Projects

Crediting the contributions of university librarians in research is a growing practice. Librarians offer crucial support with the formulation of research methodologies and search strategies, result retrieval and screening, and the management of citations, and are often consulted throughout the research lifecycle on strategy and approaches to research. Additionally, librarians often advise diverse ranges of research teams, effectively cultivating their expertise in trends and knowledge gaps across fields, making them an invaluable resource for the conception and formulation of research projects. This research-in-progress aims to investigate how Canadian librarians are credited on journal publications. It will survey whether they are listed as co-authors or credited in acknowledgement sections. It will observe whether this practice is increasing over time, in which fields, and provide an overview of the current state of this practice in relation to Canadian librarians included in the recently developed “Canadian Publications in Library and Information Science” database.

One-way knowledge exchange via scholarly communications (journals, books, and conference proceedings) is often the default knowledge mobilization approach for scientists. The visibility of this work outside of the academic realm can be captured using Altmetrics. This project will provide large-scale analysis of the forest science field and its different subareas, and the extent to which this research gets mentioned on social media and cited in the news or in policy documents. We will use state-of-the-art science mapping and community detection techniques based on citation relationship to identify distinct publication clusters, and use topic modelling techniques to characterize these communities. The project will provide a large-scale overview of forest science research dissemination and use over the last decade. Also, we will identify how attention to the literature is distributed across subdisciplines, research areas, and topics within the field. The findings will help decision-makers identify areas of forest science where knowledge exchange is more frequent, areas one could look to for best practices in knowledge exchange, and areas where further attention to knowledge exchange efforts may be required.

The goal of this project is to understand what impact the mentor-mentee relationship has on the future publication patterns of LIS doctoral students in North America. Related questions we hope to answer are: How closely related is the subject matter of a mentor’s scholarship/area of expertise and the mentee’s dissertation during the doctoral process? Do the publishing behaviors (impact, frequency) of the mentor influence the mentee’s publication patterns as they progress through their academic career? Does the mentor’s subject of expertise influence the mentee’s future publication subject area or does it tend to deviate in a multidisciplinary field like LIS? What implications might the mentor-mentee relationship have on the academic network of a student; do students of the same mentor tend to publish together/in the same subject area?

The main goal of this project is to build a tool to map and explore the research output of the eight ALA-accredited information schools in Canada, with a focus of the specicific contribution of schools in shaping the Canadian LIS research landscape.

