Dietmar Wolfram’s research while affiliated with University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee and other places

This e-book presents a collection of articles hand-picked by editors from publications in Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics between 2020 and 2024.

Biomedical research reporting guidelines provide a framework by which journal editors and the researchers who conduct studies can ensure that the reported research is both complete and transparent. With more than 16 different guidelines for the 11 major study types of medical and health research, authors need to be familiar with journal reporting standards. To assess the current endorsements of reporting guidelines for biomedical and health research, this study examined the instructions for authors (IFAs) of 559 biomedical journals by 11 prominent publishers that publish original research or systematic reviews/meta-analyses. Data from the above original sources were cleaned and restructured, and analyzed in a database and text miner. Each journal’s instructions or information for authors were examined to code if any of five prominent reporting guidelines were mentioned and what form the guideline adherence demonstration took. Seventeen journals published the reporting guidelines. Four of the five reporting guidelines listed journals as endorsers. For journals with open peer review reports, a sample of journals and peer reviews was analyzed for mention of adherence to reporting guidelines. The endorsement of research guidelines by publishers and their associated journals is inconsistent for some publishers, with only a small number of journals endorsing relevant guidelines. Based on the analysis of open peer reviews, there is evidence that some reviewers check the adherence to the endorsed reporting guidelines. Currently, there is no universal endorsement of reporting guidelines by publishers nor ways of demonstrating adherence to guidelines. Journals may not directly inform authors of their guideline endorsements, making it more difficult for authors to adhere to endorsed guidelines. Suggestions derived from the findings are provided for authors, journals, and reporting guidelines to ensure increased adequate use of endorsed reporting guidelines.

Higher education continues to experience challenges arising from changing demographics and perceptions of the value of higher education. Prospective students want flexibility in how they pursue higher education. Programs must adapt to meet the changing needs and expectations of the audiences they serve. This is equally true for programs offered by library and information science schools. In an increasingly competitive educational environment where traditional student populations are shrinking, higher education institutions must be agile and proactive (Grawe, 2021). Prior Learning Assessment (PLA) or Credit for Prior Learning (CPL) recognize the students may bring knowledge and skills that are not documented as credit-bearing learning experiences from higher education institutions. The idea of PLA and CPL is not new. The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL) (https://www.cael.org/) has advocated for PLA and CPL for more than 40 years. Learning can take place through nontraditional instructional outlets. Work-related and military experiences also provide learning opportunities for which evidence may be available. Central to PLA and CPL is rigorous assessment. This assessment can take multiple forms, including portfolio evaluation, examinations for learning achievement, or equivalency determination of non-credit learning experiences. A recent study on PLA for adult learners concluded that PLA is associated with better student outcomes, including higher credential completion, cost savings and time savings (Klein-Collins et al., 2020). The panel topic addresses the conference theme by focusing on learning, practice and competencies. Many students applying to undergraduate or graduate programs at LIS schools bring work or non-credit experiences in areas such as information technology, librarianship or archival studies that are germane to the areas they plan to study. Should these applicants be provided the opportunity to demonstrate the knowledge they bring for admission consideration, course exemptions or credit recognition? The objective of this juried panel is to begin a dialogue on the place of PLA in library and information science programs. After a brief introduction to PLA concepts, the panelists will discuss PLA initiatives in their schools. This will be followed by a discussion with the audience during the second half of the panel on questions that arise when considering the adoption of PLA. These questions include: What are the potential benefits of, and concerns with, offering PLA options to prospective undergraduate and graduate students? Which programs offered by LIS schools lend themselves to PLA? How much credit should be provided to students for demonstrating prior learning? What are the most effective approaches for assessing prior learning? Can PLA make LIS programs more inclusive, and can it serve as an effective recruitment tool? The following presenters will participate on the panel: Dietmar Wolfram (Moderator), Head of School and Associate Dean, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Information Studies (SOIS) will provide a brief overview of PLA and methods of assessment. Louise Spiteri, Professor, School of Information Management, Dalhousie University will discuss how Dalhousie’s School of Information Management (SIM) moved from an ad hoc process to an official PLA process for admission assessment for their Master of Information (MI) program, and how this has allowed SIM to broaden the students entering the program. The presentation will also discuss the experience of students who have entered this way. Sarah Beth Nelson, Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, has led the University of Wisconsin System School Library Education Consortium where students can submit a portfolio to demonstrate prior learning in order to be exempted from three of the courses required for school library licensure. Chad Zahrt, Assistant Dean, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee will outline how SOIS has been providing elective credit for non-credit workshops in relevant information technology areas to incoming students in the Bachelor of Science in Information Science and Technology program. Tomas A. Lipinski, Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, will describe how SOIS is addressing the challenge of recognizing the knowledge of incoming MLIS students who bring substantial experience working in the field and how this may be assessed.

