Alesia Zuccala | University of Copenhagen (original) (raw)
Papers by Alesia Zuccala
Journal of Informetrics, Nov 1, 2022
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, 2022
Journal of Documentation
PurposeThis study investigates an approach to book metrics for research evaluation that takes int... more PurposeThis study investigates an approach to book metrics for research evaluation that takes into account the complexity of scholarly monographs. This approach is based on work sets – unique scholarly works and their within-work related bibliographic entities – for scholarly monographs in national databases for research output.Design/methodology/approachThis study examines bibliographic records on scholarly monographs acquired from four European databases (VABB in Flanders, Belgium; CROSBI in Croatia; CRISTIN in Norway; COBISS in Slovenia). Following a data enrichment process using metadata from OCLC WorldCat and Amazon Goodreads, the authors identify work sets and the corresponding ISBNs. Next, on the basis of the number of ISBNs per work set and the presence in WorldCat, they design a typology of scholarly monographs: Globally visible single-expression works, Globally visible multi-expression works, Miscellaneous and Globally invisible works.FindingsThe findings show that the con...
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
This paper investigates different uses of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) in national journal ran... more This paper investigates different uses of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) in national journal rankings and discusses the merits of supplementing metrics with expert assessment. Our focus is national journal rankings used as evidence to support decisions about the distribution of institutional funding or career advancement. The seven countries under comparison are: China, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Norway, Poland, and Turkey-and the region of Flanders in Belgium. With the exception of Italy, top-tier journals used in national rankings include those classified at the highest level, or according to tier, or points implemented. A total of 3,565 (75.8%) out of 4,701 unique top-tier journals were identified as having a JIF, with 55.7% belonging to the first Journal Impact Factor quartile. Journal rankings in China, Flanders, Poland, and Turkey classify journals with a JIF as being top-tier, but only when they are in the first quartile of the Average Journal Impact Factor Percentile. Journal rankings that result from expert assessment in Denmark, Finland, and Norway regularly classify journals as top-tier outside the first quartile, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. We conclude that experts, when tasked with metric-informed journal rankings, take into account quality dimensions that are not covered by JIFs.
The relevance and value of books in scholarly communication from both sides, the scholars who cho... more The relevance and value of books in scholarly communication from both sides, the scholars who chose this format as a communication channel and the instances assessing the scholarly and scientific output is undisputed. Nevertheless, the absence of worldwide comprehensive databases covering the items and information needed for the assessment of this type of publication has urged several European countries to develop custom-built information systems for the registration of books, weighting procedures and funding allocation practices enabling a proper assessment of books and book-type publications. For the first time, these systems make the assessment of books as a research output feasible. This paper resumes the main features of the assessment systems developed in five European countries / regions (Spain, Denmark, Flanders, Finland and Norway), focusing on the processes involved in the collection and processing of data on books, weighting, as well as their application in the context of...
The term libcitations was introduced by White et al. (2009) as a name for counts of libraries tha... more The term libcitations was introduced by White et al. (2009) as a name for counts of libraries that have acquired a given book. Somewhat like citations, these library holdings counts, which vary greatly, can be taken as indicators of the book’s cultural impact. Torres-Salinas and Moed (2009) independently proposed the same measure under the name catalog inclusions. Both articles sought an altmetric for authors of books in, e.g., the humanities, since the major citation indexes, oriented toward scientific papers, have not served them well. Here, using very large samples, we explore the libcitation-citation relationship for the same books by correlating their holdings counts from OCLC’s WorldCat with their citation counts from Elsevier’s Scopus. For books cited in two broad fields of the humanities during 1996-2000 and 2007-2011, we obtain positive, weak, but highly significant correlations. These largely persist when books are divided by main Dewey class. The overall results are incon...
Journal of Informetrics, 2021
Self-citation patterns of 1,104 journals indexed in the 2018 edition of the Journal Citation Repo... more Self-citation patterns of 1,104 journals indexed in the 2018 edition of the Journal Citation Reports were examined to assess the possibility of underlying rank manipulations. The journals included in this study were all found to have a self-citation rate of more than 25%. Our research shows that by excluding self-citation rates, the rank of journals with a high impact factor are not affected; however, for other journals, the removal of even a single self-citation can cause significant rank changes. Self-citation patterns are typical for local language journals as well as journals from upper-middle-income European countries. Impact factors used in research performance evaluations should be used more carefully, particularly when variables such as journal size, publication language, publisher country, and subject area correlate with self-citation rates.
