Producción Científica

As the volume of scientific literature expands rapidly, accurately gauging and predicting the citation impact of academic papers has become increasingly imperative. Citation counts serve as a widely adopted metric for this purpose. While numerous researchers have explored techniques for projecting papers’ citation counts, a prevalent constraint lies in the utilization of a singular model across all papers within a dataset. This universal approach, suitable for small, homogeneous collections, proves less effective for large, heterogeneous collections spanning various research domains, thereby curtailing the practical utility of these methodologies. In this study, we propose a pioneering methodology that deploys multiple models tailored to distinct research domains and integrates early citation data. Our approach encompasses instance-based learning techniques to categorize papers into different research domains and distinct prediction models trained on early citation counts for papers within each domain. We assessed our methodology using two extensive datasets sourced from DBLP and arXiv. Our experimental findings affirm that the proposed classification methodology is both precise and efficient in classifying papers into research domains. Furthermore, the proposed prediction methodology, harnessing multiple domain-specific models and early citations, surpasses four state-of-the-art baseline methods in most instances, substantially enhancing the accuracy of citation impact predictions for diverse collections of academic papers.

Objectives: Development of search queries for systematic reviews (SRs) is time-consuming. In this work, we capitalize on recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and a relatively large dataset of natural language descriptions of reviews and corresponding Boolean searches to generate Boolean search queries from SR titles and key questions. Materials and Methods: We curated a training dataset of 10 346 SR search queries registered in PROSPERO. We used this dataset to fine-tune a set of models to generate search queries based on Mistral-Instruct-7b. We evaluated the models quantitatively using an evaluation dataset of 57 SRs and qualitatively through semi-structured interviews with 8 experienced medical librarians. Results: The model-generated search queries had median sensitivity of 85% (interquartile range [IQR] 40%-100%) and number needed to read of 1206 citations (IQR 205-5810). The interviews suggested that the models lack both the necessary sensitivity and precision to be used without scrutiny but could be useful for topic scoping or as initial queries to be refined. Discussion: Future research should focus on improving the dataset with more high-quality search queries, assessing whether fine-tuning the model on other fields, such as the population and intervention, improves performance, and exploring the addition of interactivity to the interface. Conclusions: The datasets developed for this project can be used to train and evaluate LLMs that map review descriptions to Boolean search queries. The models cannot replace thoughtful search query design but may be useful in providing suggestions for key words and the framework for the query.

The past 20 years has seen a significant increase in articles with 500 or more authors. This increase has presented problems in terms of determining true authorship versus other types of contribution, issues with database metadata and data output, and publication length. Using items with 500+ authors deemed as mega-author titles, a total of 5,533 mega-author items were identified using InCites. Metadata about the items was then gathered from Web of Science and Scopus. Close examination of these items found that the vast majority of these covered physics topics, with medicine a far distant second place and only minor representation from other science fields. This mega-authorship saw significant events that appear to correspond to similar events in the Large Hadron Collider’s timeline, indicating that the projects for the collider are driving this heavy output. Some solutions are offered for the problems resulting from this phenomenon, partially driven by recommendations from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors.