Academic publishers remove fake papers from journals

Following revelations from French researcher Cyril Labbé, well-known editors such as IEEE or Springer had to remove conference proceeding papers created using SCIgen, a MIT-developed tool that creates computer-generated academic articles.

Read article in Nature: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers. Cyril Labbé has developed a tool to help identify papers authored via SCIen.

ShareLaTeX now open source

LaTeX users may already be using the ShareLaTex tool a web-based real-time collaborative LaTeX editor.

ShareLaTex is now open source, the authors hope that by opening up the code to all, requests for new features will be met faster than what their current resources allow.

One year with MOOCs, research findings from the first 17 edX classes

Courtesy of: MOOCs.com

Professors from MIT and Harvard report on their first year in MOOCs and the edX project: 

MITx working papers
HarvardX Working Papers

• There were 841,687 registrations from 597,692 unique users
• Only 5 percent earned a certificate of completion.
• One-third of users never viewed any course materials.
• More than half of those who completed at least half of the course went on to earn a certificate of completion

See also:
Education Week article from one of the authors, 

The First Year of edX: Research Findings to Inform Online Learning

Journal ranking by Scopus

The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a "portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus database."

It offers finer levels of business and management categories than the - more well-known - Journal Citation Report by ISI Web of Knowledge.

Methodology

Example for top 5 journals in

Subject Area: Business Management & Accounting

Subject Category: Organizational Behavior and Human Resources Management 

SCImago. (2007). SJR — SCImago Journal & Country Rank.

Retrieved January 27, 2014, from http://www.scimagojr.com

Hat tip to The University of Manchester Library Business Research Plus blog.

2014 Updated List of Predatory Publishers

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

Jeffrey Beall, Scholarly Initiatives Librarian and Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Denver, has released the 2014 list of predatory publishers and questionable journals.

Reproduced with permission below, the table shows a significant growth in number:

Year	Number of predatory publishers
2011	18
2012	23
2013	225
2014	477

Citing data

A few links on citing data in research:

• Why cite data?
• Why not cite data?
• Out of Cite, Out of Mind: The Current State of Practice, Policy, and Technology for the Citation of Data
• Harvard's Guide to Citing your Data.

Can tweets really predict citations?

In contrast with the article 'Can tweets predict citations' a recent study finds very little correlation between the number of tweets received by articles in the biomedical literature and later citation counts obtained from more traditional methods.
Tweeting biomedicine: An analysis of tweets and citations in the biomedical literature

See also, Nature's article:
Twitter buzz about papers does not mean citations later

Information is Beautiful - 2013 awards

The Kantar Information is Beautiful site has posted its winners for 2013

Google Scholar Library

A new initiative from Scholar:

"Google Scholar library is your personal collection of articles. You can save articles right off the search page, organize them by topic, and use the power of Scholar search to quickly find just the one you want "

Read this page detailed help to get started.
This could potentially become a threat to free citation management software such as Zotero and Mendeley as mentioned in a post from 'The Distant Librarian' .

Google Book Scanning Project is Fair!

Big success for the Google Book project and the libraries involved in this initiative. Yesterday a judge ruled that the project did not break any fair use regulations and dismissed the lawsuit.

Access full text of the ruling here, thanks to Karen Coyle's blog entry.