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Dalhousie University’s Ocean Frontier Institute launched the Transforming Climate Action (TCA) research program in 2023. Philippe Mongeon, one of the leads of Cluster 3.2, and members of the QSSLab will be involved in four work packages, in collaboration with Dalhousie’s Faculty of Computer Science and the Université du Québec à Rimouski.
Work Package 1: Oceans and climate: identifying knowledge and its structure
This work package has two main objectives: to identify scholarly literature on the role of oceans in relation to climate and to analyze the structure and evolution of this research over time using research clusters. It aims to build a global overview of ocean-climate research, supporting both internal projects and informing broader climate policy, like the IPCC reports. Through hierarchical clustering and machine learning, the project will classify knowledge within this corpus, creating tools for future research. Collaboration between Dalhousie University’s Information Science and Computer Science faculties will help ensure the development of a robust knowledge navigation and classification system.
Work Package 2: The evolution of scholarly and public attention toward ocean-climate research
This work package builds on WP1 by examining how ocean-climate research is mobilized across different platforms, including scientific literature, social media, news, policy, and educational materials. Its aim is to determine who engages with this knowledge, the contexts of its citations, and how different geographical or topical clusters generate attention. By mapping knowledge flows, this study will identify which research is visible to key organizations like NGOs and explore how knowledge is disseminated across different audiences. The project will also develop visualization tools to track the movement of knowledge and provide insights into how external events, such as COVID-19, affect knowledge structures, feeding into WP3’s analysis of the drivers of knowledge dissemination.
Work Package 3: The shaping of the ocean-climate research landscape
Work Package 3 focuses on understanding the evolution of ocean-climate research by analyzing knowledge flows over time, using bibliometrics and generative AI. It aims to identify how world events, political actions, and social shifts impact the production and dissemination of research, while also exploring hidden causalities in the knowledge landscape. The project will develop tools to assess gaps in the current knowledge base, predict future research directions, and generate targeted actions to address under-explored areas, with an emphasis on equity and inclusion. Generative AI will also be leveraged to hypothesize future knowledge flows, shape research initiatives, and support multi-language accessibility.
Work Package 4: Mapping curriculum and the scientific landscape
This work package builds on previous efforts to connect ocean and climate science with educational syllabi, focusing on Atlantic Canadian secondary and post-secondary educators. The project aims to analyze the gap between scientific literature and its representation in regional curricula, understand who is and isn’t represented in the scientific works used in education, and develop tools that help educators access relevant research. Through bibliometric analysis and information science methodologies, the project seeks to empower educators to effectively teach ocean-climate science, with particular emphasis on marginalized communities. Collaboration between Dalhousie University and UQAR will ensure interdisciplinary expertise, community partnerships, and the development of participatory, user-friendly tools.
To learn more about different research clusters within TCA and the program’s expected impact, visit the Ocean Frontier Institutes’ website.
The QSSLab presented several projects at the 28th International Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators, September 18-20, in Berlin, Germany.
Geoff Krause presented his ongoing doctoral work “Well-tailored words: Comparing the fit of articles within scholarly journals to their citation rates”.
Rebecca Marjoram presented preliminary results for her Masters thesis project “Privilege in publishing: Investigating the impact of scientific reputation on peer review outcomes”.
Philippe Mongeon presented a poster by Poppy Riddle, Rémi Toupin, Maddie Hare, Geoff Krause, and himself, entitled “Mapping the UN Second World Ocean Assessment: Challenges and opportunities” which is a methodological investigation of a larger OFI seed-funded project.
The lab enjoyed seeing old friends, making new connections with other attendees, and eating schnitzel and apple strudel. We are keen to advance these research projects with the valuable feedback and insight received at the conference and are already looking forward to STI in Bristol, UK in 2025!
Congratulations to Geoff Krause (IDPhD) and Rebecca Marjoram (MI), 2024 Coalition Publica scholarship recipients!