Since COVID-19 first appeared, enormous numbers of scientific articles have been published on thi... more Since COVID-19 first appeared, enormous numbers of scientific articles have been published on this subject every day, and these articles have been brought to the attention of millions of people. People make great efforts to obtain information about COVID-19, however, the public cannot access health information under equal conditions. On the other hand, one of the important missions of science is informing the public, and language is one of the essential channels of this mission. The main aim of this commentary is to analyse the languages of the published articles on COVID-19 to reveal the language trends. To achieve this aim, we evaluated 10,728 publications listed in WHO’s Global COVID-19 database. As a result, although 125 different countries publish articles on COVID-19, our findings show that English, as the universal language of science, is dominant. Scientists prefer the English language for their articles; in fact, this preference is the expected choice because of the interna...
Scientometrics, 2019
Following the 'black-white swan' interaction metaphor introduced in an earlier study, we now trac... more Following the 'black-white swan' interaction metaphor introduced in an earlier study, we now trace and observe a new 'swan groups' pattern. Our motivation for introducing the 'swan groups' is based on the fact that 'black-white swan' interactions are observed primarily in physics, which belongs to science. We extend a newer model called 'swan groups' model and test its applicability to the field of economics, belonging to social sciences. The primary feature of this model is that the 'black swan' represents an important scientific discovery or contribution that has been awarded Nobel Prize, while the 'white swans' are highly cited publications by the 'black swan'. Together the two types of swans form a group, though unlike the original 'black-white swan' interaction pattern, the 'swan groups' do not necessarily interact in a way where we see a marked decrease in citations to white swans. Our findings show that the new 'swan groups' pattern covers about 50% of key Nobel prize-winning physics papers and about 40% of key Nobel prize-winning economic papers. This allows us to identify important academic achievements both qualitatively and quantitatively, not only in science where major breakthroughs can cause paradigm shifts, but also in the social sciences where progress often remains open to multiple discoveries and doctrines. Keywords Swan groups • White swans • Black swan • Scientific metrics • Nobel prize Helena H. Zhang and Alesia A. Zuccala have contribute equally and are listed alphabetically.
This is a research-in-progress paper concerning two types of institutional rankings, the Leiden a... more This is a research-in-progress paper concerning two types of institutional rankings, the Leiden and QS World ranking, and their relationship to a list of universities' 'geo-based' impact scores, and Computing Research and Education Conference (CORE) participation scores in the field of computer science. A 'geo-based' impact measure examines the geographical distribution of incoming citations to a particular university's journal articles for a specific period of time. It takes into account both the number of citations and the geographical variability in these citations. The CORE participation score is calculated on the basis of the number of weighted proceedings papers that a university has contributed to either an A*, A, B, or C conference as ranked by the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia. In addition to calculating the correlations between the distinct university rankings and the separate 'geo-based' versus CORE scores, we are in the process of developing a geographical visualization tool that presents the metrics so that they may be examined in an explorative way.
In this study we investigate the state of multilingualism across the social sciences and humaniti... more In this study we investigate the state of multilingualism across the social sciences and humanities using a comprehensive dataset of research outputs from seven European countries (Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Flanders [Belgium], Poland, and Slovenia). Although English tends to be the dominant language of science, SSH researchers often produce culturally and societally relevant work in their local languages. We have collected and analysed a set of 164,218 peer-reviewed journals articles (produced by 51,063 researchers from 2013 to 2015), and found that multilingualism is prevalent regardless of geographical location and field. Amongst the researchers who published at least three journal articles during this time period, over one third from the various countries had written their work in at least two languages. The highest share of researchers who published in only one language were from Flanders (80.9%), whereas the lowest shares were from Slovenia (57.2%) and Poland (59.3%). O...
In this paper we examine the statistical relationship between citation counts to books referenced... more In this paper we examine the statistical relationship between citation counts to books referenced in SCOPUS humanities journals and library holding counts ('libcitations') retrieved from WorldCat®. Our focus is on books (with ISBN numbers)
![Research paper thumbnail of The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) Framework for Indexing Monographs: Implications for the Book Citation Index™ and Metric Evaluations [NWB'2016 poster]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/85981687/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](In the past, bibliographic data and citation data pertaining to books were difficult to retrieve.... more In the past, bibliographic data and citation data pertaining to books were difficult to retrieve. Now, as digital resources have improved, so has the priority to advance book-related metrics. This is partly due to the introduction of Thomson Reuter's Book Citation Index (BKCI) (Adams & Testa, 2011) and the addition of books to Elsevier's Scopus. These commercial databases; however, are not the 'be-all and end-all' for the discerning bibliometrician. Recent assessments of the BKCI (in particular) point to numerous indexing problems, which can lead to flawed evaluations (Gorraiz et al., 2013; Leydesdorff & Felt, 2013; Torres-Salinas et al., 2014). Still, researchers continue to use the BKCI or Scopus, and work mainly with book citations from journal articles (Hammarfelt, 2011; Zuccala et al., 2014), or choose alternative resources, like Google Books (Kousha & Thelwall, 2009), Google Scholar (Kousha & Thelwall, 2011) and OCLC WorldCat (Torres-Salinas & Moed, 2009; White...
