Judit Bar-Ilan

Bar Ilan University | BIU · Department of Information Science

Purpose This study explores faculty members' outputs and citations by gender and academic rank in Israeli academia. The study focuses on the connection between research productivity and underrepresentation of women in academia. To this end, four fields were chosen, each representing a different discipline: Psychology (social sciences), Public Healt...

Introduction. Facebook groups are a popular way to communicate and exchange information. This is reinforced when membership of the particular group forms an important part of that member’s identity. Method. The authors joined closed Facebook groups and studied the factors that enhance engagement from within. This study used a mixed method: 1) the l...

Axiomatic characterisation of a bibliometric index provides insight into the properties that the index satisfies and facilitates the comparison of different indices. A geometric generalisation of the $h$-index, called the $\chi$-index, has recently been proposed to address some of the problems with the $h$-index, in particular, the fact that it is...

Research evaluation is increasingly influenced by quantitative data. We focus on the influential Web of Science Journal Citation Reports (JCR) ranking of law journals and critically assess its methodology. In particular, we consider the existence and impact of a tacit citation cartel between US law reviews. A study of 45 US student‐edited (SE) and...

This paper examines the data accuracy and number of altmetric counts reported by Mendeley, altmetric.com and PlumX at two points in time: June 2017 and April 2018 for the dataset of 2,728 articles and reviews published in JASIST between 2001 and 2014. The findings show growth in the number of citations and Mendeley readers over time. In addition, t...

Almost a decade after its introduction to the scientific community, “Altmetrics” now has its’ own journal and a place in the mainstream evaluative methods of scholarly output.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand the use of Facebook by Israeli party leaders during an election period by examining four elements: the type of Aristotelian language of persuasion; the level of online engagement measured by three different types of feedback: likes, comments and shares; the use of personalization elements as engag...

We propose the χ-index as a bibliometric indicator that generalises the h-index. While the h-index is determined by the maximum square that fits under the citation curve of an author when plotting the number of citations in decreasing order, the χ-index is determined by the maximum area rectangle that fits under the curve. The height of the maximum...

The recent literature on e-democracy reflects a certain disillusionment with the capacity of e-ruling initiatives to generate processes that serve concurrently the goals of democratization and of “good governance”. The main challenge has been to create e-ruling platforms that facilitate a deliberative process that is sufficiently inclusive and also...

There are three main reasons for retraction: (1) ethical misconduct (e.g. duplicate publication, plagiarism, missing credit, no IRB, ownership issues, authorship issues, interference in the review process, citation manipulation); (2) scientific distortion (e.g. data manipulation, fraudulent data, unsupported conclusions, questionable data validity,...

Introduction. While online discussion groups have become powerful tools to enhance open democratic discussions, the literature shows that only a marginal percentage of individuals are active participants. The majority of users read the content but do not participate (lurkers). The aim of this research was to better understand the psychological and...

In this study we aim to explore users' behaviour when assessing search results relevance based on the hypothesis of categorical thinking. In order to investigate how users categorise search engine results, we perform several experiments where users are asked to group a list of 20 search results into a number of categories, while attaching a relevan...

In this article we examined the scholarly output and impact of 81 women scientist at the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Mount Sinai. The group was divided into three career level sub-groups based on the first year of publication of each scientist. We examined the number of publications, citations, readership and social media attention pe...

Coverage is an important criterion when evaluating information systems. This exploratory study investigates this issue by submitting the same query to different databases relevant to the query topic. Data were retrieved from three databases: ACM Digital Library, Web of Science (with the Proceedings Citation Index) and Scopus. The search phrase was...

This panel will present views and critical reflections on peer review, bibliometrics and altmetrics against the background of the latest developments and critique of the scientific system (e.g., replication crisis, DORA, open science, data manipulation). Peer review is the oldest form of monitoring the scientific process and research outcomes and i...

A survey of iSchool and Library and Information Science American Library Association accredited school heads explored their use and opinions about academic social media platforms. Results show that ResearchGate is the venue of choice, although respondents do not believe maintaining a profile on academic social media platforms influences academic ca...

