Publications, Volume 7, Issue 1 (March 2019) – 22 articles

Qualitative research involves scientific narratives and the analysis and interpretation of textual or numerical data (or both), mostly from conversations and discussions, to uncover meaningful patterns that describe a particular phenomenon. It is important to know other ways of framing and explaining these nuanced scientific narratives so that they can convey scientific knowledge. A qualitative hypothesis can play this role. The testing of hypotheses in qualitative research—which does not strictly mean the same thing as testing of hypotheses in quantitative research—always comes with challenges that provoke concerns. The questions that scholars, especially undergraduate and postgraduate students, have had to deal with are: Is it possible to “test” hypotheses using a qualitative method? If it is possible, how can this be done? This study deconstructs the concept, notion, and use of the hypotheses. It presents the “how-to” aspect of hypothesising (in qualitative research and inquiries) by using creative diagramming within post-positivist research, and also contributes to the literature on visual communication and qualitative research. The study is a guide to early career scholars (including undergraduate and post-graduate students) on how to formulate and “test” hypotheses qualitatively using visual or diagrammatical approaches. Full article

Many Korean scholars rely on language professionals for preparing English manuscripts. So far, little has been reported on how Korean scholars utilize them and how they perceive various types of help received. This study examines how Korean scholars utilize for-pay editors and translators, and how they perceive various types of textual modifications incurred in the process, based on the data obtained through a survey completed by 88 Korean faculty from three universities. Half of the participants received proofreading help from for-pay editors, and fewer participants received help with translation. They held widely differing views on ethicality concerning scenarios that involved global- and content-level editing; none of the help described was perceived as clearly unethical. This paper argues that as the academic communities benefit from the knowledge and insights created through research conducted by scholars across the world, it is necessary to establish proper boundaries of writing help. Full article

The vast majority of highly ranked academic journals use English as the means of communication. That means that academics who wish to have their research internationally recognised need to publish in English. For those who are not native speakers of English (non-anglophone), this requirement is challenging. Research indicates that these authors are at a distinct disadvantage, and that to a certain extent, this disadvantage may be exacerbated by the attitudes of reviewers. This study sought to investigate the attitudes of journal reviewers who are native speakers of English (anglophone). Eight academics who regularly review for international journals took part in semistructured interviews about their attitudes towards the kind of English they believe should be used in articles they would recommend for publication. It appears that there is a bias against language that differs from native speaker use, and that authors who employ nonstandard English might well be regarded negatively, regardless of the merits of their research. It is important, therefore, that the issue of what is regarded as appropriate English for international journals enjoys a great deal more careful consideration. Full article

This writing utilizes the case study of a specific project, namely adopting a Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) based on open source technologies at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), to describe the thought process, which along the way led to the discovery of Linked Data and more general technology development practices based on community participation. In order to better replicate such a thought process and its evolution into a broader strategy that goes beyond technology, this paper will begin by describing the problem that the Collection IT team at AIC had been initially tasked to resolve, and its technical implementation. After that, the paper will treat the strategic shift of resources from a self-contained production and review cycle toward an exchange-based economy. The challenges, both external and internal, posed by this change will be addressed. All the while, the paper will highlight perspectives and challenges related to the museum sector, and the efforts of AIC to adopt views and methodologies that have traditionally been associated with the library world. A section is dedicated to ongoing efforts of the same nature among museums. Full article

While journal articles are still considered the most important sources of scholarly reading, libraries may no longer have a monopoly on providing discovery and access. Many other sources of scholarly information are available to readers. This international study examines how researchers discover, read, and use scholarly literature for their work. Respondents in 2018 report an average of almost 20 article readings a month and there are still significant differences found in the reading and use of scholarly literature by discipline and geographical location, consistent with the earlier studies. Researchers show they are willing to change or adopt new strategies to discover and obtain articles. Full article

Indiana University was an early adopter of the Fedora repository, developing it as a home for heterogeneous digital library content from a variety of collections with unique content models. After joining the Hydra Project, now known as Samvera, in 2012, development progressed on a variety of applications that formed the foundation for digital library services using the Fedora 4 repository. These experiences have shaped migration planning to move from Fedora 3 to Fedora 4 for this large and inclusive set of digital content. Moving to Fedora 4 is not just a repository change; it is an ecosystem shift. End user interfaces for access, management systems for collection managers, and data structures are all impacted. This article shares what Indiana University has learned about migrating to Fedora 4 to help others work through their own migration considerations. This article is also meant to inspire the Fedora repository development community to offer ways to further ease migration work, sustaining Fedora users moving forward, and inviting new Fedora users to try the software and become involved in the community. Full article

