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"SCIENTOMETRICS AND
HYPERPUBLISHING: THE OTHER SIDE OF
THE COIN"
Prof. dr Radovan Stojanović
MANT Montenegro
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NEW TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICES IN SOCIOECONOMIC RESEARCH, 26-28 APRIL 2018, Igalo, Herceg Novi, Montenegro
Overview
•Introduction
•Reality
•Conclusion
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NEW TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICES IN SOCIOECONOMIC RESEARCH, 26-28 APRIL 2018, Igalo, Herceg Novi, Montenegro
Introduction
•“All men by nature desire knowledge”,
Aristotle
•“Every society seeks knowledge”
•The need to measure the knowledge is a
natural, for individuals, institutions, and
societies .
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NEW TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICES IN SOCIOECONOMIC RESEARCH, 26-28 APRIL 2018, Igalo, Herceg Novi, Montenegro
Introduction
•For the last 50 years, there has been a
"big bang" in the metrics. Primarily,
thanks to the Information Technologies
(ITs). Everything is measured and
statistically analysed including the
knowledge and its results.
• "Scientometrics" is “a science about
the measurement the science” and
very close to the terms „Bibliometrics,”
“informetrics,” “webometrics,”
“netometrics,” “cybermetrics”…
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NEW TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICES IN SOCIOECONOMIC RESEARCH, 26-28 APRIL 2018, Igalo, Herceg Novi, Montenegro
Introduction
•"Scientometrics" is a relatively young discipline,
introduced by Eugene Garfield and Alan Priard in 1960s,
how far after the first libraries appeared in 2600BC .
•Although young it is fast growing , becoming a
"nightmare" and "controversy" for scientific community.
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NEW TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICES IN SOCIOECONOMIC RESEARCH, 26-28 APRIL 2018, Igalo, Herceg Novi, Montenegro
•Today, the bibliometrics and the science are controlled by global private
magnates as:
•Clarivate Analytics (firstly the Intellectual Property and Science business of
Thomson Reuters), todays owner of SCI rights.
•One of the creator of SCI is David Thomson, 3rd Baron Thomson of Fleet,
continued by Gerry Schwartz (Baring Private Equity Asia) and Erik
Engstrom (RELX Group which covers Elsevier)
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David Thomson
& family
Chairman, Thomson Reuters
201818
$25.2 B, FORBES
Gerry Schwartz Erik Engstrom
Introduction
Introduction
•There are many knowledge data bases, resources, tehniques,
indicators, alternatives: Scopus, Web of Knowledge (sa WoS),
Urlich’s, Google Scholar, Reseachgate, SCImago Journal and
Country Rank, Academia edu, Mendeley, Medline, arXiv,
CiteSeerX, EMBASE, ERIC, IEEE Xplore, Index Copernicus,
Inspec, JournalSeek, MathSciNet, Microsoft Academic
Search, PubChem, SciELO, ScienceOpen, WestLaw,
Zentralblatt MATH, VIVO, Altmetrics.org…
•Some of them are narrow, some of the width
(multidisciplinary), some on-line, some free...
•The biggest are Scopus (>22000 journals) and Web of Science
(WoS) (>12000) and also most agile and influenced .
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NEW TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICES IN SOCIOECONOMIC RESEARCH, 26-28 APRIL 2018, Igalo, Herceg Novi, Montenegro
Introduction
•Dilemma 1: Does bibliometrics need to be
identified with journals and scientific
publications, and librarianship at all?.
•NO!
•Recently, the Royal Society (RS)
celebrated 350 years of the first journal,
published on March 6, 1665,
“Philosophical Transactions”, under the
vision of the first Secretary Henry
Oldenburg.
•The journals and publication played a
proven role in presenting and popularizing
the knowledge, and
•There is a clear correlation between the
greatest scientific discoveries and research
works published in the journals.
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Title of the page of first Transaction
NEW TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICES IN SOCIOECONOMIC RESEARCH, 26-28 APRIL 2018, Igalo, Herceg Novi, Montenegro
Introduction
•Dilemma 2: Does bibliometrics need to be identified
with economy, business, neoliberal approach,
globalisation?
•YES.
•It was derived from Fridman’s (Weber's doctrine) “ No
free lunch”, which is fully applied in this field.
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Introduction
•By this doctrine the administrationapplies the "payback" or
"return of investment (ROI)", because 1500 billion dollars
annually invested in this area over the globe should be
covered.
