Announcements
5 March 2024
Interview with the Winners of the Publications 2022 Best Paper Award for 10th Anniversary
The Publications 2022 Best Paper Award for 10th Anniversary has been granted to the following paper:
“Deep Impact: A Study on the Impact of Data Papers and Datasets in the Humanities and Social Sciences”
by Barbara McGillivray, Paola Marongiu, Nilo Pedrazzini, Marton Ribary, Mandy Wigdorowitz and Eleonora Zordan
Publications 2022, 10(4), 39; doi:10.3390/publications10040039
Author Introduction
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Barbara McGillivray is a lecturer in Digital Humanities and Cultural Computation at King’s College London, UK. Her research focuses on computational models for studying language change. She obtained her Ph.D. in computational linguistics from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 2010. She has worked in academic publishing at Oxford University Press and as a data scientist at Springer Nature. Since 2019, she has been the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Open Humanities Data. |
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Paola Marongiu is a Ph.D. student in linguistics at the University of Neuchâtel, Institut des sciences du langage (ISLa), Switzerland. Her research interests include the study of semantics, with a focus on modality and lexical semantic change, corpus linguistics, and computational linguistics for historical languages. In her Ph.D. thesis, she combines quantitative and qualitative methods to study the co-occurrence of modal markers in a Latin corpus. She is the lead social media editor for the Journal of Open Humanities Data. Email: [email protected] |
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Nilo Pedrazzini is a Turing Research Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute (London, UK). He obtained a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Oxford, UK, and specializes in corpus linguistics, language typology, and the syntax–semantics interface, focusing on the computational modeling and statistical analysis of historical languages. He is a Fellow at RROx, the Oxford network of the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN). Email: [email protected] |
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Marton Ribary is a lecturer in Law at Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL), UK, where his research focuses on legal reasoning. He works with natural language processing (NLP) and algorithmic rule modeling methods applied to historical (Roman and Rabbinic) as well as modern (English) texts in private law. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Open Humanities Data. Email: [email protected] |
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Mandy Wigdorowitz is an open research community manager at the University of Cambridge, UK, affiliated researcher in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, and Bye-Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. She obtained a Ph.D. in theoretical and applied linguistics from the University of Cambridge in 2022 and is a registered research psychologist with the Health Professions Council of South Africa. Her research focuses on understanding language and interaction from social, cognitive, and psychological perspectives. She is an associate editor for the Journal of Open Humanities Data. Email: [email protected] |
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Eleonora Zordan is a librarian at BAUM—Arts and Humanities Library at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy. Her role focuses on cultural heritage preservation, valorization, digitalization and the organization and accessibility of the library's resources. She obtained an M.A. degree in digital and public humanities from the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. She is an editorial assistant for the Journal of Open Humanities Data. Email: [email protected] |
The following is a short interview with the authors:
1. Could you please introduce the main research included in this article and the importance and impact of this research?
Our paper presents an analysis of the current state of the art concerning data journals for the humanities. In order to do this, we focus on two existing journals that publish data papers for the humanities, i.e., the Journal of Open Humanities Data (JOHD) and the Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences (RDJ). We studied the impact of the publication of data papers on the associated research papers and deposited dataset by using citation counts, altmetrics, views, downloads, and analytics from Twitter (now X).
We think that the research presented in this paper is extremely relevant to the field of data publishing as it shows encouraging results that highlight the benefits of data papers and open data publishing for both the authors and the research community. Our findings show that publishing a data paper improves the visibility of both the dataset described in the data paper and the research paper derived from the dataset itself. Moreover, by studying the impact of our Twitter activity, especially our #showmeyourdata campaign, on the data papers published by JOHD, we found that combining the publication of data papers with social media activities aimed at raising awareness around the topic of open data publishing leads to higher visibility of both the papers and the associated datasets.
2. How do you think open access impacts authors?
Open access benefits authors significantly by expanding the visibility and accessibility of their work. It allows authors to reach a larger audience because their research is freely available to the public. This can increase the citation and effect of their work, while also encouraging collaboration and information exchange. Furthermore, open access fosters inclusion by allowing readers who do not have access to subscription-based publications to benefit from and build on the authors' contributions.
3. Do you have any advice or experience that you would like to share with young researchers who want to pursue research in this field?
Our advice is to be brave. It is easy to lose your confidence, especially at the beginning of your career, but if you have a bold idea, try and pursue it, in spite of any challenges you encounter. Pursuing interdisciplinary research is particularly challenging, because it faces traditional disciplinary barriers, but it’s definitely worthwhile!
4. How do you know about Publications and why did you choose to publish this paper in Publications?
We submitted the paper to Publications since the Special Issue “Research Data and Data Papers” aligned well with the scope of our paper.
5. How was your experience submitting to Publications?
Our experience submitting to Publications has been extremely positive. The reviews definitely helped us improve the paper. The process was quick, and the editorial team was very responsive and helpful.
