The state of Learning Management Systems in Higher Education

Educause has released a report this month: 'The Current Ecosystem of Learning Management Systems in Higher Education: Student, Faculty, and IT Perspectives" 

"On average, LMSs have been in place for eight years, and 15% of U.S. higher education institutions are currently planning to replace their LMS within the next three years."

Google Scholar Profiles new look

Google Scholar Profiles have a new look for the new academic year.
Here are some of the new features, read the entire post.

• Publications are taking the center stage
• Aggregate citation metrics are moving to the sidebar
• "Follow" button is in a more prominent spot
• Printing a clean version of your profile is easier

Latest JCR released, see the top journals in your field!

Thomson Reuters has released its latest Journal Citation Report.

You can access this tool on your library page here.

Here are the top 10 journals by impact factor for the Economics category

1. Journal of Economic Literature  
2. Journal of Finance          
3. Quarterly Journal of Economics
4. Journal of Economic Perspective              
5. Transportation Research part b-methodological
6. Journal of Financial Economics  
7. Journal of Political Economy       
8. Review of Financial Studies        
9. Econometrica   
10. Journal of the European Economic Association

2014 Google Scholar Metrics report released

Last month Google Scholar released its Scholar Metrics report for 2014, link to the Business, Economics & Management area.

"This release is based on citations from all articles that were indexed in Google Scholar as of mid-June 2013 and covers articles published in 2009–2013."

You can filter down the results by 8 broad areas and 253 specific categories. You will see the top 20 publications ordered by their five-year h-index and h-median metrics.

Here is a view for the Finance category

Librarians and Impact

Elsevier's infographic "tells the story of how librarians are working with researchers and the research office to measure research impact and to explore the application of these measurements"

See more 

Journal Subscription Costs

Cambridge mathematician Tim Gowers who had launched the 2012 Elsevier boycott movement digs deeper into the publishing giant business practices and the various ways it charges universities and schools . 

Read his entire blog entry: Elsevier journals — some facts

Source: http://neurodojo.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/cost-of-elsevier-journals-by-university.html 

2013-2014 AAUP Faculty Salary Survey

Another survey on faculty salary in the US.
The table is available on the Chronicle of Higher Education website:

Faculty in Higher Education Salary Survey 2014

CUPAHR, the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, has released its latest faculty salary survey: Salaries of Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty at 4-Year Colleges, 2013-14
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about it and the interactive table on their website.

"Research universities are doctorate-granting institutions that the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has classified as having either high or very high research activity."

The top three disciplines with the highest salaries are respectively Legal Profession, Business and Engineering.

Read the Executive Summary for methodology and a list of participating institutions.

ISNI: International Standard Name Identifier

Author name disambiguation has become increasingly important with the rise of bibliometrics.


This article/interview from the Scholarly Kitchen by Todd Carpenter explains the goal of ISNI: the International Standard Name Identifier initiative and its relationship with the existing ORCID (see this post).

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.