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1 – 10 of 15Muhammad Sajid Qureshi, Ali Daud, Malik Khizar Hayat and Muhammad Tanvir Afzal
Academic rankings are facing various issues, including the use of data sources that are not publicly verifiable, subjective parameters, a narrow focus on research productivity and…
Abstract
Purpose
Academic rankings are facing various issues, including the use of data sources that are not publicly verifiable, subjective parameters, a narrow focus on research productivity and regional biases and so forth. This research work is intended to enhance creditability of the ranking process by using the objective indicators based on publicly verifiable data sources.
Design/methodology/approach
The proposed ranking methodology – OpenRank – drives the objective indicators from two well-known publicly verifiable data repositories: the ArnetMiner and DBpedia.
Findings
The resultant academic ranking reflects common tendencies of the international academic rankings published by the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy (SRC), Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and Times Higher Education (THE). Evaluation of the proposed methodology advocates its effectiveness and quick reproducibility with low cost of data collection.
Research limitations/implications
Implementation of the OpenRank methodology faced the issue of availability of the quality data. In future, accuracy of the academic rankings can be improved further by employing more relevant public data sources like the Microsoft Academic Graph, millions of graduate's profiles available in the LinkedIn repositories and the bibliographic data maintained by Association for Computing Machinery and Scopus and so forth.
Practical implications
The suggested use of open data sources would offer new dimensions to evaluate academic performance of the higher education institutions (HEIs) and having comprehensive understanding of the catalyst factors in the higher education.
Social implications
The research work highlighted the need of a purposely built, publicly verifiable electronic data source for performance evaluation of the global HEIs. Availability of such a global database would help in better academic planning, monitoring and analysis. Definitely, more transparent, reliable and less controversial academic rankings can be generated by employing the aspired data source.
Originality/value
We suggested a satisfying solution for improvement of the HEIs' ranking process by making the following contributions: (1) enhancing creditability of the ranking results by merely employing the objective performance indicators extracted from the publicly verifiable data sources, (2) developing an academic ranking methodology based on the objective indicators using two well-known data repositories, the DBpedia and ArnetMiner and (3) demonstrating effectiveness of the proposed ranking methodology on the real data sources.
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Tehmina Amjad, Ali Daud and Naif Radi Aljohani
This study reviews the methods found in the literature for the ranking of authors, identifies the pros and cons of these methods, discusses and compares these methods. The purpose…
Abstract
Purpose
This study reviews the methods found in the literature for the ranking of authors, identifies the pros and cons of these methods, discusses and compares these methods. The purpose of this paper is to study is to find the challenges and future directions of ranking of academic objects, especially authors, for future researchers.
Design/methodology/approach
This study reviews the methods found in the literature for the ranking of authors, classifies them into subcategories by studying and analyzing their way of achieving the objectives, discusses and compares them. The data sets used in the literature and the evaluation measures applicable in the domain are also presented.
Findings
The survey identifies the challenges involved in the field of ranking of authors and future directions.
Originality/value
To the best of the knowledge, this is the first survey that studies the author ranking problem in detail and classifies them according to their key functionalities, features and way of achieving the objective according to the requirement of the problem.
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Mario Karlovcec, Dunja Mladenic, Marko Grobelnik and Mitja Jermol
The purpose of this paper is to propose an approach for conceptualizing science based on collaboration and competences of researchers.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to propose an approach for conceptualizing science based on collaboration and competences of researchers.
Design/methodology/approach
The research is conducted by exploratory analysis of collaboration and competences using case studies from humanistic, engineering, natural sciences and a general topic.
Findings
The findings show that by applying the proposed approach on bibliographic data that readily exist for many national sciences as well as for international scientific communities, one can obtain useful new insights into the research. The approach is demonstrated with the following exploratory findings: identification of important connections and individual researchers that connect the community of anthropologists; collaboration of technical scientists in the community of anthropologists caused by an interdisciplinary research project; connectivity, interdisciplinary and structure of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and a community based on a general topic; and identifying research interest shift described with concretization and topic-shift.
