Publications

Industry 4.0 and its application in the business has been the focus of attention by the academy, for its ability to establish principles of flexibility and connectivity along the shop floor. Meantime, because of a lean wave in the 1990’s, most of the western industry adopted principles, techniques and tools of lean production, whose results were quickly captured, guaranteed its adoption worldwide. Thus, with a view to turning traditional manufacturing companies into smart companies, it is essential to preserve the existing system and find ways for the two concepts (Lean and I4.0) to come together. This study was conducted based on a systematic literature review, using the Scopus database. The PRISMA process was the method used to select the articles. Finally, to analyze and discuss the results, the bibliometric analysis of the articles and content analysis were adopted. The results point to a greater impact of I4.0 technologies on lean, since it was perceived that I4.0 technologies give to lean tools a more dynamic way of working, accelerating information sharing processes and improving production manager’s and operator’s decision making. In the perspective of lean’s contribution to I4.0; however, there is little practical and theoretical application, thus the actual contribution is still somewhat blurred. Full article

The present study examines a sample of 220 pieces of news related to human evolution, written in Spanish and published over a period of two years, both in digital and print media. The aim of this study is to assess the rigor and coherence of the information in the news in our sample with scientific knowledge on the theory of evolution. To this end, errors and the incorrect use of concepts related to biological evolution are identified, classified according to criteria resulting from the review of previous studies, and finally, the frequency of errors identified in news published in print media is compared with that identified in digital media. The results presented allow us to highlight the significantly high frequency of errors in the news analyzed and the most frequent error categories. Results are discussed within the frame of the important role that scientific journalism plays in the processes of knowledge dissemination, in this case, related to human evolution. Full article

Classifying citations according to function has many benefits when it comes to information retrieval tasks, scholarly communication studies, and ranking metric developments. Many citation function classification schemes have been proposed, but most of them have not been systematically designed for an extensive literature-based compilation process. Many schemes were also not evaluated properly before being used for classification experiments utilizing large datasets. This paper aimed to build and evaluate new citation function categories based upon sufficient scientific evidence. A total of 2153 citation sentences were collected from Indonesian journal articles for our dataset. To identify the new categories, a literature survey was conducted, analyses and groupings of category meanings were carried out, and then categories were selected based on the dataset’s characteristics and the purpose of the classification. The evaluation used five criteria: coherence, ease, utility, balance, and coverage. Fleiss’ kappa and automatic classification metrics using machine learning and deep learning algorithms were used to assess the criteria. These methods resulted in five citation function categories. The scheme’s coherence and ease of use were quite good, as indicated by an inter-annotator agreement value of 0.659 and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) F1-score of 0.93. According to the balance and coverage criteria, the scheme still needs to be improved. This research data was limited to journals in food science published in Indonesia. Future research will involve classifying the citation function using a massive dataset collected from various scientific fields and published from some representative countries, as well as applying improved annotation schemes and deep learning methods. Full article

This study investigates citation patterns between 2017 and 2020 for preprints published in three preprint servers, one specializing in biology (bioRxiv), one in chemistry (ChemRxiv), and another hosting preprints in all disciplines (Research Square). Showing evidence that preprints are now regularly cited in peer reviewed journal articles, books, and conference papers, the outcomes of this investigation further substantiate the value of open science also in relation to citation-based metrics on which the evaluation of scholarship continues to rely on. This analysis will be useful to inform new research-based education in today’s scholarly communication. Full article

Journal publishers play an important role in the open research data ecosystem. Through open data policies that include public data archiving mandates and data availability statements, journal publishers help promote transparency in research and wider access to a growing scholarly record. The library and information science (LIS) discipline has a unique relationship with both open data initiatives and academic publishing and may be well-positioned to adopt rigorous open data policies. This study examines the information provided on public-facing websites of LIS journals in order to describe the extent, and nature, of open data guidance provided to prospective authors. Open access journals in the discipline have disproportionately adopted detailed, strict open data policies. Commercial publishers, which account for the largest share of publishing in the discipline, have largely adopted weaker policies. Rigorous policies, adopted by a minority of journals, describe the rationale, application, and expectations for open research data, while most journals that provide guidance on the matter use hesitant and vague language. Recommendations are provided for strengthening journal open data policies. Full article

Current societies are based on huge flows of information and knowledge circulating on the Internet, created not only by traditional means but by all kinds of users becoming producers, which leads to fake news and misinformation. This situation has been exacerbated by the pandemic to an unprecedented extent through social media, with special concern among young people. This study aims to provide significant data about the youngest generation in Spain (Generation Z) regarding their media and information consumption, their social network use, and their relationship with fake news, all in relation to the feeling of reliability/trust. Focusing on a convenience sample of 408 young Spanish students from Generation Z aged 18 to 22, a descriptive exploratory study is presented. Data collection was performed with an adapted questionnaire. Results show that young Spanish people use networks for information, showing a surprising lack of trust in social networks as the media they consume the most. The content they consume the most since the occurrence of COVID-19 is related to politics, entertainment, humor, and music. On the other hand, distrust of politicians, media, and journalists is evident. The conclusion is that media literacy is still more necessary than ever, but with the added challenge of mistrust: maybe it is time to rethink media literacy. Full article

