Andrey Lovakov

Major Chinese funder to stop paying fees for 30 pricey open-access journals Move comes amid effort to grow the country’s own journals

"the government has been pursuing a plan to develop 400 world-class scientific journals as affordable alternatives to ones based in Western countries; by 2023 the country had about 178 English-language open-access journals, nearly half of which charged no APC" www.science.org/content/arti...

Migrant rent penalties in the German housing market Abstract. We investigate whether migrants pay higher rents for comparable housing than natives with similar characteristics using nationally representative data from the 2018 German Microcensus. The d...

For a change, something we made ourselves: Together with my colleagues Tobias Roth, Andreas Horr, and @nataliebackes.bsky.social, we examined ethnic rent penalties. Do migrants pay higher rents for comparable housing than natives with similar characteristics? direct.mit.edu/euso/article...

Last year, the KB presented the initial OPENBIB data release, which contains selected and curated metadata from OpenAlex. See this new blog post tinyurl.com/58zmb79z for an updated data release based on the OAL snapshot from July 25. This data release also features a KB author disambiguation system.

Geopolitics in the Evaluation of International Scientific Collaboration Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

US policymakers & scientists show significantly lower support for proposals with China-based vs. Germany-based collaborators (US policymakers: 68% support for Germany-collaboration vs. 28% for identical China-collaboration proposals, US scientists: 48% vs. 30%) www.nber.org/papers/w34789

This is a new preprint on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on international researcher mobility.

The analysis estimates approximately 14,700 fewer international researcher movements between 2020 and 2022 than expected, corresponding to a global loss of about 3.7%.

osf.io/preprints/so...

If someone paid you $4.75 every night you slept 7+ hours, would you sleep more?

And--more importantly--would that increase in sleep change your behavior in other meaningful ways?

This new paper ran an experiment to find out.

Presenting a classifier to improve the identification of research journal publications in OpenAlex - Scientometrics This paper introduces a document type classifier with the purpose to optimise the distinction between research and non-research journal publications in OpenAlex. Based on open metadata, the classifier...

"This paper introduces a document type classifier with the purpose to optimise the distinction between research and non-research journal publications in OpenAlex" link.springer.com/article/10.1...

We're looking for a post-doc to join our international, multidisciplinary project looking at how evaluation systems influence researchers' questionable practices. A great chance to get involved with a collaborative team doing exciting work on research integrity. Get in touch if you're interested!

"...adoption of AI in science presents what seems to be a paradox: an expansion of individual scientists’ impact but a contraction in collective science’s reach, as AI-augmented work moves collectively towards areas richest in data" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This looks like a great opportunity!

The University of Vienna invites applications for at least 40 fully funded, 4-year doctoral positions in the social sciences, humanities and cultural studies.

careers.univie.ac.at/en/praedoc/p...

Explainers & tutorials are a great way to criticize current practices with a positive twist. Tailoring them to a specific substantive (!) subfield can greatly increase uptake. Forget about novelty; if some statistican said sth in the 70s but no one was around to hear it, say it again.>

Internationally educated health professionals and health-system change: A global qualitative study This article examines how internationally educated health professionals contribute to health system change on return to their countries of origin. Rather than treating return as reintegration or sk...

Health professional mobility debates still focus on numbers. Who leaves. Who returns. How to offset shortages. This paper shows something else: international education reshapes how health professionals judge responsibility and act within constrained systems.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers | RGS Journal | Wiley Online Library Scientific excellence is clustering ever more tightly in a few ‘superstar’ cities. Four—New York, Boston, London and the San Francisco Bay Area—now host 12% of the world's top scientists. In contrast...

Scientific excellence is clustering in a few ‘superstar’ cities. New York, Boston, London and San Francisco now host 12% of the world's top scientists. The Global South remains largely absent, with the notable exception of Beijing's dramatic rise rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Line chart of Google search interest for “Christmas gift wife” and “Christmas gift husband” from November 18 to December 24. Bold lines show the average pattern across 2020–2024, while lighter shaded lines represent individual years. Shaded areas highlight which term has higher search interest at each point in time. The chart shows that searches for gifts for wives peak later in December than searches for gifts for husbands.

🎄 Hope you’ve got all your presents ready 💝

Google search interest shows a stable pattern:

🎅 “Christmas gift wife” peaks just before Christmas Eve
🎅 “Christmas gift husband” peaks much earlier

#MerryChristmas to all of you! 🎁

📈 Google Trends (Nov 18–Dec 24, 2020–2024)
#dataviz #ggplot2

The Robust Bayesian Meta-Analysis package got updated with additional vignettes explaining how to perform Bayesian model-averaged publication bias-adjusted

- multilevel meta-analysis (cran.r-project.org/web/packages...)
- multilevel meta-regression (cran.r-project.org/web/packages...)

Delighted to share this very important article with sobering results relevant for all migration researchers worldwide.

Lead by @carrasco-jig.bsky.social, together with @mariegodin.bsky.social, @cvar-sil.bsky.social and yours truly.

Open Access here:
doi.org/10.1057/s415...