Practical implications
As demonstrated with the practical implementation (http://scienceatlas.ijs.si/), users can obtain information of the most relevant competences of a researcher and his most important collaborators. It is possible to obtaining researchers, community structure and competences of an arbitrary research topic.
Social implications
The map for collaboration and competences of a complete science can be a crucial tool for policy-making. Social scientists can use the results of the proposed approach to better understand and direct the development of science.
Originality/value
Originality and value of the paper is in combining text (competences) and network (research collaboration and co-authoring) approaches for exploring science. Additional values give the results of analysis that demonstrate the approach.
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Previous commonly used author co-citation analysis (ACA) methods have limited the ability to deal with accidental co-citation in constructing a raw co-citation matrix. Therefore…
Abstract
Purpose
Previous commonly used author co-citation analysis (ACA) methods have limited the ability to deal with accidental co-citation in constructing a raw co-citation matrix. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to propose a new method, called author tri-citation analysis (ATA), to better map knowledge domains and depict scientific intellectual structures.
Design/methodology/approach
Different from the previous method of using ACA that captures author co-citation relationships, the ATA method seeks tri-citation relationships among authors. Compared with ACA, ATA can ignore some accidental co-citation relationships between authors and can improve the accuracy of mapping knowledge domains.
Findings
Although ATA does not mine more sub-fields than ACA does, the results of the empirical studies show that ATA, the newly proposed method, performs better in knowledge domain maps based on publications in the field of computer science.
Research limitations/implications
The definition of ATA in this article is simple and still insufficiently informative. Many other pieces of information can be involved; for example, all authors’ information, authors’ sequence in the author list, reference published time and similar. These can be enhanced in future studies.
Practical implications
This research will enrich the methods of mapping knowledge domains due to its new perspective.
Social implications
Knowledge domain mapping is important to understand a discipline, and this research provides more potential methods for this, which benefits the performance of the maps.
Originality/value
ATA can provide a methodological awareness for mapping knowledge domains. This value lies in not only a tri-citation perspective, but also author bibliographic tripling and author tri-operation perspectives (“tri-” perspectives).
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Junsheng Zhang, Yunchuan Sun and Changqing Yao
This paper aims to semantically linking scientific research events implied by scientific and technical literature to support information analysis and information service…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to semantically linking scientific research events implied by scientific and technical literature to support information analysis and information service applications. Literature research is an important method to acquire scientific and technical information which is important for research, development and innovation of science and technology. It is difficult but urgently required to acquire accurate, timely, rapid, short and comprehensive information from the large-scale and fast-growing literature, especially in the big data era. Existing literature-based information retrieval systems focus on basic data organization, and they are far from meeting the needs of information analytics. It becomes urgent to organize and analyze scientific research events related to scientific and technical literature for forecasting development trend of science and technology.
Design/methodology/approach
Scientific literature such as a paper or a patent is represented as a scientific research event, which contains elements including when, where, who, what, how and why. Metadata of literature is used to formulate scientific research events that are implied in introduction and related work sections of literature. Named entities and research objects such as methods, materials and algorithms can be extracted from texts of literature by using text analysis. The authors semantically link scientific research events, entities and objects, and then, they construct the event space for supporting scientific and technical information analysis.
Findings
This paper represents scientific literature as events, which are coarse-grained units comparing with entities and relations in current information organizations. Events and semantic relations among them together formulate a semantic link network, which could support event-centric information browsing, search and recommendation.
Research limitations/implications
The proposed model is a theoretical model, and it needs to verify the efficiency in further experimental application research. The evaluation and applications of semantic link network of scientific research events are further research issues.
Originality/value
This paper regards scientific literature as scientific research events and proposes an approach to semantically link events into a network with multiple-typed entities and relations. According to the needs of scientific and technical information analysis, scientific research events are organized into event cubes which are distributed in a three-dimensioned space for easy-to-understand and information visualization.
