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Article
Publication date: 25 October 2018

Amalia Mas-Bleda and Mike Thelwall

The purpose of this paper is to assess the educational value of prestigious and productive Spanish scholarly publishers based on mentions of their books in online scholarly…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to assess the educational value of prestigious and productive Spanish scholarly publishers based on mentions of their books in online scholarly syllabi.

Design/methodology/approach

Syllabus mentions of 15,117 books from 27 publishers were searched for, manually checked and compared with Microsoft Academic (MA) citations.

Findings

Most books published by Ariel, Síntesis, Tecnos and Cátedra have been mentioned in at least one online syllabus, indicating that their books have consistently high educational value. In contrast, few books published by the most productive publishers were mentioned in online syllabi. Prestigious publishers have both the highest educational impact based on syllabus mentions and the highest research impact based on MA citations.

Research limitations/implications

The results might be different for other publishers. The online syllabus mentions found may be a small fraction of the syllabus mentions of the sampled books.

Practical implications

Authors of Spanish-language social sciences and humanities books should consider general prestige when selecting a publisher if they want educational uptake for their work.

Originality/value

This is the first study assessing book publishers based on syllabus mentions.

Details

Aslib Journal of Information Management, vol. 70 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2050-3806

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 15 January 2018

Mike Thelwall and Amalia Mas-Bleda

The purpose of this paper is to analyse popular YouTube science video channels for evidence of attractiveness to a female audience.

2242

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to analyse popular YouTube science video channels for evidence of attractiveness to a female audience.

Design/methodology/approach

The influence of presenter gender and commenter sentiment towards males and females is investigated for 50 YouTube science channels with a combined view-count approaching ten billion. This is cross-referenced with commenter gender as a proxy for audience gender.

Findings

The ratio of male to female commenters varies between 1 and 39 to 1, but the low proportions of females seem to be due to the topic or presentation style rather than the gender of the presenter or the attitudes of the commenters. Although male commenters were more hostile to other males than to females, a few posted inappropriate sexual references that may alienate females.

Research limitations/implications

Comments reflect a tiny and biased sample of YouTube science channel viewers and so their analysis provides weak evidence.

Practical implications

Sexist behaviour in YouTube commenting needs to be combatted but the data suggest that gender balance in online science presenters should not be the primary concern of channel owners.

Originality/value

This is the largest scale analysis of gender in YouTube science communication.

Details

Aslib Journal of Information Management, vol. 70 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2050-3806

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 7 January 2014

Amalia Más-Bleda, Mike Thelwall, Kayvan Kousha and Isidro F. Aguillo

This study aims to explore the link creating behaviour of European highly cited scientists based upon their online lists of publications and their institutional personal websites…

2022

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to explore the link creating behaviour of European highly cited scientists based upon their online lists of publications and their institutional personal websites.

Design/methodology/approach

A total of 1,525 highly cited scientists working at European institutions were first identified. Outlinks from their online lists of publications and their personal websites pointing to a pre-defined collection of popular academic websites and file types were then gathered by a personal web crawler.

Findings

Perhaps surprisingly, a larger proportion of social scientists provided at least one outlink compared to the other disciplines investigated. By far the most linked-to file type was PDF and the most linked-to type of target website was scholarly databases, especially the Digital Object Identifier website. Health science and life science researchers mainly linked to scholarly databases, while scientists from engineering, hard sciences and social sciences linked to a wider range of target websites. Both book sites and social network sites were rarely linked to, especially the former. Hence, whilst successful researchers frequently use the Web to point to online copies of their articles, there are major disciplinary and other differences in how they do this.

Originality/value

This is the first study to analyse the outlinking patterns of highly cited researchers' institutional web presences in order to identify which web resources they use to provide access to their publications.

Details

Journal of Documentation, vol. 70 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0022-0418

Keywords

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