Abstract Concerns over research integrity are rising, with increasing attention to potential threats from untrustworthy authors. We established a framework to gauge the potential negative influence of researchers potentially engaged in misconduct. The field of Alzheimer's disease (AD) research has been a focal point of these worries. This study aims to assess the risk posed by questionable studies or individuals potentially engaging in fraudulent science in research by examining citation relationships among papers, taking AD research as an illustrative example. Analysis of citation network structure can elucidate the potential propagation of misinformation arising at the author level. Our analysis revealed that there aren't any single authors or papers whose citation connections jeopardize a major portion of the field's literature. This indicates a low probability of single entities undermining the majority of works in this area. However, our findings suggest that attention to the research integrity of the most influential scientists is warranted. Some scientists can reach a sizable minority of the literature through citations to their work. Emphasizing oversight of the integrity of these authors is crucial, given their influence on the field. Our study introduces an analytical framework adaptable across various fields and disciplines to evaluate potential risks from fraudulence.

Abstract Promotions and academic mobility are trajectory‐altering events in a researcher's career. This paper compiles a unique large data set and investigates publication and citation differences between two groups of researchers: the ones who are mobile and their counterparts who stay at a university with a promotion. This paper finds that mobile researchers often have a lesser productivity increase than their post‐promotion counterparts. The difference is largely driven by male professors in physical science and clinical health fields moving from more research‐intensive to less research‐intensive institutions. In contrast, the citational impact differences between the two groups are largely minimal.

Abstract COVID‐19 has emerged as a major research hotspot and trending topic in recent years, leading to increased publications and citations of related papers. While concerns exist about the potential citation boost in journals publishing these papers, the specifics are not fully understood. This study uses a generalized difference‐in‐differences approach to examine the impact of publishing COVID‐19 papers on journal citation metrics in the Health Sciences fields. Findings indicate that journals publishing COVID‐19 papers in 2020 received significantly higher citation premiums due to COVID‐19 in 2020 and continued to benefit from the premium in 2021 in certain fields. In contrast, journals that began publishing COVID‐19 papers in 2021 experienced weaker citation premiums. The citation premiums exhibit some negative spillover effect: Although the publication volume of non‐COVID‐19 papers also surged, these papers experienced insignificant or negative citation gains, even when published in the same journals as COVID‐19 papers. COVID‐19 papers published in high‐impact journals brought higher citation premiums than those in low‐impact journals in most fields, indicating a potential Matthew effect. These citation premiums can affect various citation‐based journal metrics, such as our simulated impact factor and SCImago Journal Rank, to different degrees. Compared to the simulated impact factor, other normalized journal metrics are less influenced by citation premiums. The results highlight a “gold rush” pattern in which early entrants establish their citation advantage in research hotspots and caution against using citation‐based metrics for research assessment.

Abstract Ensuring Wikipedia cites scholarly publications based on quality and relevancy without biases is critical to credible and fair knowledge dissemination. We investigate gender‐ and country‐based biases in Wikipedia citation practices using linked data from the Web of Science and a Wikipedia citation dataset. Using coarsened exact matching, we show that publications by women are cited less by Wikipedia than expected, and publications by women are less likely to be cited than those by men. Scholarly publications by authors affiliated with non‐Anglosphere countries are also disadvantaged in getting cited by Wikipedia, compared with those by authors affiliated with Anglosphere countries. The level of gender‐ or country‐based inequalities varies by research field, and the gender‐country intersectional bias is prominent in math‐intensive STEM fields. To ensure the credibility and equality of knowledge presentation, Wikipedia should consider strategies and guidelines to cite scholarly publications independent of the gender and country of authors.

This paper performs an analysis on the influence of different factors on users' choices of specific word changes in query reformulation during a search session. We study three types of word changes: whether to remove or retain a word in the current query; whether or not to add a brand-new word to the query; whether or not to reuse a word (included in previous queries, but removed in the current query). Three types of factors are examined: session-level factors measuring task and user characteristics; query-level factors related to past user activities in a session; word-level factors for the characteristics of the examined word and its relation to the current query and search results. Statistical analysis suggests that: word-level factors strongly influence all three types of word changes; query-level factors only show a clear influence on retaining or removing a word; task-level factors exhibit limited direct influence on all three types of word changes. Analysis also disclose reasons for different word changes: users remove a word to stop exploring a subtask, or to correct bad performing queries; they look for related, unused words from recently viewed result summaries and add to queries; reusing a word usually indicates reverting from a subtask to the main task or another subtask.

