YouTube is one of the world's most popular websites and hosts numerous amateur and professional videos. Comments on these videos might be researched to give insights into audience reactions to important issues or particular videos. Yet, little is known about YouTube discussions in general: how frequent they are, who typically participates, and the role of sentiment. This article fills this gap through an analysis of large samples of text comments on YouTube videos. The results identify patterns and give some benchmarks against which future YouTube research into individual videos can be compared. For instance, the typical YouTube comment was mildly positive, was posted by a 29-year-old male, and contained 58 characters. About 23% of comments in the complete comment sets were replies to previous comments. There was no typical density of discussion on YouTube videos in the sense of the proportion of replies to other comments: videos with both few and many replies were common. The YouTube audience engaged with each other disproportionately when making negative comments, however; positive comments elicited few replies. The biggest trigger of discussion seemed to be religion, whereas the videos attracting the least discussion were predominantly from the Music, Comedy, and How to & Style categories. This suggests different audience uses for YouTube, from passive entertainment to active debating.
Scientists and managers using citation-based indicators to help evaluate research cannot evaluate recent articles because of the time needed for citations to accrue. Reading occurs before citing, however, and so it makes sense to count readers rather than citations for recent publications. To assess this, Mendeley readers and citations were obtained for articles from 2004 to late 2014 in five broad categories (agriculture, business, decision science, pharmacy, and the social sciences) and 50 subcategories. In these areas, citation counts tended to increase with every extra year since publication, and readership counts tended to increase faster initially but then stabilize after about 5 years. The correlation between citations and readers was also higher for longer time periods, stabilizing after about 5 years. Although there were substantial differences between broad fields and smaller differences between subfields, the results confirm the value of Mendeley reader counts as early scientific impact indicators.
The primary webometric method for estimating the online impact of an organization is to count links to its website. Link counts have been available from commercial search engines for over a decade but this was set to end by early 2012 and so a replacement is needed. This article compares link counts to two alternative methods: URL citations and organization title mentions. New variations of these methods are also introduced. The three methods are compared against each other usingYahoo!.Two of the three methods (URL citations and organization title mentions) are also compared against each other using Bing. Evidence from a case study of 131 UK universities and 49 US Library and Information Science (LIS) departments suggests that Bing's Hit Count Estimates (HCEs) for popular title searches are not useful for webometric research but that Yahoo!'s HCEs for all three types of search and Bing's URL citation HCEs seem to be consistent. For exact URL counts the results of all three methods in Yahoo! and both methods in Bing are also consistent. Four types of accuracy factors are also introduced and defined: search engine coverage, search engine retrieval variation, search engine retrieval anomalies, and query polysemy.
Biochemistry is a highly funded research area that is typified by large research teams and is important for many areas of the life sciences. This article investigates the citation impact and Mendeley readership impact of biochemistry research from 2011 in the Web of Science according to the type of collaboration involved. Negative binomial regression models are used that incorporate, for the first time, the inclusion of specific countries within a team. The results show that, holding other factors constant, larger teams robustly associate with higher impact research, but including additional departments has no effect and adding extra institutions tends to reduce the impact of research. Although international collaboration is apparently not advantageous in general, collaboration with the United States, and perhaps also with some other countries, seems to increase impact. In contrast, collaborations with some other nations seems to decrease impact, although both findings could be due to factors such as differing national proportions of excellent researchers. As a methodological implication, simpler statistical models would find international collaboration to be generally beneficial and so it is important to take into account specific countries when examining collaboration.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.