Questionable or Predatory Open Access Journals

As of January 2017, J. Beall has shut down his blog.

A few recent articles around a growing number of 'predatory' open access journals.

• Beall's List: Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access journals(University of Colorado Denver, librarian)
• Scientific Articles Accepted (Personal Checks, Too) (New York Times article, April 7, 2013)
• Investigating journals: The dark side of publishing The explosion in open-access publishing has fueled the rise of questionable operators (Nature 495, 433–435, 28 March 2013)

Elsevier buys Mendeley

While acknowledging Elsevier's recurrent issues in Academia the Mendeley team gives the reason behind the deal.

Press Release from Mendeley.

Press Release from Elsevier.

ORCID has officially launched

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is an initiative started in 2010 aimed at "providing a registry of persistent unique identifiers for researchers and scholars and automating linkages to research objects such as publications, grants, and patents."

Frequently Asked Questions

Cite feature in Google Scholar

Scholar now offers the ability to format the articles in APA, MLA or Chicago style in one click.
To copy a formatted citation, click on the “Cite” link below a search result ( or click on More as the screenshot below illustrates) and select from the available citation styles

For more styles don't forget that you can export the scholar article references to a citation management software.

Steps to export to Refworks

Steps to export to EndNote

Need help? Contact your librarian

Google Scholar adds 'Updates'

Google Scholar has implemented a feature that will automatically bring to your attention articles relevant to your research.
Read the official announcement and the feedback from a satisfied researcher.
You do need to have a Google Scholar profile.

Top 10 journals in Management, Finance & Economics

The latest edition (2011) of the Journal Citation Reports has just been released. Academics can use this tool to rank several journals in different disciplines according to various fields such as Total Cites, Immediacy Index, Impact Factor and more.
Top 10 Journals in Management by Impact Factor

1. Academy of management review
2. Academy of Management Journal
3. Academy of Management Learning & Education
4. Journal of  Management
5. Academy of Management Annals
6. MIS Quarterly
7. Journal of Operation Management
8. Organization Science
9. Journal of Applied Psychology
10. Journal of Management Studies

Top 10 Journals in Finance by Impact Factor

1. Review of Financial Studies
2. Journal of  Finance
3. Journal of Financial Economics
4. Journal Accounting & Economics
5. Accounting  Organizations and Society
6. Journal of Banking and Finance
7. Accounting Review
8. Journal of Accounting Research
9. IMF Economic Review
10. Review of  Accounting Studies

Top 10 Journals in Economics by Impact Factor

1. Journal of Economic Literature
2. Quarterly Journal of Economics
3. Review of Financial Studies
4. Journal of  Finance
5. Journal of Economic Perspectives
6. Economic Geography
7. American Economic Journal-Macroeconomics
8. Journal of Financial Economics
9. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity
10. Journal Accounting & Economics

The Journal Impact Factor is defined as the number of citations in 2011 to items published in the previous two years, divided by the total number of items published in those same two years. 

For more categories and variables INSEAD users can login here.
Note: once on the platform, Business, Management, Finance, Economics and Psychology related fields are within the Social Sciences Edition -- Operations Research & Management is within the Science Edition.

Coercive Citation in Academic Publishing

A study was released in Science magazine on February 3rd: Coercive Citation in Academic Publishing. 

The authors analyzed 6672 responses from a survey sent to researchers in economics, sociology, psychology, and multiple business disciplines (marketing, management, finance, information systems, and accounting) as well as data from 832 journals in those same disciplines 

The survey results are available in the  supporting material along with a list of journals identified as 'coercers' by survey respondents. 

1. Journal of Business Research 
2. Journal of Retailing 
3. Marketing Science 
4. Journal of Banking and Finance 
5. Information and Management 
6. Applied Economics 
7. Academy of Management Journal 
8. Group and Organization Management 
9. Journal of Consumer Psychology 
10. Psychology and Marketing 

Conclusion from the paper:

Overall, the empirical results from the author survey and the journal-based data tell a consistent story. Coercive self-citation exists and is more common in the business disciplines than in economics, sociology, and psychology

Can Tweets Predict Citations?

Interesting article in the Journal of Medical Internet Research:
Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact

The author, Gunther Eysenbach , concludes: 

Tweets can predict highly cited articles within the first 3 days of article publication. Social media activity either increases citations or reflects the underlying qualities of the article that also predict citations, but the true use of these metrics is to measure the distinct concept of social impact. Social impact measures based on tweets are proposed to complement traditional citation metrics. The proposed twimpact factor may be a useful and timely metric to measure uptake of research findings and to filter research findings resonating with the public in real time.'

 

Google Scholar Citations open to all!

Use Google Scholar Citation to

• Track citations to your publications 
• View publications by colleagues 
• Appear in Google Scholar search results

From the announcement:

Here’s how it works. You can quickly identify which articles are yours, by selecting one or more groups of articles that are computed statistically. Then, we collect citations to your articles, graph them over time, and compute your citation metrics - the widely used h-index; the i-10 index, which is simply the number of articles with at least ten citations; and, of course, the total number of citations to your articles. Each metric is computed over all citations and also over citations in articles published in the last five years.

