Top 5 ways to thumb your nose at the citation rankings

There is too much advice around about how to improve your citation performance.  This can become quite a bore for those who clearly couldn’t care less, or, worse, are proactively anti the use of citations as a measure of research quality.  Today’s post offers something for such colleagues.

Top 5 ways to thumb your nose at the citation rankings.

1) Spend all your time poo-pooing the whole idea of citations as a measure of research quality.  Complain loudly about how it’s so open to abuse. And how low an h-index Einstein has.  And how poor it is for Humanities scholars. Think long and hard about such issues and, most importantly, do nothing else.

2) If you have a really good research idea, try and wring as many papers as you can out of it. Salami slicing is the way to go.  How about writing the methods in one paper, half the findings in another, and so on.  That way any citations to your work will be spread across so many papers that your average citation rate will go down.  That’ll show ’em!

3) Never write a systematic review.  They take so long.  And they’re not real research anyway.

4) Only publish alone, and under no circumstances build any alliances with FOREIGNERS.  Thick accents are such hard work.  Not to mention time-zones!  No, collaboration is only for self-doubters who haven’t the strength of their research convictions to go it alone.

5) Remember it’s not British to go in for self-promotion.  Your research really should stand on its own merits. People will instinctively know about it if it’s good enough.  Word will get round!  So keep a tight-lipped humility about yourself and your work.   After all, Jesus never wrote a journal paper and everybody knows about him.

Data-day concerns

I have a confession to make – well, two actually. The first is that I watched the Christmas Day special of Downton Abbey – all one-and-a-half hours of it (the length being the more remarkable, in the absence of any plot developments that might connect together to form a story-line). I put this down to a semi-comatose state that arose from my eating too much Christmas fare, although with hindsight it may have been the lack of anything interesting happening in Downton that induced my stupor (in the past I have been similarly affected by accidental exposure to episodes of Lark Rise to Candleford). My second, and more serious confession is that I failed to appreciate the speed with which Her Majesty’s Government is planning to introduce important changes to the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA), as part of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 (POFA). “The what? Should I care about this?”, I hear you say. Well, yes. If you didn’t get around to reading the Government’s Open Data White Paper, published in July 2012, you may be surprised – and alarmed – to find that the POFA will introduce a new statutory requirement on public authorities to publish data-sets for re-use. This will include data-sets generated as a result of research carried out in English and Welsh universities. The POFA requires that where reasonably practical, all such data-sets should be published in an electronic format that facilitates their re-use; they should be published under a particular (open) licensing framework; and should be accompanied by metadata and other descriptive material that may facilitate their interpretation. The new Act will be implemented in April 2013, giving universities and other public bodies only a few more months to get themselves prepared.

As a result of the impending changes, The Cabinet Office is running a consultation on a new Code of Practice for data-sets, to sit alongside the existing guidance contained in Section 45 of the FOIA. This consultation can be found at http://data.gov.uk/consultation. It opened with little fanfare on 21 November 2012 and has a (now worryingly short) deadline of 10 January 2013, with Universities UK seeking responses by 8 January.

How does all of this square with the recent (November 2012) acceptance by the Government that Section 22 of the FOIA should be amended to provide for a pre-publication exemption for research? Until the latter is enshrined in legislation, it is hard to say. However I must admit that the POFA, and the proposed open licensing framework in particular, has got me worried. May I therefore urge you to re-visit the Open Data White Paper and – if you haven’t done so already – contribute your views to the consultation on the Code of Practice?

Now, back to writing my Christmas ‘thank-you’ letters. Let’s see. ‘Dear Aunt Beatrice, imagine my surprise at receiving your kind gift of a DVD box-set containing every single episode of Lark Rise …’.

