2014 Nobel prizes predictions from Thomson Reuters

The first 2014 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medecine will be announced shortly.

Like every year Thomson Reuters uses its citation analysis tools to predict the winners. Click for the press release and full list.

Click here for the methodology.

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.

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.