Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research

The scholars comprising journal editorial boards play a critical role in defining the trajectory of knowledge in their field. Nevertheless, studies of editorial board composition remain rare, especially those focusing on journals publishing research in the increasingly globalized fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Using metrics for quantifying the diversity of ecological communities, we quantified international representation on the 1985-2014 editorial boards of 24 environmental biology journals. Over the course of 3 decades, there were 3,827 unique scientists based in 70 countries who served as editors. The size of the editorial community increased over time-the number of editors serving in 2014 was 4-fold greater than in 1985-as did the number of countries in which editors were based. Nevertheless, editors based outside the "Global North" (the group of economically developed countries with high per capita gross domestic product [GDP] that collectively concentrate most global wealth) were extremely rare. Furthermore, 67.18% of all editors were based in either the United States or the United Kingdom. Consequently, geographic diversity-already low in 1985-remained unchanged through 2014. We argue that this limited geographic diversity can detrimentally affect the creativity of scholarship published in journals, the progress and direction of research, the composition of the STEM workforce, and the development of science in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and much of Asia (i.e., the "Global South").

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A persistent lack of international representation on editorial boards in environmental biology.

The disambiguation of author names is an important and challenging task in bibliometrics. We propose an approach that relies on an external source of information for selecting and validating clusters of publications identified through an unsupervised author name disambiguation method. The application of the proposed approach to a random sample of Italian scholars shows encouraging results, with an overall precision, recall, and F-measure of over 96%. The proposed approach can serve as a starting point for large-scale census of publication portfolios for bibliometric analyses at the level of individual researchers.

Collecting large-scale publication data at the level of individual researchers: a practical proposal for author name disambiguation

This paper presents a review of publications that explore the role of editorial boards for scholarly journals. Such studies are rather limited as the role of editorial boards of scientific periodicals has not yet been fully gauged by information experts as a subject of scientometric research. However, the study of the publication activities, as well as the geographic, linguistic, and gender distribution of editorial-board members offers a new perspective on several issues of relevance to scientometrics. Such issues include the assessment of research performance at the country, organizational, or research-group level; research and publication ethics; journal quality; and internationalization of a scientific discipline.

The editorial boards of scientific journals as a subject of scientometric research: A literature Review

In striving for academic relevance and recognition, editors exert a significant influence on a journal's mission and content. We examine how characteristics of editors, in particular the diversity of editorial teams, are related to journal impact. Our sample comprises 2244 editors who were affiliated with 645 volumes of 138 business and management journals. Using multi-level modeling, we relate editorial team characteristics to journal impact as reflected in three widely used measures: Five-year Impact Factor, SCImago Journal Rank, and Google Scholar h5 index. Results show that multiple editorships and editors' affiliation to institutions of high reputation are positively related to journal impact, while the length of editors' terms is negatively associated with impact scores. Surprisingly, we find that diversity of editorial teams in terms of gender and nationality is largely unrelated to journal impact. Our study extends the scarce knowledge on editorial teams and their relevance to journal impact by integrating different strands of literature and studying several demographic factors simultaneously. Results indicate that the editorial team's scientific achievement is more decisive than team diversity in terms of journal impact. The study has useful implications for the composition of editorial teams.

Editorial governance and journal impact: a study of management and business journals

Alternative metrics (altmetrics) as a possible substitute for or addition to the traditional methods of assessing scientific results based on opinions and bibliometric indicators were first proposed in 2010. Since then, metric indicators, primarily those based on accounting for the use and discussion of scientific publications on the Internet, have, on the one hand, found influential advocates among scientists and publishers and, on the other, been met with resistance on the part of equally authoritative participants in the market of scientific publications. Altmetrics are already used actively by the largest publishers; in June 2014, the American National Information Standards Organization developed a draft altmetrics standard. This article presents a review of the existing indicators, describes their target audience, and considers leading companies that develop software products on altmetrics calculation for users of different categories. Altmetrics and citation-based indicators are compared.

http://www.ipgg.sbras.ru/ru/Files/publications/ibc/hras-2015-85-01-26.pdf

Alternative approaches to assessing scientific results

To date, there is no unique accepted and standardized method for identifying journal articles, authors, and other elements of bibliographic metadata, although in recent years a considerable number of identifiers have been developed. The problem of identification becomes particularly urgent when the same information is used in different scientometric and bibliographic databases, when it is necessary to carry out complex data processing with their further integration. The need for unique identifiers outside of a system is a universal requirement. Initiatives to construct identifiers and systems appear regularly in the scientific press; however, they have not achieved the necessary degree of interoperability. This paper presents the general problems that are associated with metadata identifiers of scientific publications, analyzes a number of the existing systems and technologies, and indicates the current initiatives to remove the gap in the area of identification.

The role of unique identifiers in bibliographic information systems

A relatively new method for the detection of text plagiarism is proposed based on a search for original sources with an identical or similar list of references. First of all, this is applied to the most difficult to detect forms of translated plagiarism and the plagiarism of ideas. This method successfully proved itself in test studies of groups of foreign authors and is a continuation of our studies. The peculiarity of the approach that is proposed by the authors is the use of multidisciplinary bibliographic databases rather than full-text databases, which are often unavailable due to the high price of subscriptions under Russian conditions. The advantage of their use is the access to the maximum possible number of article references, which significantly extends the base for the search for originals while analyzing suspicious scientific publications. The step-by-step algorithm for addressing a query to the Web of Science and Scopus databases and analysis of the obtained data can be recommended for implementation into systems of plagiarism detection as an additional component.

On the development of a plagiarism detection model based on citation analysis using a bibliographic database

The topicality of analyzing the publication rate of Russian scientists in international periodicals on Earth sciences, including translated versions of Russian journals, is determined by changes in the assessment criteria of research projects in their financing system, particularly by focusing on the total number of publications. Russian developments in Earth sciences occupy the eighth place in the world. The authors draw attention to the fact that, contrary to the common opinion, the distribution of joint developments is approximately the same in different countries, and, from this point of view, Russian developments equal foreign ones.

http://www.ipgg.sbras.ru/ru/files/publications/ibc/hras-2015-01-20.pdf

V. N. Gureev

Papers

The editorial boards of scientific journals as a subject of scientometric research: A literature Review

Alternative approaches to assessing scientific results

The role of unique identifiers in bibliographic information systems

On the development of a plagiarism detection model based on citation analysis using a bibliographic database

Russian Publications and Journals on Earth Sciences in International Databases