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Henryk Rybinski, Lukasz Skonieczny, Jakub Koperwas, Waclaw Struk, Jolanta Stepniak and Weronika Kubrak
The purpose of this paper is to present a solution for building an institutional information system (IIS) for the university, so that it combines the functionality of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present a solution for building an institutional information system (IIS) for the university, so that it combines the functionality of institutional repository (IR) with the functionality of current research information system (CRIS). The paper presents functionality of a system that has been implemented at Warsaw University of Technology (WUT), which solves the requirements of both system types. In addition, applied AI technologies aiming at providing features attractive for the system beneficiaries are presented.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors have reviewed various approaches to IIS, analyzed the problems observed by researchers in combining CRIS with IR, and have shown how the problems can be solved within a system that integrates various functionalities. Based on this analysis, the authors have implemented software Ω-ΨR (OMEGA-PSIR) for an academic IIS, which integrates requirements of both system types, and then deployed it at WUT.
Findings
It is shown that although a classical repository is an important part of the CRIS/IR system, the essential value of the solution is in providing analytical tools for “research management.” Based on the example of OMEGA-PSIR, the authors have also presented how the researcher-centric approach influences the acceptance rate of the academic community. It is also shown how the researcher-centric approach can take advantage from integrating the conflicting functionalities of IR and CRIS.
Practical implications
The paper bridges the gap between theory and practice in the area of IIS for academic institutions. It constructively discusses the role of institutional IR and it provides guides how to develop a system combining functionalities of CRIS and IR, as well as how to make IIS more attractive for the users by making the system researcher centric.
Originality/value
The survey of various approaches to IIS is unique. The research-centric approach and its implementation within OMEGA-PSIR system are original. Lessons learned from deploying the software at the WUT are of great value for institutions planning to install IR/CRIS solutions. A survey research concerning the system usability is provided, showing practical usefulness of the proposed approach.
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Shah Khalid, Shengli Wu and Fang Zhang
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…
Abstract
Purpose
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.
Design/methodology/approach
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.
Findings
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.
Originality/value
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.
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Amina Amara, Mohamed Ali Hadj Taieb and Mohamed Ben Aouicha
The intensive blooming of social media, specifically social networks, pushed users to be integrated into more than one social network and therefore many new “cross-network”…
Abstract
Purpose
The intensive blooming of social media, specifically social networks, pushed users to be integrated into more than one social network and therefore many new “cross-network” scenarios have emerged, including cross-social networks content posting and recommendation systems. For this reason, it is mightily a necessity to identify implicit bridge users across social networks, known as social network reconciliation problem, to deal with such scenarios.
Design/methodology/approach
We propose the BUNet (Bridge Users for cross-social Networks analysis) dataset built on the basis of a feature-based approach for identifying implicit bridge users across two popular social networks: Facebook and Twitter. The proposed approach leverages various similarity measures for identity matching. The Jaccard index is selected as the similarity measure outperforming all the tested measures for computing the degree of similarity between friends’ sets of two accounts of the same real person on two different social networks. Using “cross-site” linking functionality, the dataset is enriched by explicit me-edges from other social media websites.
Findings
Using the proposed approach, 399,407 users are extracted from different social platforms including an important number of bridge users shared across those platforms. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves good performance on implicit bridge users’ detection.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to the current scarcity of literature regarding cross-social networks analysis by providing researchers with a huge dataset of bridge users shared between different types of social media platforms.
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ELyazid Akachar, Brahim Ouhbi and Bouchra Frikh
The purpose of this paper is to present an algorithm for detecting communities in social networks.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present an algorithm for detecting communities in social networks.
Design/methodology/approach
The majority of existing methods of community detection in social networks are based on structural information, and they neglect the content information. In this paper, the authors propose a novel approach that combines the content and structure information to discover more meaningful communities in social networks. To integrate the content information in the process of community detection, the authors propose to exploit the texts involved in social networks to identify the users’ topics of interest. These topics are detected based on the statistical and semantic measures, which allow us to divide the users into different groups so that each group represents a distinct topic. Then, the authors perform links analysis in each group to discover the users who are highly interconnected (communities).
Findings
To validate the performance of the approach, the authors carried out a set of experiments on four real life data sets, and they compared their method with classical methods that ignore the content information.
Originality/value
The experimental results demonstrate that the quality of community structure is improved when we take into account the content and structure information during the procedure of community detection.
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