Academic LGBTQ+ Terminology 1900-2021: Increasing Variety, Increasing Inclusivity?

LGBTQ+ labels and terminology in society embed ideological assumptions and affect who gains community support and protection. In academia, terminology is also needed to help define study objects, methods, and goals. Academics therefore need to choose their words to be both precise and appropriate, adjusting to changes in societal language. This article assesses the evolution of LGBTQ+ terminology in the titles and abstracts of academic journal articles since 1900 to identify the main trends. Based on a search of 74 LGBTQ+ terms in Scopus, LGBTQ+ related journal articles have almost continually increased in prevalence since 1900. In parallel, the concept of homosexuality that dominated early research has almost disappeared, being replaced by the word gay or more specific terms, such as lesbian or bisexual. Transexual terminology has also been supplanted by transgender and trans* terminology. At various points in time other LGBTQ+ terms have emerged with activist, health professional and academic origins. These include multiple acronyms, inclusive phrases, and activity-specific phrases (e.g., men who have sex with men) that are not used by the LGBTQ+ community. Currently, no terminologies are dominant, with this plurality probably reflecting differing research needs.

The high scholarly value of grey literature before and during Covid-19.

New academic knowledge in journal articles is partly built on peer reviewed research already published in journals or books. Academics can also draw from non-academic sources, such as the websites of organisations that publish credible information. This article investigates trends in the academic citing of this type of grey literature for 17 health, media, statistics, and large international organisations, with a focus on Covid-19. The results show substantial and steadily increasing numbers of citations to all 17 sites, with larger increases from 2019 to 2020. In 2020, Covid-19 citations to these websites were particularly common for news organisations, the WHO, and the UK Office for National Statistics, apparently for up-to-date information in the rapidly changing circumstances of the pandemic. Except for the UN, the most cited URLs of each organisation were not traditional report-like grey literature but were other types, such as news stories, data, statistics, and general guidance. The Covid-19 citations to most of these websites originated primarily from medical research, commonly for coronavirus data and statistics. Other fields extensively cited some of the non-health websites, as illustrated by social science (including psychology) studies often citing UNESCO. The results confirm that grey literature from major websites has become even more important within academia during the pandemic, providing up-to-date information from credible sources despite a lack of academic peer review. Researchers, reviewers, and editors should accept that it is reasonable to cite this information, when relevant, and evaluators should value academic work that supports these non-academic outputs. Supplementary Information: The online version of this article (10.1007/s11192-022-04398-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Exploring nurses' online perspectives and social networks during a global pandemic COVID-19.

OBJECTIVES: Examine the online interactions, social networks, and perspectives of nursing actors on COVID-19 from conversations on Twitter to understand how the profession responded to this global pandemic. DESIGN: Mixed methods. SAMPLE: Ten-thousand five-hundred and seventy-four tweets by 2790 individuals and organizations. MEASUREMENTS: NodeXL software was used for social network analysis to produce a network visualization. The betweenness centrality algorithm identified key users who were influential in COVID-19 related conversations on Twitter. Inductive content analysis enabled exploration of tweet content. A communicative figurations framework guided the study. RESULTS: Nursing actors formed different social groupings, and communicated with one another across groups. Tweets covered four themes; (1) outbreak and clinical management of the infectious disease, (2) education and information sharing, (3) social, economic, and political context, and (4) working together and supporting each other. CONCLUSION: In addition to spreading knowledge, nurses tried to reach out through social media to political and healthcare leaders to advocate for improvements needed to address COVID-19. However, they primarily conversed within their own professional community. Action is needed to better understand how social media is and can be used by nurses for health communication, and to improve their preparedness to be influential on social media beyond the nursing community.

Social media users produce more affect that supports cultural values, but are more influenced by affect that violates cultural values.

Although social media plays an increasingly important role in communication around the world, social media research has primarily focused on Western users. Thus, little is known about how cultural values shape social media behavior. To examine how cultural affective values might influence social media use, we developed a new sentiment analysis tool that allowed us to compare the affective content of Twitter posts in the United States (55,867 tweets, 1,888 users) and Japan (63,863 tweets, 1,825 users). Consistent with their respective cultural affective values, U.S. users primarily produced positive (vs. negative) posts, whereas Japanese users primarily produced low (vs. high) arousal posts. Contrary to cultural affective values, however, U.S. users were more influenced by changes in others' high arousal negative (e.g., angry) posts, whereas Japanese were more influenced by changes in others' high arousal positive (e.g., excited) posts. These patterns held after controlling for differences in baseline exposure to affective content, and across different topics. Together, these results suggest that across cultures, while social media users primarily produce content that supports their affective values, they are more influenced by content that violates those values. These findings have implications for theories about which affective content spreads on social media, and for applications related to the optimal design and use of social media platforms around the world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Alternative medicines worth researching? Citation analyses of acupuncture, chiropractic, homeopathy, and osteopathy 1996-2017.