The order of co-authors in a publication can follow different criteria that vary according to the diversity of structural dynamics of the field. This study proposes a methodology to gain insight into the meaning of each position in the by-line, working with a sample of publications from the Journal of Informetrics, based on the similarity between the discourse of an article and the citation identity of each co-author according to their position in the by-line, evaluated by the bibliographic coupling. In addition, we compare these similarities with the level of the contribution of the author to the essential activities for the development of the published research, also by their position in the by-line. We conclude that, for the analyzed area of informetrics, bibliographic coupling portrays different patterns of participation by the authors, especially in relation to the first author, which are not evaluated by other mechanisms and metrics. Therefore bibliographic coupling provides an objective and quantitative perspective to the assessment of author contributions to collaborative research.

La autoría múltiple en publicaciones de investigación es común en muchas disciplinas. ¿El orden en el que aparecen los autores en la mención de autoría está determinado por criterios consistentes? Este estudio investiga los artículos en coautoría publicados en Journal of Informetrics en 2016, el año en el que esta revista representativa del área de la informetría comenzó a publicar los artículos junto al formulario de contribuciones de los autores, como un estudio de caso para determinar si hay coherencia en el orden de los autores según sus contribuciones. Para los artículos estudiados, hubo mayor consistencia para el primer y último autor, y una justificación menos consistente para el orden de las posiciones de los autores restantes. Una encuesta enviada a los autores de las publicaciones estudiadas reveló que los autores creían que la posición del primer y último autor desempeñaba un papel más distintivo. La falta de acuerdo y función del orden de los autores en otras posiciones plantea la pregunta sobre la importancia del orden de los autores y su propósito para determinar el crédito que reciben los autores por las publicaciones en coautoría.

Journals that adopt open peer review (OPR), where review reports of published articles are publicly available, provide an opportunity to study both review content characteristics and quantitative aspects of the overall review process. This study investigates two areas relevant to the quality assessment of manuscript reviews. First, do journal policies for reviewers to identify themselves influence how reviewers evaluate the merits of a manuscript based on the relative frequency of hedging terms and research-related terms appearing in their reviews? Second, is there an association between the number of reviews/reviewers and the manuscript’s research impact once published as measured by citations? We selected reviews for articles published in 17 OPR journals from 2017 to 2018 to examine the incidence of reviewers’ uses of hedging terms and research-related terms. The results suggest that there was little difference in the relative use of hedging term usage regardless of whether reviewers were required to identify themselves or if this was optional, indicating that the use of hedging in review contents was not influenced by journal requirements for reviewers to identify themselves. There was a larger difference observed for research-related terminology. We compared the total number of reviews for a manuscript, rounds of revisions, and the number of reviewers with the number of Web of Science citations the article received since publication. The findings reveal that scrutiny by more reviewers or conducting more reviews or rounds of review do not result in more impactful papers for most of the journals studied. Implications for peer review practice are discussed.

Open Science is an umbrella term that encompasses many recommendations for possible changes in research practices, management, and publishing with the objective to increase transparency and accessibility. This has become an important science policy issue that all disciplines should consider. Many Open Science recommendations may be valuable for the further development of research and publishing but not all are relevant to all fields. This opinion paper considers the aspects of Open Science that are most relevant for scientometricians, discussing how they can be usefully applied.