This paper reports on the results of an extensive search for information on Eugene Garfield on the World Wide Web. The searches took place in August 2001, using the search terms: “Eugene Garfield”, “Garfield Eugene”, “Gene Garfield”, “E. Garfield” and “Garfield E”. The five major search engines at that time were queried. 9711 different URLs were id...

This panel pays tribute to Dr. Eugene Garfield, one of the “fathers” of bibliometrics, former president of ASIS (1999–2000) and the founder of the ISI citation databases. Dr. Garfield passed away on February 25, 2017. In this panel, we will highlight his contributions to information science. The panelists are all well-known researchers who have kno...

As Google Scholar (GS) gains more ground as free scholarly literature retrieval source it’s becoming important to understand its quality and reliability in terms of scope and content. Studies comparing GS to controlled databases such as Scopus, Web of Science (WOS) and others have been published almost since GS inception. These studies focus on its...

This study examines the nature of citations to articles that were retracted in 2014. Out of 987 retracted articles found in ScienceDirect, an Elsevier full text database, we selected all articles that received more than 10 citations between January 2015 and March 2016. Since the retraction year was known for only about 83% of the retracted articles...

This is the final report of the European Commission's Expert Group on Altmetrics, which undertook its work over the course of 2016. The report outlines a framework for next-generation metrics in the context of the EC's Open Science agenda and includes a series of recommendations for how responsible metrics can be built into the design and evaluatio...

In this study we sought to find whether there is a correlation between the journals that scientists read to those that they publish in. For the analysis, we selected the journals that include at least 10 articles authored or coauthored by Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai scientists and journals that were used at least 10,000 times in 2015. F...

In this paper we present “citation success index”, a metric for comparing the citation capacity of pairs of journals. Citation success index is the probability that a random paper in one journal has more citations than a random paper in another journal (50% means the two journals do equally well). Unlike the journal impact factor (IF), the citation...

We present the first systematic study of the influence of time on user judgements for rankings and relevance grades of web search engine results. The goal of this study is to evaluate the change in user assessment of search results and explore how users' judgements change. To this end, we conducted a large-scale user study with 86 participants who...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine participation in online social platforms consisting of information exchange, social network interactions, and political deliberation. Despite the proven benefits of online participation, the majority of internet users read social media data but do not directly contribute, a phenomenon called lurking....

This purpose of this study was to discover whether there are scholarly evaluation metrics that can be applied to a wide range of books’ types and contents. We analyzed over 70,000 books and collected various metrics per each title including traditional and altmetrics measures. The analysis in this paper depicts the top books showing the highest rat...

This panel brings together experts in bibliometrics and information retrieval to discuss how each of these two important areas of information science can help to inform the research of the other. There is a growing body of literature that capitalizes on the synergies created by combining methodological approaches of each to solve research problems...

Choosing the best scientific venue for the submission of a manuscript, with the aim of maximizing the impact of the future publication, is a frequent task faced by scholars. In this paper, we show that the Impact Factor (IF) of a journal allows to rationally achieve this goal. We take advantage of a comprehensive bibliographic and citation dataset...

Focused retrieval (a.k.a., passage retrieval) is important at its own right and as an intermediate step in question answering systems. We present a new Web-based collection for focused retrieval. The document corpus is the Category A of the ClueWeb12 collection. Forty-nine queries from the educational domain were created. The $100$ documents most h...

The e-book reader revolution is already here. The questions we asked ourselves were: What are the reading preferences of Information Science students at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century? How do different variables, such as relative advantage, comprehension, and learning strategies affect students’ reading preferences? The rese...

In this paper we explore post retraction citations to retracted papers. The reasons for retractions in our sample were data manipulation, small sample size, scientific misconduct, and duplicate publication by the authors. We found, that the huge majority of the citations are positive, and the citing papers usually fail to mention that the cited art...

This article examines whether domestic or international mobility of scientists have positive effect on the productivity or impact of their work. We analyzed 100 top producing authors from 7 disciplines and found that mobility between at least two affiliations increases both output (number of publications) and impact (number of citations). However,...