Participatory knowledge production modes that allow the integration of perspectives and forms of knowledge can help better understand our complex socio-environmental systems (Alvarado et al., 2020). Several studies have shown that society can meaningfully engage in discussions about science and technology, and that this win-win interaction can contribute to strengthening democracies and decision-making (Reen et al., 2003; Marzuki, 2015). The current global challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, demand thoughtful responses and solutions that cannot be managed with a scientific approach alone. As a result, public participation and societal engagement initiatives through so called ‘quintipule helix’ have gained wider political, institutional and public attention increasingly broad. These actions have been focal points of the Framework Programmes in the European Commission (FP7 Science in Society and Horizon 2020 SwafS programmes). In the Canadian framework, Canada’s Citizen Science Portal of the Government or the different initiatives in Universities (e.g. University of Guelph, Université Laval, Simon Fraser University, University of Waterloo) or organizations such as Community-based research Canadian organization or the Institute for Knowledge Mobilization are examples of this interest. The term citizen science (hereafter CS) is related to the general public engagement in the scientific knowledge production in which the citizens participate in different ways (e.g. intellectual, knowledge, tools or resources). The main aim is to co-create a new scientific culture and exchange of understanding (Silverstown, 2009) able to improve upon the interaction between science and society. CS is a rapidly expanding field in open science and open innovation (Hecker et al., 2018), which is linked with the democratization of science, scientific literacy, social capital, citizen inclusion in local issues, and benefits to government. The origin of the term can be traced to Irwin who defined it as a ‘form of science developed and enacted by citizens themselves’ (Irwin, 1995). Later, many other definitions arise (see Haklay 2013; Kullenberg & Kasperowski, 2016). A more recent definition stated that is ‘general public engagement in scientific research activities where citizens actively contribute to science either with their intellectual effort, or surrounding knowledge, or their tools and resource’ (European Commission, 2013). In terms of implementation of those methodologies, Living Labs are spaces where collaborative projects applying citizen science methodologies can take place. This concept was firstly introduced by Prof. Mitchell of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Schuurman et al., 2011) and refers to user-centred, open innovation ecosystems based on co-creation approaches, integrating research and innovation processes in real life communities and settings (European Network of Living Labs ENoLL, 2021). At the universities, they can connect education, research, and innovation with local issues through the design of specific activities that require the involvement of citizens. In the Canadian framework, there are different initiatives at the universities such as Concordia University . One of the main unknowns with CS initiatives’ (and by extension, in the Living Labs) is the level and nature of the citizens’ involvement in the research process with a wide variety of methodologies (e.g., action research, community-based participatory research). The tasks in which the citizens can be involved are diverse and can range from data collection and tagging images to participation in the planning and design. For measuring this contribution, different participation scales have been proposed. The eight levels of Arnstein’s (1969) ‘ladder of citizen participation’ was the first and goes from ‘non-participation’ to ‘citizen power’. More recently, Haklay (2013) classified it into four levels, showing an evolution from data collectors to the full involvement of volunteers. It implies also a fundamental shift from top-down approaches to bottom-up where volunteers and scientists interact. From a bibliometric perspective, some studies analyzed the CS research output (Kullenberg & Kasperowski, 2016; Bautista-Puig et al., 2019; Pelacho et al., 2020) but to the best of our knowledge, none analyzed the level of participation of the citizens within the research. Research questions and overall objectives Despite ongoing research on the topic, there remain gaps in our understanding of the nature and extent of the citizens’ contributions to CS projects and the contribution of those projects to the advancement of knowledge. This project aims to gain a better understanding of the nature and outcomes of CS projects and also to test a real case study with the Living Lab by answering the following research questions: How are CS projects distributed across fields? What is the nature and degree of citizen involvement in these CS projects? What kind of knowledge is produced from these projects and how does it relate to non-CS research in the same discipline? Could a living lab structure identify and solve societal issues?

This work is a quantitative exploration of archival scholarship that aims to describe the social and topical structure of the field, its evolution, and its relationship with other disciplines.

Main goal This project will identify scholarly work that mentions social justice issues and identify trends in the prevalence of these mentions in the literature. Research questions Some of the questions will be: What is the prevalence of social justice related terms in the global academic production over the last 30 years? How do these trends vary depending on the specific social justice issues discussed? How do these trends vary by research field? How do these trends vary by country?

This work revisits the relationship between tweets and citations from a new information behavior perspective, where the tweet (and not the tweeted publication) is the unit of analysis. The main question is to determine if, at the individual level, the act of tweeting a given publication is a good predictor of the act of citing that same publication. Also, we investigate how the relationship between tweeting and citing is influenced by the research activity of the tweeter and its relationship to the tweeted paper.