Scientific publishing is experiencing unprecedented growth in terms of outputs across all fields. Inevitably this creates pressure throughout the system on a number of entities. One key element is represented by peer-reviewers, whose demand increases at an even higher pace than that of publications, since more than one reviewer per paper is needed and not all papers that get reviewed get published. The relatively recent Publons platform allows for unprecedented insight into the usual ‘blindness’ of the peer-review system. At a time where the world’s top peer-reviewers are announced and celebrated, we have taken a step back in order to attempt a partial mapping of their profiles to identify trends and key dimensions of this community of ‘super-reviewers’. This commentary focuses necessarily on a limited sample due to manual processing of data, which needs to be done within a single day for the type of information we seek. In investigating the numbers of performed reviews vs. academic citations, our analysis suggests that most reviews are carried out by relatively inexperienced academics. For some of these early career academics, peer-reviewing seems to be the only activity they engage with, given the high number of reviews performed (e.g., three manuscripts per day) and the lack of outputs (zero academic papers and citations in some cases). Additionally, the world’s top researchers (i.e., highly-cited researchers) are understandably busy with research activities and therefore far less active in peer-reviewing. Lastly, there seems to be an uneven distribution at a national level between scientific outputs (e.g., publications) and reviews performed. Our analysis contributes to the ongoing global discourse on the health of scientific peer-review, and it raises some important questions for further discussion. Full article

Collecting, integrating, storing and analyzing data in a database system is nothing new in itself. To introduce a current research information system (CRIS) means that scientific institutions must provide the required information on their research activities and research results at a high quality. A one-time cleanup is not sufficient; data must be continuously curated and maintained. Some data errors (such as missing values, spelling errors, inaccurate data, incorrect formatting, inconsistencies, etc.) can be traced across different data sources and are difficult to find. Small mistakes can make data unusable, and corrupted data can have serious consequences. The sooner quality issues are identified and remedied, the better. For this reason, new techniques and methods of data cleansing and data monitoring are required to ensure data quality and its measurability in the long term. This paper examines data quality issues in current research information systems and introduces new techniques and methods of data cleansing and data monitoring with which organizations can guarantee the quality of their data. Full article

An increasing number of scientific publications are created in open and transparent peer review models: a submission is published first, and then reviewers are invited, or a submission is reviewed in a closed environment but then these reviews are published with the final article, or combinations of these. Reasons for open peer review include giving better credit to reviewers, and enabling readers to better appraise the quality of a publication. In most cases, the full, unstructured text of an open review is published next to the full, unstructured text of the article reviewed. This approach prevents human readers from getting a quick impression of the quality of parts of an article, and it does not easily support secondary exploitation, e.g., for scientometrics on reviews. While document formats have been proposed for publishing structured articles including reviews, integrated tool support for entire open peer review workflows resulting in such documents is still scarce. We present AR-Annotator, the Automatic Article and Review Annotator which employs a semantic information model of an article and its reviews, using semantic markup and unique identifiers for all entities of interest. The fine-grained article structure is not only exposed to authors and reviewers but also preserved in the published version. We publish articles and their reviews in a Linked Data representation and thus maximise their reusability by third party applications. We demonstrate this reusability by running quality-related queries against the structured representation of articles and their reviews. Full article

Citizen science (CS) aims primarily to create a new scientific culture able to improve upon the triple interaction between science, society, and policy in the dual pursuit of more democratic research and decision-making informed by sound evidence. It is both an aim and an enabler of open science (OS), to which it contributes by involving citizens in research and encouraging participation in the generation of new knowledge. This study analyses scientific output on CS using bibliometric techniques and Web of Science (WoS) data. Co-occurrence maps are formulated to define subject clusters as background for an analysis of the impact of each on social media. Four clusters are identified: HEALTH, BIO, GEO and PUBLIC. The profiles for the four clusters are observed to be fairly similar, although BIO and HEALTH are mentioned more frequently in blogposts and tweets and BIO and PUBLIC in Facebook and newsfeeds. The findings also show that output in the area has grown since 2010, with a larger proportion of papers (66%) mentioned in social media than reported in other studies. The percentage of open access documents (30.7%) is likewise higher than the overall mean for all areas. Full article

