reza ghane

The purpose of this study was to investigate the subject of “public libraries” in the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science (WoS) and Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC). The present study is a descriptive-analytical research adopting scientometrics approach in terms of data collection. The statistical population of the study consisted of 2976 documents indexed in the WoS during 1900-2017 as well as 232 documents indexed in the ISC during 1999-2017. To collect data, we refined the search to title as (TI=Public Library*) and limited it to the time span (PY=1900-2017) in WoS in order to avoid diversity in the retrieved documents. The same approach was followed to retrieve documents from ISC databases. Research findings showed that foreign researchers were interested in “information science and library”, “computer sciences”, and “architecture” in relation to public library studies. On the other hand, Iranian researchers focused on “public library studies”, “assessment”, and “staff...

The study aims to monitor the status of open access (OA) journals published in Developing 8 (D-8) countries, i.e. Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Turkey.,The authors' web-based data sources for journal-based metrics were the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Thomson Reuters (Journal Citation Reports [JCR], which provided journal impact factors [JIF]) and Scopus (source normalized impact per paper [SNIP] and SCImago journal rank [SJR]). The authors obtained information about journals published before 2000 to 2014. From the JCR, JIF, Rank in Category, Total Journals in Category, Journal Rank in Category, and Quartile in Category were used.,The authors' identified 1,407 OAJ published in D-8 countries. Egypt published the most journals (490) and Bangladesh the fewest (29). Egypt, Iran and Turkey accounted for approximately 73.5 per cent of all journals. At the time of study, 10,162 journals were registered in DOAJ, and 13.8 per cent of them were published in D-8 countries. The mean JIF for all journals from individual countries was highest for Pakistan (0.84), followed by Iran (0.74) and Turkey (0.57). The mean SNIP for all journals from each country was highest for Nigeria (0.57), followed by Egypt (0.57) and Pakistan (0.51).,The widespread use of OA publishing models in D-8 countries will boost accessibility of their journals’ content and ultimately impact research in D-8 states.,Journals published in Egypt, Iran and Turkey account for approximately three-fourths of all OA journals published in D-8 countries. More than one-third (38 per cent) of the journals the authors studied used a Creative Commons (CC) BY license, a hallmark of OA research findings. Most of the journals with a JIF were in the JCR Medical Sciences category (60 per cent). As the number of journals in D-8 countries increases, publishers should attempt to make their journals eligible for indexing in-citation databases. The authors recommend efforts to improve the quality of journals in other subject categories, so that as many as possible become eligible for indexing in JCR.

This study seeks to forecast the subject trend of library and information science research until 2030 based on modeling previous research topics in this field, which has been done with a text mining and in-depth learning approach. After preprocessing and thematic classification of the studies, deep neural network algorithms were used to model previous studies and forecast future topics. The study population included 90,311 journal articles in library and information science publications indexed on the Web of Science website from 1945-2020. All research processes were implemented in the Python programming language. The findings showed that the largest number of studies in the future would be related to Internet and web studies, and the growth rate of these topics will be higher in the future. However, topics related to libraries and their work processes and other traditional disciplines such as theoretical foundations will have a lower growth rate in library and information science s...

The Digital Object Recognizer (DOR) is a system for identifying Persian digital objects on the web. DOR is a unique alphanumeric string assigned by Regional Information Center for Science and Technology (RICeST) to any entity to identify content and provide a persistent link to its location on the Internet digital networks. The paper describes the construction and functions of the DOR system for Persian articles and then introduces and outlines the underlying architecture regarding DOR system. The study concluded that using DOR will enable Iranian journal publishers assign it to both print and electronic journal articles; finally enumerated the benefits of DOI for stakeholders in the scholarly communication process.  DOR: 98.1000/2142-1735.2017.15.135.0.2.68.115

In this study of access models, we compared citation performance in journals that do and do not levy article processing charges (APCs) as part of their business model. We used a sample of journals from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) science class and its 13 subclasses and recorded four citation metrics: JIF, H-index, citations per publication (CPP) and quartile rank. We examined 1881 science journals indexed in DOAJ. Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports and Web of Science were used to extract JIF, H-index, CPP and quartile category. Overall, the JIF, H-index and CPP indicated that APC and non-APC open access (OA) journals had equal impact. Quartile category ranking indicated a difference in favour of APC journals. In each science subclass, we found significant differences between APC and non-APC journals in all citation metrics except for quartile rank. Discipline-related variations were observed in non-APC journals. Differences in the rank positions of scores in d...

