Khadijeh Jokar; Maryam Yaghtin; Hajar Sotudeh; Mahdieh Mirzabeigi
Abstract
Introduction: Scientific communities have always been concerned about validity of open-access articles. Given the challenges of quantitative citation analysis in evaluating scientific articles, content-based citation analysis, including opinion mining of citances, can bring about more transparent results ...
Read More
Introduction: Scientific communities have always been concerned about validity of open-access articles. Given the challenges of quantitative citation analysis in evaluating scientific articles, content-based citation analysis, including opinion mining of citances, can bring about more transparent results about their validity. In view of this, the present study compared the opinions contained in citances about open-access and non-open-access articles.Methods: We used a quantitative content analysis method with citation and opinion analysis approaches. The citances, bibliographic, and bibliometric data were extracted from Colil and PubMed databases. Opinion scores were assigned to the citances through SentiWords. After processing the titles, abstracts, and citances, Cosine similarity of Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) values were calculated. The open-access and non-open-access articles were then paired by their similarities in abstracts, titles, and citances. The data were analyzed using Friedman test and Spearman correlation.Results: There was no significant difference between the open-access and non-open-access articles in terms of their opinion scores, despite a significant difference in citation advantages. The pairs’ citance and textual similarities had no significant correlation with their opinion distance.Conclusion: Although the open-access studies had citation advantage over their similar non-open-access peers, they showed no significant opinion distance. Besides, similar texts did not necessarily follow the same opinion patterns. Consequently, to complete the results of quantitative citation analysis, the content-based citation analysis is emphasized.
Hajar Sotudeh; Masumeh Ravaie; Mahdieh MirzaBeigi; Zahra Mazarei
Volume 14, Issue 3 , September 2017, , Pages 124-129
Abstract
Introduction: Despite the advantages of altmetrics in research evaluation, it encounters many challenges as a nascent field impacted by web dynamism. The present study attempted to identify the challenges of employing altmetrics’ in evaluating research and to highlight some of the features that required ...
Read More
Introduction: Despite the advantages of altmetrics in research evaluation, it encounters many challenges as a nascent field impacted by web dynamism. The present study attempted to identify the challenges of employing altmetrics’ in evaluating research and to highlight some of the features that required evaluation and validation.Methods: The present communication was a basic descriptive research, applying a qualitative thematic analysis method. It studies the research and theoretical works on citation and altmetric indicators in order to extract the indicators’ weaknesses and challenges.Results: The findings led to the identification of many challenges including possibility of indicator manipulation and false improvement, inability to differentiate between positive or negative credits, unbalanced coverage of materials, incompatibility, ambiguities and diversity in the sources of social web, biases, fluctuations, variable nature of social web, equating all citations, lack of standardization, inability to determine the usage type and contexts, and finally inability to measure the quality.Conclusion: Although the altmetrics have many unique strengths that can boost citation analysis, it has several fundamental weaknesses regarding its concepts, services and resources that requires its cautious and conscious use, otherwise its premature and hasty usage would distort research evaluation results.
