, which is also because preprints only have emerged lately in many disciplines and countries.

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arXiv2023

Which Factors are associated with Open Access Publishing? A Springer Nature Case Study

Open Access (OA) facilitates access to articles. But, authors or funders often must pay the publishing costs preventing authors who do not receive financial support from participating in OA publishing and citation advantage for OA articles. OA may exacerbate existing inequalities in the publication system rather than overcome them. To investigate this, we studied 522,411 articles published by Springer Nature. Employing correlation and regression analyses, we describe the relationship between authors affiliated with countries from different income levels, their choice of publishing model, and the citation impact of their papers. A machine learning classification method helped us to explore the importance of different features in predicting the publishing model. The results show that authors eligible for APC waivers publish more in gold-OA journals than others. In contrast, authors eligible for an APC discount have the lowest ratio of OA publications, leading to the assumption that this discount insufficiently motivates authors to publish in gold-OA journals. We found a strong correlation between the journal rank and the publishing model in gold-OA journals, whereas the OA option is mostly avoided in hybrid journals. Also, results show that the countries' income level, seniority, and experience with OA publications are the most predictive factors for OA publishing in hybrid journals.

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arXiv2022

The many facets of academic mobility and its impact on scholars' career

International mobility in academia can enhance the human and social capital of researchers and consequently their scientific outcome. However, there is still a very limited understanding of the different mobility patterns among scholars with various socio-demographic characteristics. The aim of this study is twofold. First, we investigate to what extent individual factors associate with the mobility of researchers. Second, we explore the relationship between mobility and scientific activity and impact. For this purpose, we used a bibliometric approach to track the mobility of authors. To compare the scientific outcomes of researchers, we considered the number of publications and received citations as indicators, as well as the number of unique co-authors in all their publications. We also analysed the co-authorship network of researchers and compared centrality measures of mobile and non-mobile researchers. Results show that researchers from North America and Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly female ones, have the lowest, respectively, highest tendency towards international mobility. Having international co-authors increases the probability of international movement. Our findings uncover gender inequality in international mobility across scientific fields and countries. Across genders, researchers in the Physical sciences have the most and in the Social sciences the least rate of mobility. We observed more mobility for Social scientists at the advanced career stage, while researchers in other fields prefer to move at earlier career stages. Also, we found a positive correlation between mobility and scientific outcomes, but no apparent difference between females and males. Comparing the centrality of mobile and non-mobile researchers in the co-authorship networks reveals a higher social capital advantage for mobile researchers.

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arXiv2021

No Deal: Investigating the Influence of Restricted Access to Elsevier Journals on German Researchers' Publishing and Citing Behaviours

In 2014, a union of German research organisations established Projekt DEAL, a national-level project to negotiate licensing agreements with large scientific publishers. Negotiations between DEAL and Elsevier began in 2016, and broke down without a successful agreement in 2018; in this time, around 200 German research institutions cancelled their license agreements with Elsevier, leading Elsevier to restrict journal access at those institutions from July 2018 onwards. We investigated the effect of these access restrictions on researchers' publishing and citing behaviours from a bibliometric perspective, using a dataset of ~410,000 articles published by researchers at the affected DEAL institutions between 2012-2020. We further investigated these effects with respect to the timing of contract cancellations with Elsevier, research disciplines, collaboration patterns, and article open-access status. We find evidence for a decrease in Elsevier's market share of articles from DEAL institutions, from a peak of 25.3% in 2015 to 20.6% in 2020, with the largest year-on-year market share decreases occurring in 2019 (-1.1%) and 2020 (-1.6%) following the implementation of access restrictions. We also observe year-on-year decreases in the proportion of citations made from articles published by authors at DEAL institutions to articles in Elsevier journals post-2018, although the decrease is smaller (-0.4% in 2019 and -0.6% in 2020) than changes in publishing volume. We conclude that Elsevier access restrictions have led to some reduced willingness of researchers at DEAL institutions to publish their research in Elsevier journals, but that researchers are not strongly affected in their ability to cite Elsevier articles, with the implication that researchers use a variety of other methods (e.g. interlibrary loans, sharing between colleagues, or "shadow libraries") to access scientific literature.

