Leveraging Expertise and Bibliometrics to Promote Open Access Journal Publications - A Case Study

Mark Eddy & Daniela Solomon, Research Services Librarians - Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University

Project Overview KSL Research Services Librarians were enlisted by a senior faculty member in Sociology to advise on the transition of a scholarly journal to an open access online platform. Drawing from a knowledge of trends in scholarly communication, article indexing standards, and bibliometric analysis techniques, we were able to provide highly valued recommendations for optimizing the journal’s website layout, content organization, search functionality, and metadata standards. We also performed quantitative bibliometric and citation analyses on the journal content to learn more about the community network of contributing researchers, and about the topics and issues addressed in their published research. These activities have become the basis of a unique advisory role, supporting an editor who hopes to use the journal as a tool to connect with underrepresented research programs, and unaffiliated, nontraditional research groups in fostering a global research community. This case study illustrates how professional expertise among librarians can be leveraged in new ways to support faculty and researchers venturing into new and emerging venues of scholarly communication publishing. Bibliometric Analysis: Methodology & Findings A total of 135 articles published between Volume 1, Issue 1 (2006) to Volume 9, Issue 2 (2014) of the journal were analyzed. Bibliographic information, subject tags, cited references, and author location/affiliations were included for each article, and formatted in an Excel spreadsheet. Google Maps and ArcGIS software were used to visualize authors’ geographic location and affiliation, and Sci2 Tool* software was used to create subject/topic and cited references networks based on co-word analysis. Analysis of cited references was confined to journal publications, representing 27% of total cited sources. Results and data visualization analysis revealed several significant patterns associated with the current research community connected to this journal publication: The vast majority of contributors are affiliated with traditional academic institutions. There is little or no contributor representation from Africa, Central Asia, India, Middle East,

China, Central and South America, Canada or Russia. (Figure 1) There is a high concentration of content contributors from a small group of institutions in the

United States. This may represent a network of core contributors from research areas that figure prominently in the journal content. (Figure 2)

Gender, race, globalization and social movements are the most frequently referenced and/or closely associated topics in the journal. The study of social movements is focused primarily on those occurring in the United States. (Figure 3)

Current subject indexing for article content does not adequately represent the full breadth of topics covered in the journal.

There is a high incidence of journal self-referencing (20%). Other journals cited by contributors suggest networked connections to research communities in

political science, psychology, and communication sciences, and health studies. Conclusions & Planned Recommendations Our initial communication with stakeholders suggested that faculty editors of scholarly journals may not be aware of key considerations in managing and marketing open access publications. Bibliometric analysis in this case study has contributed significantly to our understanding of the research networks associated with this journal, and helped us to formulate several recommendations for journal stakeholders. Based on our preliminary findings we plan to advise the journal editor on the following considerations: Standards for citation and metadata formatting, and control vocabulary for traditional database

indexing need further optimization. This is critical for journal content integration in traditional database resources.

Considering other journals that are commonly cited in the articles, we recommend that content ingest into the SocINDEX, Web of Science, SCOPUS, and Gender Studies databases should be prioritized. Also important is a journal listing in the Directory of Open Access Journals.

Editors should secure adequate journal content usage data in order to track topic trends and geographic locations among users and website visitors to discover new marketing/audience/ contributor opportunities.

Editors should explore various ways to enhance the “impact” of the journal to potential contributors by integrating article content and author information into academic social network services like ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and raising the profile of journal content in Google and Google Scholar. This will also help expand the audience and potential contributor pool among underrepresented research organizations and regions of the world.

Our experiences thus far demonstrate how librarians can play a critical advisory role in helping faculty editors of journal publications understand the importance of such things as standardized metadata and indexing, and how journal citation analytics can help identify new audiences and potential content contributors for the journal. By leveraging customized journal content analytics, librarians can help faculty editors advance the aims and goals of a journal publication. * Sci2 Tool is a free, open-source toolset specifically designed to support network analysis and visualization of scholarly datasets.

Figure 1: Author Locations by Country (Google Maps)

Figure 2: U.S. Institutional/Author Locations (ArcGIS) Larger, deeper-colored circles = higher concentration of contributors

Subject tags that have thicker, darker line connections are more closely associated (occur together more frequently) in journal content.

Figure 3: Co-Word Analysis of Subject/Keyword Tags (Sci2 Tool)

Journals from cited references that are commonly cited together

Figure 4: Co-Word Analysis of Top 20 Cited Journals (Sci2 Tool)