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Are Altmetrics a Panacea for Citation Delays? a Critical View of the Journey of the Citing Article Through the Research and Impact Cycles

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Are Altmetrics a Panacea for Citation Delays? a Critical View of the Journey of the Citing Article Through the Research and Impact Cycles Are Altmetrics a panacea for citation delays? A critical view of the journey of the citing article through the research and impact cycles Omwoyo Bosire Onyancha University of South Africa Department of Information Science Department of Information Studies (Univ of Zululand) Conference, 3-5 September 2014 Agenda Introduction Interpretation of citations in scholarly communication Problems with citations Citation delays The concept Statistical data on time delays Causes of citation delays Altmetrics – an introduction Methods and materials Findings and discussions Conclusions and recommendations Introduction the scientific tradition of citing or bibliographic referencing (the act of scientists, while documenting their own research, refer to earlier works that relate to the subject matter of their reported work) is as old as science itself (Nicolaisen 2008: 609) The use of citations in research evaluation – “supposed to identify those earlier researchers whose concepts, theories, methods equipment and so on, inspired or were used by the author in the process of conducting and presenting his or her own research” (Nicolaisen 2008: 610) How should citations be interpreted? Citations are signposts left behind after information has been utilized (Smith, 1981) Citations are frozen footprints in the landscape of scholarly achievement ... which bear witness to the passage of ideas (Cronin, 1981) Citations are one important form of use of scientific information within the framework of documented science communication (Glänzel and Schoepflin 1999) Citations may be used as a formalised account of the information use and can be taken as a strong indicator of reception at this level (Glänzel and Schoepflin 1999) Citing Smith (1981) and Merton (1973), Bornmann & Daniel (2008: 48) express the use of citation counts (or citation analysis) as follows: The use of citation counts as an indicator for research impact is appropriate only when the citation of a document means that the citing author used that document; the citation of a document reflects the merit (quality, significance, impact) of that document; and citations are made to the best possible works (Smith, 1981)… the normative theory, following Robert K. Merton's – the founder of the modern sociology of science – sociological theory of science (Merton, 1973), basically states that scientists give credit to colleagues whose work they use by citing that work Some problems with citations and citation analysis Assumptions (Wallace 1989) The citing author has actually used the cited work Citing a given work is an indicator of its quality The citing author has provided references to the best works the content of the citing work is significantly related to the content of the cited works that all citations are of equal value Peters (2006: 786) argues that authors receive citations for ‘bad’ as well as ‘good’ work; there are] problems with accuracy, consistency and reliability in citation data collection; [there are] problems of self-citation Wang, Wang & Xu (2013: 718) observe that “It is parochial to regard impact just as citations, since some influential theories, such as the Merton Miller theorem and Mendelian genetics, are widely accepted but seldom cited” Kostoff (1998: 28) argues thus: I could write a paper including Lotka's law without providing a reference to Lotka's law, or without even mentioning the name 'Lotka's law' Citations to an article happen or are normally counted once the citing article has been published and, more often, subsequently indexed in the same indexing service Citation delay – the concept The citation delay is sometimes referred to as response time (to the cited document) or citation time lag or citation speed or delayed recognition Diodato (1994: 157) defines it as “the number of months or years between the publication of a document and the publication of the first item that cites it”. Although many journals publish articles online before going print, the online-to-print time lag has continued to increase over time Tort, Targino & Amaral (2012) observed that a journal’s impact factor is still reliant on the publication of the print version of its articles. The implication of the above is that citation delays will still occur in scholarly communication, thereby leading to “important distortions, with concrete effects on policy decisions concerning the evaluation of journals and/or individual scientists” (Tort, Targino & Amaral 2012: 5) Causes of citation delay Wang, Wang & Xu (2013: 718) have observed that “the publication of a scientific paper requires months to execute the review process, and as a result, significant publication delay will cause citation delay, and thus cause delay in the current research trend analysis. Publication delay has also been identified as one of the possible causes of