Paul Donner

Bibliometric methods and bibliometric indicators are important, albeit disputed, tools in empirical studies of science systems and in research evaluation. Their validity and acceptance is partly due to their statistical scope, allowing for analyses at large scales, such as entire countries, for which the cost of employing qualitative methods is too high. Bibliometric methods are deeply data-driven which makes the trustworthiness of the statements and interpretations derived from bibliometric studies very data-dependent. Science studies researchers have long recognized that poor quality data is a possible threat to informative scientific outcomes and solid, defensible quantitative assessment of research. [...]

This study investigates researchers’ appraisals and experiences with criteria for ordering author names on scientific publications. We analyze survey responses of researchers from Austria, Switzerland, and Germany collected by the Zurich Survey of Academics. We find that researchers give normatively highest priority to criteria associated with the extent of research contribution. Relative minorities also favor alphabetical ordering and special treatment of researchers facing assessment situations. In comparison to these ideals, the practical relevance of research contribution is attenuated at the expense of status-based criteria (academic rank), which researchers normatively reject. Preferred criteria do not differ between genders. [...]

Global scholarly information systems provide poor coverage for social science and humanities research taking place outside of the anglophone world and in languages other than English. Paul Donner, Stephan Stahschmidt, Serhii Nazarovets, Igor Cojocaru, Irina Cojocaru, Marina Razmadze and Shushanik Sargsyan highlight a range of national initiatives taking place aimed at improving scholarly data for local and national research and argue for the value of their greater integration.

The citations to open access preprint and working paper versions of papers that are also formally published in journals are not regularly counted in global multidisciplinary proprietary citation index databases, nor are they considered in most bibliometric studies. They are, however, integrated into paper citation counts in other citation databases. It can be argued that open access preprint citations reflect a relevant part of scientific impact of a work as proxied by citation counts, particularly in scientific disciplines that make extensive use of preprints/working papers for rapid open communication. Here we present a large-scale study of these usually uncounted open access preprint citations for the Web of Science database [...]

Since citation context information has entered the Web of Science (Clarivate) in recent years, one wonders whether the legitimacy and soundness of citation analyses for measuring research quality of publications can be improved by considering this information. The legitimacy and soundness of citation analysis can be established by assessing their construct validity. This can be done by studying how citation impact variables relate to generally accepted external validation data, like human expert assessments of research quality.[...]

In this study we investigate the relative contributions of co-authors to publications in mathematics. Mathematics is an interesting case for such research because it is one of only a few scientific disciplines in which alphabetical order of names of co-authors on publications is still the prevailing convention rather than contribution-based order. The study is based on unique data of publicly available author-provided quantitative contribution statements for co-authored papers from applications for habilitation degrees in Poland. [...]

In this study, we investigated whether citation context information is able to increase the validity of citation impact analyses to measure research quality compared to simple citation counts. We analyzed the statistical relationships of information extracted from structured citation context data in the Web of Science (Clarivate) such as the placement of citations within specific sections of an article with post-publication peer review quality ratings from Faculty Opinions (H1 connect), used as an external validity criterion for research quality. The study is based on publications in medicine and life sciences. [...]

OpenAlex is a promising open source of scholarly metadata, and competitor to established proprietary sources, such as the Web of Science and Scopus. As OpenAlex provides its data freely and openly, it permits researchers to perform bibliometric studies that can be reproduced in the community without licensing barriers. However, as OpenAlex is a rapidly evolving source and the data contained within is expanding and also quickly changing, the question naturally arises as to the trustworthiness of its data. In this report, we will study the reference coverage and selected metadata within each database and compare them with each other to help address this open question in bibliometrics. [...]

Author self-citations are a somewhat controversial phenomenon. Some scholars maintain they are a normal, even indispensable, part of scientific referencing practice, while others claim they are frequently an expression of vanity and self-promotion. Citations are the basic data for citation network clustering, an important approach to creating bottom-up, data-driven, global taxonomic systems of research publications. Thus the topical information content of self-citations is of particular interest in this context. [...]