Latest News & Blogs

By Madelaine Hare

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.

By Madelaine Hare

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.

By Madelaine Hare

Jérémie is a PhD student in Science, Technology and Society at Université du Québec à Montréal, and a member of the Canada Research Chair in Applied Epistemology. He graduated from the Université de Sherbrooke with a bachelor and master’s degree in philosophy. Science funding, expert organizations and academic software development are some of the topics he studies using methods borrowed from social network analysis and natural language processing. In his spare time, Jérémie takes care of two exceptional canine companions and enjoy climbing rocks.

During his visit to the QSS Lab, Jérémie will contribute to the ongoing project regarding to the role of journals in structuring knowledge.

Stay up to date on collaborative projects between Jérémie and the QSSLab here.

By Madelaine Hare

Adrián Díaz-Faes is a visiting researcher with the QSSLab during August and September. Adrián is a social scientist interested in understanding collaboration and knowledge co-creation processes in science and innovation. His research brings together theoretical and empirical insights from quantitative science studies, social networks, and innovation studies.

Adrián is a Research Fellow at INGENIO, a joint research institute of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the Technical University of Valencia (UPV) where he leads the Spanish R&D funded project titled “SciCoMetrics”, studying science-society interactions captured in news and social media to develop a novel taxonomy of science communication metrics.

Stay up to date on collaborative projects between Adrián and the QSSLab here.

By Madelaine Hare

Please join us in congratulating Director of the QSSLab, Philippe Mongeon, for his new position as Editor of the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Science (CJILS/RCSIB)!

The Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science (CJILS/RCSIB) is an open access, refereed, scholarly periodical published three times per year by Western Libraries, University of Western Ontario on behalf of the Canadian Association for Information Science.

Established in 1976, the journal is recognized internationally for its authoritative bilingual contributions to library and information science research. The editorial policy of the journal is to continue the advancement of library and information science in both English and French in Canada by serving as a forum for discussion of theory and research.

Philippe is a former President of CAIS (2019-2021) and its current Awards Coordinator. We are excited that he will be taking on this new role in the CAIS community.

Visit the CJILS website here.

By Madelaine Hare

How is grey literature about marine protection cited in policy documents and scholarly literature? Philippe Mongeon and Rémi Toupin have been awarded a Partnership Engagement Grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for the project The mobilization of scientific expertise through grey literature: the case of GESAMP. With this grant, the research team will investigate the reach and visibility of reports produced by the Joint Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection), an advisory body to the UN on matters of marine environmental protection. This project is a partnership with GESAMP, the QSSLab, and the Environmental Information Use and Influence (EIUI) research group located at Dalhousie University.

A first study published in 2004 by MacDonald, Cordes, and Wells’, “Grey literature in the life of GESAMP, an international marine scientific advisory body”, provides an outline of what this research hopes to recreate with updated tools and bibliometric methodology. This analysis of GESAMP in grey literature illuminated the publication and diffusion of GESAMP reports. Expanding this project in the current context will be helpful for GESAMP as they align their work with the Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development and address current challenges identified in their working plan. This project will use bibliometric methods to measure the engagement of GESAMP with the scientific literature and the engagement with GESAMP reports and publications inside and outside the scientific realm, especially for policy-making.

By Madelaine Hare

The 51st Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Information Science/l’Association canadienne des sciences de l’information (CAIS/ACSI) will be taking place on June 6-9, 2023. Three members of QSSLab will be presenting their work at the conference as well as participating in the student research forum.

Geoff Krause will be presenting the work “Measuring Data Reuse in OpenAlex by Researchers, Institutions, and Countries”. Abstract: Open Data is a concept that is receiving increased attention and support in academic environments, with one justification being that shared data may be reused in further research. But what evidence exists for such reuse, and what is the relationship between the producers of shared datasets and researchers making use of them? This work in progress makes use of dataset citations in the OpenAlex bibliometric database to analyze the relationship between the creators of datasets and authors who cite them, at individual, institutional, and national levels.

