[Sigmetrics] NEW BOOK: The Non-trivial Effects of Trivial Errors in Scientific Communication and Evaluation

[Terje Tüür-Fröhlich]

Dear All,

I would like to draw your attention to my new book in the peer reviewed
series of the University Association Information Science (Hochschulverband
Informationswissenschaft):

Tüür–Fröhlich, Terje (2016): The Non-trivial Effects of Trivial Errors in
Scientific Communication and Evaluation. Preface: Volker Gadenne. Schriften
zur Informationswissenschaft; Bd. 69. Glückstadt/D: vwh. ISBN-10: 3864881048;
ISBN-13: 978-3864881046

ABSTRACT
“Thomson Reuters’ citation indexes i.e. SCI, SSCI and AHCI are said to be
“authoritative”. Due to the huge influence of these databases on global
academic evaluation of productivity and impact, Terje Tüür-Fröhlich decided
to conduct case studies on the data quality of Social Sciences Citation
Index (SSCI) records. Tüür-Fröhlich investigated articles from social
science and law. The main findings: SSCI records contain tremendous amounts
of “trivial errors”, not only misspellings and typos as previously
mentioned in bibliometrics and scientometrics literature. But
Tüür-Fröhlich's research documented fatal errors which have not been
mentioned in the scientometrics literature yet at all. Tüür-Fröhlich found
more than 80 fatal mutations and mutilations of Pierre Bourdieu (e.g.
“Atkinson” or “Pierre, B. and “Pierri, B.”). SSCI even generated zombie
references (phantom authors and works) by data fields’ confusion – a deadly
sin for a database producer - as fragments of Patent Laws were indexed as
fictional author surnames/initials. Additionally, horrific OCR-errors (e.g.
“nuxure” instead of “Nature” as journal title) were identified.
Tüür-Fröhlich́s extensive quantitative case study of an article of the
Harvard Law Review resulted in a devastating finding: only 1% of all
correct references from the original article were indexed by SSCI without
any mistake or error. Many scientific communication experts and database
providers’ believe that errors in databanks are of less importance: There
are many errors, yes – but they would counterbalance each other, errors
would not result in citation losses and would not bear any effect on
retrieval and evaluation outcomes. Terje Tüür-Fröhlich claims the contrary:
errors and inconsistencies are not evenly distributed but linked with
languages biases and publication cultures.”

Table of content:
 http://www.vwh-verlag.de/vwh/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/
titelei_tuur-frohlich.pdf

Book can be ordered at:
https://shop.strato.de/epages/Store8.sf/?ObjectPath=/Shops/61236266/Products/978-3-86488-104-6



Best wishes,

Terje Tüür-Fröhlich
Philosophy and Theory of Science
Johannes Kepler University Linz/Austria
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