Quantitative Science Studies, 2021
This study compares publisher ratings to the visibility and impact of individual books, based on ... more This study compares publisher ratings to the visibility and impact of individual books, based on a 2017 data set from three Nordic performance-based research funding systems (PRFS) (Denmark, Norway, and Finland). Although there are Journal Impact Factors (JIFs) for journals, there is no similar indicator for book publishers. National publisher lists are used instead to account for the general “quality” of books, leading to institutional rewards. But, just as the JIF is not recommended as a proxy for the “citedness” of a paper, a publisher rating is also not recommended as a proxy for the impact of an individual book. We introduce a small fish in a big pond versus big fish in a small pond metaphor, where a “fish” is a book and “the pond” represents its publishing house. We investigate how books fit on this metaphorical fish and pond continuum, using WorldCat holdings (visibility) and Google Scholar citations (impact), and test other variables to determine their predictive value with ...
This is a research-in-progress paper concerning two types of institutional rankings, the Leiden a... more This is a research-in-progress paper concerning two types of institutional rankings, the Leiden and QS World ranking, and their relationship to a list of universities’ ‘geo-based’ impact scores, and Computing Research and Education Conference (CORE) participation scores in the field of computer science. A ‘geo-based’ impact measure examines the geographical distribution of incoming citations to a particular university’s journal articles for a specific period of time. It takes into account both the number of citations and the geographical variability in these citations. The CORE participation score is calculated on the basis of the number of weighted proceedings papers that a university has contributed to either an A*, A, B, or C conference as ranked by the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia. In addition to calculating the correlations between the distinct university rankings and the separate ‘geo-based’ versus CORE scores, we are in the process of developing...
Journal of Informetrics, Nov 1, 2022
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, 2022
Journal of Documentation
PurposeThis study investigates an approach to book metrics for research evaluation that takes int... more PurposeThis study investigates an approach to book metrics for research evaluation that takes into account the complexity of scholarly monographs. This approach is based on work sets – unique scholarly works and their within-work related bibliographic entities – for scholarly monographs in national databases for research output.Design/methodology/approachThis study examines bibliographic records on scholarly monographs acquired from four European databases (VABB in Flanders, Belgium; CROSBI in Croatia; CRISTIN in Norway; COBISS in Slovenia). Following a data enrichment process using metadata from OCLC WorldCat and Amazon Goodreads, the authors identify work sets and the corresponding ISBNs. Next, on the basis of the number of ISBNs per work set and the presence in WorldCat, they design a typology of scholarly monographs: Globally visible single-expression works, Globally visible multi-expression works, Miscellaneous and Globally invisible works.FindingsThe findings show that the con...
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
This paper investigates different uses of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) in national journal ran... more This paper investigates different uses of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) in national journal rankings and discusses the merits of supplementing metrics with expert assessment. Our focus is national journal rankings used as evidence to support decisions about the distribution of institutional funding or career advancement. The seven countries under comparison are: China, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Norway, Poland, and Turkey-and the region of Flanders in Belgium. With the exception of Italy, top-tier journals used in national rankings include those classified at the highest level, or according to tier, or points implemented. A total of 3,565 (75.8%) out of 4,701 unique top-tier journals were identified as having a JIF, with 55.7% belonging to the first Journal Impact Factor quartile. Journal rankings in China, Flanders, Poland, and Turkey classify journals with a JIF as being top-tier, but only when they are in the first quartile of the Average Journal Impact Factor Percentile. Journal rankings that result from expert assessment in Denmark, Finland, and Norway regularly classify journals as top-tier outside the first quartile, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. We conclude that experts, when tasked with metric-informed journal rankings, take into account quality dimensions that are not covered by JIFs.
