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      Comparing the topological rank of journals in Web of Science and Mendeley

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          Abstract

          Recently, there has been a surge of interest in new data emerged due to the rapid development of the information technologies in scholarly communication. Since the 2010s, altmetrics has become a common trend in scientometric research. However, researchers have not treated in much detail the question of the probability distributions underlying these new data. The principal objective of this study was to investigate one of the classic problems of scientometrics—the problem of citation and readership distributions. The study is based on the data obtained from two information systems: Web of Science and Mendeley. Here we based on the concept of the cumulative empirical distribution function to explore the differences and similarities between citations and readership counts of biological journals indexed in Web of Science and Mendeley. The basic idea was to determine, for any journal, a “size” (it is said to be the topological rank) of citation and readership empirical cumulative distributions, and then to compare distributions of the topological ranks of Web of Science and Mendeley. In order to verify our model, we employ it to the bibliometric and altmetric research of 305 biological journals indexed in Journal Citation Reports 2015. The findings show that both distributions of the topological rank of biological journals are statistically close to the Wakeby distribution. The findings presented in this study add to our understanding of information processes of the scholarly communication in the new digital environment.

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          Deep impact: unintended consequences of journal rank

          Most researchers acknowledge an intrinsic hierarchy in the scholarly journals (“journal rank”) that they submit their work to, and adjust not only their submission but also their reading strategies accordingly. On the other hand, much has been written about the negative effects of institutionalizing journal rank as an impact measure. So far, contributions to the debate concerning the limitations of journal rank as a scientific impact assessment tool have either lacked data, or relied on only a few studies. In this review, we present the most recent and pertinent data on the consequences of our current scholarly communication system with respect to various measures of scientific quality (such as utility/citations, methodological soundness, expert ratings or retractions). These data corroborate previous hypotheses: using journal rank as an assessment tool is bad scientific practice. Moreover, the data lead us to argue that any journal rank (not only the currently-favored Impact Factor) would have this negative impact. Therefore, we suggest that abandoning journals altogether, in favor of a library-based scholarly communication system, will ultimately be necessary. This new system will use modern information technology to vastly improve the filter, sort and discovery functions of the current journal system.
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            Scholarly use of social media and altmetrics: A review of the literature

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              Coverage and adoption of altmetrics sources in the bibliometric community

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Heliyon
                Heliyon
                Heliyon
                Elsevier
                2405-8440
                29 July 2019
                July 2019
                29 July 2019
                : 5
                : 7
                : e02089
                Affiliations
                [a ]Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge, National Research University Higher School of Economics, 20 Myasnitskaya Ulitsa, Moscow 101000, Russian Federation
                [b ]American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1200 New York Ave NW, 20005, Washington, DC, USA
                Author notes
                [* ]Corresponding author. yurij.katchanov@ 123456gmail.com
                Article
                S2405-8440(19)35749-4 e02089
                10.1016/j.heliyon.2019.e02089
                6667838
                31388571
                ae3efed8-71f3-4386-9b57-8776f72d006e
                © 2019 The Author(s)

                This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

                History
                : 9 October 2018
                : 25 February 2019
                : 10 July 2019
                Categories
                Article

                information science,biological journals,ranking,bibliometrics,altmetrics,wakeby distribution

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