You will need to login with a Google account, by default your profile is private but you can decide to make it public.

Get started here  

Citing datasets, a How To guide

Researchers from the Digital Curation Center have posted a How To Guide:
How to Cite Datasets and Link to Publications

Book Citation Index is released

The book citation index has been launched as part of the Web of Knowledge

It covers 25,000 books in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities dating back to 2005.

13.5 million additional cited references will appear inWeb of Knowledge as a result of this launch.  

Coverage is expected to rise to 30,000 books by the end of 2011, with 10,000 new books added each year.

What's in it?

• The Book Citation Index will cover only scholarly books that present fully referenced articles of original research, or reviews of the literature. 
• The Book Citation Index will cover both series and non-series books.
• The Science Edition of the Book Citation Index will include books with copyright from the current or previous five (5) years (e.g. 2010-2005)
• The Social Science & Humanities Edition of the Book Citation Index will include books with copyright from the current or previous seven (7) years.

For a full explanation of the selection process click here.
For the Master Book List and a list of publishers covered click here.

For the press release click here.

Google Scholar Citations

Google's answer to ResearcherID?

We use a statistical model based on author names, bibliographic data, and article content to group articles likely written by the same author. You can quickly identify your articles using these groups. After you identify your articles, we collect citations to them, graph these citations over time, and compute your citation metrics.

Full Google announcement - Help & FAQ page
Sample pages:Albert Einstein, Margaret Mead, Alonzo Church

This is still in development and open only to a small number of users. You can still sign up to be notified when the service is open to all.

Top 10 management journals by impact factor

The 2010 Journal Citation Report from Thomson Reuters has just been released.

• Covers more than 9,100 journals from over 2,200 publishers in approximately 230 disciplines from 78 countries.
• The Sciences Edition covers over 6,500 journals; the Social Sciences Edition covers over 1,900.
• Cited and citing journal statistics from 1997 forward.

Access the Journal Citation Report on the Library page to view more rankings by disciplines.

Top 10 management journals by impact:

1. Academy of Management Review
2. Academy of Management Annals 
3. Academy of Management Journal
4. Journal of Operations Management
5. MIS Quarterly
6. Research in Organizational Behavior
7. Organizational Research Methods
8. Journal of International Business Studies
9. Journal of Business Logistics
10. Journal of Management Studies  

Another study questions the impact of open access journals

Mr. Philip M. Davis, a researcher in the department of communication at Cornell University, publishes a study in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology journal and concludes that "open access publishing may reach more readers than subscription access publishing, although additional readership may not translate into more citations."

Open access, readership, citations: a randomized controlled trial of scientific journal publishing

Does online access boost citations?

This is the question posed by two researchers in their working paper:
Did Online Access to Journals Change the Economics Literature? (SSRN)

Mark McCabe, adjunct professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, and Christopher Snyder, economics professor at Dartmouth College question the often reported 'citation advantage' to publishing in online open-access journals.

This Steve Kolowich article explains more about the study and its potential  impact for the proponents of open-access publishing.

New ways to measure impact

This Inside Higher Ed. article: New Measures of Scholarly Impact describes attempts at integrating new metrics in citation analysis and research impact.

Eigenfactor is currently looking into how to incorporate real-time usage data, as well as “citation-like references” from scholars on social networking sites. Shout-outs on scholarly blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, along with digital dog-earing on social bookmarking sites such as CiteULike and Connotea, might also be used as proxies for influence

The article also references research from the MESUR (MEtrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources) project.

image from the MESUR website.

Book citations to appear in Web of Science...at last!

Thomson Reuters announces the 'Book Citation Index' for Q2 2011.

Excerpt from an interview with VP for editorial development and publisher relations, James Testa"

How large will the index be at the time of the launch?

At launch, there will be about 25,000 volumes in the database. Book Citation Index will include publications from major publishers, university presses, and other major book sources. [...]

Right now, we are accepting books in the sciences published from 2005 to the present. In the social sciences and humanities, [we accept] anything with a copyright date of 2003 to the present.

Read the full interview here.

The lack of book indexation in WoS has often been cited as leading to an underestimation of an author's impact in his/her field. Google scholar - freely available on the web - has always included citation from books.

 

Elsevier: Article-Based Publishing to Increase Publication Speed

Elsevier announces 'Article-Based Publishing' service.

Final and citable articles are published without needing to wait until a journal issue is complete; speeding the publication process by an average of 7 weeks

Published faster = cited faster!                                                        

Reference Manager Overview

Compiled by Martin Fenner, blog entry: Reference Manager Overview

Zotero Everywhere

Zotero Everywhere

Zotero Everywhere will have two main components: a standalone desktop version of Zotero with full integration into a variety of web browsers and a radically expanded application programming interface (API) to provide web and mobile access to Zotero libraries. Zotero is a production of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.