Geoff Krause is an Interdisciplinary PhD student based in the Department of Information Science. He was awarded funding for his project “Defining the scope of academic journals through computational text analysis”. His project aims to propose measures of the scope of academic journals and to explore the relationship between the scope and other journal characteristics such as the field, the type of publisher, the publishing model, age, and Impact Factor.
Rebecca Marjoram, Master of Information student, was awarded the scholarship for her thesis entitled “Privilege in publishing: Investigating the impact of scientific reputation and sociodemographic factors on peer review outcomes”. Her project asks: If you’re a researcher who has been publishing in your field for years, you have a high number of citations, and loads of publications to your name, do you really need to fit the scope of a journal to publish in it? Or do you get to lead the discourse of the community? Those are some of the questions this project seeks to answer. We’re going to determine the scope of the top journals across 174 scientific sub-fields and see what impact academic reputation and other sociodemographic factors have (e.g. Inferred gender, inferred ethnicity) on the need for authors to fit the scope of a journal in order to be accepted for publication.
Coalition Publica is a partnership between Érudit and the Public Knowledge Project which supports the social sciences and humanities journal community in the transition towards sustainable open access. Their mission is to help develop and coordinate an open and sustainable national infrastructure supporting research dissemination and digital scholarly publishing in Canada. They are proud to support students at the Masters and PhD levels to apply digital humanities methods to Coalition Publica’s textual corpus or to study the scholarly communication ecosystem.
Read the full announcement here. Learn more about Coalition Publica, a partnership between Érudit and the Public Knowledge Project here.
Read more about Geoff and Rebecca at their profiles here.
Stay up to date on QSSLab projects here.
Rémi Toupin and Philippe Mongeon are one of 30 new projects to receive funding awards from the Ocean Frontier Institute (OFI) Seed Fund. Their project, entitled, ‘Aligning scholarly and public understanding of ocean knowledge: An assessment based on the UN Second World Ocean Assessment Report’aims to map oceans research synthesized in the UN Second World Ocean Assessment Report, an exhaustive corpus of oceans knowledge. Specifically, they seek to identify scholarly outputs and map the research areas and scientific actors associated with topics and issues in ocean science, and measure attention to research areas from scholarly and non-scholarly audiences and stakeholders. We will assess how attention to research about the oceans is distributed across scholarly communities, policy, news media, and social media. Discrepancies of attention to research areas in relation to social and topical dynamics will be exposed, such as whether certain topics are discussed more because they are deemed more attractive by the media, leveraged by policymakers towards certain ends, or due to imbalance of attention resources in research clusters. This will propel tactical responses to knowledge and capacity-building gaps and key areas of oceans research, the mobilization of resources and knowledge production where it is most needed, and lay the groundwork for more effectively bridging the science-policy-public interface.
The OFI Seed Fund provides financial support and expertise for ocean-related projects that demonstrate a high potential to grow into larger externally funded research projects or to deliver their impact through commercialization.
Learn more about other Dalhousie projects funded by the OFI Seed Fund.
Stay up to date on QSSLab projects here.
The 27th International Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators, 2023, was held September 27-29, 2023 in Leiden, The Netherlands. The 2023 edition focused on improving scholarly evaluation practices in the light of cultural change. Several members of the QSSLab also attended the fifth CWTS Scientometrics Summer School before the conference.
The conference program included several presentations and posters by the Quantitative Science Studies Lab.
Philippe Mongeon and Maddie Hare presented the paper “Do you cite what you tweet? Investigating the relationship between tweeting and citing research articles”. Find the preprint here.
Rémi Toupin presented his work “Public attention to research on Twitter through storytelling: making a narrative out of tweets to a scientific article”.
Geoff Krause presented the poster “Measuring Data Re-Use Through Dataset Citations in OpenAlex”. Preprint available here.
Marc-André Simard presented the paper “Worldwide trends in brain research: A bibliometric analysis”.
Stay up to date on QSSLab projects here.
