Impact of bibliometric studies on the publication behaviour of authors

Abstract

It has been widely discussed how individuals change the way they act and react in studies just because they are under observation. In this paper, we try to analyse how this so-called Hawthorne effect applies to researchers that are the subject of bibliometric investigations. This encompasses individual assessments as well as international performance comparisons. We test various bibliometric indicators for notable changes in the last decade from a world-wide perspective and deduce explanations for changes from the observations. We then concentrate on the behaviour of German authors in particular, to show national trends. The German publication behaviour is evaluated in regard to citation rates and collaborations in publications and size, publisher country and impact of the journals chosen for publication. We can conclude that authors adapt their publication behaviour to aim for journals that are more internationally known and have a US publisher. Also, a trend from more specialized journals to journals with a broader scope can be observed that raises the question whether the implicit penalization of specialized fields in the bibliometrics leads to undesired shifts in conducted research

Assessment of Researchers Through Bibliometric Indicators: The Area of Information and Library Science in Spain as a Case Study (2001–2015)

“…These analyses generally require costly bibliometric studies or reference values/thresholds that illustrate the degree to which researchers exceed the typical values of the discipline or topic area. Moreover, any decision made could be associated with modifications in the future conduct of the researchers under evaluation, as some aspects such as signature order or position are easy to manipulate by unscrupulous researchers, to the detriment of collaborators with less influence or academic standing (Michels and Schmoch, 2014;Bloch and Schneider, 2016).…”

Comportamento e Particularidades da Produção Acadêmica do Tema “Contabilidade Gerencial” Divulgada na Base de Dados do ISI WEB of Science Core Collection de 1985 a 2014

“…Para tanto, utilizou-se das técnicas de análise bibliométrica (Michels & Schmoch, 2014) Rostampoor-Vajari, 2012).…”

Text mining

“…In the social sciences, LIS professionals have conducted bibliometric studies in order to study the authorship patterns from top library and information science journals from the Asia and Pacific region (Park, 2006), (Park, 2008); publication behaviour of authors (Michels and Schmoch, 2014); author co-citation analysis to find out a particular network of the scientific community (Oliveira and Grácio, 2014) and bibliometric analysis of a specific journal (Swain et al, 2013) (Sahu and Swain, 2014), etc.…”