Some complementary and alternative medicines (CAM) are frequently criticised for being based on faith rather than scientific evidence. Despite this, researchers, academic departments, and institutes teach and investigate them. This article assesses whether the scholarship produced by four CAMs is valued by the academic community in terms of citations, and whether the level of citations received might be detrimental to academic authors' careers. Based on an analysis of acupuncture, chiropractic, homeopathy, and osteopathy journal articles indexed in Scopus 1996-2020, the results show that the prevalence of the four areas vary substantially internationally, with acupuncture eclipsing the others in East Asia but homeopathy being more common in India and Brazil. The main broad fields publishing these specialties are Medicine, Nursing, Health Professions, Veterinary Science, and Neuroscience. Whilst the research tends to be cited at a below average rate in most broad fields (n = 27) and years (1996-2017), acupuncture, chiropractic, and homeopathy are exceptions in some broad fields, including some core areas. Thus, studying these alternative medicines may not always lead to research that tends to be ignored in academia, even if many scientists disparage it. As a corollary, citation analysis cannot be relied on to give low scores to widely disparaged areas of scholarship.

Researchers' attitudes towards the h-index on Twitter 2007-2020: criticism and acceptance.

The h-index is an indicator of the scientific impact of an academic publishing career. Its hybrid publishing/citation nature and inherent bias against younger researchers, women, people in low resourced countries, and those not prioritizing publishing arguably give it little value for most formal and informal research evaluations. Nevertheless, it is well-known by academics, used in some promotion decisions, and is prominent in bibliometric databases, such as Google Scholar. In the context of this apparent conflict, it is important to understand researchers' attitudes towards the h-index. This article used public tweets in English to analyse how scholars discuss the h-index in public: is it mentioned, are tweets about it positive or negative, and has interest decreased since its shortcomings were exposed? The January 2021 Twitter Academic Research initiative was harnessed to download all English tweets mentioning the h-index from the 2006 start of Twitter until the end of 2020. The results showed a constantly increasing number of tweets. Whilst the most popular tweets unapologetically used the h-index as an indicator of research performance, 28.5% of tweets were critical of its simplistic nature and others joked about it (8%). The results suggest that interest in the h-index is still increasing online despite scientists willing to evaluate the h-index in public tending to be critical. Nevertheless, in limited situations it may be effective at succinctly conveying the message that a researcher has had a successful publishing career.

Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, Scopus, Dimensions, Web of Science, and OpenCitations' COCI: a multidisciplinary comparison of coverage via citations.

New sources of citation data have recently become available, such as Microsoft Academic, Dimensions, and the OpenCitations Index of CrossRef open DOI-to-DOI citations (COCI). Although these have been compared to the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS), Scopus, or Google Scholar, there is no systematic evidence of their differences across subject categories. In response, this paper investigates 3,073,351 citations found by these six data sources to 2,515 English-language highly-cited documents published in 2006 from 252 subject categories, expanding and updating the largest previous study. Google Scholar found 88% of all citations, many of which were not found by the other sources, and nearly all citations found by the remaining sources (89-94%). A similar pattern held within most subject categories. Microsoft Academic is the second largest overall (60% of all citations), including 82% of Scopus citations and 86% of WoS citations. In most categories, Microsoft Academic found more citations than Scopus and WoS (182 and 223 subject categories, respectively), but had coverage gaps in some areas, such as Physics and some Humanities categories. After Scopus, Dimensions is fourth largest (54% of all citations), including 84% of Scopus citations and 88% of WoS citations. It found more citations than Scopus in 36 categories, more than WoS in 185, and displays some coverage gaps, especially in the Humanities. Following WoS, COCI is the smallest, with 28% of all citations. Google Scholar is still the most comprehensive source. In many subject categories Microsoft Academic and Dimensions are good alternatives to Scopus and WoS in terms of coverage.

Mental Health Discourses on Twitter during Mental Health Awareness Week.