Research is rarely created for private use; researchers publish their work so that others can read and use it, to advance the collective understanding of a field and impact people’s lives. Yet traditional approaches to scholarship, which emphasize publication in subscription-based rather than open access journals, inhibit not only the dissemination of research but also its usefulness, particularly outside of academia. Across all fields, scholars, educators, and members of the public benefit from scholarship which is easily accessible. Open science and public, social scholarship can break down these barriers to accessibility and utility. In this age which calls for a more informed citizenry, the use of social media to share and promote discussion of research could change not only the nature of scholarly communication but also the nature of scholarship and scholars’ roles. In this conceptual article, we argue that practicing public, social scholarship and increasing the use of social media to promote scholarship are the civic responsibility of citizen-scholars, so that research becomes more widely accessible, shareable, and usable in the public sphere. Full article

The debate about ‘linguistic injustice’ centers on whether or not English as an additional language (EAL) writers face challenges in writing academically that are qualitatively different from those of novice academic writers irrespective of language background. This study aims to add nuance to this debate by looking at range of writers (from novice to expert) within an interdisciplinary social science research institute in Norway in order to investigate the mediating role of the institutional context. Using an ethnographic approach with an academic literacies perspective, it examines the challenges these writers face and discusses them in light of tensions between identity and institutional environment. It argues that the high degree of immersion in English causes ‘situated multilingualism’, where their ability to write about their topic in English surpasses their ability to write about it in Norwegian. Nonetheless, even the expert writers, particularly those in disciplines that value a unique authorial voice, demonstrated insecurity and lack of ownership to their writing in English. Moreover, the pressure to also sometimes write in Norwegian represented an additional site of negotiation not faced by their non-Norwegian counterparts. This suggests that the challenges EAL writers face are not determined by their language background alone, but also by their institutional environment—including the pressure to publish ‘internationally’, the amount of writing expected, and their immersion in English. Full article

In the landscape of Open Science, Open Data (OD) plays a crucial role as data are one of the most basic components of research, despite their diverse formats across scientific disciplines. Opening up data is a recent concern for policy makers and researchers, as the basis for good Open Science practices. The common factor underlying these new practices—the relevance of promoting Open Data circulation and reuse—is mostly a social form of knowledge sharing and construction. However, while data sharing is being strongly promoted by policy making and is becoming a frequent practice in some disciplinary fields, Open Data sharing is much less developed in Social Sciences and in educational research. In this study, practices of OD publication and sharing in the field of Educational Technology are explored. The aim is to investigate Open Data sharing in a selection of Open Data repositories, as well as in the academic social network site ResearchGate. The 23 Open Datasets selected across five OD platforms were analysed in terms of (a) the metrics offered by the platforms and the affordances for social activity; (b) the type of OD published; (c) the FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) data principles compliance; and (d) the extent of presence and related social activity on ResearchGate. The results show a very low social activity in the platforms and very few correspondences in ResearchGate that highlight a limited social life surrounding Open Datasets. Future research perspectives as well as limitations of the study are interpreted in the discussion. Full article

Genre pedagogy plays an important role in helping graduate students to enter the discourse community of their fields. Although familiarity with research genres benefits graduate students, few studies have explored the influences of instruction on learners’ subsequent generic practices. In this study, we describe the genre-based approach used in a bilingual (English and Spanish) Applied Linguistics graduate course, which aimed to enhance students’ research genre awareness to allow them to be better able to confront their own work as investigators. The description of the course is followed by a study to determine if and how a research article discourse analysis task influenced the students’ academic writing in their own papers. Our research question was the following: To what extent can course instruction influence students’ academic writing? The study entails a survey to elicit students’ perspectives on the influence of the course and its tasks on their academic writing, as well as teachers’ comments on the students’ written work. Although learning to do research at the graduate level requires a broad range of competencies that go beyond genre awareness, the findings from the survey confirmed the positive effects of genre knowledge gains in accomplishing further research goals. Full article