Researchers at medical universities are highly active in scientific collaborations at the national, regional, and international levels. Iranian Medical researchers pay diligent attention to scientific collaborations at all levels. The present study aimed to investigate various dimensions of scientific collaborations of the researchers at Shiraz University of Medical Sciences (SUMS). The dimensions include the patterns and levels of national and international collaborations, interdisciplinary interactions, the relationship between geographical distance and scientific collaboration, and the interdisciplinarity pattern of international collaborations. The study adopted a descriptive-analytical method. The data were collected using scientometric measures. The research population consisted of 4499 journal articles in Web of Science (WoS) authored by SUMS researchers during 2014-2018. The VOSviewer was applied to analyze the data and visualize the networks. The results revealed that national collaboration was the dominant pattern. The results showed a desirable ratio of scientific collaborations to all publications (52%). The authors mostly tended to collaborate with American researchers. The majority of interdisciplinary collaborations were observed in the microbiology field. The results suggested that geographical distance did not affect scientific collaborations at the national and international levels (P>0.05). At the international level, SUMS researchers had the highest collaboration with the University of Manitoba and Tehran University at the national level. The results suggested that research policymakers at SUMS should prioritize research policies toward scientific collaborations at all levels and fields to share and synergize knowledge.

The paper introduces a novel mechanism for approximating traffic of the academic sites (universities and research institutes) in the World Wide Web based on Alexa rankings. Firstly we introduce and discuss new method for calculating score (weight) of each site based on its Alexa rank. Secondly we calculate percentage of academic traffic in the World Wide Web. Thirdly we introduce and discuss two new rankings of countries based on academic traffic. Finally we discuss about three indicators and effects of them in traffic of the academic sites. Results indicate that the methodology can be useful for approximating traffic of the academic sites and producing rankings of countries in practice

Current competitive environment has forced higher education authorities to rank the scientific performance of their universities. The results of the university rankings have been used in strategic planning of research affairs. Focal point behind the university ranking is the methodological issues. Previous university rankings have relied on the conventional methods that are accompanied by some drawbacks. Therefore, the present study aims to evaluate Iranian universities based on the Crown indicator. The performance of fourteen Iranian universities was evaluated based on the data gathered from Essential Science Indicators (ESI) database. Results of the world university rankings do not indicate the true positions of the universities that can be attributed to the combined methods. Findings show that the older and larger sized Iranian universities, notwithstanding their enormous publications and citations, have lower research impact performance compared to relatively newer and smaller u...

The aim of this study was mapping, visualizing and determining subject trends in the field of information retrieval using author co-citation network based on articles indexed in Scopus from 2005- 2018. This scientometric study was performed using co-citation analysis. Research population includes all articles indexed in Scopus in the field of information retrieval from 2005 to 2018. Therefore, 35018 papers were retrieved in this field. VOSviewer was used to analyze the author co-citation. The study indicated that a total of 604757 authors were co-cited, 212328 journals were cited. Also highly cited articles and sources were determined. Amongst countries, United States, China, United Kingdom, Germany and Canada ranked one to five, respectively. Computer science was a pioneer with regard to interdisciplinary area in IR. It is noteworthy that visualization of author co-citation in field of IR determined ten clusters, namely knowledge and information science, computer science, electroni...

The paper introduces a novel mechanism for approximating traffic of the academic sites (universities and research institutes) in the World Wide Web based on Alexa's rankings. Firstly we introduce and discuss new method for calculating score (weight) of each site based on its Alexa's rank. Secondly we calculate percentage of academic traffic in the World Wide Web. Thirdly we introduce and discuss two new rankings of countries based on academic traffic. Finally we discuss about five indicators and effects of them in traffic of the academic sites. Results indicate that the methodology can be useful for approximating traffic of the academic sites and producing rankings of countries in practice.

