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- ItemLink‑based approach to study scientific software usage : the case of VOSviewer(Springer, 2021-07-10) Orduna‑Malea, Enrique; Costas, RodrigoScientific software is a fundamental player in modern science, participating in all stages of scientific knowledge production. Software occasionally supports the development of trivial tasks, while at other instances it determines procedures, methods, protocols, results, or conclusions related with the scientific work. The growing relevance of scientific software as a research product with value of its own has triggered the development of quantitative science studies of scientific software. The main objective of this study is to illustrate a link-based webometric approach to characterize the online mentions to scientific software across different analytical frameworks. To do this, the bibliometric software VOSviewer is used as a case study. Considering VOSviewer’s official website as a baseline, online mentions to this website were counted in three different analytical frameworks: academic literature via Google Scholar (988 mentioning publications), webpages via Majestic (1,330 mentioning websites), and tweets via Twitter (267 mentioning tweets). Google scholar mentions shows how VOSviewer is used as a research resource, whilst mentions in webpages and tweets show the interest on VOSviewer’s website from an informational and a conversational point of view. Results evidence that URL mentions can be used to gather all sorts of online impacts related to non-traditional research objects, like software, thus expanding the analytical scientometric toolset by incorporating a novel digital dimension.
- ItemDo 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, HeidiThis 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.
- ItemThe development of vegetable enterprises in the presence of transaction costs among farmers in Omusati Region of Namibia : an assessment(Elsevier, 2020) Vink, Nick; Thomas, BenisiuThe paper investigates how transaction characteristics influence the development of vegetable enterprises among smallholder farmers in north-central Namibia. As transaction costs are difficult to measure the theoretical framework of analysis is based on transaction costs economics of new institutional economics. The results revealed that the spot market-based governance structure was the most preferred market arrangements by smallholders farmers in north-central Namibia because vegetable farmers struggle to meet the quality and quantity standards as required by the contractors market-based and commission market-based arrangements. The results also suggest that due to incomplete information, farmers and market agents suffer from high transaction costs. Skewed information distribution between farmers and marketing agents leads to slow development of vegetable enterprises. The study recommends that information shared to farmers must be packaged in an adequate manner to minimise transaction costs in the vegetable value chain.
- ItemAutoethnographic view of South African social work educators during the Covid-19 pandemic : highlighting social (in)justice(Department of Social Work, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, 2021-10-20) Perumal, Nevashnee; Pillay, Roshini; Zimba, Zibonele France; Sithole, Mbongeni; Van der Westhuizen, Marichen; Khosa, Priscalia; Nomngcoyiya, Thanduxolo; Mokone, Malebo; September, UwarrenCOVID-19 has exposed the inequalities and polarisation of South African communities and institutions of higher learning on the continuum of privilege. As nine social work educators, we share our reflections on how we traversed the higher education space during the beginning of the pandemic, using an autoethnography lens, with the pedagogy of discomfort and critical social work theory as the threads in the complex tapestry of our stories. We describe our orientations as social work educators, the successes, challenges, and recommendations on reimagining and reframing learning and teaching in relation to student-institutional relationships, boundaries and support.
- ItemDecolonial human rights education : changing the terms and content of conversations on human rights(University of South-Eastern Norway, 2021) Becker, AnneThe aim of this paper is to search for possibilities to change the terms and content of conversations on colonial/decolonial human rights education. The content of conversations consists of what we know about human rights. The terms of conversations are the principles, assumptions, and rules of knowing in human rights education. The terms and content are interrelated and continually sustain each other. Decoloniality resists global coloniality of power, ontologies and epistemologies which are consequences of colonisation. It also questions the Eurocentric assumptions and principles which serve as a premise for human rights and human rights education. There is an urgent need to explore pluriversal knowledges of human rights and to problematise the Human of human rights. This is explored through data from Roux’s research project Human rights literacy: quest for meaning. Some thoughts on decolonising human rights education are provided in the conclusion.