This literature review examines the application of informetric methods to assess diversity within the scientific workforce, focusing on recent advances in author name disambiguation, researcher profiling, and the evaluation of individual-level metrics. The study traces the evolution of quantitative approaches, from traditional productivity metrics to modern multidimensional models that incorporate contextual factors such as career trajectory, research practices, and social engagement. Emphasizing methodological innovations, the review explores the potential of advanced algorithms and new data sources (e.g., OpenAlex, ORCID) to offer a nuanced understanding of diversity in science. The review highlights gaps in the current literature, particularly the need to account for diverse individual characteristics, including gender, ethnicity, and team dynamics, and suggests pathways for future research. The findings contribute to ongoing discussions in the field of scientometrics regarding responsible research assessment and the development of equitable evaluation frameworks.

The last decade of altmetrics research has demonstrated that altmetrics have a low to moderate correlation with citations, depending on the platform and the discipline, among other factors. Most past studies used academic works as their unit of analysis to determine whether the attention they received on Twitter was a good predictor of academic engagement. Our work revisits the relationship between tweets and citations where the tweet itself is the unit of analysis, and the question is to determine if, at the individual level, the act of tweeting an academic work can shed light on the likelihood of the act of citing that same work. We model this relationship by considering the research activity of the tweeter and its relationship to the tweeted work. The results show that tweeters are more likely to cite works affiliated with their same institution, works published in journals in which they also have published, and works in which they hold authorship. It finds that the older the academic age of a tweeter the less likely they are to cite what they tweet, though there is a positive relationship between citations and the number of works they have published and references they have accumulated over time.

Authorship is associated with scientific capital and prestige, and corresponding authorship is used in evaluation as a proxy for scientific status. However, there are no empirical analyses on the validity of the corresponding authorship metadata in bibliometric databases. This paper looks at differences in the corresponding authorship metadata in Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus to investigate how the relationship between author position and corresponding authors varies by discipline and country and analyzes changes in the position of corresponding authors over time. We find that both WoS and Scopus have accuracy issues when it comes to assigning corresponding authorship. Although the number of documents with a reprint author has increased over time in both databases, WoS indexed more of those papers than Scopus, and there are significant differences between the two databases in terms of who the corresponding author is. Although metadata is not complete in WoS, corresponding authors are normally first authors with a declining trend over time, favoring middle and last authors, especially in the Medical, Natural Sciences, and Engineering fields. These results reinforce the importance of considering how databases operationalize and index concepts such as corresponding authors, this being particularly important when they are used in research assessment.

The role played by research scholars in the dissemination of scientific knowledge on social media has always been a central topic in social media metrics (altmetrics) research. Different approaches have been implemented to identify and characterize active scholars on social media platforms like Twitter. Some limitations of past approaches were their complexity and, most importantly, their reliance on licensed scientometric and altmetric data. The emergence of new open data sources such as OpenAlex or Crossref Event Data provides opportunities to identify scholars on social media using only open data. This paper presents a novel and simple approach to match authors from OpenAlex with Twitter users identified in Crossref Event Data. The matching procedure is described and validated with ORCID data. The new approach matches nearly 500,000 matched scholars with their Twitter accounts with a level of high precision and moderate recall. The data set of matched scholars is described and made openly available to the scientific community to empower more advanced studies of the interactions of research scholars on Twitter.

Intergovernmental Economic Organizations usually leverage the scientific capacity of their member countries to ensure economic prosperity through consensual science policies. The D-8 Organization for Economic Cooperation is an intergovernmental economic forum constituting eight developing Muslim-majority countries with a host of recent initiatives toward encouraging interstate scientific and technological collaborations. This study presents an overview of the forum’s overarching science policies and the research performance in the member countries in the past two decades. The individual D-8 countries’ performance over a set of STI indicators is analyzed to examine the driving forces of the STI system in the member countries. The findings revealed marked disparities among the countries in economic prosperity, R&D expenditure, and the stock of researchers in their STI systems. Although the aggregate research volume of the D-8 countries almost quadrupled over the 2010s compared with the previous decade, there are salient differences in the research capacity and scientific impact among these countries. GDP, R&D expenditure, human development index, GNI per capita, and the number of researchers (FTE per million inhabitants) contribute to explain the growth of publications in some of the D-8 countries. Knowledge sharing, transfer of technology, research collaboration, and investment in R&D infrastructure among the member countries underline the recent overarching scientific policy initiatives of the D-8 organization.

Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites in the world and is also a frequent subject of scientific research. However, the analytical possibilities of Wikipedia information have not yet been analyzed considering at the same time both a large volume of pages and attributes. The main objective of this work is to offer a methodological framework and an open knowledge graph for the informetric large-scale study of Wikipedia. Features of Wikipedia pages are compared with those of scientific publications to highlight the (dis)similarities between the two types of documents. Based on this comparison, different analytical possibilities that Wikipedia and its various data sources offer are explored, ultimately offering a set of metrics meant to study Wikipedia from different analytical dimensions. In parallel, a complete dedicated data set of the English Wikipedia was built (and shared) following a relational model. Finally, a descriptive case study is carried out on the English Wikipedia data set to illustrate the analytical potential of the knowledge graph and its metrics.

This study investigates the scientific mobility and international collaboration networks in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region between 2008 and 2017. By using affiliation metadata available in scientific publications, we analyze international scientific mobility flows and collaboration linkages. Three complementary approaches allow us to obtain a detailed characterization of scientific mobility. First, we uncover the main destinations and origins of mobile scholars for each country. Results reveal geographical, cultural and historical proximities. Cooperation programs also contribute to explain some of the observed flows. Second, we use the academic age. The average academic age of migrant scholars in MENA was about 12.4 years. The academic age group 6–10 years is the most common for both emigrant and immigrant scholars. Immigrants are relatively younger than emigrants, except for Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, and Turkey. Scholars who migrated to Gulf Cooperation Council countries, Jordan, and Morocco were on average younger than emigrants by 1.5 years from the same countries. Third, we analyze gender differences. We observe a clear gender gap: Male scholars represent the largest group of migrants in MENA. We conclude by discussing the policy relevance of the scientific mobility and collaboration aspects.

This paper presents a new method for identifying scholars who have a Twitter account from bibliometric data from Web of Science (WoS) and Twitter data from Altmetric.com . The method reliably identifies matches between Twitter accounts and scholarly authors. It consists of a matching of elements such as author names, usernames, handles, and URLs, followed by a rule-based scoring system that weights the common occurrence of these elements related to the activities of Twitter users and scholars. The method proceeds by matching the Twitter accounts against a database of millions of disambiguated bibliographic profiles from WoS. This paper describes the implementation and validation of the matching method, and performs verification through precision-recall analysis. We also explore the geographical, disciplinary, and demographic variations in the distribution of scholars matched to a Twitter account. This approach represents a step forward in the development of more advanced forms of social media studies of science by opening up an important door for studying the interactions between science and social media in general, and for studying the activities of scholars on Twitter in particular.