Scholarly journals should adhere to quantitative and qualitative standards for their continuing existence and acceptance by the scientific community, making them eligible for application and indexation in international databases. Concerning this, the journal editorial board would be held accountable for any flaws in publication standards. Obviously, improving standards causes perpetual scholarly communication between authors and journal editors as well as publishers, accreditation and quality assurance, and research finding dissemination. The objective of this study is to assess the status of 359 scientific journals in Iran with regards to their commitment to publication standards. The findings depict journals’ strengths and weaknesses in relation to the editorial profile, instant references, layout quality, exclusive features, academic profile, and miscellaneous features.

The references cited in scientific articles are as important as any other part of the paper, because of their usefulness to the scientific community and to abstracting and indexing services and citation databases. I studied inaccuracies in references and in-text citations in sample of 97 of the 519 peer-reviewed journals accredited by the Iranian National Commission for Journal Accredita-tion Policy (Ministry of Research, Science and Technology). The target journals published 2,980 articles with 74,577 cited references and 108,151 in-text citations. The results showed 36.6% as the average percentage error rate (range 5.6% to 61.3%). The mean number of errors in cited reference and in-text citations was 2.7 per article, and the mean number of errors per journal was 690. For the entire sample of articles, 4,369 in-text citations did not match any source in the list of references (4%), and 8,683 cited references did not match any in-text citation (11.6%). The stakeholders in scholarly communication, especially authors, pay insufficient attention to the accuracy of bibliographic references. Peer-reviewed journals should encourage the use of standardized journal policies and quality-control measures regarding peer review, data quality and accuracy.

The Digital Object Recognizer (DOR) is a system for identifying Persian digital objects on the web. DOR is a unique alphanumeric string assigned by Regional Information Center for Science and Technology (RICeST) to any entity to identify content and provide a persistent link to its location on the Internet digital networks. The paper describes the construction and functions of the DOR system for Persian articles and then introduces and outlines the underlying architecture regarding DOR system. The study concluded that using DOR will enable Iranian journal publishers assign it to both print and electronic journal articles; finally enumerated the benefits of DOI for stakeholders in the scholarly communication process.

Current competitive environment has forced higher education authorities to rank the scientific performance of their universities. The results of the university rankings have been used in strategic planning of research affairs. Focal point behind the university ranking is the methodological issues. Previous university rankings have relied on the conventional methods that are accompanied by some drawbacks. Therefore, the present study aims to evaluate Iranian universities based on the Crown indicator. The performance of fourteen Iranian universities was evaluated based on the data gathered from Essential Science Indicators (ESI) database. Results of the world university rankings do not indicate the true positions of the universities that can be attributed to the combined methods. Findings show that the older and larger sized Iranian universities, notwithstanding their enormous publications and citations, have lower research impact performance compared to relatively newer and smaller universities. Furthermore, employing a normalized mechanism [such as Citation per Publication (CPP)/ Mean Field Citation Score (FCSm)] in rankings provide better results useful for strategic decisions in universities. Using the ranking results from normalized data, using new sets of metrics, smaller and newer Iranian universities could attract larger resources, better quality faculties and students to strengthen stronger national and international collaborations.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the subject of “public libraries” in the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science (WoS) and Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC). The present study is a descriptive-analytical research adopting scientometrics approach in terms of data collection. The statistical population of the study consisted of 2976 documents indexed in the WoS during 1900-2017 as well as 232 documents indexed in the ISC during 1999-2017. To collect data, we refined the search to title as (TI=Public Library*) and limited it to the time span (PY=1900-2017) in WoS in order to avoid diversity in the retrieved documents. The same approach was followed to retrieve documents from ISC databases. Research findings showed that foreign researchers were interested in “information science and library”, “computer sciences”, and “architecture” in relation to public library studies. On the other hand, Iranian researchers focused on “public library studies”, “assessment”, and “staff studies including managers and librarians”. Considering the journals publishing research on public library issues, the findings showed that the American Library Journal (n=722) and the Iranian Research on Information Science and public libraries (n=134) published the largest number of articles on the subject at the global and local levels, respectively.  USA, Canada, and England were the most productive countries in “public libraries” research area. Besides, University of Illinois and Islamic Azad University were the most active institutions publishing in this field at international and national levels with 62 and 57 documents, respectively. This study aimed to survey and compare research on public libraries in WoS and ISC. An examination of the subject area of public libraries revealed the trends of research fronts at the global level and in Iran and determines whether or not the topics of interest to world-class researchers are close to that of national researchers or if domestic researchers have addressed public library issues with an indigenous approach.