The Man with the Midas Touch

It’s one thing for Government Ministers to be seeking advice from our recently established ‘Agony Aunt’ column, quite another when we get a letter from a superannuated Bond villain …

Dear Open-ise,

Having finally abandoned my quest for world domination and moved with my last remaining henchman to Skegness, I have tried my best to keep a low profile in retirement. Okay, I accept that Oddjob, my Korean butler, looks out of place in a sleepy English seaside town, as does the full-size replica of Fort Knox, the US Bullion Depository, which I had built in my back garden – but hey, this is a whole new ball-game for me! Then the rumours started: was it true that Oddjob was the ‘sixteenth member’ of the Finch Working Group on Open-Access publishing; did that mean I’d had undue influence on the Group’s ‘Gold’ report to the UK Government; did I really supplement my pension by working as a life-coach for Michael Gove? Despite my best efforts at denying all these things, it seems that no-one believes me! In desperation I removed Michael’s phone number from my address book and introduced him to Ernst Stavro Blofeld, an old friend. Fortunately Michael shares Ernst’s passion for Turkish Angora cats – so they hit if off immediately. Shaking off the Gold Open-Access thing is proving more difficult, as everyone thinks I had a hand (or at least, a digit) in it. Is there anything you can do to help?

Auric Goldfinger, Skegness, Lincolnshire

Auntie replies: Glad to hear that the SPECTRE of you taking over the world has been firmly laid to rest (sorry, Auntie couldn’t resist a little joke!). I understand your desire to distance yourself from your past life; even a super-villain is entitled to some peace and quiet in his old age. May I suggest that you get straight on the blower to the new ‘M’? Explain that Oddjob had no involvement in the Finch review; that despite your previous megalomania and love of Gold, you’ve no links to the world’s largest publishers; and that your newly-built replica of Fort Knox is far too small to hold, on behalf of those publishers, all the money that universities will soon have to fork-out in the form of Article Processing Charges. Conclude the phone call with an evil chuckle. Job done!

Worried about the rising price of Gold? Perhaps Auntie can help? Share your problem via the Open-ise post-box.

If Elsevier ruled the World (Rankings)

If, like me, you read the THE World Rankings from the bottom up to avoid disappointment, you may have caught yourself wondering how different the listing would look if someone other than Thomson Reuters supplied the data.  To the surprise of many of us, TR weren’t chosen to supply citation data to the REF.  So, is it only a matter of time before Elsevier  are selected to supply data to the THE World Rankings as well?   I don’t know.  But imagine how my interest piqued when I discovered that our wealthy Dutch friends do generate a World Institution Ranking using data from SCOPUS.  It is called the Scimago Institutions Rankings (SIR), is freely available on the web, and provides a very scientific looking window on Institutional rankings, full of red and green arrows, serious-looking abbreviations, and red and amber dots.

Image courtesy of http://www.freeimages.co.uk

Whilst they try to make out they are “NOT A LEAGUE TABLE” (their caps), I’m really not sure to what other use you could put  such data.  Indeed, Wikipedia defines a League Table  as a “a chart or list which compares sports teams or… institutions…ranking them in order of ability or achievement”.  So it must be true.  In fact Wikipedia go on to stress that whislt “a league table may list several related statistics… they are generally sorted by the primary one that determines the rankings.”   Thus it is unfortunate that the SIR ranks institutions according to their total publication output (the bigger you are, the higher you climb), even though they do offer a variety of other (weird and wonderful) measures. 

The real beauty of the SIR is, of course, that it is only available online so you can run a milisecond-long search for your Institution rather than a 5-10 second heart-stopping scan in the printed version.  I know, I probably take this too seriously. 

Take a look yourself and let us know what you think.

Open Access: It’s agony!

Always keen to support our readers, we recently introduced a new feature: the Open-ise Agony Aunt. We’ve been amazed at the response, much of it on House of Commons notepaper. Here’s a small selection of recent postings:

Dear Open-ise,

I have been doing my best to keep the universities happy by agreeing to implement the main proposals in Dame Janet’s report, giving the top 30 institutions £10 million to help them move towards Gold Open Access. The other day I found  another £17 million down the back of my sofa, which I’m about to hand out by means of a block grant. Now I find these universities are not happy at all – in fact they seem to think Dame Janet was barking [up the wrong tree – Ed.], and want something called ‘Green OA’ instead. They say it will mean not having to pay publishers twice for the privilege of seeing their papers go to press. Is this a ruse by beardy academics or other rampant lefties, such as librarians? I have to admit that both my brains are baffled. What have I done wrong?

DW, Havant, Hampshire

Auntie replies: I’m sorry to hear of your woes, but had you consulted more widely than just Dame Janet and a few publishers, you’d have realised the error of your ways well before now. Green is good and won’t cost the earth. Gold is costly and your millions are going straight into the publishers’ deep pockets. Green is the colour of lush rainforest; gold is the colour of the Liberal Democrats. You may have got it badly wrong, but please don’t leave office just yet – someone needs to keep Michael Gove from taking over the world.

