Browsing by Author "Prozesky, H. E. (Heidi Eileen)"

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    Do open access journal articles experience a citation advantage? Results and methodological refections of an application of multiple measures to an analysis by WoS subject areas
    (Springer, 2021) Basson, Isabel; Blanckenberg, Jaco P.; Prozesky, H. E. (Heidi Eileen)
    This study is one of the first that uses the recently introduced open access (OA) labels in the Web of Science (WoS) metadata to investigate whether OA articles published in Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed journals experience a citation advantage in comparison to subscription journal articles, specifically those of which no self-archived versions are available. Bibliometric data on all articles and reviews indexed in WoS, and published from 2013 to 2015, were analysed. In addition to normalised citation score (NCS), we used two additional measures of citation advantage: whether an article was cited at all; and whether an article is among the most frequently cited percentile of articles within its respective subject area (pptopX %). For each WoS subject area, the strength of the relationship between access status (whether an article was published in an OA journal) and each of these three measures was calculated. We found that OA journal articles experience a citation advantage in very few subject areas and, in most of these subject areas, the citation advantage was found on only a single measure of citation advantage, namely whether the article was cited at all. Our results lead us to conclude that access status accounts for little of the variability in the number of citations an article accumulates. The methodology and the calculations that were used in this study are described in detail and we believe that the lessons we learnt, and the recommendations we make, will be of much use to future researchers interested in using the WoS OA labels, and to the field of citation advantage in general.
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    Gender differences in the publication productivity of South African scientists
    (Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2006-12) Prozesky, H. E. (Heidi Eileen); Kritzinger, A. S.; Mouton, J.; University of Stellenbosch. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Sociology and Social Anthropology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation is aimed at describing gender difference in publication productivity among South African academic authors, and to develop an understanding of possible reasons for these differences. It is argued that the lack of empirical knowledge of publication productivity of academics in South Africa needs to be addressed, as scientific communication through publication is one of the most central social processes in science. Moreover, one form of scientific publication, the peer-reviewed article, has become the single most important aspect according to which academics in South Africa and abroad are rewarded. The focus on gender differences is motivated by the fact that women have been strengthening their representation in South African HEIs, but not their proportional contribution to our country’s output of accredited research articles. A review of the past four decades of empirical and theoretical work on the gender gap in publication productivity leads the author to identify three sets of factors that may account for its existence: gender-socialised differences between women and men, women’s greater family responsibilities, and gender-related deficits in the academic workplace. However, none of these sets of variables by themselves satisfactorily account for gender differences in publication productivity, and they should not be considered independent from each other. The literature review is followed by a review of methodological considerations that need to be taken into account when studying gender differences in publication productivity. Against this background, the advantages and limitations associated with the first empirical project of the dissertation - a secondary analysis of SA Knowledgebase, an existing bibliometric database - are identified. This analysis is aimed at quantifying gender differences in the publication productivity of South African academic authors; at controlling for relevant variables (race, age, highest qualification, rank, institutional affiliation and scientific domain); and at investigating gender differences in the tendency towards joint authorship. The results show that South African male authors publish almost twice as many articles in accredited journals than women authors do, but that the latter’s contribution to the total scientific publication output of South Africa has increased from 16 percent in 1990 to 24 percent in 2001. Part of the gender gap in publication productivity can be explained by women’s younger age, lower qualification level and lower rank as a gender group, but not by any tendency among women to co-author less than men do. This project was complemented by the analysis of primary data collected from the CVs of and qualitative interviews with sixteen highly productive South African academics. This second project contributes to the development of a more in-depth understanding of the way in which men and women’s publication productivity is differentially affected, in a predominantly male milieu and across the span of their careers, by their family responsibilities, non-research academic roles, and gender-socialisation. The dissertation concludes with an integration of the literature review with the main findings of the two projects, on the basis of which recommendations are made for future research, and proposals are made towards rendering the measurement of publication productivity more sensitive to the gender differences highlighted by the dissertation.