Promoting health-related campaigns on Twitter has increasingly become a world-wide choice to raise awareness and disseminate health information. Data retrieved from Twitter are now being used to explore how users express their views, attitudes and personal experiences of health-related issues. We focused on Twitter discourse reproduced during Mental Health Awareness Week 2017 by examining 1,200 tweets containing the keywords 'mental health', 'mental illness', 'mental disorders' and '#MHAW'. The analysis revealed 'awareness and advocacy', 'stigmatization', and 'personal experience of mental health/illness' as the central discourses within the sample. The article concludes with some recommendations for future research on digitally-mediated health communication.

Identifying Data Sharing and Reuse with Scholix: Potentials and Limitations.

The Scholexplorer API, based on the Scholix (Scholarly Link eXchange) framework, aims to identify links between articles and supporting data. This quantitative case study demonstrates that the API vastly expanded the number of datasets previously known to be affiliated with University of Bath outputs, allowing improved monitoring of compliance with funder mandates by identifying peer-reviewed articles linked to at least one unique dataset. Availability of author names for research outputs increased from 2.4% to 89.2%, which enabled identification of ten articles reusing non-Bath-affiliated datasets published in external repositories in the first phase, giving valuable evidence of data reuse and impact for data producers. Of these, only three were formally cited in the references. Further enhancement of the Scholix schema and enrichment of Scholexplorer metadata using controlled vocabularies would be beneficial. The adoption of standardized data citations by journals will be critical to creating links in a more systematic manner.

A calibrated measure to compare fluctuations of different entities across timescales.

A common way to learn about a system's properties is to analyze temporal fluctuations in associated variables. However, conclusions based on fluctuations from a single entity can be misleading when used without proper reference to other comparable entities or when examined only on one timescale. Here we introduce a method that uses predictions from a fluctuation scaling law as a benchmark for the observed standard deviations. Differences from the benchmark (residuals) are aggregated across multiple timescales using Principal Component Analysis to reduce data dimensionality. The first component score is a calibrated measure of fluctuations-the reactivity RA of a given entity. We apply our method to activity records from the media industry using data from the Event Registry news aggregator-over 32M articles on selected topics published by over 8000 news outlets. Our approach distinguishes between different news outlet reporting styles: high reactivity points to activity fluctuations larger than expected, reflecting a bursty reporting style, whereas low reactivity suggests a relatively stable reporting style. Combining our method with the political bias detector Media Bias/Fact Check we quantify the relative reporting styles for different topics of mainly US media sources grouped by political orientation. The results suggest that news outlets with a liberal bias tended to be the least reactive while conservative news outlets were the most reactive.

How does nursing research differ internationally? A bibliometric analysis of six countries.

BACKGROUND: International nursing research comparisons can give a new perspective on a nation's output by identifying strengths and weaknesses. AIM: This article compares strengths in nursing research between six mainly English-speaking nations (Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States). METHODS: Journal authorship (percentage of first authorship by nationality) and article keywords were compared for Scopus-indexed journal articles 2008-2018. Three natural language processing strategies were assessed for identifying statistically significant international differences in the use of keywords or phrases. RESULTS: Journal author nationality was not a good indicator of international differences in research specialisms, but keyword and phrase differences were more promising especially if both are used. For this, the part of speech tagging and lemmatisation text processing strategies were helpful but not named entity recognition. The results highlight aspects of nursing research that were absent in some countries, such as papers about nursing administration and management. CONCLUSION: Researchers outside the United States should consider the importance of researching specific patient groups, diseases, treatments, skills, research methods and social perspectives for unresearched gaps with national relevance. From a methods perspective, keyword and phrase differences are useful to reveal international differences in nursing research topics.

Is useful research data usually shared? An investigation of genome-wide association study summary statistics.

Primary data collected during a research study is often shared and may be reused for new studies. To assess the extent of data sharing in favourable circumstances and whether data sharing checks can be automated, this article investigates summary statistics from primary human genome-wide association studies (GWAS). This type of data is highly suitable for sharing because it is a standard research output, is straightforward to use in future studies (e.g., for secondary analysis), and may be already stored in a standard format for internal sharing within multi-site research projects. Manual checks of 1799 articles from 2010 and 2017 matching a simple PubMed query for molecular epidemiology GWAS were used to identify 314 primary human GWAS papers. Of these, only 13% reported the location of a complete set of GWAS summary data, increasing from 3% in 2010 to 23% in 2017. Whilst information about whether data was shared was typically located clearly within a data availability statement, the exact nature of the shared data was usually unspecified. Thus, data sharing is the exception even in suitable research fields with relatively strong data sharing norms. Moreover, the lack of clear data descriptions within data sharing statements greatly complicates the task of automatically characterising shared data sets.

