SIG-MET Awards: Geoff Krause and Poppy Riddle winners of the Metrics 2022 Best Student Paper Award

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.