This study investigates the extent to which scholarly tweets of scientific papers are engaged with by Twitter users through four types of user engagement behaviors, i.e., liking, retweeting,... Show moreThis study investigates the extent to which scholarly tweets of scientific papers are engaged with by Twitter users through four types of user engagement behaviors, i.e., liking, retweeting, quoting, and replying. Based on a sample consisting of 7 million scholarly tweets of Web of Science papers, our results show that likes is the most prevalent engagement metric, covering 44% of scholarly tweets, followed by retweets (36%), whereas quotes and replies are only present for 9% and 7% of all scholarly tweets, respectively. From a disciplinary point of view, scholarly tweets in the field of Social Sciences and Humanities are more likely to trigger user engagement over other subject fields. The presence of user engagement is more associated with other Twitter-based factors (e.g., number of mentioned users in tweets and number of followers of users) than with science-based factors (e.g., citations and Mendeley readers of tweeted papers). Building on these findings, this study sheds light on the possibility to apply user engagement metrics in measuring deeper levels of Twitter reception of scholarly information. Show less
Background: Bibliometric studies are used to analyse and map scientific areas, and study the sci-entific output and impact of institutes and countries. Objectives: Describe the thematic structure... Show moreBackground: Bibliometric studies are used to analyse and map scientific areas, and study the sci-entific output and impact of institutes and countries. Objectives: Describe the thematic structure and evolution of the field of physical therapy inter-ventions using articles indexed in Physiotherapy Evidence Database (PEDro). Also, identify and compare the main producers (countries, institutions) over time (research output, citation impact). Methods: Eligible articles were those indexed in PEDro (1986-2017) and matched to Web of Sci-ence. VOSviewer software, bibliometric text mining, and visualisation techniques were used to evaluate the thematic structure of the included articles. We collected data about authors' coun-try and institutional affiliation, and calculated bibliometric indicators (production, citation impact). Results: A total of 29 090 articles were analysed. Eight topics were identified: "neurological rehabilitation"; "methods"; "exercise for prevention and rehabilitation of lifestyle diseases"; "assessment and treatment of musculoskeletal pain"; "physical activity", "health promotion and behaviour change"; "respiratory physical therapy"; "hospital, primary care and health eco-nomics"; "cancer and complementary therapies". The most productive countries were United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. The most impactful countries were United States, France, Finland, and Canada. The most productive institutions were University of Sydney, VU University of Amsterdam, University of Queensland, and University of Toronto. Conclusions: The thematic structure of physical therapy interventions has evolved over time with "neurological rehabilitation", "methods", "exercise related to lifestyle diseases", and "physical activity" becoming increasingly important. Main producers of this research were tradi-tionally located in North America and Europe but now include countries like China and Brazil. Show less
Carballo-Costa, L.; Quintela-Del-Rio, A.; Vivas-Costa, J.; Costas Comesana, R. 2022
Objectives The objectives of the study were: 1) Describe the thematic structure and evolution of the field of physical therapy; 2) identify the main research producers (i.e. countries and... Show moreObjectives The objectives of the study were: 1) Describe the thematic structure and evolution of the field of physical therapy; 2) identify the main research producers (i.e. countries and institutions); and 3) compare their research output and citation impact. Methods Papers related to physical therapy indexed in Web of Science (2000-2018) were identified to delineate the field, using keywords, journals, and citation networks. VOSviewer software, advanced bibliometric text mining, and visualization techniques were used to evaluate the thematic structure. We collected data about the country and institutional affiliation of all the authors and calculated production and citation impact indicators. Results 85,697 papers were analyzed. Eleven thematic clusters were identified: 1) "health care and education"; 2) "biomechanics"; 3) "psychosocial, chronic pain and quality of life outcomes"; 4) "evidence-based physical therapy research methods"; 5) "traumatology and orthopedics"; 6) "neurological rehabilitation"; 7) "psychometrics and cross-cultural adaptation"; 8) "gait-balance analysis and Parkinson's disease"; 9) "exercise"; 10) "respiratory physical therapy"; and 11) "back pain." The United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia were the most productive countries. Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden had the highest citation impact. Conclusions Our bibliometric visualization approach makes it possible to comprehensively study the thematic structure of physical therapy. The ranking of producers has evolved and now includes China and Brazil. High research production does not imply a high citation impact. Show less
Machacek, V.; Srholec, M.; Ferreira, M.R.; Robinson-Garcia, N.; Costas Comesana, R. 2022
We propose institutional mobility indicators based on researchers' mobility flows in 22 major fields of science across 1,130 Leiden Ranking institutions from 64 countries. We base our indicators on... Show moreWe propose institutional mobility indicators based on researchers' mobility flows in 22 major fields of science across 1,130 Leiden Ranking institutions from 64 countries. We base our indicators on data from the Dimensions database and Global Research Identifier Database. We use researchers' first and last affiliations to estimate the extent authors have moved across institutions as well as countries. For each institution, we quantify the shares of researchers with the same affiliation (insiders), those who came from another institution within the country (domestic outsiders), and those coming from a different country (foreign outsiders). Institutions in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe have the highest share of insiders, whereas institutions in Northern America and Western and Northern Europe have a higher share of foreign outsiders. Foreign outsiders are most common in small and wealthy countries. No disciplinary differences are observed, as captured by the field classification scheme of Dimensions. Show less
