Related papers: Reflexive Behaviour: How publication pressure affe…
Science is a fundamental human activity and we trust its results because it has several error-correcting mechanisms. Its is subject to experimental tests that are replicated by independent parts. Given the huge amount of information…
Overconfidence is a prevalent problem and particularly consequential in its relation with scientific knowledge: being unaware of one`s own ignorance can affect behaviours and threaten public policies and health. We introduce both analytical…
The exponentially growing number of scientific papers stimulates a discussion on the interplay between quantity and quality in science. In particular, one may wonder which publication strategy may offer more chances of success: publishing…
The volume of scientific manuscripts is growing faster than the capacity to evaluate them, yet the institutions that govern peer review have remained largely unchanged. The result is a widening mismatch: reviewer scarcity, noisier…
A widely used measure of scientific impact is citations. However, due to their heavy-tailed distribution, citations are fundamentally difficult to predict. Instead, to characterize scientific impact, we address two analogous questions asked…
Is more always better? We address this question in the context of bibliometric indices that aim to assess the scientific impact of individual researchers by counting their number of highly cited publications. We propose a simple model in…
Authorship and citation practices evolve with time and differ by academic discipline. As such, indicators of research productivity based on citation records are naturally subject to historical and disciplinary effects. We observe these…
Despite enormous efforts devoted to understand the characteristics and impacts of retracted papers, little is known about the mechanisms underlying the dynamics of their harm and the dynamics of its propagation. Here, we propose a…
The impact of scientific publications has traditionally been expressed in terms of citation counts. However, scientific activity has moved online over the past decade. To better capture scientific impact in the digital era, a variety of new…
As more scholarly content is born digital or converted to a digital format, digital libraries are becoming increasingly vital to researchers seeking to leverage scholarly big data for scientific discovery. Although scholarly products are…
The ability to activate and manage effective collaborations is becoming an increasingly important criteria in policies on academic career advancement. The rise of such policies leads to development of indicators that permit measurement of…
The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a periodic UK-wide assessment of the quality of published research in universities. The most recent REF was in 2014, and the next will be in 2021. The published results of REF2014 include a…
In research policy, effective measures that lead to improvements in the generation of knowledge must be based on reliable methods of research assessment, but for many countries and institutions this is not the case. Publication and citation…
Evaluating and comparing the academic performance of a journal, a researcher or a single paper has long remained a critical, necessary but also controversial issue. Most of existing metrics invalidate comparison across different fields of…
We approach productivity in science in a longitudinal fashion: We track careers over time, up to 40 years. We first allocate scientists to decile-based publishing productivity classes, from the bottom 10% to the top 10%. Then, we seek…
We describe an implementation of a semi-automated review system for the astrophysics literature. Registered users identify names under which they publish, and provide scores for individual papers of their choosing. Scores are held…
Peer review is an integral component of contemporary science. While peer review focuses attention on promising and interesting science, it also encourages scientists to pursue some questions at the expense of others. Here, we use ideas from…
Context: The retraction of research papers, for whatever reason, is a growing phenomenon. However, although retracted paper information is publicly available via publishers, it is somewhat distributed and inconsistent. Objective: The aim is…
AI alignment relies on annotator judgments, yet annotation pipelines often treat annotators as interchangeable, obscuring how their social position shapes annotation. We introduce reflexive annotating as a probe that invites crowd workers…
What factors affect a scientist's choice of research problem? Qualitative research in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science suggests that this choice is shaped by an "essential tension" between the professional demand for…