Marc-André Simard will be presenting the work “The value of a diamond: Understanding global coverage of diamond Open Access journals in Web of Science, Scopus, and OpenAlex to support an open future”. Abstract: Open Data is a concept that is receiving increased attention and support in academic environments, with one justification being that shared data may be reused in further research. But what evidence exists for such reuse, and what is the relationship between the producers of shared datasets and researchers making use of them? This work in progress makes use of dataset citations in the OpenAlex bibliometric database to analyze the relationship between the creators of datasets and authors who cite them, at individual, institutional, and national levels.

Poppy Riddle will be presenting the work “The use of institutional Repository for self-archiving in Canadian Universities”. Abstract: This study investigates the use of institutional repositories (IR) for self-archiving journal articles in the U15 universities as well as the presence of institutional policies and publisher embargoes. While 45.1% to 56.6% of publications are available in open access (OA), only 0.5% to 10.7% are found in the IRs. We found only three university-wide OA policies, and embargo periods of 12 months or more for 25.6% of journal policies. This suggests that IRs play a minor role in OA practices, and a need for more policies related to self-archiving and the use of IRs specifically.

Find the official conference program here. Additionally, the CAIS Annual General Meeting will conclude the conference on Friday, June 9th; consider attending and participating in the vibrant Canadian Information Science community!

The theme of this year’s conference is “Imagining Information”: attendees are invited to consider imagining in its many senses and forms, from imagining potential futures for the field and our society, to the nature and function of imagination in information experiences and phenomena. We are delighted that our lab members are contributing their expertise and thoughtful perspectives to imagining better futures for the IS field and for society.

By Madelaine Hare

Poppy Riddle is a doctoral student in the Dalhousie Interdisciplinary PhD (IDPhD) program where she combines her interests in library and information science (LIS) and human-computer interaction (HCI). This profile highlights the extension of Poppy’s thesis research in the Master of Information (MI) program into her PhD research, current projects she is working on, and her experience working in the QSS lab!

Poppy, what was your MI thesis topic? What interested you in the subject and inspired you to dive deeper?

My thesis looked at how keywords from peer-reviewed articles might be useful to compare two search terms during the exploratory search phase. I used a visualization to show how the keywords overlap in two search results. At the time, this was just a static visualization and a demonstration of the concept. However, I’m still working towards making this a working application to be used in a user study.

There was an article I read by Devon Greyson on ignorance and a call to revive agnatology as part of a reflective process on what information we include, exclude, or don’t know about. As the search interfaces we use in libraries return list based results, I can’t really see what I’m missing or I don’t know about. Coming from an art and design background, I’m used to using visual tools to explore and gain knowledge about complex things. What if our ability to search in libraries was augmented by a visual mode for exploration? Would I be able to be more aware of what articles or books I’m choosing and not choosing?

How has your thinking and research evolved since you began the IDPhD program? What are the different research projects you are working on and what are you most looking forward to digging into more over the course of your doctoral degree?

So, it turns out this is a much deeper problem and I’m learning so much in the PhD program about how other fields can inform and shape this problem. I’m working in both LIS and HCI fields right now and both are highly interdisciplinary. I’m learning cognitive science concepts, theories of cognition and emotion, ethnographic methods, user interface design and evaluation methods, natural language processing, virtual and augmented reality, immersive visualization and analytics, and of course more explorations in coding and the technical aspects of creating prototype applications. All of these, (just in my first year) are shaping, guiding, and clarifying my desire for a visual search interface.

I’ve been working on a quite a wide range of research from investigating open access and institutional repositories, LIS research in Canadian institutions, learning more about the OpenAlex database and mapping its contents, designing and learning to create applications, virtual reality authentication using graphical passwords, and contributing to course development in bibliometrics and data science. As varied as they seem, there is a thread joins all this together, albeit a very long one! However, despite all I’m learning, I’m really exicted for next year as I’ll be able to focus on my research and making visual search interfaces!