Previous research shows that users tend to change their assessment of search results over time. This is a first study that investigates the factors and reasons for these changes, and describes a stochastic model of user behaviour that may explain these changes. In particular, we hypothesise that most of the changes are local, i.e. between results w...

A new methodology is proposed for comparing Google Scholar (GS) with other citation indexes. It focuses on the coverage and citation impact of sources, indexing speed, and data quality, including the effect of duplicate citation counts. The method compares GS with Elsevier’s Scopus, and is applied to a limited set of articles published in 12 journa...

A new methodology is proposed for comparing Google Scholar (GS) with other citation indexes. It focuses on the coverage and citation impact of sources, indexing speed, and data quality, including the effect of duplicate citation counts. The method compares GS with Elsevier's Scopus, and is applied to a limited set of articles published in 12 journa...

The purpose of this study is to get insights on library users’ information retrieval behavior, as reflected in log files, reports, and publishers’ counts. From the data it appears that the library’s discovery tool is not the major source for accessing full text items and the patrons often prefer other sources such as Google Scholar. Google Scholar...

Domain experts are skilled in buliding a narrow ontology that reflects their subfield of expertise based on their work experience and personal beliefs. We call this type of ontology a single-viewpoint ontology. There can be a variety of such single viewpoint ontologies that represent a wide spectrum of subfields and expert opinions on the domain. H...

The purpose of this study was to examine whether scientific mobility, either between countries or between affiliations has an effect on researchers’ productivity and impact. In order to investigate this issue, we examined the relationships between the number of institutional affiliations and countries of the top 100 authors in seven disciplines. Th...

The majority of participants in online communities are lurkers, who browse discussions without actively contributing to them. Their lack of active participation threatens the sustainability of online communities. This review provides an understanding as to why the majority of participants in online communities remain silent. It specifies a variety...

MOOCs are open, online courses that use information technologies to enhance the learning experience and attract various people from the entire world. The current study uses the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), as well as personal characteristics such as learning strategies, cognitive appraisal, and Kuhlthau’s (1991) model of information seeking a...

This study considered two Web-based virtual reference services (VRS) at an academic library in Israel: chat (116 interactions) and email (213 exchanges). The contents of a set of questions and answers in both VRS services were analyzed, along with an open-ended questionnaire administered to the library's reference team (n = 16). Differences were fo...

This study was designed to examine the manner by which academic personnel including students, faculty, librarians and administrators, not only access and read scientific literature bust also interacts with it. In addition, the study examines whether there are differences in accessing, reading and interaction behavior between different groups in aca...

In this study we investigate whether and why users change their preferences when assessing search engine results over time. We conducted a study with 35 subjects who were asked to rank and assign relevance scores to the same set of search results for three times, with a few weeks period between each round. The subjects were then exposed to the diff...

In this paper we propose and test a methodology for evaluation of statements of a multi-viewpoint ontology by crowdsourcing. The task for the workers was to assess each of the given statement as true statements, controversial viewpoint statement or error. Typically, in crowdsourcing experiments the workers are asked for their personal opinions on t...

The panel explores the theoretical, practical, and policy aspects of self-presentation in academia given the rapidly changing world of knowledge creation, dissemination and consumption. It offers insights into both the potential and challenges of social media in academia and highlights future directions regarding scholarly communication. The goal o...

Purpose – Ontologies are prone to wide semantic variability due to subjective points of view of their composers. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new approach for maximal unification of diverse ontologies for controversial domains by their relations. Design/methodology/approach – Effective matching or unification of multiple ontologies fo...

Blogs that cite academic articles have emerged as a potential source of alternative impact metrics for the visibility of the blogged articles. Nevertheless, to evaluate more fully the value of blog citations, it is necessary to investigate whether research blogs focus on particular types of articles or give new perspectives on scientific discourse....

Wikipedia was formally launched in 2001, but the first research papers mentioning it appeared only in 2002. Since then it raised a huge amount of interest in the research community. At first mainly the content creation processes and the quality of the content were studied, but later on it was picked up as a valuable source for data mining and for t...

