The changes in journal internationality in mainstream science were examined using 1,398 journals and 2,557,229 papers during 1991-2014. The authors' country of affiliation in journals' papers and references of multinational and national publishers were analysed. The results showed that journals' papers and references have become more globalized over time. On average, older journals are more international than the newer ones. Although multinational publishers publish more international journals than the national ones do, journals from national publishers have internationalized faster than those from multinationals.The difference between these two groups of publishers is much greater in authoring compared to referencing. For both groups of publishers, the most

This study explores the extent to which authors with different impact and productivity levels cite journals, institutions, and other authors through an analysis of the scientific papers of 37,717 authors during 1990-2013. The results demonstrate that the core-scatter distribution of cited authors, institutions, and journals varies for authors in each impact and productivity class. All authors in the science network receive the majority of their credit from high-impact authors; however, this effect decreases as authors' impact levels decrease. Similarly, the proportion of citations that lower-impact authors make to each other increases as authors' impact levels decrease. High-impact authors, who have the highest degree of membership in the science network, publish fewer papers in comparison to highly productive authors. However, authors with the highest impact make both more references per paper and also more citations to papers in the science network. This suggests that high-impact authors produce the most relevant work in the science network. Comparing practices by productivity level, authors receive the majority of their credit from highly productive authors and authors cite highly productive authors more frequently than less productive authors.

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Diabetes is a chronic disease that affects millions of people worldwide. It is therefore unsurprising that there is a high volume of public discussions, resources, and research tackling various aspects of the disease. This study describes a new method for identifying areas of public interest in issues like diabetes and compares them to the topics being discussed in research. We tested our method by using posts from a popular diabetes discussion forum (DiabeticConnect), pages (articles) about diabetes published on Wikipedia, and the titles and abstracts of research articles about diabetes from the Scopus database. Tags assigned to each post in the discussion forum were used along with the post itself to compute a Labeled Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LLDA) model, which was then used to classify the Wikipedia pages and research articles. The resulting classifications were then used to compare the prevalence of the topics found in the discussion forum with that in the other two sources. The results show that the public interest in diabetes is not necessarily addressed by researchers. More importantly, the alignment and misalignment in the changes in relative interest over the various topics are evidence that LLDA modeling can be useful for comparing a public corpus, like a diabetes forum, and an academic one, like research article titles and abstracts. The success of using LLDA to classify research articles based on the tags assigned to posts in a public discussion forum shows that this a promising method for better understanding how the scientific community responds to public interests and needs.

BackgroundDiabetes is a chronic disease that affects millions of people worldwide. It is therefore unsurprising that there is a high volume of public discussions, resources, and research tackling various aspects of the disease. Over the last decade, more than hundred thousand research articles have been published by researchers and countless of online discussions have taken place on various online platforms. This study is an attempt to identify the areas of public interest, related to diabetes, by looking at online discussion forums and to evaluate their relationship to pages about diabetes found on Wikipedia and to the academic research about the topic. The main aim is to investigate the extent to which researchers are responding to the public's interests and concerns, and to the level of uptake of the research topics in the public sphere. Methodology/Principal findingsTo detect public interests and concerns in diabetes, we collected posts on a popular diabetes discussion forum (DiabeticConnect) and pages (articles) about diabetes published in Wikipedia. We also downloaded the titles and abstracts of research articles about diabetes from the Scopus database, all between 2008 and 2016. Tags assigned to each post in the discussion forum were used along with the post itself to compute a Labeled Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LLDA) model, which was then used to classify the Wikipedia pages and research articles. The resulting classifications were then used to compare the prevalence of the topics found in the discussion forum with those of the other two sources. The results show that while research articles and Wikipedia pages about diabetes focus on diabetes testing, treatments, and disease control, the public forum discussions focus on Type 2 diabetes, emotional support, and proper diet for diabetic patients. However, for some other topics there was an alignment in the relative rise and fall of interest across the three platforms. Conclusions/SignificanceThe alignment and misalignment in the changes of relative interest over the various topics is evidence that the LLDA modelling can be useful for comparing a public corpus, like a diabetes forum, and an academic one, like research titles and abstracts. The success of using LLDA to classify research articles based on the tags assigned to posts in a public discussion forum shows that this a promising method for better understanding how the scientific community responds to public interests and needs, and, on the flip side, how the public takes up the language and topics discussed by the academic community.