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Impact of bibliometric studies on the publication behaviour of authors

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Abstract

It has been widely discussed how individuals change the way they act and react in studies just because they are under observation. In this paper, we try to analyse how this so-called Hawthorne effect applies to researchers that are the subject of bibliometric investigations. This encompasses individual assessments as well as international performance comparisons. We test various bibliometric indicators for notable changes in the last decade from a world-wide perspective and deduce explanations for changes from the observations. We then concentrate on the behaviour of German authors in particular, to show national trends. The German publication behaviour is evaluated in regard to citation rates and collaborations in publications and size, publisher country and impact of the journals chosen for publication. We can conclude that authors adapt their publication behaviour to aim for journals that are more internationally known and have a US publisher. Also, a trend from more specialized journals to journals with a broader scope can be observed that raises the question whether the implicit penalization of specialized fields in the bibliometrics leads to undesired shifts in conducted research.

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Notes

  1. For more methodological details cf. Schmoch et al. (2012).

  2. However, the high standard deviation values indicate that there are also some exceptions to this rule where the citation rate is extremely high in both cases.

  3. I.e. of all volumes that were covered in the Web of Science for the publication year 2008.

  4. The median of the first quintile is 56.42 pages and the median of the fifth quintile is 329.94. The overall median in the set of 66,615 journals is a page size of 152.38.

  5. In particular, in the medical sciences, the impact factor is generally asked, although the impact factor includes no information on the real citation rate of the respective article.

  6. The main Dutch publisher is Elsevier.

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Correspondence to Carolin Michels.

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Michels, C., Schmoch, U. Impact of bibliometric studies on the publication behaviour of authors. Scientometrics 98, 369–385 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1015-7

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