Related papers: On the rules of science game
This article offers a personal perspective on the current state of academic publishing, and posits that the scientific community is beset with journals that contribute little valuable knowledge, overload the community's capacity for…
Percentiles have been established in bibliometrics as an important alternative to mean-based indicators for obtaining a normalized citation impact of publications. Percentiles have a number of advantages over standard bibliometric…
For a variety of inter-related cultural, organizational, and political reasons, progress in climate science and the actual solution of scientific problems in this field have moved at a much slower rate than would normally be possible. Not…
Impact of science is one of the most important topics in scientometrics. Recent developments show a fundamental change in impact measurements from impact on science to impact on society. Since impact measurement is currently in a state of…
The Brier score is a widely used metric evaluating overall performance of probabilistic predictions for binary outcomes in clinical research. However, its interpretation can be complex, as it does not align with commonly taught concepts in…
Bibliometrics plays an increasingly important role in research evaluation. However, no gold standard exists for a set of reliable and valid (field-normalized) impact indicators in research evaluation. This opinion paper recommends that…
The web-based microblogging system Twitter is a very popular altmetrics source for measuring the broader impact of science. In this case study, we demonstrate how problematic the use of Twitter data for research evaluation can be, even…
We discuss what hampers the rate of scientific progress in our exponentially growing world. The rapid increase in technologies leaves the growth of research result metrics far behind. The reason for this lies in the education of astronomers…
Online bibliographic databases have enabled new research through which bibliographic records are analyzed as data about science. Within these records, the acknowledgements sections of papers are often used to draw conclusions about funding…
Book reviews play important roles in scholarly communication especially in arts and humanities disciplines. By using Web of Science's Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index,…
"We risk sliding down toward the standards where the validity of action is decided by whether one can get away with it." (P. Doty) "We do not 'risk' sliding down toward such standards; we have reached them." (S. Lang) This is an essay in…
Research misconduct and frauds pollute the scientific literature. Honest errors and malevolent data fabrication, image manipulation, journal hijacking, and plagiarism passed peer review unnoticed. Problematic papers deceive readers, authors…
Publication bias arises whenever the probability that a study is published depends on the statistical significance of its results. This bias, often called the file-drawer effect since the unpublished results are imagined to be tucked away…
Citations are essential for recognizing scientific contributions, yet citation behavior is shaped by more than just relevance or quality. We analyzed approximately 255,000 refereed astronomy articles published between 2000 and 2025 to…
The impact of individual scientists is commonly quantified using citation-based measures. The most common such measure is the h-index. A scientist's h-index affects hiring, promotion, and funding decisions, and thus shapes the progress of…
In recent years, evaluation of the quality of academic research has become an increasingly important and influential business. It determines, often to a large extent, the amount of research funding flowing into universities and similar…
The standard assumptions that underlie many conceptual and quantitative frameworks do not hold for many complex physical, biological, and social systems. Complex systems science clarifies when and why such assumptions fail and provides…
We describe various errors in the mathematical literature, and consider how some of them might have been avoided, or at least detected at an earlier stage, using tools such as Maple or Sage. Our examples are drawn from three broad…
The current system of scholarly publishing is often criticized for being slow, expensive, and not transparent. The rise of open access publishing as part of open science tenets, promoting transparency and collaboration, together with calls…
Bibliometric indicators, citation counts and/or download counts are increasingly being used to inform personnel decisions such as hiring or promotions. These statistics are very often misused. Here we provide a guide to the factors which…