Dear all, I would like your opinion on these considerations.
1) Academia requests us to publish more and with better quality, that means first of all citations. Your career and funding depends on this.
2) Quality:
- more complete information, experimental results, good technical insight, English form all concur to better paper, but this is subjective and it is not measured and recognized;
- instead, journal ranking and citations are an indirect but quantitative metric
3) Journals have problems of fair and timely review (see mong others e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_to_do_when_receiving_an_unfair_review_made_up_of_one_size_fit_all_generic_comments?_ec=topicPostOverviewFollowedQuestions&_sg=gtqC-NPqjCtDbJftTNhtrhYlkVtfNnAyGZqrIQaI20-EjERDWC3Qir5ulvywB15CgOB-MeQrzSbB3x2z and https://www.researchgate.net/post/Publication_experience_of_IEEE_Access_Journal?_ec=topicPostOverviewFollowedQuestions&_sg=gtqC-NPqjCtDbJftTNhtrhYlkVtfNnAyGZqrIQaI20-EjERDWC3Qir5ulvywB15CgOB-MeQrzSbB3x2z), but they are a good knowledge repository. They are however ranked almost always by means of citations, ... as we are.
4) Citations and reference databases.
Scopus and Web of Science list and rank journals, and similarly list and rank authors.
How complete is this citation collection?
How fair the selection of journals and conferences to include/exclude?
Is it a open process open verifiable by the users (the authors and then e.g. institutions and funding bodies)?
5) Mistakes and Feedback
- our career and funding depends on citations and the criteria by which journal or conference is selected or excluded;
- the price of open access often follows the achieved ranking (a form of stock exchange).
>> Question1: how may times you found that citations to your work are missing? citations that maybe Google Scholar catches easily.
>> Question2: did you feedback Scopus or WOS for corrections? if yes, how quick was the implementation of the change?
>> Question3: how many times in % did you find mistakes or missing citations?
>> Question4: do you think that this % of errors is justifiable? (e.g. a medicine paper that has nothing to do with your discipline, linked as a cited reference)
>> Question5: for complete information, did you ever found that you have received a citation that was not directed to you? (to compensate statistically for all missing citations .... where where do they end up, then? :)
>> Question6: is the effort you put to correct something that should work by itself in principle a significant fraction of your time?
Thank you AL Timimi Zahra
.Regarding Questions at point 5), as for me, I ask corrections, I think as everyone else, because mistakes and oversights are possible.
Let us think for example that capturing your citations is done by reading "automatically" references in pdf, that may have issues of formatting (e.g. double f is often unreadable) or coding (have you ever copied a string from a pdf for a search to discover weird characters?)
But I have noticed that Scopus makes less mistakes that WOS and is quicker to reply and correct.
It would be interesting if this is a common base for Scopus and WOS interfacing with all of us, or it depends on the disciplines or the parts of the world from which the request comes.
What about collect some statistics of our requests of corrections and compare our findings?
For example:
i) type (missing citation, missing own paper, ...?)
ii) date of request,
iii) date of positive/negative reply (may we made a mistake and the request is correctly rejected, but let's avoid canned automatic replies)
iv) date of implementation (when effectively the requested change is effective)
v) discipline (broadly speaking)
vi) country (origin of request)
Thank you to all the readers in advance.
Career, quality publications, grants, citations, etc. are very important to an academic, and they have to be taken seriously
Yes, dear Chinaza Godswill Awuchi , agree.
Regarding citations, what happens if the Government or funding institution evaluates your achievements to decide a promotion or grant using a database that has errors, is not complete, etc.? You should take care of that keeping a close eye on available sources of information, and react in due time, because it takes time to get corrections done.
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