The declining scientific impact of theses: Implications for electronic thesis and dissertation repositories and graduate studies

Larivière, Vincent; Zuccala, Alesia A.; Archambault, Éric

doi:10.1007/s11192-008-0106-3

Cited by 37 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…The decline might be due to scholars preferring to cite journal articles, conference papers or books generated from theses, rather than the original dissertations. The introduction of electronic theses has not reversed this decline (Larivière, Zuccala, & Archambault, 2008). This study did not examine the extent of citations to theses from non-journal documents and has an unknown coverage (recall) of theses.…”

Section: Citations To Dissertationsmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Thomson Scientific's citation databases (now Clarivate Analytics) has been used to identify citations from articles, research notes and review articles to theses. These citations were identified by first extracting references matching the query thesis* and then using a set of rules to filter out non-thesis references (Larivière, Zuccala, & Archambault, 2008). This study found that the share of references to dissertations from articles, research notes and review articles declined the last century including in the most recent period and in all broad fields examined.…”

Section: Citations To Dissertationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, it might be difficult to correctly track publications from dissertations several years after graduation and to assign authorship credit for multi-authored publications resulting from dissertations (Hagen, 2010). Given the lack of a comprehensive citation index, cited references searches in conventional citation indexes have also been used to assess citations to theses or dissertations by searching for related terms (e.g., *thesis* or *dissertation*) in the reference sections of other scholarly publications (Larivière, Zuccala, & Archambault, 2008;Rasuli, Schöpfel, & Prost, 2018). This method is useful to estimate the total number of citations to all dissertations rather than to individual doctoral dissertations across different fields, institutions or years.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Can Google Scholar and Mendeley help to assess the scholarly impacts of dissertations?

Kousha

Thelwall

2019

Journal of Informetrics

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Dissertations can be the single most important scholarly outputs of junior researchers. Whilst sets of journal articles are often evaluated with the help of citation counts from the Web of Science or Scopus, these do not index dissertations and so their impact is hard to assess. In response, this article introduces a new multistage method to extract Google Scholar citation counts for large collections of dissertations from repositories indexed by Google. The method was used to extract Google Scholar citation counts for 77,884 American doctoral dissertations from 2013-2017 via ProQuest, with a precision of over 95%. Some ProQuest dissertations that were dual indexed with other repositories could not be retrieved with ProQuest-specific searches but could be found with Google Scholar searches of the other repositories. The Google Scholar citation counts were then compared with Mendeley reader counts, a known source of scholarly-like impact data. A fifth of the dissertations had at least one citation recorded in Google Scholar and slightly fewer had at least one Mendeley reader. Based on numerical comparisons, the Mendeley reader counts seem to be more useful for impact assessment purposes for dissertations that are less than two years old, whilst Google Scholar citations are more useful for older dissertations, especially in social sciences, arts and humanities. Google Scholar citation counts may reflect a more scholarly type of impact than that of Mendeley reader counts because dissertations attract a substantial minority of their citations from other dissertations. In summary, the new method now makes it possible for research funders, institutions and others to systematically evaluate the impact of dissertations, although additional Google Scholar queries for other online repositories are needed to ensure comprehensive coverage.

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Section: Citations To Dissertationsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Citations To Dissertationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Can Google Scholar and Mendeley help to assess the scholarly impacts of dissertations?

Kousha

Thelwall

2019

Journal of Informetrics

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“…Although doctoral theses were used in some of the seminal work in scientometrics (de Solla Price 1963), they are not as well-studied as other kinds of scientific literature, perhaps because theses themselves have declined in scientific impact as measured by incoming citations (Lariviere et al 2008). Kushkowski et al (2003) provide a summary of scientometric work that has used doctoral theses, primarily in support of collection management.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Google effect in doctoral theses

Varshney

2012

Scientometrics

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It is often said that successive generations of researchers face an increasing educational burden due to knowledge accumulation. On the other hand, technological advancement over time can improve the productivity of researchers and even change their cognitive processes. This paper presents a longitudinal study (2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011) of citation behavior in doctoral theses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. It is found that the number of references cited has increased over the years. At the same time, there has been a decrease in the length of time in the doctoral program and a relative constancy in the culture of the department. This suggests that students are more productive in facing an increased knowledge burden, and indeed seem to encode prior literature as transactive memory to a greater extent, as evidenced by the greater use of older literature.

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“…Larivière et al 2008), and been largely superseded by a modern PhD thesis consisting of a collection of multi-authored manuscripts and publications (e.g. Powell 2004).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deconstructing doctoral dissertations: how many papers does it take to make a PhD?

Hagen¹

2010

Scientometrics

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A collection of coauthored papers is the new norm for doctoral dissertations in the natural and biomedical sciences, yet there is no consensus on how to partition authorship credit between PhD candidates and their coauthors. Guidelines for PhD programs vary but tend to specify only a suggested range for the number of papers to be submitted for evaluation, sometimes supplemented with a requirement for the PhD candidate to be the principal author on the majority of submitted papers. Here I use harmonic counting to quantify the actual amount of authorship credit attributable to individual PhD graduates from two Scandinavian universities in 2008. Harmonic counting corrects for the inherent inflationary and equalizing biases of routine counting methods, thereby allowing the bibliometrically identifiable amount of authorship credit in approved dissertations to be analyzed with unprecedented accuracy. Unbiased partitioning of authorship credit between graduates and their coauthors provides a post hoc bibliometric measure of current PhD requirements, and sets a de facto baseline for the requisite scientific productivity of these contemporary PhD’s at a median value of approximately 1.6 undivided papers per dissertation. Comparison with previous census data suggests that the baseline has shifted over the past two decades as a result of a decrease in the number of submitted papers per candidate and an increase in the number of coauthors per paper. A simple solution to this shifting baseline syndrome would be to benchmark the amount of unbiased authorship credit deemed necessary for successful completion of a specific PhD program, and then monitor for departures from this level over time. Harmonic partitioning of authorship credit also facilitates cross-disciplinary and inter-institutional analysis of the scientific output from different PhD programs. Juxtaposing bibliometric benchmarks with current baselines may thus assist the development of harmonized guidelines and transparent transnational quality assurance procedures for doctoral programs by providing a robust and meaningful standard for further exploration of the causes of intra- and inter-institutional variation in the amount of unbiased authorship credit per dissertation.

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The declining scientific impact of theses: Implications for electronic thesis and dissertation repositories and graduate studies

Cited by 37 publications

References 24 publications

Can Google Scholar and Mendeley help to assess the scholarly impacts of dissertations?

Can Google Scholar and Mendeley help to assess the scholarly impacts of dissertations?

The Google effect in doctoral theses

Deconstructing doctoral dissertations: how many papers does it take to make a PhD?

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