Should highly cited items be excluded in impact factor calculation? The effect of review articles on journal impact factor

Application of chimeric antigen receptor therapy beyond oncology: A bibliometric and visualized analysis

PURPOSE

Chimeric antigen receptor therapy beyond oncology has gained increasing attention. While a substantial number of publications have emerged in recent years, there has been a paucity of conducted bibliometric studies. Our objective is to systematically summarize and visually analyze the literature in the field of chimeric antigen receptors therapy beyond oncology and explore hotspots in this field.

METHODS

Web of Science Core Collection was selected as the data source, and the data was retrieved on December 23, 2022, according to the search strategy. CiteSpace 6.1.R6 and Vosviewer 1.6.18 were used to analyze publications and explore research hotspots and directions.

RESULTS

A total of 338 publications written by 1832 authors from 516 institutions in 42 countries/regions were selected for the analysis. The number of publications is steadily increasing annually. The United States emerged as the primary contributor, and University of Pennsylvania was the leading institution. Frontiers in Immunology boasted the highest number of published papers. Kitchen SG, Riley JL, and Scott DW were the most productive researchers in this field. The keyword cluster analysis identified HIV, autoimmune diseases, transplant related diseases and COVID-19 as the primary focus areas within the realm of chimeric antigen receptor therapy beyond oncology.

CONCLUSION

The advancement of chimeric antigen receptor therapy beyond oncology has witnessed rapid progress in recent years. We have explored the hotspots and research directions in this field. It is hoped that this study could provide references and directions for future clinical researches.

A bibliometric investigation of the journals that were repeatedly suppressed from Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports

Journals indexed by Clarivate are temporarily suppressed from the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) if their Journal Impact Factor (JIF) scores are distorted through excessive self-citations or citation stacking with other journals. This paper reports the results of a bibliometric investigation that covers the 18 journals that were suppressed three or more times from the JCR. Results indicate that these 18 journals were repeatedly and exclusively suppressed for being excessive self-citers. Together, these 18 journals totaled 65 suppressions. Two of these 18 journals have lost the status of a JIF-carrying journal. One has changed its title to start as a new. Of the 16 journals that are still included in the JCR, 12 (four) have significantly (slightly) reduced their self-citation rates. Two of these journals are, however, experiencing what the author calls a cycle of suppression. Upon further examination, it turned out that one of these 18 journals is currently using JIF boosting stratagems not yet banished by Clarivate.

Network Analysis and Natural Language Processing to Obtain a Landscape of the Scientific Literature on Materials Applications

Recent progress in natural language processing (NLP) enables mining the literature in various tasks akin to knowledge discovery. Obtaining an updated birds-eye view of key research topics and their evolution in a vast, dynamic field such as materials science is challenging even for experienced researchers. In this Perspective paper, we present a landscape of the area of applied materials in selected representative journals based on a combination of methods from network science and simple NLP strategies. We found a predominance of energy-related materials, e.g., for batteries and catalysis, organic electronics, which include flexible sensors and flexible electronics, and nanomedicine with various topics of materials used in diagnosis and therapy. As for the impact calculated through standard metrics of impact factor, energy-related materials and organic electronics are again top of the list across different journals, while work in nanomedicine has been found to have a lower impact in the journals analyzed. The adequacy of the approach to identify key research topics in materials applications was verified indirectly by comparing the topics identified in journals with diverse scopes, including journals that are not specific to materials. The approach can be employed to obtain a fast overview of a given field from the papers published in related scientific journals, which can be adapted or extended to any research area.

Citation advantage of COVID-19-related publications

With the global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists from various disciplines responded quickly to this historical public health emergency. The sudden boom of COVID-19-related papers in a short period of time may bring unexpected influence to some commonly used bibliometric indicators. By a large-scale investigation using Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, this brief communication confirms the citation advantage of COVID-19-related papers empirically through the lens of Essential Science Indicators’ highly cited paper. More than 8% of COVID-19-related papers published during 2020 and 2021 were selected as Essential Science Indicators highly cited papers, which was much higher than the set global benchmark value of 1%. The citation advantage of COVID-19-related papers for different Web of Science categories/countries/journal impact factor quartiles was also demonstrated. The distortions of COVID-19-related papers’ citation advantage to some bibliometric indicators such as journal impact factor were discussed at the end of this brief communication.

The top 100 cited Nurse Practitioner publications: a bibliometric analysis

BACKGROUND

Development of the Nurse practitioner role and the specialisation of practice is an increasing focus in healthcare. To date, a bibliometric evaluation of scholarly work referring to Nurse Practitioners, has not been located in the published literature.

OBJECTIVE

With the aim of identifying the top 100 cited articles in the Nurse Practitioner domain, the Scopus™ database was searched for Nurse Practitioner studies during 2007-2021. Using bibliometric analysis we identified prolific authors; annual trend; citation rates; countries of origin; and study design.

RESULTS

There were 1768 papers identified across 360 peer reviewed journals in 33 countries.

CONCLUSIONS

Finding from this analysis provides evidence of an evolving research area of inquiry which contributes to knowledge of the Nurse Practitioner role and scope of practice.

