Scholar-what?

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This morning, an email from ScholarGPS dropped into my inbox informing me that Your prolific publication record, the high impact of your work, and the outstanding quality of your scholarly contributions have placed you in the top 0.05% of all scholars worldwide according to the most recent 2024 ScholarGPS rankings. Is this some scam to inflate my ego first and then make me buy into some subscription service? I was Googling around, but it seems to be a legitimate endeavor. I am not clear why somebody thinks that there should be still another company collecting this kind of research metrics, and why universities would be buying their ScholarGPS Pro subscription, which is aimed at academic institutions and apparently the way they monetize their service. ScholarGPS was founded in 2022 and evaluates individual scholars, institutions and publications. I briefly checked their rankings, and the institutional rankings are - with a few exceptions - pretty in line with other well-known ranking systems. E.g., the University of Helsinki ranks 82nd , behind the Karolinska Institute (67), ETH Zürich (56) and the University of Copenhagen (54). The three highest ranked publications are all about technical advances in protein analysis (Lowry, Bradford and Laemmli). Their numbers for these three (235778, 208682 and 195947 as of April 7th, 2025) do not match with Scopus (273686, 233419, 220553), Web of Science (356029, 242982, 259225), or Google Scholar numbers (234173, 261986, 307492). Do they really do their own counting? They claim to use AI. I don’t think counting counts as AI, and for all that counts, AI is really bad at counting and other simple math ( https://x.com/yuntiandeng/status/1836114401213989366 ). What does this “top 0.05% of all scholars” actually mean? Not much if you do not know how big the pond is from where you are fishing. There is no precise definition of what a “scholar” is. Scopus and Web Science contain profiles for about 10 million unique authors. And 0.05% of these is 5000, which is still a large number. ScholarPro claims it has data about 30 million scholars and 15000 academic institutions. For all that it’s worth, I checked the other experts on the VEGF list , and the vast majority checks out as legitimate (#1 Napoleone Ferrara, #2 Kari Alitalo). They have broken up science into many subspecialties, and you can look at the ranked experts in each of these (e.g. angiogenesis or TGF . Although the categories sometimes appear random. Why are there VEGFs and TGFs, but not Angiopoietins?

Being indexed

Tue, 03 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

There are many databases storing and analysing scientific publications . “Being indexed” or “being listed” simply means for a journal that one of these databases includes the articles that are published in this journal. Importantly, several of these databases also include citation data for each article; therefore they are often referred to as journal citation databases. Since there are many such databases, virtually every journal is “listed” somewhere and if you want to get your journal listed, there are several guides out there, e.g. Getting your journal indexed . However, in the life sciences, there are a few databases that are substantially more important and authoritative than others. The big three are MEDLINE , Web of Science and Scopus . How are these three databases different? Clearly, the most important journals are covered by all of them. But less important journals and journals that publish in non-English languages might be only listed by one or two of the three. The databases have different journal selection criteria (see below) and the selection is subject to constant change.MEDLINE MEDLINE is a non-commercial database that is maintained by the US-American National Library of Medicine and the selection of journals happens under NIH -oversight. MEDLINE and especially its online portal PubMed are exceptional due to their free accessibility for everybody. In fact, PubMed is probably the only transparent academic bibliographic database that can be used for free by everybody to research life science literature. MEDLINE currently indexes 5620 journals.Web of ScienceThe Web of Science comprises several databases and they used to be maintained by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI), before it was sold to Thomson Scientific & Healthcare (nowadays Thomson Reuters ). The ISI was founded by Eugene Garfield , who is considered to be the father of bibliometrics and scientometrics . The Web of Science currently indexes 13762 journals (combined Arts & Humanities, Expanded Science and Social Sciences Citation Indexes).ScopusThe other commercial journal database is Scopus , which is owned by Elsevier , the largest publisher of scientific journals. Scopus is the largest of these three databases covering many more journals than the other two. According to some, this is due to the somewhat loosely applied journal selection criteria ( http://www.issi2015.org/files/downloads/all-papers/1198.pdf) . There has also been some discussion about the independence of the journal selection for commercial databases. After all, according to a study published in PlosOne, five companies control more than half of all academic publishing, with Elsevier dominating at about 25% of the market ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502) . Scopus indexes currently over 22000 journals.People have been comparing databases and citation counts (e.g. here ). One database, that I have been omitting is Google Scholar . Even though the free accessibility of Google Scholar and its broader approach to measure impact have advantages as opposed to Web of Science or Scopus, Google Scholar is - similar to the general Google search engine - not very open about what journals and sources its search covers. In my opinion, this is a big draw-back, but on the other hand Google probably constantly has to tweak its algorithm to avoid exploitation. If you want to know more about Google Scholar as a citation database, I recommend this article . Journal ListsMEDLINE: ftp://ftp.nlm.nih.gov/online/journals/lsi2015.xml,http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog?cmd=historysearch&querykey=1 (currently indexed)http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog/?term=reportedmedline (all)Web of Science/Thomson Reuters: http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/mjl/Scopus : https://www.elsevier.com/__data/assets/excel_doc/0015/91122/title_list.xlsx Journal selection criteriaMEDLINE: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/jsel.htmlWeb of Science/Thomson Reuters: http://wokinfo.com/essays/journal-selection-process/Scopus : https://www.elsevier.com/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/95118/SC_FAQ-content-selection-process-22092014.pdf

Scientometrics on Michael’s Domain

Scholar-what?

Being indexed