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arXiv2021

What happens when a journal converts to Open Access? A bibliometric analysis

In recent years, increased stakeholder pressure to transition research to Open Access has led to many journals converting, or 'flipping', from a closed access (CA) to an open access (OA) publishing model. Changing the publishing model can influence the decision of authors to submit their papers to a journal, and increased article accessibility may influence citation behaviour. In this paper we aimed to understand how flipping a journal to an OA model influences the journal's future publication volumes and citation impact. We analysed two independent sets of journals that had flipped to an OA model, one from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and one from the Open Access Directory (OAD), and compared their development with two respective control groups of similar journals. For bibliometric analyses, journals were matched to the Scopus database. We assessed changes in the number of articles published over time, as well as two citation metrics at the journal and article level: the normalised impact factor (IF) and the average relative citations (ARC), respectively. Our results show that overall, journals that flipped to an OA model increased their publication output compared to journals that remained closed. Mean normalised IF and ARC also generally increased following the flip to an OA model, at a greater rate than was observed in the control groups. However, the changes appear to vary largely by scientific discipline. Overall, these results indicate that flipping to an OA publishing model can bring positive changes to a journal.

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arXiv2019

From closed to open access: A case study of flipped journals

In recent years, increased stakeholder pressure to transition research to Open Access has led to many journals "flipping" from a toll access to an open access publishing model. Changing the publishing model can influence the decision of authors to submit their papers to a journal, and increased article accessibility may influence citation behaviour. The aim of this paper is to show changes in the number of published articles and citations after the flipping of a journal. We analysed a set of 171 journals in the Web of Science (WoS) which flipped to open access. In addition to comparing the number of articles, average relative citation (ARC) and normalized impact factor (IF) are applied, respectively, as bibliometric indicators at the article and journal level, to trace the transformation of flipped journals covered. Our results show that flipping mostly has had positive effects on journal's IF. But it has had no obvious citation advantage for the articles. We also see a decline in the number of published articles after flipping. We can conclude that flipping to open access can improve the performance of journals, despite decreasing the tendency of authors to submit their articles and no better citation advantages for articles.

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arXiv2018

What increases (social) media attention: Research impact, author prominence or title attractiveness?

Do only major scientific breakthroughs hit the news and social media, or does a 'catchy' title help to attract public attention? How strong is the connection between the importance of a scientific paper and the (social) media attention it receives? In this study we investigate these questions by analysing the relationship between the observed attention and certain characteristics of scientific papers from two major multidisciplinary journals: Nature Communication (NC) and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). We describe papers by features based on the linguistic properties of their titles and centrality measures of their authors in their co-authorship network. We identify linguistic features and collaboration patterns that might be indicators for future attention, and are characteristic to different journals, research disciplines, and media sources.

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arXiv2018

Can We Count on Social Media Metrics? First Insights into the Active Scholarly Use of Social Media

Measuring research impact is important for ranking publications in academic search engines and for research evaluation. Social media metrics or altmetrics measure the impact of scientific work based on social media activity. Altmetrics are complementary to traditional, citation-based metrics, e.g. allowing the assessment of new publications for which citations are not yet available. Despite the increasing importance of altmetrics, their characteristics are not well understood: Until now it has not been researched what kind of researchers are actively using which social media services and why - important questions for scientific impact prediction. Based on a survey among 3,430 scientists, we uncover previously unknown and significant differences between social media services: We identify services which attract young and experienced researchers, respectively, and detect differences in usage motivations. Our findings have direct implications for the future design of altmetrics for scientific impact prediction.

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arXiv2015

Research Data Explored II: the Anatomy and Reception of figshare

This is the second paper in a series of bibliometric studies of research data. In this paper, we present an analysis of figshare, one of the largest multidisciplinary repositories for research materials to date. We analysed the structure of items archived in figshare, their usage, and their reception in two altmetrics sources (PlumX and ImpactStory). We found that figshare acts (1) as a personal repository for yet unpublished materials, (2) as a platform for newly published research materials, and (3) as an archive for PLOS. Depending on the function, we found different bibliometric characteristics. Items archived from PLOS tend to be coming from the natural sciences and are often unviewed and non-downloaded. Self-archived items, however, come from a variety of disciplines and exhibit some patterns of higher usage. In the altmetrics analysis, we found that Twitter was the social media service where research data gained most attention; generally, research data published in 2014 were most popular across social media services. PlumX detects considerably more items in social media and also finds higher altmetric scores than ImpactStory.