Bibliometric Analysis for Carbon Neutrality with Hotspots, Frontiers, and Emerging Trends between 1991 and 2022

The proposal of carbon neutrality is a manifestation of actively responding to global warming and sustainable development, which means all greenhouse gases achieve near-zero emissions. China is also fulfilling its national mission in this regard. This paper collected 4922 documents from the "Web of Science Core Database" and used Citespace (6.1.R2 Advanced) and Vosviewer (1.6.18) software and Bibliometrix functions to carry out descriptive statistics on the number of publications, cooperation mechanisms, and keyword hotspots, finding that the literature mainly focused on China's carbon neutrality, carbon emissions, energy efficiency, sustainable development, and other related topics in the past two years. Further, the 2060 carbon neutrality action plan for China is discussed, focusing on the implementation plan and technical route and proposing the corresponding plans. The purpose of this paper is to accelerate the pace of China's achievement of this goal and to provide feasible solutions and pathways to its achievement through insight into global carbon neutrality hotspots and new trends.

Low methodological quality of systematic reviews on acupuncture: a cross-sectional study

BACKGROUND

While well-conducted systematic reviews (SRs) can provide the best evidence on the potential effectiveness of acupuncture, limitations on the methodological rigour of SRs may impact the trustworthiness of their conclusions. This cross-sectional study aimed to evaluate the methodological quality of a representative sample of SRs on acupuncture effectiveness.

METHODS

Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, MEDLINE, and EMBASE were searched for SRs focusing on the treatment effect of manual acupuncture or electro-acupuncture published during January 2018 and March 2020. Eligible SRs must contain at least one meta-analysis and be published in English language. Two independent reviewers extracted the bibliographical characteristics of the included SRs with a pre-designed questionnaire and appraised the methodological quality of the studies with the validated AMSTAR 2 (A MeaSurement Tool to Assess systematic Reviews 2). The associations between bibliographical characteristics and methodological quality ratings were explored using Kruskal-Wallis rank tests and Spearman's rank correlation coefficients.

RESULTS

A total of 106 SRs were appraised. Only one (0.9%) SR was of high overall methodological quality, zero (0%) was of moderate-quality, six (5.7%) and 99 (93.4%) were of low-quality and critically low-quality respectively. Among appraised SRs, only ten (9.4%) provided an a priori protocol, four (3.8%) conducted a comprehensive literature search, five (4.7%) provided a list of excluded studies, and six (5.7%) performed meta-analysis appropriately. Cochrane SRs, updated SRs, and SRs that did not search non-English databases had relatively higher overall quality.

CONCLUSIONS

Methodological quality of SRs on acupuncture is unsatisfactory. Future reviewers should improve critical methodological aspects of publishing protocols, performing comprehensive search, providing a list of excluded studies with justifications for exclusion, and conducting appropriate meta-analyses. These recommendations can be implemented via enhancing the technical competency of reviewers in SR methodology through established education approaches as well as quality gatekeeping by journal editors and reviewers. Finally, for evidence users, skills in SR critical appraisal remain to be essential as relevant evidence may not be available in pre-appraised formats.

A bibliometric analysis of paramedicine publications using the Scopus database: 2010-2019

BACKGROUND

Paramedicine is an evolving profession undergoing increases in scholarly activity and peer-reviewed publications. This study aims to complete the first extensive bibliometric examination of the worldwide paramedicine literature.

METHOD

Scopus was utilised to search for paramedicine-based articles published in peer-reviewed journals between 2010 and 2019 inclusive. The included articles were examined for citation count, journal, journal quartile, country of origin, university affiliation, collaboration, and topic.

RESULTS

Paramedicine-based publications have steadily increased and are predominantly published in prehospital or emergency healthcare journals. The majority of highly cited authors were located in Australia; however, only one of these authors was identified as a paramedic. Monash University (Australia) was the most productive institution (11.7% of total articles) and collaboration was mostly within national boundaries (53.2%).

CONCLUSION

This study demonstrates the progressive increase in paramedic scholarly activity over the past decade. Although a large number of articles originate from two countries (Australia and the USA) and one university, numerous nations and institutions are contributing to this body of knowledge. The growing literature base is indicative of the evolution of paramedicine; however, the high level of non-paramedic authors suggests the opportunity for further scholarly development within the paramedic discipline.

The weighted impact factor: the paper evaluation index based on the citation ratio

Purpose

This study distinguishes the academic influence of different papers published in journals of the same subject or field based on the modification of the journal impact factor.

Design/methodology/approach

Taking SSCI journals in library and information science (LIS) as the research object, the authors first explore the skewness degree of the citation distribution of journal articles. Then, we define the paper citation ratio as the weight of impact factor to modify the journal impact factor for the evaluation of papers, namely the weighted impact factor. The authors further explore the feasibility of the weighted impact factor in evaluating papers.

Findings

The research results show that different types of skewness exist in the citation distribution of journal papers. Particularly, 94% of journal paper citations are highly skewed, while the rest are moderately skewed. The weighted impact factor has a closer correlation with the citation frequency of papers than the journal impact factor. It resolves the issue that the journal impact factor tends to exaggerate the influence of low-cited papers in journals with high impact factors or weaken the influence of high-cited papers in journals with low impact factors.

