Research Trends -

This Special Issue of Research Trends is published in honor of the 10th anniversary of Scopus, Elsevier’s bibliographical database, launched in the fall of 2004. The common denominator of the contributions published in this issue is looking backwards in time, ten years or even longer, and illustrating the potential of Scopus in bibliometric studies of trends in the global science system. Although these studies look backwards in time, they also bear relevance to the present and future, as their outcomes and the explored bibliometric methodologies potentially contribute to a better understanding of the research process, and to an informed research policy.

The first contribution is written by Gali Halevi, in collaboration with me, Henk Moed. We present a list of the most frequently cited articles published in the past decade in eight main research areas, and highlight comments made by their authors on their achievements. Matthew Richardson analyzes a decade’s research trends in the domain of virology by applying topic identification and visualization techniques, and Andrew Plume depicts developments in a hot topic in the field of materials science: graphene research.

In his next contribution, Andrew and Daphne van Weijen present patterns in co-authorship, for instance, in the number of co-authors in research articles, during the past 10 years and more. The quality, archiving, availability and re-use of research data are gaining more and more interest. A detailed analysis of data on cited references in Scopus enabled Sarah Huggett to trace the visibility of research data in the published literature.

The next two contributions focus on nations rather than subject fields as the primary object of analysis. Stephanie Oeben and Sarah Huggett analyze trends in German publication output and its citation impact, while Gali Halevi and I present a model for the development phases of a country’s research system. Our study focuses on countries in Asia, the region in which an important conference on research assessment took place in June 2014, the APAC Research Intelligence Conference. And in the last contribution of this issue, Alexander van Servellen and Ikuko Oba report back on this event.

On behalf of the Editorial Team, I hope that you will enjoy reading this issue. Please do share your thoughts and feedback with us, either by inserting your comments in the section following each article on our website, or by sending us an email (researchtrends@elsevier.com). We look forward to hearing from you!

Kind regards,

This special issue of Research Trends is dedicated to altmetrics, or, as some may prefer, alternative metrics. The growing interest in the development of alternative measurements of scientific productivity resulted in the 2010 Altmetrics manifesto in which the term “altmetrics” was introduced. The manifesto notes that “in growing numbers, scholars are moving their everyday work to the web”, and that new online tools “reflect and transmit scholarly impact”. This “forms a composite trace of impact far richer than any available before; we call the elements of this trace altmetrics”.

In his historical account, Mike Thelwall covers the use of social web services. He dedicates attention to Mendeley and Twitter. He also underlines the need to further validate altmetrics, by investigating the degree to which they correlate with – or predict – citation counts and other traditional measures. Ron Daniel addresses the issue of how past citation prediction studies showed so little consistency in their results, and indicates the potential of altmetrics. Hadas Shema introduces another promising altmetric data source: scholarly blogs.

The rapid ICT development is a first principal driver of new metrics in general. It is not only reflected in the emergence of social web services, but also, for instance, in the further digitalization of scientific information. Electronic user log files of publication archives provide traces of another aspect of scholars’ everyday work, namely their literature browsing and perhaps their reading behavior. In this sense, indicators of full text downloads of scholarly publications can be conceived as altmetrics as well.

A team of 5 researchers headed by Christian Schlögl interprets correlations between citation, full text download and readership data in terms of the degree in overlap between the user communities of the three systems from which data was extracted. Vicente P. Guerrero-Bote and Félix Moya-Anegón also examine statistical correlations between downloads and citations. They focus on the role of publication language, and analyze less visible journals publishing in languages other than English and clearly show how the two types of measures are complementary – one type may reveal patterns that are invisible in the other. As Euan Adie outlines in his contribution, another aspect of digitalization is that more and more grey literature including pre-prints and policy documents become available for research and as a source for new metrics. However, in a discussion with Mike Taylor, Juan Pablo Alperin warns that differences in access to new technology exist between scientifically developing and developed countries that can have negative implications for the former group of countries even in altmetrics research.

A second principal driver of the development of new metrics is the Open Science movement, directed towards making scientific research, data, and dissemination accessible to all levels of an inquiring society, whether amateur or professional. Perhaps the base notions of this movement can be characterized as expressions of the fundamental ethos of science in a digital or computerized age. As William Gunn explains, research funding agencies seek to maximize the potential of their funded outputs including papers, methods, and data. This urges us to develop new metrics of reuse that go beyond classical citations.

This brings us to a third driver: the research policy domain. This is also clearly reflected in the contribution by Judit Bar-Ilan who introduces the portfolio concept developed in the ACUMEN project (Academic Careers Understood through Measurement and Norms) funded by the European Commission, aimed at “studying and proposing alternative and broader ways of measuring the productivity and performance of individual researchers”. The author shows how online and social media presence and altmetrics are well represented in the expertise, output and influence sub-portfolios.

We believe the contributions in this Special Issue cover the major trends in the development of new metrics, and are written by leading researchers in the field. We hope you will enjoy reading them.

Please share your thoughts and feedback with us. You can do this in the comments section following each article on our website or by sending us an email (researchtrends@elsevier.com)