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Citation content in academic papers and academic monographs promotes the knowledge flow among different publications. However, existing citation content analysis (CCA) focuses on academic papers and monographs have not received much research attention. We want to know if monographs are appropriate objects of CCA and whether existing methods of analyzing citation in papers are suitable for citation in monographs. Therefore, this paper aims to learn more about features of cited references and citation content in monographs and compare the characteristic of citation pattern between monographs and papers.

The authors manually annotate the references and syntactic citation content in academic monographs published by Morgan & Claypool and automatically extracted the references and citation content from academic papers published by Public Library of Science. Five features in two types citation pattern, namely, pattern of cited reference (including year, source and mention frequency of reference) and pattern of citation content (including location, length of citation content) are used to examine similarities and differences between monographs and papers.

The results indicate that between monographs and papers, differences are shown in location, length of citation content and year, source of reference, whereas frequency of mention of reference is similar.

Previous studies have explored the patter of citation content in academic papers. However, none of the existing literature, as far as the authors know, has considered the citation content in academic monographs and the similarities or differences among academic documents when studying the citation pattern.

The influencing factors of academic papers have always been the focus of attention in the field of Scientometrics. Exploring the influencing factors of altmetrics indicators and traditional literature indicators on academic papers is beneficial to better explore the potential significance and value of academic papers in the evaluation of scientific research. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Based on the latest JCR citation report, this paper selects 22 academic journals in the JIF Quartile Q1 journal of Information Science and Library Science, and then obtains the evaluation data of these journal papers from WOS database and Altmetric.com. This paper uses literature measurement, correlation analysis and regression analysis to explore the influencing factors of the paper.

The results show that the original influencing factors of academic papers have a significant impact on secondary influencing factors. What is more obvious is that the number of references (nr) presents a significant positive correlation with the total number of times (Z9), the number of uses (U1) and (U2).

This paper combines traditional literature indicators with Altmetrics indicators to study the influencing factors through primary influencing factors and secondary influencing factors. Through research, it denies the phenomenon that academic circles have published academic papers in the world in recent years to overemphasize certain factors to improve the influence of the paper.

This study distinguishes the academic influence of different papers published in journals of the same subject or field based on the modification of the journal impact factor.

Taking SSCI journals in library and information science (LIS) as the research object, the authors first explore the skewness degree of the citation distribution of journal articles. Then, we define the paper citation ratio as the weight of impact factor to modify the journal impact factor for the evaluation of papers, namely the weighted impact factor. The authors further explore the feasibility of the weighted impact factor in evaluating papers.

The research results show that different types of skewness exist in the citation distribution of journal papers. Particularly, 94% of journal paper citations are highly skewed, while the rest are moderately skewed. The weighted impact factor has a closer correlation with the citation frequency of papers than the journal impact factor. It resolves the issue that the journal impact factor tends to exaggerate the influence of low-cited papers in journals with high impact factors or weaken the influence of high-cited papers in journals with low impact factors.

The weighted impact factor is constructed based on the skewness of the citation distribution of journal articles. It provides a new method to distinguish the academic influence of different papers published in journals of the same subject or field, then avoids the situation that papers published in the same journal having the same academic impact.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the extent to which academic librarians in African universities know and use self-archiving options to make their papers visible globally.

An online survey was designed using SurveyMonkey software to collect data from 455 academic librarians working in 52 universities in Africa.

The study revealed that the academic librarians in Africa are aware of ResearchGate, institutional repository, personal website/server, kudos and Mendeley and they actually upload papers to self-archiving platforms such as institutional repository, ResearchGate, academia.edu and personal websites/servers. Factors such as increased exposure of one’s previously published work, provides exposure for works not previously published (e.g. seminar papers), broadens the dissemination of academic research generally and increases one’s institutions’ visibility were among the options the academic librarians rated as very important factors that motivate them to submit their scholarly output to the self-archiving options. It was also found that majority of the academic librarians in Africa checked the publishers’ website for copyright policy compliance before submitting their papers to the platform.

The study called for academic librarians in developing countries to voluntarily sign-up to register with self-archiving options such as ResearchGate, kudos, Mendeley.com, academia.edu and others to enable them self-archive their published papers for access globally by students, researchers, etc.

The findings of this study will add to the body of knowledge by bringing to light the extent of awareness and use of self-archiving options by academic librarians in universities in Africa.

This paper takes the current COVID-19 pandemic raging around the world as a realistic background and uses the informal scientific communication mode in social media as the theoretical basis. It aims to explore the characteristics and rules of scientific communication in social media under emergency events, grasp the potential and risks of scientific communication in social media in special times and provide a perspective of academic communication for the scientific response.

The authors select the enumeration data of the early COVID-19 theme papers spread on social media networks as the research object, apply descriptive statistical analysis to the basic statistical distribution of variables and use factor analysis and visualization methods to explore the law and characteristics of the spread of scientific papers on social media platforms.

It was found that users of the COVID-19 paper are mainly in North America, Europe and South America, followed by those in East Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceania. The users are mainly public figures, doctors and other practitioners, science communicators and scientists. The process of social media communication reflects three ways of knowledge construction, social interaction and academic communication, and there are three ways of communication law and changing trend of cross transition and integration.

This study observes the function and role of science communication in social media in a special period from a unique perspective of academic communication, so as to promote academic means to fight against the epidemic.

The purpose of this paper is to review, evaluate and classify the academic research that has been published in facilities management (FM) and to analyse how FM research and practice are linked.

