Publish or Perish

Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents the following statistics:

  • Total number of papers
  • Total number of citations
  • Average number of citations per paper
  • Average number of citations per author
  • Average number of papers per author
  • Average number of citations per year
  • Hirsch’s h-index and related parameters
  • Egghe’s g-index
  • The contemporary h-index
  • The age-weighted citation rate
  • Two variations of individual h-indices
  • An analysis of the number of authors per paper.

Theory

In today’s workshop the group explored the meaning and relevance of ‘theory’.

theoryWe drew on work by Neuman (2006, ch.3) to explore the parts of social theory, viz: assumptions, concepts, relationships and units of analysis. We identified that theoretical concepts:

  • are”ideas we can express as a symbol or in words“;
  • vary according to their level of abstraction;
  • vary as to scope, some being “very narrow and applying only to specific settings or … [being] restricted in time or place“;
  • can be single but usually “form interconnected groups or concept clusters“;

We also talked at some length about how concepts can be assembled into theoretical frameworks (see figure below) that allow us to give meaning to and explain the ideas in a research study.

framework-neuman-1024x560

Source: Neuman, p.70

Reference:
NEUMAN, W. L. 2006. Social research methods : qualitative and quantitative approaches, Boston, Mass. ; London, Pearson, Allyn and Bacon.

CiteSeerx

CiteSeerx is an evolving scientific literature digital library and search engine that focuses primarily on the literature in computer and information science. CiteSeerx aims to improve the dissemination of scientific literature and to provide improvements in functionality, usability, availability, cost, comprehensiveness, efficiency, and timeliness in the access of scientific and scholarly knowledge.

Rather than creating just another digital library, CiteSeerx attempts to provide resources such as algorithms, data, metadata, services, techniques, and software that can be used to promote other digital libraries. CiteSeerx has developed new methods and algorithms to index PostScript and PDF research articles on the Web.