This study applied LDA (latent D irichlet allocation) and regression analysis to conduct a lead‐lag analysis to identify different topic evolution patterns between preprints and papers from arXiv and the W eb of S cience ( WoS ) in astrophysics over the last 20 years (1992–2011). Fifty topics in arXiv and WoS were generated using an LDA algorithm and then regression models were used to explain 4 types of topic growth patterns. Based on the slopes of the fitted equation curves, the paper redefines the topic trends and popularity. Results show that arXiv and WoS share similar topics in a given domain, but differ in evolution trends. Topics in WoS lose their popularity much earlier and their durations of popularity are shorter than those in arXiv . This work demonstrates that open access preprints have stronger growth tendency as compared to traditional printed publications.

Conceptualizations of disciplinarity often focus on the social aspects of disciplines; that is, disciplines are defined by the set of individuals who participate in their activities and communications. However, operationalizations of disciplinarity often demarcate the boundaries of disciplines by standard classification schemes, which may be inflexible to changes in the participation profile of that discipline. To address this limitation, a metric called venue‐author‐coupling ( VAC ) is proposed and illustrated using journals from the Journal Citation Report's ( JCR ) library science and information science category. As JCRs are some of the most frequently used categories in bibliometric analyses, this allows for an examination of the extent to which the journals in JCR categories can be considered as proxies for disciplines. By extending the idea of bibliographic coupling, VAC identifies similarities among journals based on the similarities of their author profiles. The employment of this method using information science and library science journals provides evidence of four distinct subfields, that is, management information systems, specialized information and library science, library science‐focused, and information science‐focused research. The proposed VAC method provides a novel way to examine disciplinarity from the perspective of author communities.

Journals in the Information Science & Library Science category of Journal Citation Reports (JCR) were compared using both bibliometric and bibliographic features. Data collected covered journal impact factor (JIF), number of issues per year, number of authors per article, longevity, editorial board membership, frequency of publication, number of databases indexing the journal, number of aggregators providing full‐text access, country of publication, JCR categories, Dewey decimal classification, and journal statement of scope. Three features significantly correlated with JIF: number of editorial board members and number of JCR categories in which a journal is listed correlated positively; journal longevity correlated negatively with JIF. Coword analysis of journal descriptions provided a proximity clustering of journals, which differed considerably from the clusters based on editorial board membership. Finally, a multiple linear regression model was built to predict the JIF based on all the collected bibliographic features.

We propose a method to dynamically estimate the utility of documents in a search session by modeling the users' browsing behaviors and novelty. The method can be applied to evaluate query reformulations in a search session.

Studying scientific collaboration using coauthorship networks has attracted much attention in recent years. How and in what context two authors collaborate remain among the major questions. Previous studies, however, have focused on either exploring the global topology of coauthorship networks (macro perspective) or ranking the impact of individual authors (micro perspective). Neither of them has provided information on the context of the collaboration between two specific authors, which may potentially imply rich socioeconomic, disciplinary, and institutional information on collaboration. Different from the macro perspective and micro perspective, this article proposes a novel method (meso perspective) to analyze scientific collaboration, in which a contextual subgraph is extracted as the unit of analysis. A contextual subgraph is defined as a small subgraph of a large-scale coauthorship network that captures relationship and context between two coauthors. This method is applied to the field of library and information science. Topological properties of all the subgraphs in four time spans are investigated, including size, average degree, clustering coefficient, and network centralization. Results show that contextual subgprahs capture useful contextual information on two authors' collaboration.

Interdisciplinarity has been studied using cognitive connections among individuals in corresponding domains, but rarely from the perspective of academic genealogy. This article utilizes academic genealogy network data from 3,038 PhD dissertations in Library and Information Science (LIS) over a span of 80 years (1930–2009) to describe interdisciplinary changes in the discipline. Aspects of academic pedigree of advisors and committee members are analyzed, such as country, school, and discipline of highest degree, to reveal the interdisciplinary features of LIS. The results demonstrate a strong history of mentors from fields such as education and psychology, a decreasing trend of mentors with LIS degrees, and an increasing trend in mentors receiving degrees in computer science, business, and communication, among other disciplines. This work proposes and explores the use of academic genealogy as an indicator of interdisciplinarity and calls for additional research on the role of doctoral committee composition in a student's subsequent academic career.