Sunday 23 June 2019

ENHANCE YOUR RESEARCH VISIBILITY AND IMPACT

https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.8312597.v1

Tuesday 18 June 2019

Postdoctoral Position in Sustainable Process Systems Engineering applied to Energy and the Environment

Source: https://www.myscience.de/jobs/id147263-postdoctoral_position_in_sustainable_process_systems_engineering_applied_to_energy_and_the_environment-eidgenossische_technische_hochschule_zuerich_ethz

Postdoctoral Position in Sustainable Process Systems Engineering applied to Energy and the Environment

Anbieter		Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule Zürich, ETHZ

Erschienen		13. Juni 2019

Arbeitsort		Zürich, Region Zürich, Schweiz

Kategorie		Umwelt

Funktion		Senior Researcher / Postdoc

Beschreibung ETH Zurich is one of the world’s leading universities specialising in science and technology. It is renowned for its excellent education, its cutting-edge fundamental research and its efforts to put new knowledge and innovations directly into practice. The group of Prof. Gonzalo Guillén-Gosálbez, at the Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering, is offering a position as a PostDoc to an outstanding researcher. Postdoctoral Position in Sustainable Process Systems Engineering applied to Energy and the Environment The main duties of this position are to undertake original research in the area of Sustainable Engineering, with applications in energy and the environment, and ideally with special focus on the chemical sector. It is expected that you will communicate the results through regular publications in high-impact journals and presentations at conferences. You should collaborate actively with researchers at ETH as well as with other institutions. The original length of the contract is one year, with potential annual extensions until a maximum of three years upon successful evaluation at the end of each period. It is essential that you have a PhD in a relevant area. You should have demonstrated expertise in Sustainable Engineering, as applied to energy and the environment, through the writing and dissemination of research results in papers and presentations. It is also essential that you can work in a team, as well as independently. A specific requirement for this position is to have published as main author or co-author (at least one journal article) in a high-impact journal (impact factor above ten, e.g., Nature, Science, Nature Communications, Nature Energy, Nature Sustainability, Nature Climate Change, PNAS, Energy & Environmental Science, etc.). Applications not fulfilling the latter requirement will get a rejection.

Web
Online bewerben



Bitte beziehen Sie sich bei Ihrer Bewerbung auf myScience.de und die Referenz JobID 147263.

Introduction to “Research Tools”: Tools for Collecting, Writing, Publishing, and Improving Research Visibility

Source:

https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.8258957.v1

Fact or Fiction? Hyphens in an article title negatively impact citation counts

Source: https://blog.scopus.com/posts/fact-or-fiction-hyphens-in-an-article-title-negatively-impact-citation-counts

Fact or Fiction? Hyphens in an article title negatively impact citation counts

Submitted by Rachel McCullough

on Wed, 06/12/2019 - 17:59

A recent article in the journal IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering by Zhi Quan Zhou, T.H. Tse, and Matt Witheridge, doi: 10.1109/TSE.2019.2915065, has drawn attention due to its claim that the number of hyphens in article titles negatively impacts the citation counts of such articles in abstract and citation databases such as Scopus and Web of Science.
Hyphens do not play a role in Scopus reference linking. Scopus matching algorithms (e.g. those that match references to articles) cope with many kinds of variations of punctuation, because punctuation in an article title is where the most discrepancies occur when the article is cited. Missed reference matches are continually analyzed by the Scopus team and the occurrence of hyphens in article titles is not a reason for the missing citation links. Therefore we reject the claim made in the article.
In addition, we observe:

The dataset used in the article is very small: it contains 140,000 articles which is 0.19% of Scopus.
The dataset is comprised of the top 20,000 most cited articles for each year between 2007 and 2013, at the time of collection. Hyphens in titles in this dataset are actually more prevalent than in Scopus overall, which contradicts the point that hyphens negatively impact citation counts, as these are top-cited articles.
The Scopus reference matching algorithm makes use of a diversity of details in an article’s metadata and the metadata present in references pointing to the article in question. Critical datapoints are for instance (1) the names of the first author, and the name of the second author when present in the article; (2) volume/issue/page number/article number information; (3) publication year; (4) Journal name; (5) other metadata such as the DOI.
The algorithm only takes the article title itself into account as an extra confirmation step in case a match has not been made via the aforementioned metadata fields. For this extra confirmation step, text is ‘flattened’,i.e., hyphenation and punctuation are ignored.

Do hyphens in article titles harm citation counts?

Source: https://www.cwts.nl/blog?article=n-r2x254

Do hyphens in article titles harm citation counts?

