Communicating knowledge: how and why researchers publish and disseminate their findings (Sept 2009) is a new free online report published by the UK’s Research Information Network (RIN).
Communicating knowledge – new report
07 Wednesday Oct 2009
Category Archives: Official and think-tank reports
Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy
29 Tuesday Sep 2009
A new free ebook from Media Commons Press: Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, presented in an intuitive HTML format. The author is inviting readers to help her revise and polish the final version of the book.
New Andrew W. Mellon Foundation report: The Future of Scholarly Journals Publishing
27 Sunday Sep 2009
Posted in Official and think-tank reports
A new Andrew W. Mellon Foundation report by Mary Waltham, The Future of Scholarly Journals Publishing Among Social Science and Humanities Associations (2009).
The e-journals revolution: podcast
29 Wednesday Jul 2009
If you couldn’t be at the recent Research Information Network meeting in London, “The e-journals revolution: how the use of scholarly journals is shaping research”, then RIN has kindly provided a 28 minute “edited highlights” podcast for free.
A delicious little snippet…
“Government researchers search the least. They switch off at Friday lunchtime and don’t come back until Monday lunchtime”
Free 20,000-item lookup table for commercial journals in the humanities and social studies
26 Sunday Jul 2009
Fancy having a 720-page table that lists all humanities journals in the two major commercial subscription databases, and tells you which journal is to be found in which database?…
The June 2009 “A Comparative International Study of Scientific Journal Databases in the Social Sciences and the Humanities” (PDF link, 2.8Mb) by Michele Dassa and Christine Kosmopoulos is just that. Amazingly, it seems to be the first time such a table has been compiled…
“Presented here for the first time in a comparative table are the contents of the databases … in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, of the Web of Science (published by Thomson Reuters) and of Scopus (published by Elsevier), as well as of the biographical lists European Reference Index for Humanities (ERIH) … and of the French Agence d’Evaluation de la Recherche et de l’Enseignement Superieur (AERES). With some 20,000 entries, this is an almost exhaustive overview of the wealth of publications in the Social Sciences and the Humanities …”
This might be read in combination with a May 2009 Gale Reference Review review of three major academic search-engines, which took a sceptical look at both Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus…
“I looked at the widely touted figures in the promotional materials [ of WoS and Scopus and found ] they should not be taken for granted. Many of these are incorrect and exaggerated. Their compilation has been fast and loose, sometimes making them fiction rather than fact.”
“The coverage of arts & humanities [ in Scopus ] is extremely poor (representing barely 1% of the database) [ and by comparison ] Web of Science has about […] 10 times as many for arts & humanities.” [ and even if Scopus gets a boost, as proposed, it would still only have ] about 1/6th of what Web of Science has for these disciplines”
“It is one thing that Scopus has no cited references in records for papers published before 1996, but it adds insult to injury that the pre-1996 papers are ignored. This results in absurdly low h-index for many of the senior teaching and research faculty members and independent researchers who published papers well before 1996 which have been widely cited in the past 25-35 years […] Lazy administrators and bureaucrats stop here and ignore [ worthy people ] for some lifetime award”
“That’s the way to do it”
24 Friday Jul 2009
Posted in Official and think-tank reports, Ooops!
A classic…
“a survey in the UK by Myhill (2007), which found that the library OPAC and university web pages were well-used – especially by students in their final year – may have been due to the study design, which consisted of an online questionnaire hosted on the library website.”
Correlation is not causation
23 Thursday Jul 2009
The Scholarly Kitchen blog fisks a new ‘study’ that purports to show that developing countries with free access to scientific information experienced a six-fold increase in article output since 2002…
“the present analysis simply cannot adequately evaluate the effect of these free literature programs on research output”
The long-term integrity of scholarly data
23 Thursday Jul 2009
A new U.S. National Academies report, Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age. The page for the report looks as though it’s behind a paywall, but scroll a little further down the page to find links to full-text page images. The report was commissioned in 2006, and the Chronicle of Higher Education has a short journalistic summary.
I’m thinking we need new long-term personal financial instruments that fund/ensure that the family/institution/archivists are sent the keys to a universal “digital vault” after someone’s death, the vault containing a structured and tagged backup archive of that person’s vital academic data, papers, blogs, book files, bibliographies, etc.
Students’ Use of Research Content in Teaching and Learning
21 Tuesday Jul 2009
Posted in Academic search, Official and think-tank reports
Students’ Use of Research Content in Teaching and Learning : a report for the Joint Information Systems Council (JISC) 2009. (PDF link). None of the findings will be unexpected to anyone who works with undergraduates, but it’s useful to have common knowledge crystallised into a report like this.
“Although Google, Google Books and Google Scholar are heavily used, the library catalogue is still the preferred first choice for most students .. A lot of students use Google but are bewildered by the amount of responses and will rarely look beyond the first couple of pages of search terms … An increasing number of students are using the limited preview facility in Google Books to either read books not in their library or to save themselves the trouble of actually going to the library”
Publishing a humanities article costs three times as much as a science article
20 Monday Jul 2009
This seems to be an important bit of research. The U.S. Chronicle of Higher Education reports on new NHA research which finds that…
“It costs more than three times as much to publish an article in a humanities or social-science journal as it does to publish one in a science, technical, or medical, or STM, journal [ reports ] an in-depth study of eight flagship journals in the humanities and social sciences.” […] “It cost an average of $9,994 in 2007 to publish an article in one of the eight journals analyzed” […] first-copy costs — “collecting, reviewing, editing, and developing content” — added up to about 47 per cent of the total outlay among the eight journals studied
The National Humanities Alliance report The Future of Scholarly Journals Publishing Among Social Science and Humanities Associations (not yet online) was written during 2007-2009, and examined U.S. data from 2005 to 2007. The Chronicle journalist highlights three possible reasons for the difference…
* articles are significantly longer than in the sciences
* acceptance rates are far lower than in the sciences, at a pitiful 11%
* such journals include a wider variety of content than in the sciences…
“peer-reviewed research made up about 62 percent of what the eight journals published in 2007. The remaining 38 percent consisted of “other scholarly content,” including book reviews.” […] Such material does not come cheap, though; it must still be commissioned, edited, and put into production. It cost an [annual] average of $313,612 per journal in 2007, the study found.
On the “articles are longer” argument, I’m not sure that a simple word-count is a valid measure. Science articles are full of complex tables, formulae, diagrams, and it must take quite some time for a reviewer to mull these over. Similarly, I’m thinking that the acceptance rate may be so low because only the “top eight” most prestigious journals were surveyed — lesser journals may well have a far higher acceptance rate?