Congratulations on receiving the CARL research grant! Could you tell us a bit about the project you are working on?

The CARL research grant was awarded based on my masters thesis and the gap in understanding how visual metaphors of graphs, charts, maps, or networks affect viewers. This project is still being shaped by what I’m learning in coursework and the technical challenges of creating different ways of representing the data. I’m anticipating running the study in the summer.

What do you enjoy most about LIS/HCI?

HCI is a great overlap between my prior education in design and LIS, though HCI goes deep into the user research theory and methods. I find this both satisfying and daunting! I think there is also a good complement between HCI and LIS in theories and methods that are unique to each, but may cross over well. For example, cognition theories that HCI borrows from cognitive science may help LIS researchers understand how technological systems are shaping the perception and decision making of library patrons. Conversely, HCI seems to lack the critical perspectives that LIS brings to address social inequities and would benefit from reflective practices in identifying how design processes, theories, contexts, etc are continuing to enable inequalities and bias.

Finally, what are your favourite parts about QSS Lab?

The people! Perhaps its our curiosity, our shared ability to geek about anything, or how satisfying it is to hear about other’s successes. Its such a wonderfully supportive community. Second, I really like the breadth of our research topics. There’s technical work, (which can be really deep and satisfying), and there’s critical work of deconstructing, (which can be personally rewarding), and topics that genuinely interest me as well as those that are surprisingly interesting! ( I think anything can be interesting if you ask the right questions.)

Compared with prior professional experience, our QSS group and SIM as a whole are quite unique. There is a real chemistry at work that support collaboration, thoughtfulness, critical thinking, and communal goodwill. So, its quite unique and special in my opinion. I plan on being here for quite some time, thank you very much.

By Madelaine Hare

QSSLab is looking forward to hosting two research interns this summer through the Mitacs Globalink Research program! Valeriia Moroz and JoonSeok Oh will be working with the lab from June until September 2023.

Valeriia Moroz is a third-year Bachelor of Cybersecurity at Sumy State University in Ukraine. She enjoy learning new things related to web development, collection, processing, and the protection of information. Find Valeriia’s profile here

JoonSeok Oh is an aeronautics major at Hanseo University in South Korea. He is also a commercial aircraft pilot! Find Joon Seok’s profile here.

Valeriia and JoonSeok will be working on a project entitled “The contribution of Atlantic Canada to the global production of knowledge” with Director Philippe Mongeon.

We are excited to welcome JoonSeok and Valeriia to the QSSLab!

By Madelaine Hare

In October 2022, several members of the QSS Lab presented at Metrics 2022: ASIS&T Virtual Workshop on Informetrics and Scientometrics Research sponsored by Elsevier’s International Center for the Study of Research (ICSR). Both Poppy Riddle and Geoff Krause were awarded Best Student Paper. Congratulations to Poppy and Geoff for their outstanding presentations and research!

Geoff Krause presented the study “Who re-uses data? A bibliometric analysis of data citations and the relationship between authors and data creators” (Krause, G., Bowman, T., Rosati, D., Mongeon, P., & Smit, M.) It is widely recognized that open science has widespread benefits not only for science and society, but also for individual researchers (McKiernan et al., 2016). A study by Drachen et al. (2016) suggested that papers get more citations when the underlying data is made available. But when data is re-used, are the datasets themselves being cited, and if so, by whom? Past studies that investigated citations to datasets found that formal data citations are generally rare (Peters et al., 2016; Robinson-García et al., 2016), and observed field differences in data citation practices (Peters et al., 2016). There have also been attempts to link data creators to researchers in order to capture data sharing practices and incorporate them into the reward system of science (Mongeon et al., 2017). A previous study by Dudek, Mongeon and Bergmans (2019) analyzed citations to datasets from the IFREMER and found that most of those citations came from researchers affiliated with the organization, and that 75% of the citing papers had at least one author in common with the dataset. This project increases on the scale of their work by analyzing citations to 474,609 datasets, and the relationship between the citing authors and the creators of the 30,582 datasets with at least one citation. This is, to their knowledge, the first analysis to provide large-scale empirical insights on data re-use with a focus on data self-citations.