Authorship and citation gender trends in immunology and microbiology.

Immunology and microbiology research are essential for human and animal health. Unlike many other health fields, they do not usually centre around the curing or helping individual patients but focus on the microscopic scale instead. These fields are interesting from a gender perspective because two theories seeking to explain gender differences in career choices in the USA (people/things and communal/agentic goals) might produce conflicting expectations about their gender balances. This article assesses the gender shares of journal articles and gendered citation rates of five subfields of the Scopus Immunology and Microbiology broad category 1996-2014/18, for research with solely US author affiliations. Only Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology (38% female) had not reached gender parity in publishing by 2018. There was a female first author citation advantage in Parasitology but a disadvantage in Immunology. Immunology, Parasitology and Virology, had female last author citation disadvantages, but all gender effects were much smaller (<5%) than that of an extra author (10%-56%). Citation differences cannot therefore account for the current underrepresentation of women in senior roles.

Author gender differences in psychology citation impact 1996-2018.

Academic psychology in the USA is a gender success story in terms of overturning its early male dominance but there are still relatively few senior female psychology researchers. To assess whether there are gender differences in citation impact that might help to explain either of these trends, this study investigates psychology articles since 1996. Seven out of eight Scopus psychology categories had a majority of female first-authored journal articles by 2018. From regression analyses of first and last author gender and team size, female first authors associate with a slightly higher average citation impact, but extra authors have a 10 times stronger association with higher average citation impact. Last author gender has little association with citation impact. Female first authors are more likely to be in larger teams and if team size is attributed to the first author's work, then their apparent influence of female first authors on citation impact doubles. While gender differences in average citation impact are too small to account for gender-related trends in academic psychology, they warn that male-dominated citation-based ranking lists of psychologists do not reflect the state of psychology research today.

An open toolkit for tracking open science partnership implementation and impact.

Serious concerns about the way research is organized collectively are increasingly being raised. They include the escalating costs of research and lower research productivity, low public trust in researchers to report the truth, lack of diversity, poor community engagement, ethical concerns over research practices, and irreproducibility. Open science (OS) collaborations comprise of a set of practices including open access publication, open data sharing and the absence of restrictive intellectual property rights with which institutions, firms, governments and communities are experimenting in order to overcome these concerns. We gathered two groups of international representatives from a large variety of stakeholders to construct a toolkit to guide and facilitate data collection about OS and non-OS collaborations. Ultimately, the toolkit will be used to assess and study the impact of OS collaborations on research and innovation. The toolkit contains the following four elements: 1) an annual report form of quantitative data to be completed by OS partnership administrators; 2) a series of semi-structured interview guides of stakeholders; 3) a survey form of participants in OS collaborations; and 4) a set of other quantitative measures best collected by other organizations, such as research foundations and governmental or intergovernmental agencies. We opened our toolkit to community comment and input. We present the resulting toolkit for use by government and philanthropic grantors, institutions, researchers and community organizations with the aim of measuring the implementation and impact of OS partnership across these organizations. We invite these and other stakeholders to not only measure, but to share the resulting data so that social scientists and policy makers can analyse the data across projects.

Academic information on Twitter: A user survey.

Although counts of tweets citing academic papers are used as an informal indicator of interest, little is known about who tweets academic papers and who uses Twitter to find scholarly information. Without knowing this, it is difficult to draw useful conclusions from a publication being frequently tweeted. This study surveyed 1,912 users that have tweeted journal articles to ask about their scholarly-related Twitter uses. Almost half of the respondents (45%) did not work in academia, despite the sample probably being biased towards academics. Twitter was used most by people with a social science or humanities background. People tend to leverage social ties on Twitter to find information rather than searching for relevant tweets. Twitter is used in academia to acquire and share real-time information and to develop connections with others. Motivations for using Twitter vary by discipline, occupation, and employment sector, but not much by gender. These factors also influence the sharing of different types of academic information. This study provides evidence that Twitter plays a significant role in the discovery of scholarly information and cross-disciplinary knowledge spreading. Most importantly, the large numbers of non-academic users support the claims of those using tweet counts as evidence for the non-academic impacts of scholarly research.