El Ouahi, J.; Robinson Garcia, N.; Costas Comesana, R. 2021
This study investigates the scientific mobility and international collaboration networks in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region between 2008 and 2017. By using affiliation metadata... Show moreThis study investigates the scientific mobility and international collaboration networks in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region between 2008 and 2017. By using affiliation metadata available in scientific publications, we analyze international scientific mobility flows and collaboration linkages. Three complementary approaches allow us to obtain a detailed characterization of scientific mobility. First, we uncover the main destinations and origins of mobile scholars for each country. Results reveal geographical, cultural and historical proximities. Cooperation programs also contribute to explain some of the observed flows. Second, we use the academic age. The average academic age of migrant scholars in MENA was about 12.4 years. The academic age group 6-10 years is the most common for both emigrant and immigrant scholars. Immigrants are relatively younger than emigrants, except for Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, and Turkey. Scholars who migrated to Gulf Cooperation Council countries, Jordan, and Morocco were on average younger than emigrants by 1.5 years from the same countries. Third, we analyze gender differences. We observe a clear gender gap: Male scholars represent the largest group of migrants in MENA. We conclude by discussing the policy relevance of the scientific mobility and collaboration aspects. Show less
El Ouahi, J.; Robinson-García, N.; Costas Comesana, R. 2021
Scientific software is a fundamental player in modern science, participating in all stages of scientific knowledge production. Software occasionally supports the development of trivial tasks, while... Show moreScientific software is a fundamental player in modern science, participating in all stages of scientific knowledge production. Software occasionally supports the development of trivial tasks, while at other instances it determines procedures, methods, protocols, results, or conclusions related with the scientific work. The growing relevance of scientific software as a research product with value of its own has triggered the development of quantitative science studies of scientific software. The main objective of this study is to illustrate a link-based webometric approach to characterize the online mentions to scientific software across different analytical frameworks. To do this, the bibliometric software VOSviewer is used as a case study. Considering VOSviewer's official website as a baseline, online mentions to this website were counted in three different analytical frameworks: academic literature via Google Scholar (988 mentioning publications), webpages via Majestic (1,330 mentioning websites), and tweets via Twitter (267 mentioning tweets). Google scholar mentions shows how VOSviewer is used as a research resource, whilst mentions in webpages and tweets show the interest on VOSviewer's website from an informational and a conversational point of view. Results evidence that URL mentions can be used to gather all sorts of online impacts related to non-traditional research objects, like software, thus expanding the analytical scientometric toolset by incorporating a novel digital dimension. Show less
As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, researchers from all disciplines are coming together and contributing their expertise. CORD-19, a dataset of COVID-19 and coronavirus publications, has been made... Show moreAs the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, researchers from all disciplines are coming together and contributing their expertise. CORD-19, a dataset of COVID-19 and coronavirus publications, has been made available alongside calls to help mine the information it contains and to create tools to search it more effectively. We analyse the delineation of the publications included in CORD-19 from a scientometric perspective. Based on a comparison to the Web of Science database, we find that CORD-19 provides an almost complete coverage of research on COVID-19 and coronaviruses. CORD-19 contains not only research that deals directly with COVID-19 and coronaviruses, but also research on viruses in general. Publications from CORD-19 focus mostly on a few well-defined research areas, in particular: coronaviruses (primarily SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2); public health and viral epidemics; molecular biology of viruses; influenza and other families of viruses; immunology and antivirals; clinical medicine. CORD-19 publications that appeared in 2020, especially editorials and letters, are disproportionately popular on social media. While we fully endorse the CORD-19 initiative, it is important to be aware that CORD-19 extends beyond research on COVID-19 and coronaviruses. Show less
This paper presents an analysis of the anti-vaccination movement’s referencing of research articles on the topic of vaccination in the social media network Twitter. Drawing on the concept of... Show moreThis paper presents an analysis of the anti-vaccination movement’s referencing of research articles on the topic of vaccination in the social media network Twitter. Drawing on the concept of bibliographic coupling, the paper demonstrates how Twitter users can be coupled based on articles mentioned on Twitter. The sample applied consists of 113 open access journal articles. The combination of tweeter coupling with the respective stance of Twitter accounts vis-à-vis vaccination makes possible the creation of a network graph of tweeters mentioning this corpus of articles. In addition to a common interest in the scientific literature, the findings show distinct communities of shared interests within the anti-vaccination movement, and demonstrate that tweeter coupling can be used to map these distinctive interests. The emergence of Twitter accounts serving as cognitive bridges within and between communities is noted and discussed with regard to their relative positions in the network. This paper’s results extend the knowledge on the application of altmetric data to study the interests of non-scientific publics in science; more specifically, it adds to the understanding of the potentials of open science and science–society interactions arising from increased access by non-scientists to scientific publications. Show less