Poppy Riddle presented her work “The use of institutional repositories for green Open Access in Canadian universities” (Riddle, P., Simard, M-A., Gone, P., Li, V., & Mongeon, P.) This study investigates the use of institutional repositories (IR) for self-archiving journal articles in the U15 universities as well as the presence of institutional policies and publisher embargos. While 45.1% to 56.6% of publications are available in open access (OA), only 0.5% to 10.7% are found in the IRs. We found only three university-wide OA policies, and embargo periods of 12 months or more for 25.6% of journal policies. This suggests that IRs play a minor role in OA practices, and a need for more policies related to self-archiving and the use of IRs specifically.

See the official announcement on the ASIS&T website, here.

By Madelaine Hare

Research activities are a large part of the work of university librarians. However, their work often suffers from a lack of visibility, resulting in untapped potential for exchange and collaboration between librarians and researchers in information science. This project aims to help break down the silos in which the two primary target audiences- information science researchers and academic librarians- conduct their research. Canadian Publications in Library and Information Science makes visible the work that librarians do and allows other Canadian researchers to discover the research of their colleagues. We hope that this will stimulate increased collaboration amongst university librarians and researchers across Canada.

This project consists of a database and an open citation index, listing the research contributions of Canadian librarians and researchers in information sciences. This dataset and its source code is made available through this GitHub repository. It contains two CSV files; one of LIS authors, and their publications. These datasets are also available on Zenodo here. For those interesting in contributing, you may do so through the GitHub repository.

Also available is an interactive platform which allows users to view and export publications. In the future, it will also allow users to contribute to the completeness and quality of the data by proposing additions or modifications. This tool will promote and explore research in information science in Canada and help break down the walls that separate librarians and researchers by making them aware of the results of their respective research. This database will be updated annually with new publications.

This project is part of a larger SSHRC funded project of workshops and conferences and provides a means to explore a database of publications from the information science community in Canada. The website LIS Canada, available here will also provide access to these tools.

This project was carried out by two teams from Dalhousie University (QSS Lab) and the University of Montreal, in partnership with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), the Maritime Institute on Science, Technology and Society (MISTS) and the School of Library and Information Science (EBSI) of the University of Montreal. The project is directly linked to CARL’s mission to improve the contribution of librarians to research and higher education, to foster the efficiency and sustainability of the creation, dissemination and preservation of knowledge, and to promote access to research results. It is also linked to the activities of the MISTS, which offers support for research on science and its relations with society, in particular by providing researchers with a technological infrastructure designed for bibliometric research.

By Madelaine Hare

By Madelaine Hare

In early September, 2022, members of the QSS Lab travelled to Granada, Spain for the 26th International Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators hosted at the Universidad de Granada. The conference featured three days of oral communication sessions, an event dedicated for Women in Science Policy (WISP) and a PhD student round table.

The QSS Lab presented four studies at the conference. Director of the QSS Lab, Dr. Philippe Mongeon, presented his work “On the Impact of Geo-contextualized and Local Research in the Global North and South”. MI graduate Kydra Mayhew presented a study entitled “On the Citation Relationship Between Industry Funded and Publicly Funded Canadian Food Research Publications” and a poster session for her work “On the coverage of historical journals in Web of Science and Scopus”. Maddie Hare presented her research-in-progress “The Impact of Mentorship on the Research Performance of LIS PhDs”.

The QSS Lab was represented by members from Dalhousie University’s School of Information Management, as well as its collaborators from around the world. QSS Lab looks forward to STI 2023 in Leiden!

See a conference recap posted on the School of Information Management blog, INFORM, here.

More details about the project can be found here.