Volume 4, Issue 1

Purpose The purpose of this study is to assess the coverage of the scientific literature in Scopus and Web of Science from the perspective of research evaluation. Design/methodology/approach The academic communities of Norway have agreed on certain criteria for what should be included as original research publications in research evaluation and funding contexts. These criteria have been applied since 2004 in a comprehensive bibliographic database called the Norwegian Science Index (NSI). The relative coverages of Scopus and Web of Science are compared with regard to publication type, field of research and language. Findings Our results show that Scopus covers 72 percent of the total Norwegian scientific and scholarly publication output in 2015 and 2016, while the corresponding figure for Web of Science Core Collection is 69 percent. The coverages are most comprehensive in medicine and health (89 and 87 percent) and in the natural sciences and technology (85 and 84 percent). The social sciences (48 percent in Scopus and 40 percent in Web of Science Core Collection) and particularly the humanities (27 and 23 percent) are much less covered in the two international data sources. Research limitation Comparing with data from only one country is a limitation of the study, but the criteria used to define a country’s scientific output as well as the identification of patterns of field-dependent partial representations in Scopus and Web of Science should be recognizable and useful also for other countries. Originality/value The novelty of this study is the criteria-based approach to studying coverage problems in the two data sources.

Purpose To show for which publication-citation arrays h-type indices are equal and to reconsider rational h-type indices. Results for these research questions fill some gaps in existing basic knowledge about h-type indices. Design/methodology/approach The results and introduction of new indicators are based on well-known definitions. Findings The research purpose has been reached: answers to the first questions are obtained and new indicators are defined. Research limitations h-type indices do not meet the Bouyssou-Marchant independence requirement. Practical implications On the one hand, more insight has been obtained for well-known indices such as the h- and the g-index and on the other hand, simple extensions of existing indicators have been added to the bibliometric toolbox. Relative rational h-type indices are more useful for individuals than the existing absolute ones. Originality/value Answers to basic questions such as “when are the values of two h-type indices equal” are provided. A new rational h-index is introduced.

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the scientific productivity of China’s science system. Design/methodology/approach This paper employs the Malmquist productivity index (MPI) based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Findings The results reveal that the overall efficiency of Chinese universities increased significantly from 2009 to 2016, which is mainly driven by technological progress. From the perspective of the functions of higher education, research and transfer activities perform better than the teaching activities. Research limitations As an implication, the indicator selection mechanism, investigation period and the MPI model can be further extended in the future research. Practical implications The results indicate that Chinese education administrative departments should take actions to guide and promote the teaching activities and formulate reasonable resource allocation regulations to reach the balanced development in Chinese universities. Originality/value This paper selects 58 Chinese universities and conducts a quantified measurement during the period 2009–2016. Three main functional activities of universities (i.e. teaching, researching, and application) are innovatively categorized into different schemes, and we calculate their performance, respectively.

Purpose Formal concept analysis (FCA) and concept lattice theory (CLT) are introduced for constructing a network of IDR topics and for evaluating their effectiveness for knowledge structure exploration. Design/methodology/approach We introduced the theory and applications of FCA and CLT, and then proposed a method for interdisciplinary knowledge discovery based on CLT. As an example of empirical analysis, interdisciplinary research (IDR) topics in Information & Library Science (LIS) and Medical Informatics, and in LIS and Geography-Physical, were utilized as empirical fields. Subsequently, we carried out a comparative analysis with two other IDR topic recognition methods. Findings The CLT approach is suitable for IDR topic identification and predictions. Research limitations IDR topic recognition based on the CLT is not sensitive to the interdisciplinarity of topic terms, since the data can only reflect whether there is a relationship between the discipline and the topic terms. Moreover, the CLT cannot clearly represent a large amounts of concepts. Practical implications A deeper understanding of the IDR topics was obtained as the structural and hierarchical relationships between them were identified, which can help to get more precise identification and prediction to IDR topics. Originality/value IDR topics identification based on CLT have performed well and this theory has several advantages for identifying and predicting IDR topics. First, in a concept lattice, there is a partial order relation between interconnected nodes, and consequently, a complete concept lattice can present hierarchical properties. Second, clustering analysis of IDR topics based on concept lattices can yield clusters that highlight the essential knowledge features and help display the semantic relationship between different IDR topics. Furthermore, the Hasse diagram automatically displays all the IDR topics associated with the different disciplines, thus forming clusters of specific concepts and visually retaining and presenting the associations of IDR topics through multiple inheritance relationships between the concepts.

Purpose Online reviews on tourism attractions provide important references for potential tourists to choose tourism spots. The main goal of this study is conducting sentiment analysis to facilitate users comprehending the large scale of the reviews, based on the comments about Chinese attractions from Japanese tourism website 4Travel. Design/methodology/approach Different statistics- and rule-based methods are used to analyze the sentiment of the reviews. Three groups of novel statistics-based methods combining feature selection functions and the traditional term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) method are proposed. We also make seven groups of different rules-based methods. The macro-average and micro-average values for the best classification results of the methods are calculated respectively and the performance of the methods are shown. Findings We compare the statistics-based and rule-based methods separately and compare the overall performance of the two method. According to the results, it is concluded that the combination of feature selection functions and weightings can strongly improve the overall performance. The emotional vocabulary in the field of tourism (EVT), kaomojis, negative and transitional words can notably improve the performance in all of three categories. The rule-based methods outperform the statistics-based ones with a narrow advantage. Research limitation Two limitations can be addressed: 1) the empirical studies to verify the validity of the proposed methods are only conducted on Japanese languages; and 2) the deep learning technology is not been incorporated in the methods. Practical implications The results help to elucidate the intrinsic characteristics of the Japanese language and the influence on sentiment analysis. These findings also provide practical usage guidelines within the field of sentiment analysis of Japanese online tourism reviews. Originality/value Our research is of practicability. Currently, there are no studies that focus on the sentiment analysis of Japanese reviews about Chinese attractions.