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.

Social Media for Teaching & Learning - Pearson report 2013

Pearson has released its 2013 Social Media in Higher Education survey [free registration required]

Infographic

Open Access Week - Oct 21- 27 2013.

Open Access Week "a global event now entering its sixth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they've learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research."

Publishers participation:

• Oxford 
• SAGE 
• Taylor & Francis 

HBR's fee policy questioned

Found on Flickr - CC

Joshua Gans, chaired professor at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto questions whether changes to Harvard Business Review article fee policy should impact their participation to the FT's business school rankings.

While this is a long shot - FT has already said that they would keep HBR on the list of publications used for their ranking - the article raises good questions about access to research content.

Links to his original post, his article in FT and HBR's answer are available from his Digitopoly blog.

Update: Librarians chime in via Chris Flegg's [Bodleian Business Librarian at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford] article in the Financial Times (Oct. 23, 2013):
Access to research comes at a price

Open Access and Peer Review issues

John Bohannon, journalist at Science, sent a fake research paper under a fake name to several open access peer review journals. He reports on the experiment in Science: Who's Afraid of Peer Review  (INSEAD community only)

CREDIT: C. SMITH/SCIENCE

Unfortunately "Acceptance was the norm, not the exception. The paper was accepted by journals hosted by industry titans Sage and Elsevier. The paper was accepted by journals published by prestigious academic institutions such as Kobe University in Japan. It was accepted by scholarly society journals. It was even accepted by journals for which the paper's topic was utterly inappropriate, such as the Journal of Experimental & Clinical Assisted Reproduction."

Some critique the paper for lack if its own academic rigor in not using a control group of subscription based journals to compare the acceptance/rejection rate, read: 

Open Access “Sting” Reveals Deception, Missed Opportunities .

Update Oct. 8, 2013: Read more reactions here or here

edX+Google = mooc.org

A new alliance in the ever growing field of MOOCs was announced on the Google Research blog:
The platform mooc.org is set to go live in the first half of 2014.

Today, Google will begin working with edX as a contributor to the open source platform, Open edX. We are taking our learnings from Course Builder and applying them to Open edX to further innovate on an open source MOOC platform. We look forward to contributing to edX’s new site, MOOC.org, a new service for online learning which will allow any academic institution, business and individual to create and host online courses.

edX press release. 

Google Scholar Metrics

The 2013 version of Scholar Metrics was released on July 24, 2013. It covers articles published between 2008 and 2012.

'Scholar Metrics currently cover articles published between 2008 and 2012, both inclusive. The metrics are based on citations from all articles that were indexed in Google Scholar in July 2013. This also includes citations from articles that are not themselves covered by Scholar Metrics.'

More information... 

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. "

The National Digital Public Library is now live

Launched on April 18, 2013 the Digital Public Library of America aims to "make the holdings of America’s research libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans—and eventually to everyone in the world—online and free of charge" .

This ambitious and long time in the making project (see this post), is discussed at length by Robert Darnton, main leader of the initiative and Professor and University Librarian at Harvard, in this NY Review of Books article.

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.

Faculty Survey on Research & Teaching Practices

The Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey focused on research and teaching practices broadly, as well as the dissemination, collecting, discovery, and access, of research and teaching materials.

Download PDF Report

Major topics covered by the survey include:

• Research processes
• Teaching practices: 
• Scholarly communications:
• The library: 
• Scholarly societies

From Academia to Society: the Commercialization of Research

Science article: The Many Ways of Making Academic Research Pay Off

Research universities are under growing pressure to play a more active, entrepreneurial role in commercial innovation. They increasingly regard tech transfer as a prerequisite for luring top faculty members and students, raising research funds, and potentially cashing in on lucrative inventions. But efforts to turn universities into commercial hothouses often don't succeed: Many advise schools to focus instead on "knowledge transfer"—helping society benefit from the discoveries and skills of faculty members and students without focusing just on finances. 

Science,15 Feb. 2013,vol 339, issue 6121.

Business Schools and Big Data

Two articles from the FT discuss potential uses of big data by business schools:

1. Business schools’ big data revolution 
2. Business schools should embrace big data 

Ebook Trends in 2013

E book prices continue to fall:

In the past few months, pricing of ebooks and issues of competition are coming into sharper focus. Changes are coming much faster in the publishing world today—prices for titles are dropping and we are seeing the development of new models and channels for publishing, distribution, and sales.

Read full article by N. K. Herther.

Taken from http://goo.gl/D0QAY   

9 Facts about Top Journals in Economics

Two UC Berkeley researchers ( David Card & Stefano DellaVigna ) have released this NBER paper: 

Nine Facts about Top Journals in Economics.

"How has publishing in top economics journals changed since 1970? Using a data set that combines information on all articles published in the top-5 journals from 1970 to 2012 with their Google Scholar citations, we identify nine key trends."

170 billion tweets archived

The Library of Congress has "an archive of approximately 170 billion tweets and growing. The volume of tweets the Library receives each day has grown from 140 million beginning in February 2011 to nearly half a billion tweets each day as of October 2012."

Click to view a a white paper [PDF] that summarizes the Library’s work to date and outlines present-day progress and challenges.