By Ruth A. Pagell*
- What’s in a name? (Appendix A)
- Who is the most cited researcher in Citation Topic Bibliometrics? (Appendix B)
- What is the search strategy used in Scopus for SDG 5, Gender Quality? (Appendix C)
(10 Mar 2021) I am fortunate to have access to many of the bibliometric products from Clarivate and Elsevier. It allows me to do research for my articles, keep up to date on the functionality of the website, and analyze the raw data that contributes to the rankings. Even without access to these products, it is useful for researchers to know about these research tools. This article also includes updates to Ruth’s Rankings for Australia, Japan, India, and business school rankings.
CLARIVATETM, formerly Clarivate Analytics (See Appendix A for official name change).
1 — Web of Science TM (WOS)
Clarivate began making changes to Web of Science in November 2020 and will be continuing through the summer of 2021. A beta site is currently available along with traditional WOS.
The new platform at this time, includes reloads of existing capabilities. Here is the timeline for the upgrades.
One addition is the inclusion of icons representing filters. This open access review article is a highly cited hot paper, and has associated data:
EXAMPLE 1: New Web of Science display with filters
2 — Data Citation Index was launched in 2012 with descriptive records. It now provides links to the associated data. These may be large datasets that require expanded storage and expertise to access and manipulate.
Data Citation Index – Descriptive document
3 — Early Access in Journal Citation Reports: This year’s computation for the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) will include citations in documents that have been through the peer review and editing processes and are available on publishers’ websites but have not yet been assigned a journal. This has proved to be controversial since it does not include all publisher’s early access documents. See Appendix A to Ruth’s Rankings 46 Part 2.
4 — My Research Assistant: One change that affects the whole WOS package is improved functionality for users across all devices.
5 — InCites Citation Topics (see Appendix B)
Eugene Garfield (1955) introduced the concept of co-citations, or “association of ideas”, 65 years ago. Through research at the Institute for Scientific Information, the concept became reality with the release of the first citation index in 1964 and Journal Citation Reports in 1975 (Garfield, 1974, Small). Co-citations link publications related by frequent pairwise citations. In JCR, these relationships are presented at a journal level.
Citation Topics are created by algorithms at an item level using clustering techniques, not pairs, and are a new Research Area schema in InCites they were designed at Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies (van Eck and Waltman).
Citation Topics have three levels of detail: Macro level with 10 broad categories; Meso level with 326 categories attached to a Macros; Micro level with 2,444 specific topics. InCites does not provide the actual documents. The researcher refocuses on the underlying sources:
- Publication sources this entity has published in,
- Organizations that publish in this entity,
- Researchers that publish in this entity,
- Locations that publish this entity,
- Funding agencies that fund this entity
In addition to Research Areas, Citation Topics and Refocusing capabilities are available for all InCites analysis categories: Organizations, Researchers, Locations, Publication Sources, and Funding Agencies.
See Appendix B for more details, examples, and commentary on this addition.
Garfield, E. (15 Jul 1955). Citation indexes for Science: A new dimension in documentation through association of ideas. Science, (122) accessed at DOI: 10.1126/science.122.3159.108
Garfield, E. (1974). ISI is studying the structure of science through co-citation analysis. Current Contents, Issue 7, 5-6.
Small, H. (1974). Co-citation in the scientific literature: A new measure of the relationship between two documents. Journal of the American Society of Information Science & Technology, 24(July/Aug) 265-269.
Van Eck, NJ and Waltman, L. (May 2017). Citation-based-clustering of publications using CiNetExplorer and VOSviewer. Scientometrics, 111(2), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-017-2300-7
6 — Arabic Citation Index (ARCI) joins the Chinese, Russian, Korean, and SciElo regional indexes running on the Web of Science platform, with their own inclusion criteria. Announced in August and officially rolled out in January 2021, it is searchable in English and Arabic. ARCI is supported by the Egyptian government. It includes about 440 journals. Egypt and Algeria have over 100 titles each and Iraq is third with 50. Comoros, Djibouti, and Somalia are the only members of the Arab League to have none. Click here for a sample entry of ARCI.
(17 Aug 2020). Clarivate launches the Arabic Citation Index in Egypt, PR Newswire (https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/clarivate-launches-the-arabic-citation-index-in-egypt-301112527.html).
Webometrics includes rankings for at least one university for all 22 countries. http://webometrics.info/en
FROM ELSEVIER
1 — SCOPUS launched a redesigned Home Page in mid-January and announced further changes for the year. I have to admit the changes were so subtle that I did not notice the difference.
2 — Scopus added Preprints as a content type in existing Author Profiles, dating back to 2017. The preprints are from arXiv, bioRxiv, ChemRxiv and medRxiv servers. SSRN will be added later in 2021. Inclusion in Scopus follows the policies of the preprint servers. If a preprint becomes an article, as in Example 2 below, both records exist in the author profile. McCullough (2021) explains the rationale for preprints. Preprints do not affect existing publication and citation metrics and will have no impact on the data used in university rankings.