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arXiv2015

Research Data Explored: Citations versus Altmetrics

The study explores the citedness of research data, its distribution over time and how it is related to the availability of a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) in Thomson Reuters' DCI (Data Citation Index). We investigate if cited research data "impact" the (social) web, reflected by altmetrics scores, and if there is any relationship between the number of citations and the sum of altmetrics scores from various social media-platforms. Three tools are used to collect and compare altmetrics scores, i.e. PlumX, ImpactStory, and Altmetric.com. In terms of coverage, PlumX is the most helpful altmetrics tool. While research data remain mostly uncited (about 85%), there has been a growing trend in citing data sets published since 2007. Surprisingly, the percentage of the number of cited research data with a DOI in DCI has decreased in the last years. Only nine repositories account for research data with DOIs and two or more citations. The number of cited research data with altmetrics scores is even lower (4 to 9%) but shows a higher coverage of research data from the last decade. However, no correlation between the number of citations and the total number of altmetrics scores is observable. Certain data types (i.e. survey, aggregate data, and sequence data) are more often cited and receive higher altmetrics scores.

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arXiv2014

Astrophysicists on Twitter: An in-depth analysis of tweeting and scientific publication behavior

This paper analyzes the tweeting behavior of 37 astrophysicists on Twitter and compares their tweeting behavior with their publication behavior and citation impact to show whether they tweet research-related topics or not. Astrophysicists on Twitter are selected to compare their tweets with their publications from Web of Science. Different user groups are identified based on tweeting and publication frequency. A moderate negative correlation (p=-0.390*) is found between the number of publications and tweets per day, while retweet and citation rates do not correlate. The similarity between tweets and abstracts is very low (cos=0.081). User groups show different tweeting behavior such as retweeting and including hashtags, usernames and URLs. The study is limited in terms of the small set of astrophysicists. Results are not necessarily representative of the entire astrophysicist community on Twitter and they most certainly do not apply to scientists in general. Future research should apply the methods to a larger set of researchers and other scientific disciplines. To a certain extent, this study helps to understand how researchers use Twitter. The results hint at the fact that impact on Twitter can neither be equated with nor replace traditional research impact metrics. However, tweets and other so-called altmetrics might be able to reflect other impact of scientists such as public outreach and science communication. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first in-depth study comparing researchers' tweeting activity and behavior with scientific publication output in terms of quantity, content and impact.

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arXiv2014

Tweets vs. Mendeley readers: How do these two social media metrics differ?

A set of 1.4 million biomedical papers was analyzed with regards to how often articles are mentioned on Twitter or saved by users on Mendeley. While Twitter is a microblogging platform used by a general audience to distribute information, Mendeley is a reference manager targeted at an academic user group to organize scholarly literature. Both platforms are used as sources for so-called altmetrics to measure a new kind of research impact. This analysis shows in how far they differ and compare to traditional citation impact metrics based on a large set of PubMed papers.

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arXiv2014

Government and Social Media: A Case Study of 31 Informational World Cities

Social media platforms are increasingly being used by governments to foster user interaction. Particularly in cities with enhanced ICT infrastructures (i.e., Informational World Cities) and high internet penetration rates, social media platforms are valuable tools for reaching high numbers of citizens. This empirical investigation of 31 Informational World Cities will provide an overview of social media services used for governmental purposes, of their popularity among governments, and of their usage intensity in broadcasting information online.

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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

Coverage and adoption of altmetrics sources in the bibliometric community

Altmetrics, indices based on social media platforms and tools, have recently emerged as alternative means of measuring scholarly impact. Such indices assume that scholars in fact populate online social environments, and interact with scholarly products there. We tested this assumption by examining the use and coverage of social media environments amongst a sample of bibliometricians. As expected, coverage varied: 82% of articles published by sampled bibliometricians were included in Mendeley libraries, while only 28% were included in CiteULike. Mendeley bookmarking was moderately correlated (.45) with Scopus citation. Over half of respondents asserted that social media tools were affecting their professional lives, although uptake of online tools varied widely. 68% of those surveyed had LinkedIn accounts, while Academia.edu, Mendeley, and ResearchGate each claimed a fifth of respondents. Nearly half of those responding had Twitter accounts, which they used both personally and professionally. Surveyed bibliometricians had mixed opinions on altmetrics' potential; 72% valued download counts, while a third saw potential in tracking articles' influence in blogs, Wikipedia, reference managers, and social media. Altogether, these findings suggest that some online tools are seeing substantial use by bibliometricians, and that they present a potentially valuable source of impact data.

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