Authors’ perception on abstracting and indexing databases in different subject domains

Philosophers’ appraisals of bibliometric indicators and their use in evaluation: from recognition to knee-jerk rejection

The knowledge and stance of researchers regarding bibliometric indicators is a field of study that has gained weight in recent decades. In this paper we address this issue for the little explored areas of philosophy and ethics, and applied to a context, in this case Spain, where bibliometric indicators are widely used in evaluation processes. The study combines data from a self-administered questionnaire completed by 201 researchers and from 14 in-depth interviews with researchers selected according to their affiliation, professional category, gender and area of knowledge. The survey data suggest that researchers do not consider bibliometric indicators a preferred criterion of quality, while there is a fairly high self-perception of awareness of a number of indicators. The qualitative data points to a generalised perception of a certain rejection of the specific use of indicators, with four main positions being observed: (1) disqualification of the logic of metrics, (2) scepticism about the possibility of assessing quality with quantitative methods, (3) complaints about the incorporation of methods that are considered to belong to other disciplines, and (4) criticism of the consequences that this generates in the discipline of philosophy.

A bibliometric study on library and information science and information systems literature during 2010–2019

Purpose

Studying the nature of research progress in interrelated research domains is important for evaluating the research productivity and to understand the current trends of the area of research. This study aims to examine a research domain that combines library and information science with information systems (IS).

Design/methodology/approach

Quartile 1 journals that cover both subject domains in SCImago were selected for the study. Bibliographic records of the publications during 2010 and 2019 were retrieved from the Scopus database. VOSviewer data visualization tool was used to perform citation, coauthorship, bibliographic coupling, cocitation and co-occurrence analysis. In addition, descriptive and inferential statistics were exploited.

Findings

The absence of a consistent association between the number of documents authored and the number of citations received by a researcher was an important finding of the study. The strong association of authors regardless of the different topics they researched and the trend of increasing interest on collaborative research were also highlighted. Moreover, the authors who received the highest number of citations were not always the first authors of the documents which received the most citations. The documents published in information management, information theory and IS journals attained the most citations. The journals, institutions and countries with the highest number of documents and citations were also revealed by the research. Electrical engineering departments showed a higher research productivity, while they were utilized more compared to that of other departments. IS and management, information theory, communication, information retrieval, geographic-based IS and bioinformatics were the six major research areas of the considered domain.

Originality/value

This is the first study related to examining the research progress in a combined subject domain using multiple aspects including, individual performance, institutional progress, geographical contribution and so on. Identifying the major research areas in the combined subject domain can also be considered a novel contribution to the field.