•"You received money, pls justify it!" Let the coverage to be
certified enough. “Give me the invoice for money you
received and your invoice is your published paper”!
•This phenomenon is firstly introduces by sociologists of
science Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar in the book
"Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts" (1979)
•They call it as "capital of credibility" by presenting the "cycle
of credit", representing the scientific world as an economic
enterprise.
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NEW TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICES IN SOCIOECONOMIC RESEARCH, 26-28 APRIL 2018, Igalo, Herceg Novi, Montenegro
Introduction
•Scientists act as investors by transforming scientific capital
into another.
•Publications are a guarantee of funding and position.
•Funding and position ensure the production of more
scientific data.
•And so on….and so on…
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Data
Publication
Position
Financing
NEW TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICES IN SOCIOECONOMIC RESEARCH, 26-28 APRIL 2018, Igalo, Herceg Novi, Montenegro
Introduction
•The quality of generated results (outcomes)?
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Reality
•Nothing strange happened, all seen and written?
•“All men by nature desire knowledge”, Aristotle
•Man is by nature a political animal, Aristotle
•"Man is by nature scorned, full of scandals and
frauds”, Aristofan
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NEW TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICES IN SOCIOECONOMIC RESEARCH, 26-28 APRIL 2018, Igalo, Herceg Novi, Montenegro
Reality
•“Publish or perish” effect as
a results of research (read
administrative) reform=form.
•Increasing number of
publications over decades,
1.3 milions in 2003. to 2.4
milions u 2013. Authors, 4.6
millions in 2003 to 10
millions in 2013?
•Publishing scientists
worldwide is increasing at a
rate of approximately 4-5%
per year (https://www.stm-
assoc.org/2015_02_20_STM_Report_2015.pdf)
•“Hyperauthorship”, 5000
authors of CERN’s on paper
of Higgs Boson
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Source Scopus
NEW TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICES IN SOCIOECONOMIC RESEARCH, 26-28 APRIL 2018, Igalo, Herceg Novi, Montenegro
Reality
•Absurd. Prof. Higgs should have been thrown out as
unproductive at the University of Aberdeen. Just
before receiving the Nobel Prize in 2013, he declared:
"Today I would not find an academic job, it's just so."
"It is impossible to imagine how today I would have
enough peace and quiet to do what I did in 1964,"
•
Sydney Brenner about his friend and double Nobel
laureate Fred Sanger. "Fred Sanger would not survive
today's world of science. In the process of constant
reports (reports) and evaluation, some of the
commissions would conclude that he published
insufficiently between work on insulin in 1952, his
first work on RNA (ribonucleic acid), 1967, with a
great distance to the next work on DNA 1977.
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NEW TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICES IN SOCIOECONOMIC RESEARCH, 26-28 APRIL 2018, Igalo, Herceg Novi, Montenegro
Reality
•Charlton BG, “The cancer of bureaucracy:
how it will destroy science, medicine,
education; and eventually everything else.
Med Hypotheses. 2010 Jun;74(6):961-5.
•Prof Braben, "The major scientific discoveries
of the 20th Century would not have
happened under today's rules, they would
not get funding now“.
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NEW TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICES IN SOCIOECONOMIC RESEARCH, 26-28 APRIL 2018, Igalo, Herceg Novi, Montenegro
Reality
•„Academic publishing“ market , led by Elsevier, had in
2013 turnover of $25.2 billion. More percent of the profit
than Apple-a.
(http://www.relx.com/investorcentre/reports%202007/Doc
uments/2013/reed_elsevier_ar_2013.pdf ,
http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q4fy13datasum.pdf )
• Paradoks, 1995. Forbes sad the first victim of internet will
be Accademic publishers (članak “The internet’s first
victim,” John Hayes)
•It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival
Google – and it was created by one of Britain’s most
notorious tycoons: Robert Maxwell.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/prof
itable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
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NEW TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICES IN SOCIOECONOMIC RESEARCH, 26-28 APRIL 2018, Igalo, Herceg Novi, Montenegro
The voice of the honest academia
•The academic community blindly followed metrics till
2010. Developing countries still blindly follow.
•One of the first voices, Journal of Cell Biology (IF>10)
(M. Rossner Heather V. Epps and E. Hill) u svom članku
„Show me the data“ napada odomaćenu metriku. „We
need a metric that is open and not proprietary, and
that measures the citations of an individual paper and
not the journal as a whole. We should also not forget
that the number of citations can't be compared
between different fields“.