citation delays by Aman (2013; Amat (nd); Bornmann and Daniel (2010); and Wang, Wang & Xu (2013) van Els, Janz, and Pair (1989) opine that the number of citations that an author or article misses may be due to the format of disseminating the research findings. The authors argue, for instance, that one may miss citations because “the results of his/her research are made public in the form of an instrument instead of via an article in a journal”. Indexing time lag, defined as the “number of months or years between the publication of an article and the publication of an index that refers to the article” Diodato (1994: 157), can delay citations Studies on citation delays Citation delays have been studied under different contexts (see Bornmann and Daniel, 2010; van Els, Janz, and Pair, 1989; RINIA, et al, 2001) 21.5% of all paper published in 1980 have not received any citation between the publication year and 2000. Most of these papers will probably never be cited (Glazel, Schlemmer, &Thijs, 2003: 574). The number of articles published without a previous preprint in this time period (1996-2009) is 424, of which 53 remained uncited in their first three years (12.5%). The number of articles with a foregoing preprint is 287, of which 21 remained uncited in their first three years (7.3%). To include the uncited articles into the examination, their citation delay was set to 1,095 days (Aman, 2013: 39). The median value of the citation delay for articles having a preprint is 304 days. Articles without a preprint receive their first citation on average three months later; the median is 395 days (Aman, 2013:39). Altmetrics – an introduction Altmetrics is sometimes called social web metrics (Costas, Zahedi & Wouters, nd) and/or influmetrics (Cronin & Weaver, 1995; Rousseau & Ye , 2013) Refers to the use of social media, particularly Web 2.0 media, in assessing the influence of researchers on all type of users (Rousseau & Ye, 2013:1) Refers to mentions of scientific outputs in social web tools such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, news media or online reference management tools (Costas, Zahedi & Wouters, nd) Some of the metrics that have been identified as constituting Alt-metrics include downloads, tweets, likes, posts on Facebook, blogs, bookmarks, views, visits, However, Altmetrics go beyond raw usage factors (such as downloads or click-through rates) in that they focus on readership, diffusion and reuse indicators that can be tracked via blogs, social media, peer production systems, collaborative annotation tools (including social bookmarking and reference management services). Konkiel (nd) believes that Altmetrics is concerned with assessing: How many times an output article, website, blog, dataset, grey literature, software, etc has been: Viewed (Publisher websites, Dryad) Downloaded (Slideshare, publisher websites, Dryad) Cited (PubMed, CrossRef, Scopus, Wikipedia, DOI, Web of Science) Reused/Adapted (Github) Shared (Facebook, Twitter) Bookmarked (Mendeley, CiteULike, Delicious) Commented upon (Twitter, Mendeley, blogs, publisher websites, Wikipedia, Faculty of 1000) Research question Are Altmetrics a panacea for citation delays? Methods and materials For us to answer this question, we first sought to revisit as well as establish the citation delays using the citing ‘work’ as opposed to the cited ‘work’ as the unit of analysis A closed-ended question containing 9 questions (8 of which were closed-ended) was sent to18 academics in LIS schools in South Africa The 18 researchers were purposively selected on the basis of having obtained a PhD degree So far, we have received only 14 completed questionnaires We also obtained data on the file visits and views of the top most visited or viewed documents in academic institutional repositories and compared it with the Google Scholar citations to determine whether or not Altmetrics could have a role to play in citation delays Findings and discussions At what stage of the research cycle do researchers often use literature to inform their research? Sometime Most of Never Rarely Always s the Time Before identifying of the research idea 2 5 8 Identification of the research idea 1 2 9 Identification of theory 2 12 Identification of empirical entities 1 3 9 Data acquisition 1 3 4 4 2 Data conversion 2 2 4 5 1 Data analysis 1 4 5 4 Publication 1 4 5 3 At what stage of the research cycle do researchers often cite literature to inform their research? Most of Never Rarely Sometimes the Time Always Before identifying the research idea 1 3 4 2 2 Identification of the research idea 4 3 6 Identification of theory 5 9 Identification of empirical entities 2 3 7 Data acquisition 4 4 2 3 Data conversion 2 4 2 4 Data analysis 2 3 2 6 Publication 2 3 3 5 Which of the following best describes how researchers cite the sources that they have consulted when writing a research publication (i.e. article, chapter in a book, conference paper, etc)? a. I list the sources even before I have started writing the publication [ 1 ] b. I cite the sources as I write the publication [ 13 ] c. I cite the sources after I have completed writing the publication [ 0 ] d.
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