Detailed commentary on the articles “Systematization of publications on the web”


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    The other day, Vladimir Sklyar (@Vladimir_Sklyar) published two materials about the academic segment of the Internet: one and two . I started writing a comment ... and got carried away. As a result, I am writing a very detailed comment.


    Firstly, I want to thank Vladimir for the curious materials and the topic raised. To me, who is taking the first steps in the academic world, it is very interesting and seems important (although I understand that this topic is not the most significant for the whole habr).


    Despite the joy of reading the material, wonderful style and capacious generalizations (I really liked the section “What is the reason for such inattention to this important component of scientific work?”), There remains a feeling of enormous under-disclosure of the topic. In my opinion, Vladimir touched only the very tip of the iceberg. I will divide further commentary on additions and clarifications .




    Additions


    Research Gate is very controversial in the academic community. Basically, they achieved this with a very aggressive policy of imposing themselves on the world ( for example ). In addition to Research Gate, there is a more “academic” Academia.edu . But we will not go into holivar. There are simply more options than RG. In my superficial judgment, rating on RG is very often misleading, not to mention the endorsement system. Q&A on RG - for the most part - a collection of questions that many students are too shy to ask (to the author’s words in the second article "There are functions for posting professional questions of network participants and answers to them." ).


    In addition to RG and Academia, there are plenty of options to place the full texts of their articles in good repositories. For starters, the super famous ArXiv . It appeared in the early 1990s and immediately set the level to which many imitators are still oriented. For many, the catch is that this portal specializes quite narrowly in the technical sciences. Of the notable contemporaries, Bioarxiv and the very “omnivorous” Figshare, soaringly soared, should be noted . Common to all these archives is the policy of the inability to delete files. That is, you need to think about whether the draft is ready to be shown before clogging the web. The narrower systems for the social sciences are RePEc and SSRN . Both are highly respected, but, in my opinion, are a bit stuck in the past.


    What else must I mention? Publishers and magazines policies for publishing preprints and postprints. There are countless options. Fortunately, there is a project that conveniently aggregates all this information - RoMEO .


    Well, of course, with such a review you can not ignore the topic of personal sites. There should be a "private harbor", where the availability and format of information depends only on you. Today, to create your own page is technically possible for absolutely any user. There are many options. For example, my site . Or here is the site of a rather elderly researcher, also based on Google Sites, very simple, but everything important is in place. And there are a lot of samples of beautiful sites on more modern platforms. A few examples: a WordPress site ; one more ; and here is a beautiful site created with github pages and jekyll. There are no limits to perfection. I plan in the near future to master the creation of a static website github pages using the R . In general, github is a separate world and a separate topic for discussion. Not only programmers, but also many researchers can use it to organize, beautifully present and make reproducible ( ! ) Their projects.


    By the way, one cannot fail to notice an excellent domestic development - Moscow State Truth . It is open to all researchers, not only from Moscow State University. Minimalism and a bunch of beautifully implemented things. For authors published not only in English, a very green system.


    Well, probably, it should be noted that "not a single hirsch." There is a curious Altmetric project that measures the effect of an article in the media sphere (by the way, an increasing number of publishers are integrating these metrics on their sites, for example, T&F and Wileys ).




    Refinements


    Unfortunately, national magazines of the Russian-language segment do not seek to enter the Web of Science, Scopus, or even Google Scholar.

    There is no process of getting into Google Scholar. GS indexes everything it finds in PDF format. Also in the second article , in the section on GS, the author writes praises the service and, in particular, writes "It is obvious that at the moment this service is developing". In my opinion, this is far from the truth. If Google invested in Scholar at least 10% of the effort spent on stillborn Google+, one could really make sure that all other services (as well as similar discussions and reviews) are no longer needed. Today, GS indexes a bunch of garbage and makes no difference in the quality of the material or at least the reliability of the source. Web of Science and Scopus at least try to sort the slag. It doesn’t always turn out, but, in general, the chance to meet their indexed slag is not great, especially if you focus on top magazines measured by their own metrics, for example SJR . Sometimes GS allows you to look pretty impressive frank academic freaks . For example, I came across a frame in whichmore than 1000 citations in GS and at the same time only 8 (eight!) in Scopus . This is what a typical citation list of his GS article looks like . In my opinion, comments are superfluous.


