Search

Victims of bullying are often reluctant to seek formal support, and instead, internalise their emotions, hindering recovery. Some will subsequently encounter discussions of bullying online, giving them an unexpected opportunity to share their feelings or experience vicarious support. In this article, we investigate reactions to discussions of offline and online bullying in the comments posted to the YouTube channels of 34 popular UK female lifestyle influencers. We used a thematic analysis of keywords associated with comments mentioning bullying to identify bullying-related themes. The almost universally supportive comments position female YouTube influencer channels as sources of unexpected indirect support for victims that professionals may also recommend. The comments also reveal a previously undiscussed strategy for helping victims: abstraction.

International collaboration is sometimes encouraged in the belief that it generates higher quality research or is more capable of addressing societal problems. Nevertheless, while there is evidence that the journal articles of international teams tend to be more cited than average, perhaps from increased international audiences, there is no science‐wide direct academic evidence of a connection between international collaboration and research quality. This article empirically investigates the connection between international collaboration and research quality for the first time, with 148,977 UK‐based journal articles with post publication expert review scores from the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF). Using an ordinal regression model controlling for collaboration, international partners increased the odds of higher quality scores in 27 out of 34 Units of Assessment (UoAs) and all Main Panels. The results therefore give the first large scale evidence of the fields in which international co‐authorship for articles is usually apparently beneficial. At the country level, the results suggests that UK collaboration with other high research‐expenditure economies generates higher quality research, even when the countries produce lower citation impact journal articles than the United Kingdom. Worryingly, collaborations with lower research‐expenditure economies tend to be judged lower quality, possibly through misunderstanding Global South research goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assess whether ChatGPT 4.0 is accurate enough to perform research evaluations on journal articles to automate this time-consuming task. Test the extent to which ChatGPT-4 can assess the quality of journal articles using a case study of the published scoring guidelines of the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021 to create a research evaluation ChatGPT. This was applied to 51 of my own articles and compared against my own quality judgements. ChatGPT-4 can produce plausible document summaries and quality evaluation rationales that match the REF criteria. Its overall scores have weak correlations with my self-evaluation scores of the same documents (averaging r=0.281 over 15 iterations, with 8 being statistically significantly different from 0). In contrast, the average scores from the 15 iterations produced a statistically significant positive correlation of 0.509. Thus, averaging scores from multiple ChatGPT-4 rounds seems more effective than individual scores. The positive correlation may be due to ChatGPT being able to extract the author's significance, rigour, and originality claims from inside each paper. If my weakest articles are removed, then the correlation with average scores (r=0.200) falls below statistical significance, suggesting that ChatGPT struggles to make fine-grained evaluations. The data is self-evaluations of a convenience sample of articles from one academic in one field. Overall, ChatGPT does not yet seem to be accurate enough to be trusted for any formal or informal research quality evaluation tasks. Research evaluators, including journal editors, should therefore take steps to control its use. This is the first published attempt at post-publication expert review accuracy testing for ChatGPT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaboration is encouraged because it is believed to improve academic research, supported by indirect evidence in the form of more coauthored articles being more cited. Nevertheless, this might not reflect quality but increased self‐citations or the "audience effect": citations from increased awareness through multiple author networks. We address this with the first science wide investigation into whether author numbers associate with journal article quality, using expert peer quality judgments for 122,331 articles from the 2014–20 UK national assessment. Spearman correlations between author numbers and quality scores show moderately strong positive associations (0.2–0.4) in the health, life, and physical sciences, but weak or no positive associations in engineering and social sciences, with weak negative/positive or no associations in various arts and humanities, and a possible negative association for decision sciences. This gives the first systematic evidence that greater numbers of authors associates with higher quality journal articles in the majority of academia outside the arts and humanities, at least for the UK. Positive associations between team size and citation counts in areas with little association between team size and quality also show that audience effects or other nonquality factors account for the higher citation rates of coauthored articles in some fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Altmetrics are web‐based quantitative impact or attention indicators for academic articles that have been proposed to supplement citation counts. This article reports the first assessment of the extent to which mature altmetrics from Altmetric.com and Mendeley associate with individual article quality scores. It exploits expert norm‐referenced peer review scores from the UK Research Excellence Framework 2021 for 67,030+ journal articles in all fields 2014–2017/2018, split into 34 broadly field‐based Units of Assessment (UoAs). Altmetrics correlated more strongly with research quality than previously found, although less strongly than raw and field normalized Scopus citation counts. Surprisingly, field normalizing citation counts can reduce their strength as a quality indicator for articles in a single field. For most UoAs, Mendeley reader counts are the best altmetric (e.g., three Spearman correlations with quality scores above 0.5), tweet counts are also a moderate strength indicator in eight UoAs (Spearman correlations with quality scores above 0.3), ahead of news (eight correlations above 0.3, but generally weaker), blogs (five correlations above 0.3), and Facebook (three correlations above 0.3) citations, at least in the United Kingdom. In general, altmetrics are the strongest indicators of research quality in the health and physical sciences and weakest in the arts and humanities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses link metrics which show that the hyperlink structure of national university systems can be strongly related to the research productivity of the individual institutions. Uses a page classification on United Kingdom universities to produce even stronger associations, and gives correlations between research productivity and link counts. (Contains 56 references.) (Author/LRW)

