Altmetrics - an overview

Richard Cave, Director of IT and Computer Operations, Public Library of Science has released a paper titled: Overview of the Altmetrics Landscape.

Definition from the Altmetrics website

"Altmetrics is the creation and study of new metrics based on the Social Web for analyzing, and informing scholarship."

AJ Cann via Flickr

Infographic: World's Biggest Data Breaches

The Information is Beautiful site has released an infographic showing the World's Biggest Data Breaches (losses greater than 30,000 records) overtime, click on the bubbles to read more.

Top 10 journals by impact factor - Latest JCR is released

Thomson Reuters released its latest Journal Citation Report (2012 data)

• 10,854 titles appear in the 2013 release of JCR. 
• 379 journals will be posting their first Journal Impact Factor this year. 
• 67 titles were suppressed from this year's release. (methodology used to suppress titles)

"Suppressed titles were found to have anomalous citation patterns resulting in a significant distortion of the Journal Impact Factor, so that the rank does not accurately reflect the journal’s citation performance in the literature." 

Top 10 Journals in Business, Finance by impact:

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

INSEAD community: login here to start using JCR. 

Registry of Research Data Repositories lauched

"The goal of re3data.org is to create a global registry of research data repositories. The registry will cover research data repositories from different academic disciplines. re3data.org will present repositories for the permanent storage and access of data sets to researchers, funding bodies, publishers and scholarly institutions. In the course of this mission re3data.org aims to promote a culture of sharing, increased access and better visibility of research data."

 

UK Survey of Academics

In partnership with the US Ithaka Survey of Academics, JISC and Research Libraries UK, the UK Survey of Academics 2012 has recently been released.

Starting point for research

9 Useful Educational Tools

Ned Potter is an Academic Liaison Librarian at the University of York and has created this great Prezi to suggest 9 educational tools to be used in research or teaching by academic (including Prezi itself).

Read the full article from the LSE blog

THE Global Gender Index

Read the Times Higher Education article on THE Global Gender Index done in conjunction with Thomson Reuters.

From THE article

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)

Google updates its Transparency Report

The latest update reveals more government removal requests than ever before.
From the official blog post:

"...for the seventh time, we’re releasing new numbers showing requests from governments to remove content from our services. From July to December 2012, we received 2,285 government requests to remove 24,179 pieces of content—an increase from the 1,811 requests to remove 18,070 pieces of content that we received during the first half of 2012."

Google Transparency Report

MIT Tech. Review lists 10 Breakthrough Technologies in 2013

MIT 10 Breakthrough Technologies in 2013

"Think of the most frustrating, intractable, or simply annoying problems you can imagine. Now think about what technology is doing to fix them. That’s what we did in coming up with our annual list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies. "