Academic Reputation – Science Communications in Context

DORA Top 10 for 2018; London OA Community Spreadsheet

Stephanie Krueger — Wed, 09 Jan 2019 07:39:13 +0000

DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Advancement) has listed ten favorite advances made by the international research/researcher evaluation community for 2018.
The London OA Community is attempting to make deciphering publisher open access (OA) policies easier, summarizing current problems in a new spreadsheet.

Historians of Economic Thought Illustrate Problems of Journal Rankings for Small Fields

Stephanie Krueger — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 10:46:05 +0000

Alberto Baccini, Professor of Economics at the University of Siena, points out difficulties posed for smaller academic disciplines, using the example of three history of economic thought journals now excluded from Journal Citations Report (JCR):

There are dozens of open science experiments to overcome the rigidities of scientific communication imposed by large international publishers and companies that produce citation indices. A small community could easily cooperate to take some of these paths, instead of shutting themselves in the blockhouse to defend the citation indices of their journals in national and international rankings.

This event could also be an opportunity for the small scientific community of historians of economic thought to take a firm stand against evaluation practices based on the ranking of journals.

Full article:

Baccini, A. (2018). Boycott the Journal Rankings. Institute for New Economic Thinking. https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/boycott-the-journal-rankings

Evaluating RG Score in relation to the Leiden Manifesto

Stephanie Krueger — Thu, 21 Jun 2018 08:42:42 +0000

Orduna-Malea, E., Martín-Martín, A., Thelwall, M., & López-Cózar, E.D. (2017) analyze ResearchGate (RG) Scores using a set of seventy-three Nobel Prize winners, also analyzing the RG Score in relation to the Leiden Manifesto for research metrics principles (Table 7). The authors caution against using RG Scores as indicators of academic reputation:

Within RG it is possible to distinguish between (passive) academics that interact little in the site and active platform users, who can get high RG Scores through engaging with others inside the site (questions, answers, social networks with influential researchers). Thus, RG Scores should not be mistaken for academic reputation indicators.

Additional Reading

Hicks, D., Wouters, P., Waltman, L., de Rijcke, S., & Rafols, I. (2015). The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics. Nature, 520(7548), 429–431. https://doi.org/10.1038/520429a

Orduna-Malea, E., Martín-Martín, A., Thelwall, M., & López-Cózar, E.D. (2017). Do ResearchGate Scores create ghost academic reputations? Scientometrics, 112: 443. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2396-9