The relevance and value of books in scholarly communication from both sides, the scholars who cho... more The relevance and value of books in scholarly communication from both sides, the scholars who chose this format as a communication channel and the instances assessing the scholarly and scientific output is undisputed. Nevertheless, the absence of worldwide comprehensive databases covering the items and information needed for the assessment of this type of publication has urged several European countries to develop custom-built information systems for the registration of books, weighting procedures and funding allocation practices enabling a proper assessment of books and book-type publications. For the first time, these systems make the assessment of books as a research output feasible. This paper resumes the main features of the assessment systems developed in five European countries / regions (Spain, Denmark, Flanders, Finland and Norway), focusing on the processes involved in the collection and processing of data on books, weighting, as well as their application in the context of...
The term libcitations was introduced by White et al. (2009) as a name for counts of libraries tha... more The term libcitations was introduced by White et al. (2009) as a name for counts of libraries that have acquired a given book. Somewhat like citations, these library holdings counts, which vary greatly, can be taken as indicators of the book’s cultural impact. Torres-Salinas and Moed (2009) independently proposed the same measure under the name catalog inclusions. Both articles sought an altmetric for authors of books in, e.g., the humanities, since the major citation indexes, oriented toward scientific papers, have not served them well. Here, using very large samples, we explore the libcitation-citation relationship for the same books by correlating their holdings counts from OCLC’s WorldCat with their citation counts from Elsevier’s Scopus. For books cited in two broad fields of the humanities during 1996-2000 and 2007-2011, we obtain positive, weak, but highly significant correlations. These largely persist when books are divided by main Dewey class. The overall results are incon...
Journal of Informetrics, 2021
Self-citation patterns of 1,104 journals indexed in the 2018 edition of the Journal Citation Repo... more Self-citation patterns of 1,104 journals indexed in the 2018 edition of the Journal Citation Reports were examined to assess the possibility of underlying rank manipulations. The journals included in this study were all found to have a self-citation rate of more than 25%. Our research shows that by excluding self-citation rates, the rank of journals with a high impact factor are not affected; however, for other journals, the removal of even a single self-citation can cause significant rank changes. Self-citation patterns are typical for local language journals as well as journals from upper-middle-income European countries. Impact factors used in research performance evaluations should be used more carefully, particularly when variables such as journal size, publication language, publisher country, and subject area correlate with self-citation rates.
Since COVID-19 first appeared, enormous numbers of scientific articles have been published on thi... more Since COVID-19 first appeared, enormous numbers of scientific articles have been published on this subject every day, and these articles have been brought to the attention of millions of people. People make great efforts to obtain information about COVID-19, however, the public cannot access health information under equal conditions. On the other hand, one of the important missions of science is informing the public, and language is one of the essential channels of this mission. The main aim of this commentary is to analyse the languages of the published articles on COVID-19 to reveal the language trends. To achieve this aim, we evaluated 10,728 publications listed in WHO’s Global COVID-19 database. As a result, although 125 different countries publish articles on COVID-19, our findings show that English, as the universal language of science, is dominant. Scientists prefer the English language for their articles; in fact, this preference is the expected choice because of the interna...
Scientometrics, 2019
Following the 'black-white swan' interaction metaphor introduced in an earlier study, we now trac... more Following the 'black-white swan' interaction metaphor introduced in an earlier study, we now trace and observe a new 'swan groups' pattern. Our motivation for introducing the 'swan groups' is based on the fact that 'black-white swan' interactions are observed primarily in physics, which belongs to science. We extend a newer model called 'swan groups' model and test its applicability to the field of economics, belonging to social sciences. The primary feature of this model is that the 'black swan' represents an important scientific discovery or contribution that has been awarded Nobel Prize, while the 'white swans' are highly cited publications by the 'black swan'. Together the two types of swans form a group, though unlike the original 'black-white swan' interaction pattern, the 'swan groups' do not necessarily interact in a way where we see a marked decrease in citations to white swans. Our findings show that the new 'swan groups' pattern covers about 50% of key Nobel prize-winning physics papers and about 40% of key Nobel prize-winning economic papers. This allows us to identify important academic achievements both qualitatively and quantitatively, not only in science where major breakthroughs can cause paradigm shifts, but also in the social sciences where progress often remains open to multiple discoveries and doctrines. Keywords Swan groups • White swans • Black swan • Scientific metrics • Nobel prize Helena H. Zhang and Alesia A. Zuccala have contribute equally and are listed alphabetically.