This paper is based on literature review and qualitative research. Qualitative data have been gathered from academic papers published in FM‐related journals (i.e. Facilities, Journal of Facilities Management, and the Nordic Journal of Surveying and Real Estate Research – Special Series) and in conjunction with academic conferences (i.e. European Research Symposium in Facilities Management and the CIB W70 Symposium) between 1996–2005.

When analysing empirical research in FM, research papers can be classified according to the FM topics examined in them, the type of research performed and data‐gathering methods used in the study reported, the background of the authors, research field, and research sector. Evaluation of academic papers indicates that the reporting of the methods used, data collection and limitations is inadequate in many academic papers. However, to draw valid conclusions and align FM research, methodical issues should be clearly delineated in research papers. In order to progress, the FM discipline must increasingly employ hypothesis testing and more robust data analysis techniques.

This research offers new insights into the current state of FM research and sheds light on the development steps needed in future. One limitation of this paper is that it does not include all the empirical research that has been done in FM.

This paper helps article writers to take into account the important issues brought up in literature when reporting the results of their research in order to improve validity and reliability of their studies.

The aim of the Journal of Property Investment & Finance (JPIF) is to keep industry practitioners informed on current thinking and developments in all aspects of real estate research and practice by informing and encouraging debate between academics and practising professionals. To achieve this aim the journal seeks to: “publish well‐written, readable articles of intellectual rigour with a theoretical and practical relevance to the real estate profession”. But some papers are likely to be more difficult to understand than others and may not be effective if the reader is unable to completely comprehend the contents. Thus, the readability of academic papers has a major effect on how well the reader is informed by the articles appearing in the journal. However, nothing is known about the readability of real estate journals. The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a study that analysed the readability of academic papers in the JPIF and concludes that the academic articles are “difficult” to read.

In this study, readability is defined as the “ease of understanding or comprehension based on the style of writing”. That is, the legibility of the print (typography) or the ease of reading due to the pleasantness of writing but the ease with which the reader can understand an article, read it at an optimal speed, and find it interesting, i.e. its comprehension, is being measured. In this briefing, the authors follow previous studies and use five different readability tests, designed to identify the number of years of education needed to read the text, and average the results across the tests.

Using the sample of all academic JPIF papers over the period 1997 to 2009, it was found that the academic papers in the JPIF come under the “difficult” range with the reader needing a college level education in order to understand the text.

Readability is generally considered to be one of the most important characteristics of effective writing. Yet nothing is known about the readability of academic papers in real estate journals. This paper fills some of the gaps.

How to provide the most useful papers for searchers is a key issue for academic search engines. A lot of research has been carried out to address this problem. However, when evaluating the effectiveness of an academic search engine, most of the previous investigations assume that the only concern of the user is the relevancy of the paper to the query. The authors believe that the usefulness of a paper is determined not only by its relevance to the query but also by other aspects including its publication age and impact in the research community. This is vital, especially when a large number of papers are relevant to the query.

This paper proposes a group of metrics to measure the usefulness of a ranked list of papers. When defining these metrics, three factors, including relevance, publication age and impact, are considered at the same time. To accommodate this, the authors propose a framework to rank papers by a combination of their relevance, publication age and impact scores.

The framework is evaluated with the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics Anthology Network) dataset. It demonstrates that the proposed ranking algorithm is effective for improving usefulness when two or three aspects of academic papers are considered at the same time, while the relevance of the retrieved papers is slightly down compared with the relevance-only retrieval.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the proposed multi-objective academic search framework is the first of its kind that is proposed and evaluated with a group of new evaluation metrics.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate open access practices (OAPs): a roadmap to research paper publications in academic institutions. The rationale that necessitates this scenario was the dwindling nature of the inability of researchers and lecturers/academics in African academic institutions to access related materials in their subject areas, while also advancing effort to publish their research papers in open access.

This paper applied a qualitative research approach, in which literature was harvested from Web of Science for developing and writing the research paper.

This paper establishes that OAP, when embraced, could advance and transform research paper publication in higher education institutions because its practices are globally welcome. The authors reiterate that considering the benefits accrued to OAPs, knowledge gap in terms of literature and methodological approach still exists in academic institutions in Africa; hence, the authors promote OAPs as a roadmap for research paper publications in academic institutions. It is expected that by OAPs, researchers would no longer struggle to harvest literature, of theses, dissertations and other research papers, deposited in institutional repositories required for deepening their research activities because those literature studies or those documents have to be paid for through subscription fees of published papers and publishing in open access by journals. This is what most academics have experienced because, most times, the literature which academics harvest from the internet and different institutional repositories and databases is already paid for by the different institutions that housed the literature where it is domiciled. For instance, most academic library institutions in the world pay for subscription fees of research papers and documents. This is to advance and facilitate deepened research activities in their institutions, when researchers, academics and students want to harvest materials through their university library websites.

This paper, which considers OAP as a roadmap to research paper publications in academic institutions in Africa, is insightful and unique considering the wave of OAP globally.

This is the first of a series of studies emanating from the UK JISC‐funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open‐archiving) which investigated the IPR issues relating to academic author self‐archiving of research papers. It considers the claims for copyright ownership in research papers by universities, academics, and publishers by drawing on the literature, a survey of 542 academic authors and an analysis of 80 journal publisher copyright transfer agreements. The paper concludes that self‐archiving is not best supported by copyright transfer to publishers. It recommends that universities assert their interest in copyright ownership in the long term, that academics retain rights in the short term, and that publishers consider new ways of protecting the value they add through journal publishing.