[Drifts and pernicious effects of the quantitative evaluation of research: the misuse of bibliometrics].

The quantitative evaluation of scientific research relies increasingly on bibliometric indicators of publications and citations. We present the issues raised by the simplistic use of these methods and recall the dangers of using poorly built indicators and technically defective rankings that do not measure the dimensions they are supposed to measure, for example the <> of publications, laboratories or universities. We show that francophone journals are particularly susceptible to suffer from the bad uses of too simplistic bibliometric rankings of scientific journals.

[A bibliometrical analysis of Majorana's scientific legacy].

This article analyzes the reception of Ettore Majorana's articles by tracing all the references made to them since the beginning of the 1930s. This methodology allows me to show that Ettore Majorana's 1937 piece on spin-1/2 particles was largely rediscovered during the 1960s, but also to identify the people who actively promoted Majorana's work, which has loomed larger in scientific debates since the 1970s. Analyzing co-citations, this article shows the conceptual network in which Majorana's work fits.

A small world of citations? The influence of collaboration networks on citation practices.

This paper examines the proximity of authors to those they cite using degrees of separation in a co-author network, essentially using collaboration networks to expand on the notion of self-citations. While the proportion of direct self-citations (including co-authors of both citing and cited papers) is relatively constant in time and across specialties in the natural sciences (10% of references) and the social sciences (20%), the same cannot be said for citations to authors who are members of the co-author network. Differences between fields and trends over time lie not only in the degree of co-authorship which defines the large-scale topology of the collaboration network, but also in the referencing practices within a given discipline, computed by defining a propensity to cite at a given distance within the collaboration network.

Self-selected or mandated, open access increases citation impact for higher quality research.

Background: Articles whose authors have supplemented subscription-based access to the publisher's version by self-archiving their own final draft to make it accessible free for all on the web ("Open Access", OA) are cited significantly more than articles in the same journal and year that have not been made OA. Some have suggested that this "OA Advantage" may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this we compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatory self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002-2006 in 1,984 journals.

Revisiting the "quiet debut" of the double helix: a bibliometric and methodological note on the "impact" of scientific publications.

The object of this paper is two-fold: first, to show that contrary to what seem to have become a widely accepted view among historians of biology, the famous 1953 first Nature paper of Watson and Crick on the structure of DNA was widely cited--as compared to the average paper of the time--on a continuous basis from the very year of its publication and over the period 1953-1970 and that the citations came from a wide array of scientific journals. A systematic analysis of the bibliometric data thus shows that Watson's and Crick's paper did in fact have immediate and long term impact if we define "impact" in terms of comparative citations with other papers of the time. In this precise sense it did not fall into "relative oblivion" in the scientific community.

The effects of aging on researchers' publication and citation patterns.

The average age at which U.S. researchers receive their first grant from NIH has increased from 34.

The emergence and evolution of the expression "conflict of interests" in science: a historical overview, 1880--2006.

The tendency is strong to take the notion of "conflict of interests" for granted as if it had an invariant meaning and an ethical content independent of the historical context. It is doubtful however, from an historical and sociological point of view, that many of the cases now considered as instances of "conflicts of interests" would also have been conceived and perceived as such in, say, the 1930s. The idea of a "conflict of interests" presupposes that there are indeed interests in conflict.

Bibliometric analysis of research on mental health in the workplace in Canada,1991-2002.

This paper uses the Medline biomedical papers database to measure scientific production on mental health in the workplace (MHWP) during the 1991"2002 period at the world, Canadian, provincial, urban, institutional and researcher levels. The level of scientific output has doubled at the world level and tripled at the Canadian level during the last 12 years. At the provincial level, Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta are leading in absolute number of papers.

Restless legs syndrome: confirmation of linkage to chromosome 12q, genetic heterogeneity, and evidence of complexity.

Background: Genes are involved in the etiology of restless legs syndrome, a common sensorimotor disorder.

Objectives: To replicate and to further characterize our previously reported chromosome 12q linkage results.

Design: Family linkage study.