    In addition, the phrase itself (quote above), it seems to me, is monstrously far from reality. Our magazines scratch at Web of Science and Scopus with all their might. Few people succeed. And the best ones do not always crawl. But this is a separate conversation.
    Here it is impossible not to mention the Russian Science Citation Index from Web of Science. Thomson Reuters decided to select the 1000 best Russian magazines and include them not in the Core Collection, but in a separate database. As a result, about 650 were selected. Well, wait a minute: there are more than 2000 items in the list of HAC. This is the question of the relevance of the Higher Attestation Commission as a measure of the quality of journals.


    A little more about Google Scholar. In the second article, describing the GS functionality, Vladimir writes "Notifications, in my opinion, are not so important . " Strongly disagree. In my opinion, this is the most appropriate option on the Internet that allows you to follow the publications of specific authors. Irreplaceable.
    Also in the second article about GS "... and some likelihood of connecting the Russian-language segment in the near future . " The Russian-language segment has long and beautifully existed. See, for example, this profile .


    My publications in Web of Science turned out to be less than in Scopus, although, as a matter of fact, this is a matter of promotion strategy.

    This is not at all surprising, since Scopus indexes much wider, the criteria are more stringent for WoS. As a rule, everything that is in WoS is also in Scopus. But not the other way around.


    ORCID . Marked at the very end of the second article as plans for the future. This is the perfect must of the modern academic world. Some magazines, as well as, for example, Bioarxiv, strongly recommend that all authors get an identification number as soon as possible.




    As a bonus


    I really hope that the MIT PubPub project will take off . This is a potential revolution in the world of academic publishing. The open peer review system alone is worth it! It's funny that after reading the explosive article about sci-hub and another one about the consequences of the system’s spread, I thought about how to reform the publication system of academic papers. So, PubPub is all my dreams, only cooler. Well, really, why is the peer-review, the institution on which science is based in its modern form, the most ungrateful and little-rewarded part of academic work? I believe in PubPub!




    PS Discussion


    Bibliometry is important, and now without it now. In general, this is probably still good. But an excessive focus on quantitative parameters also leads away from the truth. In Russia (judging by HSE), a rating boom typical of developing countries is observed (the same thing happened in South Korea and China). Given the numerous imperfections of existing systems and institutions, one should refrain from radical judgments based on bibliometry. In particular, the passage from the first article ( "For example, at one of the conferences I met a person whose h-index in Scopus is already 50. 50 publications, each of which was quoted at least 50 times, wow!") seems to me an illustration of such a potentially dangerous quantitative approach. Not all really great researchers in general have produced 50 significant texts in their lifetime. And not all authors of scientific articles make a significant contribution to their writing ( here a funny link ). So be careful.


    I will give an example of a potential fallacy into which bibliometric fever can introduce (of course, from my own field, demography). If you strictly follow the logic of bibliometry, then among domestic demographers it is impossible not to pay attention to A.V. Korotaeva Meanwhile, the activities of him and his team in the demographic field, I would describe as "inflation of bibliometric bubbles." That this is so can be seen in a short articlewonderful domestic demographer Yevgeny Andreev. Advancement of unreliable results in the media can only harm science, since it distracts public attention from really worthwhile work and nominates incompetent authors to the rank of "experts." So not everything that comes to the surface is worth a close look.


    UPD: comment for example

    I want to emphasize that in this example I am talking only about demographic work, the level of which I can assess to some extent. I do not have sufficient competence to judge the anthropological, historical and political studies of Korotaev. However, I am sure that there is a general level of integrity and academic integrity of the researcher. The scientific world is built on trust, and I would beware of relying on the opinions of those who undermine it.


    And in conclusion. I sincerely recommend everyone to read the appeal to the scientific community of bibliometrist and Leiden University (by the way, they are considered the best in the world). Experts urge not to go in cycles in figures!


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