Ludo Waltman, Nees Jan van Eck

June 18th, 2019

No comments

hyphen, citation analysis, reference matching, Scopus, Web of Science

During the past few weeks, those of us with an interest in citation analysis may have stumbled upon catchy headlines such as Hyphens in paper titles harm citation counts and journal impact factors, One punctuation mark has been skewing our scientific ranking system, and One small hyphen in a title could diminish academic success. These are headlines of online reports covering the paper Metamorphic robustness testing: Exposing hidden defects in citation statistics and journal impact factors by Zhi Quan Zhou, T.H. Tse, and Matt Witheridge, which has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. The paper claims that citation statistics reported by Scopus and Web of Science are unreliable, “as they can be distorted simply by the presence of hyphens in paper titles”. According to the paper, the algorithms used by Scopus and Web of Science to match references with the corresponding cited articles do not work well when cited articles include hyphens in their titles.
If the authors are right, this could undermine the validity of all citation analyses carried out worldwide based on data from Scopus and Web of Science. However, are the authors right? Elsevier and Clarivate Analytics, the producers of Scopus and Web of Science, both claim that the IEEE paper is flawed. They state that their reference matching algorithms are insensitive to the presence of hyphens in article titles. Of course, the business interests of Elsevier and Clarivate Analytics are threatened by the paper, so they have an interest in rejecting the conclusions of the paper. This makes clear that there is a need for a more independent perspective on the IEEE paper, which we aim to offer in this blog post.

On average, the larger the number of hyphens in the title of an article, the lower the number of citations received by the article. (Source: University of Hong Kong)

Should we believe the IEEE paper?

The IEEE paper looks impressive. It has been accepted for publication in a journal that seems to have a good reputation. The paper presents many different analyses, apparently showing the robustness of the authors’ findings. Studies like this one may suffer from confusion of correlation and causality, but the authors explicitly discuss this point, suggesting that they are well aware of this important methodological issue.
Nevertheless, the IEEE paper is deeply flawed. The authors make basic mistakes in confusing correlation and causality, despite their claim not to make this error. They compare citation counts of articles with and without hyphens in the title. Based on the observation that articles with hyphens in the title on average receive fewer citations than articles without hyphens in the title, they conclude that the reference matching algorithms of Scopus and Web of Science do not handle hyphens properly. The authors analyze a few confounding factors (e.g., the field of research and the publication year of an article) and observe that these factors do not explain the observed differences in citation counts. However, many other confounding factors (e.g., the type of study, for instance methodological vs. empirical studies, or the level of experience of the authors) are not considered, and therefore the strong causal conclusions drawn by the authors are not justified.
Another deeply problematic element in the IEEE paper is the analysis of journal impact factors. The authors claim that journal impact factors are affected by the alleged shortcomings of the reference matching algorithm of Web of Science. However, anyone familiar with the calculation of journal impact factors will understand that this is impossible. To calculate journal impact factors, citations are counted directly at the level of journals, not at the level of the individual articles within a journal. Only the name of the cited journal and the publication year of the cited work matter when counting the number of references citing a particular journal. The approach taken by Clarivate Analytics to calculate journal impact factors is well known and has been subject of considerable debate. Apparently, the authors of the IEEE paper are completely unaware of this.

How to communicate about mistakes in a scientific paper?

In addition to the issues discussed above, there are various other reasons for rejecting the conclusions drawn in the IEEE paper. Before writing this blog post, we contacted the authors of the IEEE paper and we shared with them our criticism on their work. The comments that we sent to the authors can be found here. We offered to discuss the various comments either by e-mail or in phone call. Unfortunately, the authors declined to engage in any further discussion, indicating that they prefer the discussion to take place through formal channels (i.e., through papers published in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering). This is a disappointing response. Research should be a joint effort aimed at producing the highest quality scientific knowledge. Writing papers is one way in which researchers can communicate with each other and share new knowledge, but it should not be the only way. A direct personal discussion typically offers a more efficient and more effective way of identifying misunderstandings and correcting mistakes. We regret the unwillingness of the authors of the IEEE paper to engage in such a discussion.
We also shared our concerns with the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. The editor has invited us to submit a paper to the journal in which we express our concerns. Although we see this as a somewhat inefficient way of addressing the fundamental mistakes made in the IEEE paper, we are indeed considering to submit such a paper. We hope this will lead to a deeper editorial investigation, eventually resulting in a correction or retraction of the paper.

Can we trust Scopus and Web of Science citation counts?

Does this mean we can blindly trust citation statistics provided by Scopus and Web of Science? No. In both databases, citation statistics suffer from problems. This is almost unavoidable. Algorithmic reference matching will never be perfect. However, some problems in the Scopus and Web of Science reference matching algorithms, which we studied in detail in a conference paper published in 2017, require careful attention from the database producers. These problems affect a small but not entirely insignificant share of the references in the two databases. The phenomenon of so-called phantom references in Web of Science, where a reference is replaced by a completely different reference, is perhaps the most important problem (see below for examples of such references). We hope that the renewed attention for the issue of reference matching will encourage database producers to further improve the quality of their algorithms.

Examples of phantom references in Web of Science. (Source: Van Eck & Waltman, 2017, Table 3)

0 30 0 029

About Ludo Waltman

Professor of Quantitative Science Studies and deputy director of CWTS. Ludo leads the Quantitative Science Studies (QSS) research group. He is coordinator of the CWTS Leiden Ranking and co-developer of the VOSviewer software for bibliometric visualization.

About Nees Jan van Eck

Senior researcher and head of ICT. Nees Jan's research focuses on the development of visualization tools and algorithms, mainly for analyzing the structure and development of science.