Dear Open-ise,

I’m a Ph.D. student in the Physics and Astronomy department of the last remaining 1994 Group university. I’ve fallen in love with a dreamy guy who works as a Research Support Librarian [‘scientific informationist’ for our younger readers – Ed.]. After watching him from the Stacks every day for two weeks, I plucked up the courage to ask him out on a date. To my delight, he said ‘yes’. We had a lovely meal at a posh restaurant, and he even asked me my name during the final course. But when I started to tell him about the work I do, it all went wrong! He dropped his spoon, his face went blank, the colour drained from his cheeks and he started chanting the words ‘Manage the data! Manage the data!’ over and over again. I got up from the table and left in tears. It was really scary – like he had become some kind of robot. Have I fallen for a sci-borg?

Worried Woman, Sheepy Magna, Leicestershire

Auntie replies: Yes, you have – you poor dear! I’m no expert but the signs are all there: blank face, pasty complexion, monotonous voice and repeated references to research data management. He looks like a Librarian, he even wears sandals, but underneath beats a heart of metal; he is a sci-borg. What’s a girl to do? I suggest you find a young man who will love you for who you are – and not simply want to curate your data-sets.

Got an open-access problem? Perhaps Auntie can help? Please post your questions via the Open-ise comments box.

Journal publishers: children of the wild?

I’m reminded of a book I read once by Jeffrey Archer (I know, I know, I only read one). In it, the rags-to-riches protagonist makes a gift of an enormous sack of banknotes to the kindly, forest-dwelling peasant who took him in as an orphaned babe.  The shivering and impoverished woman weeps for joy.  And as our hero walks away, she starts building herself a hearty bonfire with the generous gift.

You see, I’ve just read Simon Lilley’s piece in the Times Higher this week, which is based on a paper he wrote for the journal Organization.  The paper is called “What are we to do with feral publishers?”.  There he bemoans the eye-watering profit margins of commercial journal publishers (up to 53 per cent), the propensity of many such organisations to hole up in tax havens to make those profits go that bit further (every little helps), and what on earth academics can do about it (resign en masse from editorial boards and set up parallel titles elsewhere).

As I turned to my email, our exasperated Collection Development Manager had circulated some disturbing news. Apparently, the “not-for-profit” publisher of Science, (the American Academy for the Advancement of Science) plans to increase our subscription fee to the title by 41%, to £6,200.

I sighed.  I pondered. And then it all clicked into place.  The publishers are feral. They should be objects of pity, not scorn. Someone just needs to tell them that there are other ways to keep warm in winter than to burn cash.

Splash that cash

So, Loughborough University is one of a handful of recipients of a share of £10 Million to blow on Open Access by March 2013.  “Lucky you!”, snipe green-gilled colleagues from other Institutions whose research income falls below the  funding threshold. The thing is, I don’t feel so lucky.  I guess it has something to do with the fact that Loughborough has an extremely well-populated Institutional Respository (yes, brimming with real full-text, not just bibliographic records) that has been open-ising our research very nicely, thank you, for the last 5 years.  And in that 5 years it has probably cost us nigh on £150K in staff time and server space to provide that service.  And now we have a similar sum to spend on “Gold” Open Access in 5 months.  I know Gold Open Access is costly –  that’s why it’s called “Gold”, right?  And I’m not averse to spending money in the right places.  But seriously, how are Institutions meant to get rid of that kind of cash in that kind of time-frame without recourse to the latest Boden catalogue?

Rise of the sci-borg

“I am not a Librarian” sounds like something that you might stand up and say at a meeting of Librarians Anonymous – to be followed by clapping, nods from your fellow Recovering Librarians, and a pat on the shoulder when you sit down. In my case, it’s true: I am not a Librarian (see: ‘About’). But neither, it seems, are friends who until now I had regarded as Librarians.

In fact, Librarians – once a common sight in our cities and parks – are no more. According to an article published this week in Nature (see: doi:10.1038/490343d), while our attention was elsewhere, they were replaced by an army of ‘Scientific Informationists’. We’ll call them ‘sci-borgs’ for short.