A comprehensive, state-of-the-art examination of the changing ways we measure scholarly performance and research impact. Bibliometrics has moved well beyond the mere tracking of bibliographic citations. The web enables new ways to measure scholarly productivity and impact, making available tools and data that can reveal patterns of intellectual act...

Journal-based citations are an important source of data for impact indices. However, the impact of journal articles extends beyond formal scholarly discourse. Measuring online scholarly impact calls for new indices, complementary to the older ones. This article examines a possible alternative metric source, blog posts aggregated at ResearchBlogging...

Day-to-day information needed by citizens can be sought in a variety of ways. Specifically, we were interested in users of online, citizen rights websites, such as the SHIL site (http://shil.info). Our results report findings from three parallel data collection efforts. Surveys were undertaken to gain a better understanding of how the SHIL website...

This session for interaction and engagement is organized by members of the EU funded ACUMEN project that aimed at understanding the ways in which researchers are evaluated by their peers and by institutions, and at assessing how the science system can be improved and enhanced (see http://research-acumen.eu/). Among the topics to be emphasized are:...

We introduce a novel ranking of search results based on a variant of the h-index for directed information networks such as the Web. The h-index was originally introduced to measure an individual researcher’s scientific output and influence, but here a variant of it is applied to assess the ‘‘importance’’ of web pages. Like PageRank, the‘‘importance...

The aim of this SIG/MET-sponsored panel is to discuss major informetric topics including the impact factor, the h-index, sources of citation data, the Eigenfactor, the making and use of base maps of science, application of informetrics (e.g., for retrieval purposes), altmetrics, and future perspectives on bibliometrics. The panel especially address...

In previous studies, carried out in 2002 [3] and in 2005 [2] we showed, that Google, the most popular search engine in Israel, does not take into account any of the morphological complexities of Hebrew, while Morfix, a Hebrew search engine, handles Hebrew very well, but has limited coverage and freshness. In the current study we revisit these searc...

One of the main missions of a national library is to preserve the national creative works in printed and non-printed formats. In the 1990s, national libraries began to harvest and archive the national body of creative work that was published on the internet. The aim of the study was to examine to what extent national libraries implement their gener...

Users’ preferences for folders versus tags was studied in 2 working environments where both options were available to them. In the Gmail study, we informed 75 participants about both folder-labeling and tag-labeling, observed their storage behavior after 1 month, and asked them to estimate the proportions of different retrieval options in their beh...

In this study we examined a sample of 100 European astrophysicists and their publications indexed by the citation database Scopus, submitted to the arXiv repository and bookmarked by readers in the reference manager Mendeley. Although it is believed that astrophysicists use arXiv widely and extensively, the results show that on average more items a...

Altmetrics, indices based on social media platforms and tools, have recently emerged as alternative means of measuring scholarly impact. Such indices assume that scholars in fact populate online social environments, and interact with scholarly products there. We tested this assumption by examining the use and coverage of social media environments a...

We propose a new index, the $j$-index, which is defined for an author as the sum of the square roots of the numbers of citations to each of the author's publications. The idea behind the $j$-index it to remedy a drawback of the $h$-index $-$ that the $h$-index does not take into account the full citation record of a researcher. The square root func...

The main purposes of this paper are to sketch the general trends of funded A&H awards by: - Allocated capital: i.e. how much money is dedicated to A&H funding over time - Geographical distribution and monetary attributions: i.e. how much funding is allocated to A&H and in which countries - Type of funding: i.e. what are the comparative contribution...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a study that examined the perceived credibility of blogs on the internet and the medical information published in them as perceived by the readers of these blogs. Design/methodology/approach – A total of six blogs each with two posts were constructed, one on conventional treatment and the other on...

Students turn to a variety of sources when searching for information for their academic assignments. This study uses findings from a survey given to 151 Israeli students attending a university in Israel. A questionnaire comprising 12 questions was administered regarding their information needs, information behavior, and difficulties in searching an...