The relationship between a subject’s ideological persuasion with the belief and spread of fake news is the object of our study. Departing from a left- vs. right-wing framework, a questionnaire sought to position subjects on this political-ideological spectrum and demanded them to evaluate five pro-left and pro-right fake and real news, totaling 20 informational products. The results show the belief and dissemination of (fake) news are related to the political ideology of the participants, with right-wing subjects exhibiting a greater tendency to accept fake news, regardless of whether it is pro-left or pro-right fake news. These findings contradict the confirmation bias and may suggest that a greater influence of factors such as age, the level of digital news literacy and psychological aspects in the judgment of fake news are at play. Older and less educated respondents indicated they believed and would disseminate fake news at greater rates. Regardless of the ideology they favor, the Portuguese attributed higher credibility to the sample’s real news, a fact that can be meaningful regarding the fight against disinformation in Portugal and elsewhere. Full article

This article is devoted to the attitude of Russian university teachers toward scientometrics and its indicators, which have been imposed on them by university administrations and the state since 2012. In addition to substantiating the problem’s urgency, the article contains a brief critical outline of the main scientometric parameters and their application in practice in Russia. To evaluate this, 283 people from leading universities in Russia (included in Program 5-100) were questioned. As the study showed, faculties of Russian universities understand the specifics of scientometrics, relate to it relatively positively, and over the past years have been able to adapt to the new requirements of the administration regarding implementing scientometric tasks and standards. The higher the position and scholarly qualification of a respondent, the more complete the knowledge about scientometrics. Scholars in the humanities know and relate comparatively better to scientometrics than representatives of technical and general scientific specialties. Full article

One of the most important conditions for the effectiveness of science is the motivation of academic staff of universities as key and direct producers of new knowledge. The purpose of the article was to substantiate the factors of efficiency in managing the publication activity of Russian universities. The nature and density of the relationship between the number of scientific publications and the level of citation of 19 leading countries in the world, including Russia, were determined by means of statistical analysis and the method of clusters. It has been empirically proven that the priority model for the development of publication activity should be an intensive model, which aims at improving the quality of scientific publications and the level of their citation. Moreover, a survey of 1573 young scientists (under the age of 39) and 2461 senior scientists from 14 universities in Russia was conducted. It investigated the factors of effective management of the publication activity at Russian universities. The results contribute to a better understanding on how Russian universities can activate and foster the flow of high-quality publication outputs by their researchers. Full article

Of the estimated 7117 languages in the world, approximately 1500 (21%) are indigenous to the Pacific. Despite composing approximately one-fourth of the world’s linguistic diversity, the representation of these languages in academic publication is scant, even in periodicals focused on Pacific Island studies. We investigated 34 periodicals that focus on research in Oceania. We report on (1) journal names; (2) how many are currently in circulation; (3) how many accept submissions in Indigenous Pacific languages; (4) what percent of the most recent articles were actually in Indigenous languages of the Pacific and (5) which languages those were. Five of the 34 journals allowed submissions written in Indigenous Pacific languages. Three of the five journals specified Hawaiian as an accepted language of publication; one Sāmoan and one Tahitian and any other Indigenous language of Polynesia. We were able to collect data on four of the five journals, which averaged 11% of recent publications in an Indigenous language. None accepted submissions in Indigenous languages from the Pacific outside of Polynesia. Full article

The purpose is to verify trends of scientific production from 2010 to 2020, considering the best universities of the United States, China, the European Union (EU), and private companies. The top 30 universities in 2020 in China, the EU, and the US and private companies were selected from the SCImago institutions ranking (SIR). The positions in 2020, 2015, and 2010 in SIR and three sub-indicators were analyzed by means of non-parametric statistics, taking into consideration the effect of time and group on rankings. American and European Union universities have lost positions to Chinese universities and even more to private companies, which have improved. In 2020, private companies have surpassed all other groups considering Innovation as a sub-indicator. The loss of leadership of European and partly American universities mainly concerns research linked to the production of patents. This can lead to future risks of monopoly that may elude public control and cause a possible loss of importance of research not linked to innovation. Full article

