Search results

This paper aims to describe techniques librarians can use to enhance their online presence, so that students, patrons, researchers and prospective employers can locate them easily. It is an extension of a presentation given at the Association of College and Research Libraries New England Chapter Annual Conference held in Worcester, MA on May 9, 2014.

The presentation focused on a number of established and emerging tools to share professional contact information and professional output, such as Google, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, SlideShare and ImpactStory, among others.

The audience of library faculty and staff from across the Northeastern USA examined the results that appeared when they searched for themselves in major search engines (Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo) and learned strategies and tools for optimizing the results that come up when others search for their contact information.

Librarians who focus on enhancing their professional profiles online make it easier for constituents to get assistance with research questions, they can make their value and the institution’s value more visible, and facilitate the sharing of information in a field that looks to other institutions and individuals for inspiration for new programs and innovations.

While many of these tools are used in the business world to build and cultivate networks and seek employment, even steadily employed librarians can use these tools to make their expertise available to researchers at their institutions and beyond.

Alternative metrics (altmetrics) are non-traditional metrics to measure the social impact of research results, which were unable to be assessed by the previous methods, by calculating how research results are reflected in various social media. The purpose of this paper is to measure and compare the impact of Korean study results in four fields that were published in international journals using altmetrics.

This study analysed the impact of 383 Korean research articles published by international journals in the field of medical science, engineering, social science and arts and humanities through altmetrics and compared it with bibliometrics.

As a result, the frequency of research articles which are “discussed” through social media such as Twitter was shown to be highest in the medical science than in other fields. In addition, the frequency of research articles which were “saved” through reference management tool such as Mendeley was shown to be higher in the social science and the arts and humanities than in other fields. Furthermore, as a result of a correlation analysis between altmetrics and bibliometrics, it is found that there exists a positive correlation between the number of articles which were “saved” in Mendeley and “cited” in follow-up studies.

This study examined the impact of the articles originating in non-English-speaking nations; it could be referred by other non-English-speaking nations that are trying to identify invisible impact of their research output on global society. By finding the academic field which are receiving special attention from global community using altmetrics, researchers could prospect country’s overall research impact and utilize it to make a future R&D plan.

The authors explore the emergence of altmetrics and Open Access (OA) publishing and discuss why their adoption in the management field lags behind other fields such as life sciences. The authors draw on the status literature to discuss the knowledge production and consumption underpinned by the ‘Impact Factor’ metric and high-status ‘Toll Access’ journals and their implications. The authors explain the rise of altmetrics and OA publishing and their implications on the production and consumption of knowledge. The authors then examine the current situation, challenges and offer reflections on the management field’s progression towards a more open research regime in the digital era.

This study aims to measure the impact of the selected papers in the field of social sciences indexed in Scopus using altmetrics tools.

The research community consists of the articles of the Iranian researchers in the field of social sciences indexed in the Scopus database in 2014–2018. Some of the most important altmetric service providers have been used to assess the presence of the research outputs in the social media and their impact assessment. Also, the relationship between variables such as scientific collaboration of researchers, open access journals and the quality of research journals with altmetric activity have been investigated through appropriate correlation tests.

The findings indicated that the most important social media publishing Iranian articles are Mendeley, Twitter and Facebook. The results of the correlation test showed a statistically significant positive and weak relationship between the scientific collaboration of researchers and their altmetric activity. Also, there is a significant and weak statistical relation between journal openness and the altmetric scores. In this study, the findings suggest that the published articles in the journals with higher quality indicators have higher altmetric scores and are more likely to be present in social media.

In this study, the social network indicators have been introduced as a solution to examine the effectiveness of research activities on social media. These indicators can be used to evaluate the impact and usefulness of the articles and other scientific outputs with the aim of completing and eliminating the shortcomings of traditional scientometrics indicators. What distinguishes altmetric criteria from other criteria related to the scientometric studies is the speed, ease and transparency of these scales. This allows the publications to be evaluated regardless of their formal form and in the shortest possible time, and in addition to the scientific impact, the social impact of the works is also measured.

The results of these studies show that using altmetric service providers not only reflects the social impact of publications on authors in different subject areas but also helps libraries, universities, research organizations and politicians in planning, budgeting and allocating resources.

This paper aims to investigate the knowledge and experience of Zambian teaching faculties with scholarly communication and dissemination practices.

The researchers used a survey to quickly obtain information about a large sample of individuals of interest. The study population consisted of faculties from two Zambian public universities with research and publication experience. The researchers used random sampling techniques. A total of 125 valid responses were received from the selected population.

The findings show that most respondents agreed that publishing in open-access journals increased visibility and readership, had a more significant impact, facilitated collaboration and interdisciplinary research, was cost-effective and provided accessibility. Google Scholar was the most commonly used platform, followed by ResearchGate and ORCID.

This study’s limitations focus on only two Zambian public universities. This study’s practical implications include improving the universities’ open-access policies and educating faculties on the benefits of open access.

This study’s originality lies in exploring the Zambian teaching faculties’ perceptions of open access and academic social networking sites. The results of this study can help universities and researchers in Zambia to understand the importance of scholarly communication and dissemination practices and help them implement effective policies for promoting open-access publishing, institutional repositories and academic social networking sites.

Numerous research tools exist but their usage among researchers across the different phases of the research cycle of scholarly communication remains unknown. This research aims to address this knowledge gap by mapping the research tools frequently used by global researchers against the various phases of the research cycle of scholarly communication.

This research adopts a descriptive research design and conducts a cross-tabulation of secondary data consisting of 20,663 useable responses in a global survey of research tools for scholarly communication. This research also administered a survey to academic experts to classify the research tools according to traditional, modern, innovative and experimental categories.

This research reveals the six phases of the research cycle (i.e. discovery, analysis, writing, publication, outreach and assessment) and the research tools of scholarly communication frequently used by researchers worldwide in each phase as a whole and by roles, disciplines, regions and career stages. Notably, this research indicates that most of the research tools used by researchers are classified as “modern” and “innovative”.

The original insights herein should be useful for both established and early career researchers to gain and share research insights, as well as policymakers and existing and aspiring service providers who wish to improve the utility and usage of research tools for scholarly communication. Notably, this research represents a seminal endeavor at enhancing a global survey (secondary research) using a follow-up expert survey (primary research), which enabled the organization of research tools for scholarly communication into four refined categories. In doing so, this research contributes finer-grained insights that showcase the importance of keeping up with the advancement of technology through the use of modern, innovative and experimental research tools, thereby highlighting the need to go beyond traditional research tools for scholarly communication.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the evolution of Gold open access (OA) rates in different countries and disciplines, as well as explore the influencing factors.

In this study, employing the OA filter option of Web of Science (WoS), the authors perform a large-scale evaluation of the OA state of countries and disciplines from 1990 to 2016. Particularly, the authors consider not only the absolute number of Gold OA literature but also the ratio of them among all literature.

Currently, one-quarter of the WoS articles is Gold OA articles. Brazil is the most active country in OA publishing, while Russia, India and China have the lowest OA ratios. The OA percentage of Brazil has been decreasing dramatically in recent years, while the OA percentages of China, UK and the Netherlands have been increasing. There also exist huge differences of OA percentages across different subject categories. The percentages of OA articles in biology, life, and health-related areas are high, while those in physics and chemistry-related subject categories are very low.

With the availability of large-scale data from WoS, this study conducts a comprehensive evaluation of the Gold OA state of major countries for the first time. The variation of OA percentages is considered in light of the research profiles. OA policies in different countries and funding organizations also have an influence on the OA development.