Introduces three new metrics that measure the range of use of a university Web site by its peers through different heuristics for counting links targeted at its pages. Results from all three range models that were tested on United Kingdom university Web sites correlate significantly with the research productivity of the target institution. (Author/LRW)

Explains how the Web can be modeled as a mathematical graph and analyzes the graph structures of three national university publicly indexable Web sites from Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Topics include commercial search engines and academic Web link research; method-analysis environment and data sets; and power laws. (LRW)

Reports on an investigation into the most highly linked pages on United Kingdom university Web sites. Concludes that simple link counts are highly unreliable indicators of the average behavior of scholars, and that the most highly linked-to pages are those that facilitate access to a wide range of information rather than providing specific content. (Author/LRW)

Discussion of Web linking behavior and how to define a Web document focuses on a study of United Kingdom university Web sites that investigated the association between research productivity of the university and the number of incoming links from its peers' Web sites. Defines three alternative heuristics for counting links. (LRW)

Discusses Web impact factors (WIFs), Web versions of the impact factors for journals, and how they can be calculated by using search engines. Highlights include HTML and document indexing; Web page links; a Web crawler designed for calculating WIFs; and WIFs for United Kingdom universities that measured research profiles or capability. (Author/LRW)

Collaborative research causes problems for research assessments because of the difficulty in fairly crediting its authors. Whilst splitting the rewards for an article amongst its authors has the greatest surface-level fairness, many important evaluations assign full credit to each author, irrespective of team size. The underlying rationales for this are labour reduction and the need to incentivise collaborative work because it is necessary to solve many important societal problems. This article assesses whether full counting changes results compared to fractional counting in the case of the UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021. For this assessment, fractional counting reduces the number of journal articles to as little as 10% of the full counting value, depending on the Unit of Assessment (UoA). Despite this large difference, allocating an overall grade point average (GPA) based on full counting or fractional counting gives results with a median Pearson correlation within UoAs of 0.98. The largest changes are for Archaeology (r=0.84) and Physics (r=0.88). There is a weak tendency for higher scoring institutions to lose from fractional counting, with the loss being statistically significant in 5 of the 34 UoAs. Thus, whilst the apparent over-weighting of contributions to collaboratively authored outputs does not seem too problematic from a fairness perspective overall, it may be worth examining in the few UoAs in which it makes the most difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although gender identities influence how people present themselves on social media, previous studies have tested pre-specified dimensions of difference, potentially overlooking other differences and ignoring nonbinary users. Word association thematic analysis was used to systematically check for fine-grained statistically significant gender differences in Twitter profile descriptions between 409,487 UK-based female, male, and nonbinary users in 2020. A series of statistical tests systematically identified 1,474 differences at the individual word level, and a follow up thematic analysis grouped these words into themes. The results reflect offline variations in interests and in jobs. They also show differences in personal disclosures, as reflected by words, with females mentioning qualifications, relationships, pets, and illnesses much more, nonbinaries discussing sexuality more, and males declaring political and sports affiliations more. Other themes were internally imbalanced, including personal appearance (e.g. male: beardy; female: redhead), self-evaluations (e.g. male: legend; nonbinary: witch; female: feisty), and gender identity (e.g. male: dude; nonbinary: enby; female: queen). The methods are affected by linguistic styles and probably under-report nonbinary differences. The gender differences found may inform gender theory, and aid social web communicators and marketers. The results show a much wider range of gender expression differences than previously acknowledged for any social media site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efforts to combat continuing gender inequalities in academia need to be informed by evidence about where differences occur. Citations are relevant as potential evidence in appointment and promotion decisions, but it is unclear whether there have been historical gender differences in average citation impact that might explain the current shortfall of senior female academics. This study investigates the evolution of gender differences in citation impact 1996–2018 for six million articles from seven large English‐speaking nations: Australia, Canada, Ireland, Jamaica, New Zealand, UK, and the USA. The results show that a small female citation advantage has been the norm over time for all these countries except the USA, where there has been no practical difference. The female citation advantage is largest, and statistically significant in most years, for Australia and the UK. This suggests that any academic bias against citing female‐authored research cannot explain current employment inequalities. Nevertheless, comparisons using recent citation data, or avoiding it altogether, during appointments or promotion may disadvantage females in some countries by underestimating the likely greater impact of their work, especially in the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research collaboration is promoted by governments and research funders, but if the relative prevalence and merits of collaboration vary internationally then different national and disciplinary strategies may be needed to promote it. This study compares the team size and field normalized citation impact of research across all 27 Scopus broad fields in the 10 countries with the most journal articles indexed in Scopus 2008–2012. The results show that team size varies substantially