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•3 years later, 2010, D. Parkins, u svom članku „Do
metrics matter?“, Nature, Vol 465|17 June 2010,
proffed thesis from (Journal of Cell Biology) iand
thasis of Lotour (before 30 years ) indirectly
introducing the notion of “hooligans in their own
ranks" that play the metric system. 19
The voice of the honest academia
The voice of the honest academia
•Nature research
between 150
researchers and 30
administrators at
top universities.
Some comments.
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•51% of respondents said that they have
changed their behaviour because of the
way they are evaluated.
•“It discourages me from doing important
research work that may be of null
association.”
•“I am more likely to accept an article for
review if I want to verify that it is citing a
paper of mine that is near the cusp of being
counted for my h-factor.”
•71% of respondents said that they are
concerned their colleagues can ‘game’ or
‘cheat’ the systems for evaluation in
their institutions.
•“A great deal of politics are involved and a
focus on numbers over quality with regard
to publications.”
•“These metrics can be skewed by people if
they know that their performance will be
evaluated on metrics alone.”
NEW TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICES IN SOCIOECONOMIC RESEARCH, 26-28 APRIL 2018, Igalo, Herceg Novi, Montenegro
The voice of the honest academia
•“Outside letters basically trump
everything,” R. Simoni, Stanford
University in California.
•“Metrics are not used a great deal,” Al.
Halliday, University of Oxford,. “The most
important things are the letters, the
interview and the CV, and our opinions of
the papers published,”
•“I don’t look at impact factors” of the
journals a candidate publishes in, K.
Yoshikawa, Kyoto University. “These
usually highlight trendy papers, boom
fields and recently highlighted topics. We
at Kyoto don’t want to follow boom.”
•At the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in Cambridge, C. Canizares
“we pay very little attention, almost zero,
to citation indices and counting numbers
of publications”. But, he says, “if someone
has multiple publications in a higher-
impact journal, it’s like getting another set
of letters — the peers 21
NEW TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICES IN SOCIOECONOMIC RESEARCH, 26-28 APRIL 2018, Igalo, Herceg Novi, Montenegro
The voice of the honest academia
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Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for
science? Tue 27 Jun 2017 , https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-
scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
NEW TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICES IN SOCIOECONOMIC RESEARCH, 26-28 APRIL 2018, Igalo, Herceg Novi, Montenegro
Reality
•Developing countries The research
(publication) outcomes is highly growing. Is it
real?
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https://www.researchtrends.com/issue-35-december-2013/the-
bibliometrics-of-the-developing-world/
Reality
•But the growth is out of logic as e
example
•The case of former Yugoslavia.
Expansions of publications in newly
created countries
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http://www.herdata.org/in-focus/what-is-behind-
bibliometric-indicators-from-the-web-of-science/7
https://economics.rabobank.com/publications/2013/may/country-
report-serbia/
Reality, Serbia’s case???
Not better with others
Solutions and alternative
•What is a solution?
•You are scientific, be in your world, no bills for
you?
26
NO
NEW TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICES IN SOCIOECONOMIC RESEARCH, 26-28 APRIL 2018, Igalo, Herceg Novi, Montenegro
Solutions and alternative
•Balance
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Publication Other human and social values
Solutions and alternative
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1. Altmetrics (metrics are non-traditional
metrics, an alternative to traditional citation
impact metrics, all scientific products of
someone should be taken in consideration.
2. Holimetrics? (holistic approach, taking care
of something totally in all aspects).
3. How to measure Altmetrics and Holimetrics,
not easy like parametrised metrics?
Conclusions
1. A metric system is needed in the system of science.
2. The current metric system is manipulated by scientific hooligans
and political establishments.
3. The problem is emphasized in developing countries where
“scientific” progress does not follow the overall one.
4. No good science without good education and eduction is in deeply
crisis.
5. We can not be so "narrow" in evaluating research results, "no one
can read everything", "no one can measure everything".
6. Allow the time to judge, because it is the best referee.
7. Return science to the scientists and move it out from
manipulation profiteers.
8. Always publishing, but fear!!!
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NEW TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICES IN SOCIOECONOMIC RESEARCH, 26-28 APRIL 2018, Igalo, Herceg Novi, Montenegro
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