arXiv subjects

Lokman I. Meho

Publications and source records attributed to Lokman I. Meho.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Gaming the Metrics? Bibliometric Anomalies and the Integrity Crisis in Global University Rankings

Global university rankings have reshaped how academic success is defined, incentivizing metrics such as publication counts and citation rates at the expense of scholarly integrity. This study examines 18 universities in India, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, selected from among the world's 1,000 most-publishing institutions for their extraordinary research growth and sharp declines in first and corresponding authorship. These institutions exhibit bibliometric patterns consistent with strategic metric optimization, including publication surges of up to 965%, a proliferation of hyper-prolific authors, dense reciprocal co-authorship and citation networks, elevated shares of output in delisted journals, and rising retraction rates. These patterns are analyzed in light of Goodhart's Law and institutional isomorphism, illustrating how performance pressures can reshape academic behavior. To systematically assess and monitor such risks, the study introduces the Research Integrity Risk Index (RI2), a composite indicator based on retraction rates and reliance on delisted journals. RI2 effectively identifies institutions with bibliometric profiles that diverge from global norms and may warrant closer examination. The findings highlight the urgent need for integrity-sensitive reforms in how rankings, funders, and institutions assess scholarly performance.

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arXiv2024

Using Bibliometrics to Detect Unconventional Authorship Practices and Examine Their Impact on Global Research Metrics, 2019-2023

Between 2019 and 2023, sixteen universities increased their research output by over fifteen times the global average, alongside significant changes in authorship dynamics (e.g., decreased first authorship, rise in hyperprolific authors, increased multi-affiliations, and increased authors per publication rate). Using bibliometric methods, this study detected patterns suggesting a reliance on unconventional authorship practices, such as gift, honorary, and sold authorship, to inflate publication metrics. The study underscores the need for reforms by universities, policymakers, funding agencies, ranking agencies, accreditation bodies, scholarly publishers, and researchers to maintain academic integrity and ensure the reliability of global ranking systems.

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arXiv2008

Citation Counting, Citation Ranking, and h-Index of Human-Computer Interaction Researchers: A Comparison between Scopus and Web of Science

This study examines the differences between Scopus and Web of Science in the citation counting, citation ranking, and h-index of 22 top human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers from EQUATOR--a large British Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration project. Results indicate that Scopus provides significantly more coverage of HCI literature than Web of Science, primarily due to coverage of relevant ACM and IEEE peer-reviewed conference proceedings. No significant differences exist between the two databases if citations in journals only are compared. Although broader coverage of the literature does not significantly alter the relative citation ranking of individual researchers, Scopus helps distinguish between the researchers in a more nuanced fashion than Web of Science in both citation counting and h-index. Scopus also generates significantly different maps of citation networks of individual scholars than those generated by Web of Science. The study also presents a comparison of h-index scores based on Google Scholar with those based on the union of Scopus and Web of Science. The study concludes that Scopus can be used as a sole data source for citation-based research and evaluation in HCI, especially if citations in conference proceedings are sought and that h scores should be manually calculated instead of relying on system calculations.

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arXiv2006

A New Era in Citation and Bibliometric Analyses: Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar

Academic institutions, federal agencies, publishers, editors, authors, and librarians increasingly rely on citation analysis for making hiring, promotion, tenure, funding, and/or reviewer and journal evaluation and selection decisions. The Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) citation databases have been used for decades as a starting point and often as the only tools for locating citations and/or conducting citation analyses. ISI databases (or Web of Science), however, may no longer be adequate as the only or even the main sources of citations because new databases and tools that allow citation searching are now available. Whether these new databases and tools complement or represent alternatives to Web of Science (WoS) is important to explore. Using a group of 15 library and information science faculty members as a case study, this paper examines the effects of using Scopus and Google Scholar (GS) on the citation counts and rankings of scholars as measured by WoS. The paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of WoS, Scopus, and GS, their overlap and uniqueness, quality and language of the citations, and the implications of the findings for citation analysis. The project involved citation searching for approximately 1,100 scholarly works published by the study group and over 200 works by a test group (an additional 10 faculty members). Overall, more than 10,000 citing and purportedly citing documents were examined. WoS data took about 100 hours of collecting and processing time, Scopus consumed 200 hours, and GS a grueling 3,000 hours.

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