Originality/value

The weighted impact factor is constructed based on the skewness of the citation distribution of journal articles. It provides a new method to distinguish the academic influence of different papers published in journals of the same subject or field, then avoids the situation that papers published in the same journal having the same academic impact.

Practical publication metrics for academics

Research organizations are becoming more reliant on quantitative approaches to determine how to recruit and promote researchers, allocate funding, and evaluate the impact of prior allocations. Many of these quantitative metrics are based on research publications. Publication metrics are not only important for individual careers, but also affect the progress of science as a whole via their role in the funding award process. Understanding the origin and intended use of popular publication metrics can inform an evaluative strategy that balances the usefulness of publication metrics with the limitations of what they can convey about the productivity and quality of an author, a publication, or a journal. This paper serves as a brief introduction to citation networks like Google Scholar, Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, Microsoft Academic, and Dimensions. It also explains two of the most popular publication metrics: the h-index and the journal impact factor. The purpose of this paper is to provide practical information on using citation networks to generate publication metrics, and to discuss ideas for contextualizing and juxtaposing metrics, in order to help researchers in translational science and other disciplines document their impact in as favorable a light as may be justified.

Top 100 cited paramedicine papers: A bibliometric study

OBJECTIVE

Understanding the impact different journal articles have in any academic field is important - particularly in emerging professions. A bibliometric analysis like this does not yet exist for paramedicine, despite the rapid increase in its primary literature. The objective of the present study was to identify and analyse the 100 top-cited articles about paramedicine.

METHODS

We searched the Scopus database in August 2020 for studies relating to paramedicine. After screening titles and abstracts, we extracted the citation count, journal name, publication year, and country of origin. We manually assessed whether the study was clinical or not, noted the sex of the authors, the profession of first and last authors and the study design used.

RESULTS

The median citation count for the top 100 papers in paramedicine was 58 (interquartile range 46-84 citations). The articles were published across 48 different journals, with Resuscitation and Prehospital Emergency Care being the two most frequent. The top-cited paramedic papers originated from 16 different countries and were written predominantly by medical doctors. Three quarters (73%) of the studies had a clinical focus, and a quarter (26%) were randomised controlled trials.

CONCLUSIONS

The evolution of paramedicine towards professionalism is backed up by the growth of its own body of knowledge. This analysis of the 100 most cited studies in paramedicine is the first of its kind and highlights that paramedicine articles have a high citation count and are published across numerous journals, but with a relative lack of contribution from paramedic practitioners and female researchers.

Deep learning in electron microscopy

Deep learning is transforming most areas of science and technology, including electron microscopy. This review paper offers a practical perspective aimed at developers with limited familiarity. For context, we review popular applications of deep learning in electron microscopy. Following, we discuss hardware and software needed to get started with deep learning and interface with electron microscopes. We then review neural network components, popular architectures, and their optimization. Finally, we discuss future directions of deep learning in electron microscopy.

Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus: The Titans of Bibliographic Information in Today’s Academic World

Nowadays, the importance of bibliographic databases (DBs) has increased enormously, as they are the main providers of publication metadata and bibliometric indicators universally used both for research assessment practices and for performing daily tasks. Because the reliability of these tasks firstly depends on the data source, all users of the DBs should be able to choose the most suitable one. Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus are the two main bibliographic DBs. The comprehensive evaluation of the DBs’ coverage is practically impossible without extensive bibliometric analyses or literature reviews, but most DBs users do not have bibliometric competence and/or are not willing to invest additional time for such evaluations. Apart from that, the convenience of the DB’s interface, performance, provided impact indicators and additional tools may also influence the users’ choice. The main goal of this work is to provide all of the potential users with an all-inclusive description of the two main bibliographic DBs by gathering the findings that are presented in the most recent literature and information provided by the owners of the DBs at one place. This overview should aid all stakeholders employing publication and citation data in selecting the most suitable DB.

Studying review articles in scientometrics and beyond: a research agenda

Review articles are an often neglected genre in scholarly communication. Though there was intense discussion about review articles in scientometrics in the 1970s and 1980s, we find less studies devoted to this genre within the last 20 years. Yet, recent discussions in other fields, such as linguistics, sociology or medicine imply that review articles are part of important debates about problems of research in academia, such as research quality or transparency. Against that background, the purpose of this paper is to review recent developments for the study of review articles in scientometrics and beyond, to discuss theoretical, conceptual and empirical accounts of how review articles can be defined, and to identify major methodological and conceptual challenges for studying review articles. Based on reviewing work and inputs received from of a workshop conducted at a Conference of the International Society of Informetrics in September 2019, we propose a research agenda for the study of review articles. We have identified six realms of study in this area: (1) the study of methodological caveats resulting from the usage of scholarly databases, (2) the study of field specific patterns of reception and usage of review articles, (3) the study of argumentative and textual structures of review articles, (4) the exploration of organizations and infrastructures for review articles, (5) the study of epistemic roles of review articles, and (6) the analysis of authorship patterns in review articles.