Preprints are highlighted in Ruth’s Rankings 46 Part 2
EXAMPLE 2: Example of preprint in Scopus).
McCullough, R. (28/21/2021). Preprints are now in Scopus! Scopus Blog, accessed at https://blog.scopus.com/posts/preprints-are-now-in-scopus
3 — SCOPUS, Sustainable Development Goals, and Times Higher Education (THE) (See Appendix C)
One of my major complaints about Times Higher Education’s Impact Rankings, based on the UN SDGs, was the lack of transparency for the searches that were used as a ranking metric for each goal. I could not reproduce the searches. In December, Elsevier added the SDG search strategies to Scopus’ Advanced Search (McCullough). See Appendix C for a detailed example of searching SDG 5 Gender Inequality, an upcoming Ruth’s Rankings topic. Scopus displays the entire search strategy. The methodology and search strategy are freely available on Mendeley. Note that this is the search strategy used by Elsevier for THE Impact Ranking.
McCullogh, R. (9 Dec 2020). Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on Scopus. Scopus Blog (https://blog.scopus.com/posts/sustainable-development-goals-sdgs-on-scopus)
Background:
RR 38 (Jan 2019): Coming attractions: The UN Sustainable Development Goals and Times Higher Education Innovation and Impact rankings demystified
RR 41 (Jul 2019): THE’s University Impact Rankings and Sustainable Development Goals: Are these the most impactful universities in the world?
RR Update (Apr 2020): THE Releases the 2020 Impact Rankings based on Sustainable Development Goals: Has anything changed?
CONCLUSION
Both Clarivate and Elsevier continue to update their suite of products, with a focus on enhancing the experience for researchers. Researchers without access to subscription services should check out Dimensions. Content is harvested. Researchers can limit searches to curated lists of publications.
UPDATES TO RUTH’S RANKINGS ARTICLES
Australia: RR 18 (April 2016): Rankings from Down Under – Australia and New Zealand
Australia has benefited from international students who made up one third of the student body and one quarter of the system’s funding. The government put Covid restrictions in place on international students coming to Australia and made a foreign policy shift that threatens relations with China. In a webinar from CGHE, (Centre for Global Higher Education), the presenters ask if the “Australian system is doomed to become poorer in resources, less cosmopolitan, less scientific, and more factitious, embattled and defensive? Or will the sun start shining again?
Marginson, S. and Felix, M. (11 Feb 2021). Universities and research in Australia in the Covid-19 crisis: Is down under going under? CGHE Seminar 187, slides, transcript and recording available at https://researchcghe.org/events/cghe-seminar/universities-and-research-in-australia-in-the-covid-19-crisis-is-down-under-going-under/
Japan: RR 28 (Aug 2017): Is the sun setting on Japanese higher education? While the future of the sustainability of the Australian higher education system is being questioned, policies are now increasing support for the Japanese higher education system.
I have continued to highlight the decrease in rankings of most Japanese universities, especially in relationship to the rise of Chinese universities and the support top Chinese universities receive from their government. The Japanese government announced that it is creating an endowment University Fund, starting in 2022, to increase output and support PhD students (Kakuchi). The Government acknowledged that the Japanese research performance in university rankings has fallen. Some leading researchers have expressed skepticism over the effectiveness of the fund.
Kakuchi, S. (3 Feb 2021). Japan to set up massive fund for scientific research. University World News Global Edition, accessed at https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20210203130630432
India: RR 22 (Jan 2017): Indian university ranking: The good, the bad and the inconsistent
India is another country that has not lived up to its rankings’ potential. A recent forum sponsored by Times Higher Education discussed the failure of Indian institutions to rank in the top 200. The forum was told that “improving the quality of teaching for Indian students was the priority, not chasing numbers on a chart.” (Lau). In the updated business school rankings discussed below, India leads the region with five schools in the top 20.
Lau, J. (11 Feb 2021). Focus on local goals and let global rankings follow, India told. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/focus-local-goals-and-let-global-rankings-follow-india-told
Business Schools: Ruth’s Rankings 39: Business school rankings: Monkey business for an Asia/Pacific audience
A colleague from Emory and Singapore Management University posted on Linkedin that the Indian Business School ranked 23rd in the FT Global MBA rankings for 2021. India is followed in the top 20 for the Asia/Pac region by China and Singapore with four, Hong Kong and Australia with three, and South Korea with one. The world list is not comparable to prior lists since six U.S. schools ranked above IBS did not participate in the 2021 rankings.
FT Global MBA ranking 2021: methodology and key
The next Ruth’s Rankings looks at a new ranking and rankings that we have not covered in the past.
Ruth’s Rankings
A list of Ruth’s Rankings and News Updates is here.
*Ruth A. Pagell is emeritus faculty librarian at Emory University. After working at Emory she was the founding librarian of the Li Ka Shing Library at Singapore Management University and then adjunct faculty [teaching] in the Library and Information Science Program at the University of Hawaii. She has written and spoken extensively on various aspects of librarianship, including contributing articles to ACCESS – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3238-9674
