Paul Donner

We conduct an independent cluster validation study on published clustering solutions of a research testbed corpus, the Astro dataset of publication records from astronomy and astrophysics. We extend the dataset by collecting external validation data serving as proxies for the latent structure of the corpus. Specifically, we collect (1) grant funding information related to the publications, (2) data on topical special issues, (3) on specific journals’ internal topic classifications and (4) usage data from the main online bibliographic database of the discipline. The latter three types of data are newly introduced for the purpose of clustering validation and the rationale for using them for this task is set out.

By individually associating articles to basic or applied research, it is shown that basic articles are cited more frequently than applied ones. Dividing the subject categories of the Web of Science into a basic and an applied part, the mean field-normalization rate is referred to the applied or basic part depending on the research orientation of the paper analysed. By this approach, a distinct difference of the citations for the applied and basic parts of most subject categories is found. However, differences of the citation scores of applied and basic research organisations are found as well, but are less clear. The explanation is that applied and basic research organisations generally publish a mix of basic and applied articles. [...]

A perennial problem in bibliometrics is the appropriate distribution of authorship credit for coauthored publications. Several credit allocation methods and formulas have been introduced, but there has been little empirical validation as to which method best reflects the typical contributions of coauthors. This paper presents a validation of credit allocation methods using a new data set of author-provided percentage contribution figures obtained from the coauthored publications in cumulative PhD theses by authors from three countries that contain contribution statements. [...]

The present study is an evaluation of three frequently used institution name disambiguation systems. The Web of Science normalized institution names and Organization Enhanced system and the Scopus Affiliation ID system are tested against a complete, independent institution disambiguation system for a sample of German public sector research organizations. The independent system is used as the gold standard in the evaluations that we perform. We study the coverage of the disambiguation systems and, in particular, the differences in a number of commonly used bibliometric indicators. The key finding is that for the sample institutions, the studied systems provide bibliometric indicator values that have only a limited accuracy. [...]

This article reports the results of a study of the correctness of document type assignments in the commercial citation index database Web of Science (SCIE, SSCI, AHCI collections). The document type assignments for publication records are compared to those given on the official journal websites or in the publication full-texts for a random sample of 791 Web of Science records across the four document type categories articles, letters, reviews and others, according to the definitions of WoS. The proportion of incorrect assignments across document types and its influence on document specific normalized citations scores are analysed. It is found that document type data is correct in 94% of records. [...]

In this article I investigate the shortcomings of exact string match-based author self-citation detection methods. The contributions of this study are twofold. First, I apply a fuzzy string matching algorithm for selfcitation detection and benchmark this approach and other common methods of exclusively author namebased self-citation detection against a manually curated ground truth sample. Near full recall can be achieved with the proposed method while incurring only negligible precision loss. Second, I report some important observations from the results about the extent of latent self-citations and their characteristics and give an example of the effect of improved self-citation detection on the document level self-citation rate of [...].