Scholars are increasingly incorporating social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Mendeley into their professional communication. Altmetrics tracks usage of these and similar tools to measure scholarly influence on the social Web. Altmetrics researchers and practitioners have amassed a growing body of literature and working tools to gather and an...

In a previous work we tested users' preferences with systems that allow to store and retrieve information either using tags or folders. In the current study we asked participants sampled from the same population about their attitudes towards tags by using a questionnaire (N = 168). We then compared the results regarding attitudes gathered in this s...

Blog posts aggregated at ResearchBlogging.org discuss scientific results and provide full bibliographic references to the reviewed articles. Articles reviewed in these blogs therefore receive "blog citations". We hypothesized that articles receiving blog citations near their publication time become more highly cited later on than the articles in th...

Our system illustrates how information retrieved from social networks can be used for suggesting experts for specific tasks. The system is designed to facilitate the task of finding the appropriate person(s) for a job, as a conference committee member, an advisor, etc. This short description will demonstrate how the system works in the context of t...

This experiment studied the impact of various task phrasings on the search process. Eighty-eight searchers performed four web search tasks prescribed by the researchers. Each task was linked to an existing target web page, containing a piece of text that served as the basis for the task. A matching phrasing was a task whose wording matched the text...

Purpose The purpose of this study was to compare the ease of use and the effectiveness of several interfaces for retrieving tagged images. Design/methodology/approach A number of participants were randomly assigned to one of four retrieval interfaces: tag search in a search box; faceted tag search in a search box; selecting terms from the tag clou...

The impact factor is one of the most used scientometric indicators. Its proper and improper uses have been discussed extensively before. It has been criticized extensively, yet it is still here. In this paper I propose the journal report card, which is a set of measures, each with an easily comprehensible meaning that provides a fuller picture of t...

A review of Garfield's journal impact factor and its specific implementation as the Thomson Reuters impact factor reveals several weaknesses in this commonly-used indicator of journal standing. Key limitations include the mismatch between citing and ...

Editor's Summary The Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology ( JASIST ) started in 2001 after being published since 1950 under two other titles. Prior bibliometric analyses of JASIS focused on author and article characteristics and trends and on geographic and keyword distributions. The current study examines article...

In this study, we consider the structure and linking strategy of Hebrew websites of several nonprofit organizations. Because nonprofit organizations differ from commercial, educational, or governmental sectors, it is important to understand the ways they utilize the web. To the best of our knowledge, the linking structure of nonprofit organizations...

Traditionally, scholarly impact and visibility have been measured by counting publications and citations in the scholarly literature. However, increasingly scholars are also visible on the Web, establishing presences in a growing variety of social ecosystems. But how wide and established is this presence, and how do measures of social Web impact re...

Purpose Citizens Advice Bureau (SHIL in Hebrew) is an information and referral service dedicated to serving the needs of citizens by providing easy access to information about citizenship rights and obligations. Many people turn to the offices of SHIL either for help or to volunteer as advisors. This study seeks to examine the information seeking b...

The research blog has become a popular mechanism for the quick discussion of scholarly information. However, unlike peer-reviewed journals, the characteristics of this form of scientific discourse are not well understood, for example in terms of the spread of blogger levels of education, gender and institutional affiliations. In this paper we fill...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to develop a methodology for assessing search results retrieved from different sources. Design/methodology/approach – This is a two phase method, where in the first stage users select and rank the ten best search results from a randomly ordered set. In the second stage they are asked to choose the best pre-ranked...

In this paper we report the results of an offline survey of the information needs of members of the Israeli public about public and governmental services and entitlements. This survey was conducted as part of a research project on public use of online information: usage analysis of the Israeli Citizens Advice Bureau (SHIL) on the Web. The questionn...

This study examines the ways in which information consumers evaluate the quality of content in a collaborative-writing environment, in this case Wikipedia. Sixty-four users were asked to assess the quality of five articles from the Hebrew Wikipedia, to indicate the highest- and lowest-quality article of the five and explain their choices. Participa...