by discipline and country, with Japan (4.2) having two‐thirds more authors per article than the United Kingdom (2.5). Solo authorship is rare in China (4%) but common in the United Kingdom (27%). While increasing team size associates with higher citation impact in almost all countries and fields, this association is much weaker in China than elsewhere. There are also field differences in the association between citation impact and collaboration. For example, larger team sizes in the Business, Management & Accounting category do not seem to associate with greater research impact, and for China and India, solo authorship associates with higher citation impact in this field. Overall, there are substantial international and field differences in the extent to which researchers collaborate and the extent to which collaboration associates with higher citation impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender disparities persist in UK research, with female minorities in most science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects but female majorities in others. The nature of the gender disparity differences between subjects needs to be understood if effective remedial actions are to be targeted at STEM subjects suffering from a lack of women, in contrast to other subjects without shortages. Evidence from the USA suggests that women engage more in people-related subjects, qualitative methods, veterinary science and cell biology and men engage more in thing-related subjects, power/control fields, patient-related research, abstraction and quantitative methods, except surveys. This article investigates gender disparity differences in UK first authorship for journal articles in nearly all of science split into 26 broad and 308 narrow Scopus fields. The results largely replicate the USA but suggest that more life science topics may be female- associated in the UK and patient-related research might not be male-associated. UK STEM gender parity initiatives might therefore emphasise people-oriented, and perhaps socially positive, aspects of currently masculine STEM topics and approaches (e.g., abstraction, mathematical quantitative methods), and promote female-friendly topics, methods and goals within male-dominated fields in addition to tacking implicit and explicit sexism and providing a supportive working environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twitter is used by a substantial minority of the populations of many countries to share short messages, sometimes including images. Nevertheless, despite some research into specific images, such as selfies, and a few news stories about specific tweeted photographs, little is known about the types of images that are routinely shared. In response, this article reports a content analysis of random samples of 800 images tweeted from the UK or USA during a week at the end of 2014. Although most images were photographs, a substantial minority were hybrid or layered image forms: phone screenshots, collages, captioned pictures, and pictures of text messages. About half were primarily of one or more people, including 10% that were selfies, but a wide variety of other things were also pictured. Some of the images were for advertising or to share a joke but in most cases the purpose of the tweet seemed to be to share the minutiae of daily lives, performing the function of chat or gossip, sometimes in innovative ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – This study aims to introduce a method based on link analysis to investigate the structure of the R&D support infrastructure associated with science parks in order to determine whether this webometric approach gives plausible results. Design/methodology/approach – Three science parks from Yorkshire and the Humber in the UK were analysed with webometric and social network analysis techniques. Interlinking networks were generated through the combination of two different data sets extracted from three sources (Yahoo!, Bing, SocSciBot). Findings – These networks suggest that institutional sectors, representing business, universities and public bodies, are primarily tied together by a core formed by research institutions, support structure organisations and business developers. The comparison of the findings with traditional indicators suggests that the web-based networks reflect the offline conditions and policy measures adopted in the region, giving some evidence that the webometric approach is plausible to investigating science park networks. Originality/value – This is the first study that applies a web-based approach to investigate to what extent the science parks facilitate a closer interaction between the heterogeneous organisations that converge in R&D networks. This indicates that link analysis may help to get a first insight into the organisation of the R&D support infrastructure provided by science parks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary webometric method for estimating the online impact of an organization is to count links to its website. Link counts have been available from commercial search engines for over a decade but this was set to end by early 2012 and so a replacement is needed. This article compares link counts to two alternative methods:URL citations and organization title mentions. New variations of these methods are also introduced.The three methods are compared against each other usingYahoo!.Two of the three methods (URL citations and organization title mentions) are also compared against each other using Bing. Evidence from a case study of 131 UK universities and 49 US Library and Information Science (LIS) departments suggests that Bing's Hit Count Estimates (HCEs) for popular title searches are not useful for webometric research but that Yahoo!'s HCEs for all three types of search and Bing's URL citation HCEs seem to be consistent. For exact URL counts the results of all three methods in Yahoo! and both methods in Bing are also consistent. Four types of accuracy factors are also introduced and defined: search engine coverage, search engine retrieval variation, search engine retrieval anomalies, and query polysemy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - Alternative document models (ADMs) were created with the purpose of reducing the extent to which anomalies occur in counts of web links at the page level, and have been used extensively within webometrics as an alternative to using the web page as the basic unit of analysis. This paper seels tp carry out a longitudinal study of ADMs in an attempt to ascertain which model gives the most consistent