This is a research-in-progress paper concerning two types of institutional rankings, the Leiden a... more This is a research-in-progress paper concerning two types of institutional rankings, the Leiden and QS World ranking, and their relationship to a list of universities' 'geo-based' impact scores, and Computing Research and Education Conference (CORE) participation scores in the field of computer science. A 'geo-based' impact measure examines the geographical distribution of incoming citations to a particular university's journal articles for a specific period of time. It takes into account both the number of citations and the geographical variability in these citations. The CORE participation score is calculated on the basis of the number of weighted proceedings papers that a university has contributed to either an A*, A, B, or C conference as ranked by the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia. In addition to calculating the correlations between the distinct university rankings and the separate 'geo-based' versus CORE scores, we are in the process of developing a geographical visualization tool that presents the metrics so that they may be examined in an explorative way.
In this study we investigate the state of multilingualism across the social sciences and humaniti... more In this study we investigate the state of multilingualism across the social sciences and humanities using a comprehensive dataset of research outputs from seven European countries (Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Flanders [Belgium], Poland, and Slovenia). Although English tends to be the dominant language of science, SSH researchers often produce culturally and societally relevant work in their local languages. We have collected and analysed a set of 164,218 peer-reviewed journals articles (produced by 51,063 researchers from 2013 to 2015), and found that multilingualism is prevalent regardless of geographical location and field. Amongst the researchers who published at least three journal articles during this time period, over one third from the various countries had written their work in at least two languages. The highest share of researchers who published in only one language were from Flanders (80.9%), whereas the lowest shares were from Slovenia (57.2%) and Poland (59.3%). O...
In this paper we examine the statistical relationship between citation counts to books referenced... more In this paper we examine the statistical relationship between citation counts to books referenced in SCOPUS humanities journals and library holding counts ('libcitations') retrieved from WorldCat®. Our focus is on books (with ISBN numbers)
In the past, bibliographic data and citation data pertaining to books were difficult to retrieve.... more In the past, bibliographic data and citation data pertaining to books were difficult to retrieve. Now, as digital resources have improved, so has the priority to advance book-related metrics. This is partly due to the introduction of Thomson Reuter's Book Citation Index (BKCI) (Adams & Testa, 2011) and the addition of books to Elsevier's Scopus. These commercial databases; however, are not the 'be-all and end-all' for the discerning bibliometrician. Recent assessments of the BKCI (in particular) point to numerous indexing problems, which can lead to flawed evaluations (Gorraiz et al., 2013; Leydesdorff & Felt, 2013; Torres-Salinas et al., 2014). Still, researchers continue to use the BKCI or Scopus, and work mainly with book citations from journal articles (Hammarfelt, 2011; Zuccala et al., 2014), or choose alternative resources, like Google Books (Kousha & Thelwall, 2009), Google Scholar (Kousha & Thelwall, 2011) and OCLC WorldCat (Torres-Salinas & Moed, 2009; White...
Quantitative Science Studies, 2021
This study compares publisher ratings to the visibility and impact of individual books, based on ... more This study compares publisher ratings to the visibility and impact of individual books, based on a 2017 data set from three Nordic performance-based research funding systems (PRFS) (Denmark, Norway, and Finland). Although there are Journal Impact Factors (JIFs) for journals, there is no similar indicator for book publishers. National publisher lists are used instead to account for the general “quality” of books, leading to institutional rewards. But, just as the JIF is not recommended as a proxy for the “citedness” of a paper, a publisher rating is also not recommended as a proxy for the impact of an individual book. We introduce a small fish in a big pond versus big fish in a small pond metaphor, where a “fish” is a book and “the pond” represents its publishing house. We investigate how books fit on this metaphorical fish and pond continuum, using WorldCat holdings (visibility) and Google Scholar citations (impact), and test other variables to determine their predictive value with ...
This is a research-in-progress paper concerning two types of institutional rankings, the Leiden a... more This is a research-in-progress paper concerning two types of institutional rankings, the Leiden and QS World ranking, and their relationship to a list of universities’ ‘geo-based’ impact scores, and Computing Research and Education Conference (CORE) participation scores in the field of computer science. A ‘geo-based’ impact measure examines the geographical distribution of incoming citations to a particular university’s journal articles for a specific period of time. It takes into account both the number of citations and the geographical variability in these citations. The CORE participation score is calculated on the basis of the number of weighted proceedings papers that a university has contributed to either an A*, A, B, or C conference as ranked by the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia. In addition to calculating the correlations between the distinct university rankings and the separate ‘geo-based’ versus CORE scores, we are in the process of developing...