A community of curious souls: an analysis of commenting behavior on TED talks videos.

The TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talks website hosts video recordings of various experts, celebrities, academics, and others who discuss their topics of expertise. Funded by advertising and members but provided free online, TED Talks have been viewed over a billion times and are a science communication phenomenon. Although the organization has been derided for its populist slant and emphasis on entertainment value, no previous research has assessed audience reactions in order to determine the degree to which presenter characteristics and platform affect the reception of a video. This article addresses this issue via a content analysis of comments left on both the TED website and the YouTube platform (on which TED Talks videos are also posted). It was found that commenters were more likely to discuss the characteristics of a presenter on YouTube, whereas commenters tended to engage with the talk content on the TED website. In addition, people tended to be more emotional when the speaker was a woman (by leaving comments that were either positive or negative). The results can inform future efforts to popularize science amongst the public, as well as to provide insights for those looking to disseminate information via Internet videos.

Do altmetrics work? Twitter and ten other social web services.

Altmetric measurements derived from the social web are increasingly advocated and used as early indicators of article impact and usefulness. Nevertheless, there is a lack of systematic scientific evidence that altmetrics are valid proxies of either impact or utility although a few case studies have reported medium correlations between specific altmetrics and citation rates for individual journals or fields. To fill this gap, this study compares 11 altmetrics with Web of Science citations for 76 to 208,739 PubMed articles with at least one altmetric mention in each case and up to 1,891 journals per metric. It also introduces a simple sign test to overcome biases caused by different citation and usage windows. Statistically significant associations were found between higher metric scores and higher citations for articles with positive altmetric scores in all cases with sufficient evidence (Twitter, Facebook wall posts, research highlights, blogs, mainstream media and forums) except perhaps for Google+ posts. Evidence was insufficient for LinkedIn, Pinterest, question and answer sites, and Reddit, and no conclusions should be drawn about articles with zero altmetric scores or the strength of any correlation between altmetrics and citations. Nevertheless, comparisons between citations and metric values for articles published at different times, even within the same year, can remove or reverse this association and so publishers and scientometricians should consider the effect of time when using altmetrics to rank articles. Finally, the coverage of all the altmetrics except for Twitter seems to be low and so it is not clear if they are prevalent enough to be useful in practice.

Scientists popularizing science: characteristics and impact of TED talk presenters.

The TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference and associated website of recorded conference presentations (TED Talks) is a highly successful disseminator of science-related videos, claiming over a billion online views. Although hundreds of scientists have presented at TED, little information is available regarding the presenters, their academic credentials, and the impact of TED Talks on the general population. This article uses bibliometric and webometric techniques to gather data on the characteristics of TED presenters and videos and analyze the relationship between these characteristics and the subsequent impact of the videos. The results show that the presenters were predominately male and non-academics. Male-authored videos were more popular and more liked when viewed on YouTube. Videos by academic presenters were more commented on than videos by others and were more liked on YouTube, although there was little difference in how frequently they were viewed. The majority of academic presenters were senior faculty, males, from United States-based institutions, were visible online, and were cited more frequently than average for their field. However, giving a TED presentation appeared to have no impact on the number of citations subsequently received by an academic, suggesting that although TED popularizes research, it may not promote the work of scientists within the academic community.

Research blogs and the discussion of scholarly information.

The research blog has become a popular mechanism for the quick discussion of scholarly information. However, unlike peer-reviewed journals, the characteristics of this form of scientific discourse are not well understood, for example in terms of the spread of blogger levels of education, gender and institutional affiliations. In this paper we fill this gap by analyzing a sample of blog posts discussing science via an aggregator called ResearchBlogging.org (RB). ResearchBlogging.org aggregates posts based on peer-reviewed research and allows bloggers to cite their sources in a scholarly manner. We studied the bloggers, blog posts and referenced journals of bloggers who posted at least 20 items. We found that RB bloggers show a preference for papers from high-impact journals and blog mostly about research in the life and behavioral sciences. The most frequently referenced journal sources in the sample were: Science, Nature, PNAS and PLoS One. Most of the bloggers in our sample had active Twitter accounts connected with their blogs, and at least 90% of these accounts connect to at least one other RB-related Twitter account. The average RB blogger in our sample is male, either a graduate student or has been awarded a PhD and blogs under his own name.