Assessing scientific output through self-evaluation: Evidence from four social science fields We asked academics from the economics, political science, psychology, and sociology departments of the top 500 universities to state their top 3 publi…

Only 40 % of the publications identified as top 3 in self-evaluations also rank among the top 3 by citation performance (based on a survey of 2,331 researchers).
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

China's unilateral visa-free policies have significantly increased the number of co-authored publications between China and other countries. This effect is achieved by enhancing transportation accessibility and mobility, which facilitates cross-border research collaboration arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12189

Decreasing affiliation metadata coverage in OpenAlex – Scholarly Communication Analytics This blog post examines the decrease in affiliation metadata coverage in OpenAlex. An analysis of over 13 million articles published by major commercial publishers between 2018 and 2025 suggests that ...

There seems to be a decrease in the coverage of affiliation metadata in #OpenAlex, particularly with regard to journal articles published by Elsevier since 2024. Only around 6% of Elsevier articles published in 2025 have affiliation metadata.

subugoe.github.io/scholcomm_an...

Character overlap between Nalimov's Naukometriya book chapters and Mulchenko’s Ph.D. dissertation chapters

The Matilda Effect in Soviet scientometrics? Nalimov, Mulchenko, and the origins of Naukometriya Abstract. This article revisits the early history of Soviet scientometrics, examining the role of Zinaida Mulchenko in writing Naukometriya – the foundational book in this field. While Vasily V. Nalim...

This article revisits the early history of Soviet scientometrics, examining the role of Zinaida Mulchenko in writing Naukometriya... Mulchenko’s diminished positionality as the co-author of the book can be understood through the lens of the Matilda Effect direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

Very glad to see this collaborative work w/ Robin Haunschild and @lutzb.bsky.social published in Journal of Informetrics

"A study of gender and regional differences in scientific mobility and immobility among researchers identified as potentially talented"

Open Access here:
doi.org/10.1016/j.jo...

Studying social sciences & humanities makes students more left-leaning, controlling for initial views & major preference, driven by cultural views. Implies that if all students majored in business, college–noncollege ideological gap would shrink by 1/3
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

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🚨 New paper out in PLOS ONE! w/ @caropradier.bsky.social @benzpierre.bsky.social @natsush.bsky.social @ipoga.bsky.social @lariviev.bsky.social
We studied 43k authors and 264k citation links in U.S. economics to ask:
👉 Why do some papers cite others?
🔗 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Evaluating the visual design of science publications—a quantitative approach comparing legitimate and predatory journal papers - Scientometrics The rise of predatory publishing poses a significant challenge to the integrity of scientific research, potentially undermining the credibility of scholarly communications. As parts of the academic co...

"significant differences between legitimate and potentially predatory publishers are evident in terms of text length, metadata, visual complexity, and typography." link.springer.com/article/10.1...

11 broad categories of peer review comments on bibliometric studies

I just reviewed the article 'Implicit reporting standards in bibliometric research: what can reviewers' comments tell us about reporting completeness?' by @dimitystephen.bsky.social and colleagues. I like the article a lot!

Article: arxiv.org/abs/2508.162...

Review: prereview.org/reviews/1739...

Is academic freedom associated with strong science? Evidence from a cross-national time-series analysis Academic freedom is a widely discussed concept recognized as a key element of the academic system. While the intrinsic value of academic freedom is wi…

An analysis based on a global panel dataset covering 119 countries from 1996 to 2021 shows that academic freedom at the country level is associated with the citation impact of future papers published by researchers from that country
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Illustration of the Matthew effect and the early-career setback effect. An academic, say Alice, first applies for early-career funding in 2015. She received early-career funding, and goes on to reapply for later-career funding in 2020. According to the Matthew effect, the chances of Alice receiving later-career funding is higher when she received early-career funding. Alice showed a high Mean Field Citation Rate (MFCR) before receiving her early-career funding, and similarly a high MFCR in between the early-career and later-career applications. According to the early-career setback effect, had she instead not received funding, her "Between" MFCR would have been higher. We not only study the "Between" MFCR, we also study the MFCR after the early-career application ("Post (early)") and after the later-career application ("Post (later)").

📢 New reviewed preprint, published by @elife.bsky.social at doi.org/10.7554/eLif.... We study two effects in science funding across 14 different funding programmes from 6 research funders across Europe and North America: (1) The Matthew effect; and (2) and the early-career setback effect.

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Geographical and disciplinary coverage of open access journals: OpenAlex, Scopus, and WoS This study aims to compare the geographical and disciplinary coverage of OA journals in three databases: OpenAlex, Scopus and the Web of Science (WoS). We used the Directory of Open Access Scholarly R...

Among the 62,701 active OA journals, the WoS indexes 6,157, SCP indexes 7,351, while OpenAlex indexes 34,217. A striking observation is the presence of 24,976 OA j. exclusively in OpenAlex, whereas only 182 are exclusively present in the WoS and 373 in SCP.
journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Join our next Open Research Seminar with Dr. Annett Hoppe, PostDoc at Working Group Visual Analytics, Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology University Library (TIB):
"GROBI: Open-Source Tools for Accessible Bibliometric Analysis". October 14, 2–3 p.m.
Register: tinyurl.com/5pm8hvk8