This bibliometric study examines the overall research trends and productivity in the field of virtual reality (VR) in higher education. Bibliometric data were retrieved from Scopus databases. The findings suggest a rising trend in terms of citations and publications showing increased interest in the VR domain have been seen during the last few decades. The year in which the most citations of this type occurred was 2009, in which 1913 citations were recorded, whereas 2019 was the most productive year, as 127 documents on this subject were published in that year. The data analysis revealed that all the top ten researchers belong to Australia. Further, the top three researchers (Gregory S., Lee, M.J.W., and Wood, D.), countries (United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia), organizations (Charles Sturt University, Queensland University of Technology, and University of New England, Australia), journals (Computers and Education, International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, and Journal of Surgical Education) and collaborations (Australia and New Zealand, United States and the United Kingdom, and Australia and the United Kingdom) belong to developed countries. Virtual reality, virtual worlds, augmented reality, e-learning, and simulations are the top keywords used in the VR domain. The thematic evolution of the keyword shows the importance of “Virtual Reality” as a keyword throughout the 27 years of its existence (1994–2020). Furthermore, the main finding of the study is the interdisciplinary nature of the VR domain, which extends from the field of computer sciences to other disciplines. Full article

Academic conferences offer scientists the opportunity to share their findings and knowledge with other researchers. However, the number of conferences is rapidly increasing globally and many unsolicited e-mails are received from conference organizers. These e-mails take time for researchers to read and ascertain their legitimacy. Because not every conference is of high quality, there is a need for young researchers and scholars to recognize the so-called “predatory conferences” which make a profit from unsuspecting researchers without the core purpose of advancing science or collaboration. Unlike journals that possess accreditation indices, there is no appropriate accreditation for international conferences. Here, a bibliometric measure is proposed that enables scholars to evaluate conference quality before attending. Full article

Citations are core metrics to gauge the relevance of scientific literature. Identifying features that can predict a high citation count is therefore of primary importance. For the present study, we generated a dataset of 121,640 publications on chronic inflammation from the Scopus database, containing data such as titles, authors, journal, publication date, type of document, type of access and citation count, ranging from 1951 to 2021. Hence we further computed title length, author count, title sentiment score, number of colons, semicolons and question marks in the title and we used these data as predictors in Gradient boosting, Bagging and Random Forest regressors and classifiers. Based on these data, we were able to train these machines, and Gradient Boosting achieved an F1 score of 0.552 on classification. These models agreed that document type, access type and number of authors were the best predicting factors, followed by title length. Full article

Recently significant initiatives have been launched for the dissemination of Open Access as part of the Open Science movement. Nevertheless, two other major pillars of Open Science such as Open Research Data (ORD) and Open Peer Review (OPR) are still in an early stage of development among the communities of researchers and stakeholders. The present study sought to unveil the perceptions of a medical and health sciences community about these issues. Through the investigation of researchers‘ attitudes, valuable conclusions can be drawn, especially in the field of medicine and health sciences, where an explosive growth of scientific publishing exists. A quantitative survey was conducted based on a structured questionnaire, with 179 valid responses. The participants in the survey agreed with the Open Peer Review principles. However, they ignored basic terms like FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) and appeared incentivized to permit the exploitation of their data. Regarding Open Peer Review (OPR), participants expressed their agreement, implying their support for a trustworthy evaluation system. Conclusively, researchers need to receive proper training for both Open Research Data principles and Open Peer Review processes which combined with a reformed evaluation system will enable them to take full advantage of the opportunities that arise from the new scholarly publishing and communication landscape. Full article

Scientists observe, discover, justify and eventually share their findings with the scientific community. Dissemination is an integral aspect of scientific discovery, since discoveries which go unnoticed have no or little impact on science. Today, peer review is part of this process of scientific dissemination as it contributes proactively to the quality of a scientific article. As the numbers of scientific journals and scientific articles published therein are increasing steadily, processes such as the single-blind or double-blind peer review are facing a near collapse situation. In fact, these traditional forms of reviewing have reached their limits and, because of this, are also increasingly considered as unfair, sloppy, superficial and even biased. In this manuscript, we propose forms of post-publication public peer review (P4R) as valuable alternatives to the traditional blind peer review system. We describe how the journal Sci has explored such an approach and provide first empirical evidence of the benefits and also challenges, such a P4R approach faces. Full article

Nowadays, the importance of bibliographic databases (DBs) has increased enormously, as they are the main providers of publication metadata and bibliometric indicators universally used both for research assessment practices and for performing daily tasks. Because the reliability of these tasks firstly depends on the data source, all users of the DBs should be able to choose the most suitable one. Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus are the two main bibliographic DBs. The comprehensive evaluation of the DBs’ coverage is practically impossible without extensive bibliometric analyses or literature reviews, but most DBs users do not have bibliometric competence and/or are not willing to invest additional time for such evaluations. Apart from that, the convenience of the DB’s interface, performance, provided impact indicators and additional tools may also influence the users’ choice. The main goal of this work is to provide all of the potential users with an all-inclusive description of the two main bibliographic DBs by gathering the findings that are presented in the most recent literature and information provided by the owners of the DBs at one place. This overview should aid all stakeholders employing publication and citation data in selecting the most suitable DB. Full article