When did this happen? To uncover the truth, one has to look back only a few years to the ‘Climate Gate’ scandal at the University of East Anglia (see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8388485.stm). Worried about the potential for scientists to play an active role in suppressing the release of their own research data – as opposed to their previous practice of just sitting on it until after they retired – the UK Government decided that ‘open-access data’ should be the new norm. Universities and other research institutes would be obliged to publish the data underpinning their journal papers, or otherwise make it accessible to others – for example, through a data repository. But who could one call upon to manage this process? Surely not the scientists themselves? No, they could no longer be trusted. Far better to place this matter in the hands of proper ‘information professionals’, most of whom (it was discovered) were busy at work in university libraries, wearing a small badge with ‘Librarian’ printed on it in neat letters. The call went out from Government: “Manage the data!”; and it came to pass that these gentle folk were rounded up and sent on training courses in research data management. Days later, they emerged blinking into the sunlight, no longer Librarians, but transformed into sci-borgs: part human, part data-management-literate Scientific Informationist. Those who resisted and attempted to hide in the Short Loan Collection were harried by officials and forced to repeat the mantra “Manage the data! Manage the data!” until they could no longer even remember the word ‘periodical’. All that remained as a faint echo of their previous lives, was their sensible shoes.

So it came to pass that, like books on the shelves, the Librarian has vanished (quietly) from history, their place taken by the sci-borg. Will we miss them? I certainly will. And especially so, since the sci-borg seems capable of only limited conversation – mainly the phrase “I’ll be back”, spoken in a heavy Austrian accent.

Please sir, I want some MORe!

“MORe!?” Of course young Oliver Twist didn’t have great expectations when he dared ask the master of the workhouse for a second bowl of gruel. Most welcome then, in these equally hard times for UK universities, to see that in a surprising turn of events, a certain Mr Willetts of Her Majesty’s Circumlocution Office (see: http://www.bl.uk/learning/images/21cc/lang/transcript1272.html) is to provide £10 million to 30 of our most venerable academic institutions to help them manage open research (‘MORe’) – in other words, to provide open access to journal papers and accompanying research data sets. Unfortunately there is a catch: the money does not come unfettered. The benevolent Mr Willetts wishes by his hand-out to promote a move by all higher education institutions to Gold Open Access (see: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/documents/sherpaplusdocs/Nottingham-colour-guide.pdf), a model in which the author is expected to pay the publisher twice over, for the same paper.

What the Dickens is going on here? Government funds to universities in times of austerity must be a good thing, you might think, but it seems that the slogan adopted by Mr Willetts’s Office is “MORe for less!”; as recipients of funding from the public purse, we must now seek to make freely accessible to all-comers our published research papers and their underpinning data sets. We must do so, even if the costs are prohibitive, such that if the publishers seek to maintain their subscriptions at current levels, we will all be destined for the Marshalsea (a debtors’ prison that, like the Circumlocution Office, features heavily in Charles Dickens’s ‘Little Dorrit’).

Those institutions that will not benefit from the £10 million provided by Mr Willetts – which, incidentally, must be spent by March 2013 – will soon be presented with a small consolation prize, in the form of an annual block grant. How much each university outside of the top 30 will receive as a block grant will be revealed shortly, though rumours abound that for those HEIs at the bottom of the research pecking-order, it will be just under one shilling in old money – “and keep the change, My Good Man!”

Will these initiatives provide the necessary momentum to get us all, rich and poor alike, on the path to Gold OA – and do so within the time-frame prescribed by the Circumlocution Office (we must be ready by April 2013)? The answer will depend on the size of the block grant; how many papers each university produces in a given year; the availability of a Gold OA option for journals in those disciplines covered by each institution; how well its guardians look after the pounds and pennies in their central publications fund; and other factors besides. Ironically, even with their share of Mr Willetts’s money, those institutions that are most active in publishing their research are likely to have to find a significant internal subsidy – to be known as a ‘Finch’ – in order to make substantial progress down the Gold OA route. And in the meantime, journal subscription costs will tumble – or not. It looks like a serious gamble by the Government. Will our former colonies, notably the United States, be keen to follow our lead? Will we all end up in the workhouse? What do YOU think?

I always thought you looked dodgy

A shrewd Colorado Librarian has compiled a list of “suspect” open access publishers looking to cash-in on academics’ angst to publish in OA journals.  Some you might be taken in by, but seriously, would you choose a publisher with banner like this?