This article analyzes the discourse of what have been termed ‘predatory publishers’, with a corpus of emails sent to scholars by hitherto unknown publishers. Equipped with sociolinguistic and discourse analytic tools, we argue that the interpretation of these texts as spam or as legitimate messages may not be as straightforward an operation as one may initially believe. We suggest that English L2 scholars might potentially be more affected by publishers who engage in these email practices in several ways, which we identify and discuss. However, we argue that examining academic inequalities in scholarly publishing based exclusively on the native/non-native English speaker divide might not be sufficient, nor may it be enough to simply raise awareness about such publishers. Instead, we argue in favor of a more sociologically informed analysis of academic publishing, something that we see as a necessary first step if we wish to enhance more democratic means of access to key resources in publishing. Full article

Digital scholarship and electronic publishing within scholarly communities change when metrics and open infrastructures take center stage for measuring research impact. In scholarly communication, the growth of preprint repositories as a new model of scholarly publishing over the last three decades has been one of the major developments. As it unfolds, the landscape of scholarly communication is transitioning—with much being privatized as it is made open—and turning towards alternative metrics, such as social media attention, author-level, and article-level metrics. Moreover, the granularity of evaluating research impact through new metrics and social media changes the objective standards of evaluating research performance. Using preprint repositories as a case study, this article situates them in a scholarly web, examining their salient features, benefits, and futures. Moves towards scholarly web development and publishing on the semantic and social web with open infrastructures, citations, and alternative metrics—how preprints advance building the web as data—is discussed. We determine that this will viably demonstrate new metrics and, by enhancing research publishing tools in the scholarly commons, facilitate various communities of practice. However, for preprint repositories to be sustainable, scholarly communities and funding agencies should support continued investment in open knowledge, alternative metrics development, and open infrastructures in scholarly publishing. Full article

While output and impact assessments were initially at the forefront of institutional research evaluations, efficiency measurements have become popular in recent years. Research efficiency is measured by indicators that relate research output to input. The additional consideration of research input in research evaluation is obvious, since the output depends on the input. The present study is based on a comprehensive dataset with input and output data for 50 US universities. As input, we used research expenses, and as output the number of highly-cited papers. We employed Data Efficiency Analysis (DEA), Free Disposal Hull (FDH) and two more robust models: the order-m and order-α approaches. The results of the DEA and FDH analysis show that Harvard University and Boston College can be called especially efficient compared to the other universities. While the strength of Harvard University lies in its high output of highly-cited papers, the strength of Boston College is its small input. In the order-α and order-m frameworks, Harvard University remains efficient, but Boston College becomes super-efficient. We produced university rankings based on adjusted efficiency scores (subsequent to regression analyses), in which single covariates (e.g., the disciplinary profile) are held constant. Full article

Due to the globalisation of the economy, migratory flows have increased significantly. Unaccompanied foreign minors have become a growing problem in recent years. The objective of this study is to make an analysis from a bibliometric point of view and to identify the main research trends concerning this topic by clusters identification. It has been observed that, above all, there are two main subjects that dominate the scientific literature in this field, the social sciences and medicine. The first one is the clearest in terms of legal and political implications, but the second one is related to the field of determining the age of minors by means of diagnostic tests. As to clusters, the following have been identified: First as a refugee–asylum seeker, second as a refugees–psychology, third as migration, fourth as age determination, and fifth as health care. Finally, the following temporal evolution of the issues dealt with in relation to unaccompanied minors has been observed: War, stress, migration, immigration, risk factors, health, legal aspects and, more recently, vaccination or age determination. Full article

The aim of this study was to investigate the opinion of authors on the overall quality and effectiveness of reviewers’ contributions to reviewed papers. We employed an on-line survey of thirteen journals which publish articles in the field of life, social or technological sciences. Responses received from 193 authors were analysed using a mixed-effects model in order to determine factors deemed the most important in the authors’ evaluation of the reviewers. Qualitative content analysis of the responses to open questions was performed as well. The mixed-effects model revealed that the authors’ assessment of the competence of referees strongly depended on the final editorial decision and that the speed of the review process was influential as well. In Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) analysis on seven questions detailing authors’ opinions, perception of review speed remained a significant predictor of the assessment. In addition, both the perceived competence and helpfulness of the reviewers significantly and positively affected the authors’ evaluation. New models were used to re-check the value of these two factors and it was confirmed that the assessment of the competence of reviewers strongly depended on the final editorial decision. Full article