arXiv subjects

Philip J. Purnell

Publications and source records attributed to Philip J. Purnell.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2021

The prevalence and impact of university affiliation discrepancies between four well-known bibliographic databases: Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, and Microsoft Academic

Research managers benchmarking universities against international peers face the problem of affiliation disambiguation. Different databases have taken separate approaches to this problem and discrepancies exist between them. Bibliometric data sources typically conduct a disambiguation process that unifies variant institutional names and those of its sub-units so that researchers can then search all records from that institution using a single unified name. This study examined affiliation discrepancies between Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, and Microsoft Academic for 18 Arab universities over a five-year period. We confirmed that digital object identifiers (DOIs) are suitable for extracting comparable scholarly material across databases and quantified the affiliation discrepancies between them. A substantial share of records assigned to the selected universities in any one database were not assigned to the same university in another. The share of discrepancy was higher in the larger databases, Dimensions and Microsoft Academic. The smaller, more selective databases, Scopus and especially Web of Science tended to agree to a greater degree with affiliations in the other databases. Manual examination of affiliation discrepancies showed they were caused by a mixture of missing affiliations, unification differences, and assignation of records to the wrong institution.

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arXiv2019

The effect of the Indonesian higher education evaluation system on conference proceedings publications

Indonesia has exhibited a unique pattern of conference proceedings publishing that was distinct from global and regional norms. Conference proceedings are now an integral part of the major citation databases, and this study examined their progressive coverage in the context of academic career advancement and Indonesian government policy. The results of analyses in Web of Science (WoS), Scopus and to a lesser extent, Dimensions showed an increase in the proportion of conference proceedings far in excess of global norms and not seen in any other South East Asian country. In the conference series containing most Indonesian proceedings papers, there was a recent increase in representation from Indonesia and an increase in the proportion of those conferences hosted in Indonesia. Local policy documents and guidelines from 2012 and 2014 appeared to encourage academics to increase research outputs in high impact internationally indexed sources but did not make any distinction between document types. The conclusion suggests that scholars might have found advantage in advancing through the hierarchy of academia through publishing conference papers that were quicker and easier to publish than journal articles. The study is important to policy makers in the area of research evaluation because it highlights potential changes in academic publishing behaviour by those being assessed.

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