While the growth in open access (OA) (Piwowar et al., 2018) in recent years is a positive development towards making research more accessible, the OA landscape is complex and fraught by the academic publishing market, a profitable business controlled by an oligopoly of academic publishers, which consists of a few for-profit companies (Elsevier, SAGE, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley). Since the beginning of the digital era, these companies have acquired small publishers and now control the majority of scholarly journal publishing (Larivière et al., 2015), generating profit margins as high as 37% (Aspesi et al., 2019). These profits stem largely from subscription fees and article processing charges (APCs) paid by the academic community to read and publish content provided for free by that same community. The oligopoly’s dominant approach to OA focuses on the author-pays model and often involves astronomic article processing charges (APCs) that create inequities and barriers that excludes many from publishing (Asai, 2020; Demeter, 2020). Early OA manifestos – Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing OA and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and the Humanities (2003) – advanced the argument for the right to free, unrestricted and barrier free access to publicly-funded research and birthed the early beginnings of funder OA policies. To comply, many researchers choose publishing venues that require the payment of APCs. The author-pay-models commodifies knowledge, privileging the profits of large publishers over the equitable participation of all players in the scientific enterprise. This approach counters the BOAI 2022 recommendations to move away from the APC model to favour more inclusive forms of publishing that support an equitable and sustainable model for research (BOAI20, n.d.). Although the majority of gold OA journals does not require authors to pay (73% of journals indexed in the DOAJ have no APCs), high APCs are common from prestigious publishers (Khoo, 2019; Siler & Frenken, 2020). For gold OA journals that do rely on APCs, previous studies estimate the average fees to be $1,800 (Jahn & Tullney, 2016; Solomon & Björk, 2016) Counterintuitively, hybrid APCs—subscription journals where individual articles are made freely available through APCs—are significantly more expensive (Pinfield et al., 2016, Matthias, 2018), with average estimates of $2,900 (Jahn & Tullney, 2016; Solomon & Björk, 2016). The main criticisms of hybrid OA are the high price point with APCs and the potential for publishers to double-dip—the practice of receiving two different sources of revenue for the same article (Eve, 2014; Matthias, 2018; Pinfield et al., 2016; Suber, 2012). This study aims to estimate the total amount ($US) of APCs for gold and hybrid OA articles published between 2015 and 2018 and indexed in the Web of Science.

Since they first appeared in 1665, scholarly journals have grown to be the dominant mode of dissemination of research outputs (Csiszar, 2018). The first journals were generalists and covered all areas of science, but the growing number of increasingly specialized researchers led to a segmentation process and the creation of new disciplines and specialized journals (Gingras, 2013). This specialization is usually made explicit by the declared scope of a journal. The scope of a journal signals to the potential users (within and beyond academia) where to look for knowledge that may be valuable to them, which highlights the crucial role of journals in ensuring that knowledge can be found and mobilized in further research, policies, and innovations. The fundamental role academic research is to advance knowledge, the fundamental role of journals is to disseminate it, and the fundamental role of the journal scope is to structure knowledge to optimize its dissemination. The proposed research addresses the potential erosion of these functions of journals brought about by the political economy of knowledge dissemination in which the interests of individual agents participating in the field (Bourdieu, 1999, 2001) may not align with the ideals (Armstrong, 2010) and where the question “how well does this paper fit the scope of the journal?” potentially becomes secondary. What happens to the scope of journals when they are increasingly owned by corporation (Larivière et al., 2015) whose fundamental role is the generation of profit? When publishers (commercial or not) use pay-to-publish business models in which revenues are coupled with the number of papers they publish? When editors’ focus on increasing the Impact Factor of their journal? Or when researchers are pressured to publish or perish? When the journal’s Impact Factor is more important for researchers than the fit of the work for the journal? The project has three main objectives: Use natural language processing and text-mining to measure the scope of all journals in the Web of Science and the fit of all papers in the journals where they are published (Mongeon et al., 2019). Investigate the relationship between the journal scope and other journal characteristics o the journals (business model, ownership, impact factor, etc.) Model the relationship between the fit of a paper in a journal and the impact of that paper on research, policy and technology to test the hypothesis that publishing papers where they best fit increases their likelihood of being found and used. Note: the project is currently recruiting students interested in writing a grant supported Master or PhD thesis as part of this project.

The goal of this research collaboration between the QSS lab and the Environmental Information Use and Influence (EIUI) group is to contribute to the discussion by providing an empirical basis for assessing the unequal representation and attention that different bodies of literature receive in social media specifically. Our research questions are: What distinct communities can be identified within the shark scholarship? How is scientific attention distributed across these communities? How is media attention distributed across these communities? To what extent do researchers themselves contribute to the dissemination the research on social media? We will then discuss the implications of a potentially skewed coverage of media attention for policy and the societal understanding of an issue, and the role that information literacy may play in improving science-society interactions on social media and improve policy and decision-making processes.