results when applied to the UK, Australia and New Zealand academic web spaces over the last six years. Design/methodology/approach - Information science software (SocSciBot Tools, socscibot.wlv.ac.uk) was used to process hyperlink structure text files for UK, Australian and New Zealand universities and produced standard Page, Directory, Domain and Site ADMs using both inlinks and outlinks. Spearman bivariate correlation analysis was then undertaken to determine the level of correlation between these eight ADMs and a measure of site size for each university. Findings - The findings show that the Domain ADM gives the most consistent results. However, the Directory ADM also gives more reliable results than are evident when using the standard Page model. Aggregating at the site (or university) level appears to provide less reliable results than using the page as the standard unit of measure, and this finding holds true over all three academic webs and for each time period examined over the last six years. Research limitations/implications - The use of Spearman's correlation coefficient is considered to be unreliable when used with very small sample sizes and, with only eight universities, the New Zealand academic web space may not be sufficiently large to give truly accurate statistical results. Originality/value - While previous specific studies have shown that more accurate results can be obtained through the use of the Domain or Directory ADM, the paper has shown that these results are consistent over time and across different countries' academic web spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - This paper seeks to address the question: do university web sites publish the same kind of information and use the same kind of hyperlinks year on year or do these change over time? Design/methodology/approach - A link classification exercise is used to identify temporal changes in the distribution of different types of academic web links changes, using the academic web spaces of the UK, Australia and New Zealand in the years 2000 and 2006. Findings - Significant increases in "research oriented", "social/leisure" and "superficial" links were identified as well as notable decreases in "technical" and "personal" links. Some of these changes identified may be explained by general changes in the management of university web sites and some by more wide-spread internet trends, e.g. dynamic pages, blogs and social networking. The increase in the proportion of research-oriented links is particularly hopeful for future link analysis research. Originality/value - This is an important issue from the perspective of interpreting the results of academic web analyses, because changes in link types over time would also force interpretations of link analyses to change over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth-orientated social networking sites, like MySpace, are important venues for socialising and identity expression. Analysing such sites can, therefore, provide a timely insight into otherwise hidden aspects of contemporary culture. In this paper, MySpace member home pages are used to analyse swearing in the US and UK. The results indicate that almost all young MySpaces, and about half of middle-aged MySpaces, contain some swearing, in terms of both males and females. There was no significant gender difference in the UK for strong swearing, especially for younger users (16–19). This is perhaps the first significant evidence of gender equality in strong swearing frequency in any informal English-language context. By contrast, US male MySpaces contain significantly more strong swearing than those of females. The assimilation by UK females of traditional male swearing in the informal context of MySpace, suggests deeper changes in gender roles in society – possibly related to the recent rise in `ladette culture'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Web has become an important tool for scholars to publicise their activities and disseminate their findings. In the information age, those who do not use it risk being bypassed. In this paper we introduce a statistical technique to assess the extent to which the broad spectrum of research areas are visible online in UK universities. Five broad subject categories are used for research, and inlink counts are used as indicators of online visibility or impact. The approach is designed to give more complete subject coverage than previous studies and to avoid the conceptual difficulties of a page classification approach, although one is used for triangulation. The results suggest that Science and Engineering dominate university Web presences, but with Humanities and Arts also achieving a high presence relative to its size, showing that high Web impact does not have to be restricted to the sciences. Research funding bodies should now consider whether action needs to be taken to ensure that opportunities are not being missed in the lower Web impact areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: International nursing research comparisons can give a new perspective on a nation's output by identifying strengths and weaknesses., Aim: This article compares strengths in nursing research between six mainly English-speaking nations (Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States)., Methods: Journal authorship (percentage of first authorship by nationality) and article keywords were compared for Scopus-indexed journal articles 2008-2018. Three natural language processing strategies were assessed for identifying statistically significant international differences in the use of keywords or phrases., Results: Journal author nationality was not a good indicator of international differences in research specialisms, but keyword and phrase differences were more promising especially if both are used. For this, the part of speech tagging and lemmatisation text processing strategies were helpful but not named entity recognition. The results highlight aspects of nursing research that were absent in some countries, such as papers about nursing administration and management., Conclusion: Researchers outside the United States should consider the importance of researching specific patient groups, diseases, treatments, skills, research methods and social perspectives for unresearched gaps with national relevance. From a methods perspective, keyword and phrase differences are useful to reveal international differences in nursing research topics., (© 2020 The Authors. International Journal of Nursing Practice published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.)