Publishing Behaviour in Economics: Coronavirus Pandemic Turns out to Be a Temporary Shock

Posted on November 24, 2021 by ZBW MediaTalk

by Olaf Siegert

COVID-19 has not only had an important influence on daily life, but also on our professional work as researchers and service providers. Trends towards increasing digitisation of the entire research process, in particular through remote conferences and meetings, have changed the dynamics of how research teams interact. Changes in publishing models were also driven by the unique shock of the pandemic to the scientific system. But are there differences regarding changes in publication behaviour in different research disciplines, e.g. in Economics and Business Studies?

Based on these questions the ZBW organised a virtual workshop to highlight recent studies that address and inves-tigate these changes in publication behaviour in response to COVID-19. So, in September 2021 more than 50 participants came together to engage in a productive exchange of ideas.

The seven presentations of the workshop were grouped in two thematic sessions followed by an open discussion with all attendees. The first session focused on general trends in the publishing behaviour of researchers in Economics and Business Studies. The second session was mainly con-cerned with gender disparities in publication behaviour, i.e. the differences in the productivity of women and men during the corona crisis and how these relate to differences in pressures experi-enced by women and men (e.g. childcare during lockdown). The effects of COVID-19 on the role of Social Media and Peer Review in scholarly publishing and its overall impact on the academic reputa-tion system were discussed with all workshop participants at the end of the meeting.

General trends in publishing behaviour during the corona crisis

The first session started with a presentation by Klaus Wohlrabe (ifo Institute Munich) on „The in-fluence of Covid19 on the publication behaviour in economics – Bibliometric evidence from five working paper series (PDF). In his paper Wohlrabe analyses, how the pandemic influenced the publication behav-iour in the area of Economics. He considered articles published in five working paper series (NBER, CEPR, IZA, CESifo and MPRA) to answer questions like: „In what areas of economics were COVID-19-related studies published?“ or „Do COVID-19 papers have been downloaded more often com-pared to other economics papers?“.

The second presenter was Nicholas Fraser (ZBW) with a presentation of his paper „Publishing of working papers during the COVID-19 pandemic: a survey of economics researchers“. He compared repositories from different disciplines (e.g. SSRN, RePEc, BioRxiv and medRxiv) to analyse the changes in publication behaviour, e.g. regarding publication output.

After that Emilia Di Lorenzo (University of Naples Federico II, Italy), Gabriella Piscopo (University of Naples Federico II, Italy) and Marilena Sibillo (University of Salerno, Italy) talked about their paper „Economics and Business Studies during the pandemic and beyond: new research trends“ (PDF). They focused on the developments of research in the field of insurance sciences, based on a bibliometric analysis of the Web of Science database.

The last presenter in the first session, Kristin Biesenbender (ZBW) showcased first results from her PhD study „Publication behaviour of German economists in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic“ based on EconBiz data. The possible effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on publication formats, internationalisation, co-authorship and Open Access were presented. The focus was on whether it makes a difference whether a researcher is at the beginning of her : his scientific career or already established.

Gender disparities in publication behaviour during the pandemic

The first presentation in the second half of the workshop came from four researchers from the University of Cambridge, namely Noriko Amano-Patiño, Elisa Faraglia, Chryssi Giannitsarou and Zeina Hasna on “The Unequal Effects of Covid-19 on Economists’ Research Productivity”. They used data mainly from the NBER and CEPR working paper series to explore the patterns of working paper publica-tions. Among other things, they found that gender differences are particularly stark at the mid-career level.

The second presenter was Tatyana Deryugina (University of Illinois, USA) on “Gender Disparities and Covid-19”. She discovered in her survey of academics across various disciplines that female and male academics experienced a substantial increase in time spent on childcare and housework and that the increase was even larger for women. This also led to a reduction of time available for research when compared to men and to women without children.

Illustration from the Workshop “The Impact of Covid-19”, Detail, Helge Windisch

Simone Chinetti from the University of Salerno (Italy) showcased his recent paper „Academic productivity and pandemic – evidence from female economists during the COVID-19 crisis“. He investigated how the current pandemic affects the productivity of female economists, including the sudden increase in domestic work and childcare to be done by women due to school closures and social distanc-ing measures. His data sample came from SSRN papers published between January and November 2020. He found a decline regarding the number of uploaded papers from female economists com-pared to their male counterparts.

Discussion on the change of publishing behaviour in times of a pandemic

The third session of the workshop was an open discussion among participants chaired by Isabella Peters (ZBW). They discussed the following topics:

Are research results being shared more intensively via Social Media (e.g. Twitter) or via other online media (e.g. in blogs, news articles)?
What is the mode and role of Peer Review when publishing in a pandemic? Are there expe-riences with other formats of Peer Review (e.g. Rapid Reviews, Open Peer Reviews, Open Review Reports)?
How has the pandemic affected the scientific reputation system in Economics and Business Studies? What are positions and approaches from learned societies, universities or re-search funders?

To sum up, the workshop resulted in the following four core conclusions:

COVID-19 has meanwhile led to a sharp increase in publication activity, which can be seen above all in the number of preprints published (mostly called “working papers” in Econom-ics). However, this was apparently a temporary effect, which was especially noticeable in spring / summer 2020 and has now subsided.
The pandemic itself was a very strong topic in preprints in economics – around 15% of all publications that have been published since the beginning of the corona crisis also deal with it. Here, too, the effect was stronger in 2020 and is now slowly decreasing again. COVID-19-related papers were also used more, i.e. downloaded and cited.
In relation to gender, a stronger publication activity was temporarily observed among men when compared to women. The slump among women was particularly evident in mothers of young children, who were particularly affected by lockdown and home schooling. Here, too, the effect now seems to be decreasing.
With regard to the reputation system in Economics, COVID-19 does not seem to have any major effects. Above all, the pandemic has positively influenced the publication behaviour in the area of preprints – the importance of journal rankings and the submission behaviour in journals have changed little or not at all.

The detailed workshop programme including abstracts is available here.

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Author: Olaf Siegert
Olaf Siegert is head of the Publication Services department and Open Access Representative of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics. He is involved with open access as part of his work at the ZBW and is also active for the Leibniz Association, where he represents the Leibniz Open Access working group in external committees. He is involved in the Alliance of Science Organisations in the working group Scientific Publication System and at Science Europe for the Leibniz Association.

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Science Checker: Open Access and Artificial Intelligence Help Verify Claims

Posted on November 17, 2021 by ZBW MediaTalk

An Interview with Sylvain Massip

What is the Science Checker?

In July 2021, the Science Checker went online in a beta version. In this version, it only deals with health topics. As a first step, it is intended to help science journalists and other scientific fact checkers to test the likelihood of a claim. 3 million Open Access articles from PubMed (out of 36 million) serve as the data basis for the Open Source tool. It uses artificial intelligence to check whether a claim is supported, discussed or rejected by the scientific literature. As a result, it shows how many and which documents it has found on the topic, when they were published and to what extent they make the claim probable. The guiding question is always: “What does the research literature say about this? In the practical operation of the Science Checker, three fields must first be filled in: agent, effect (increase, cause, prevent, cure) and disease.

To make the Science Checker more imaginable, here are a few examples: “Does caffeine lead to more intelligence?” (unfortunately unlikely). For this question, the tool finds three sources in the database.

Science Checker

There are 5933 sources on the question whether smoking causes cancer. Of these, 80% are confirmatory and 20% negative. For the question “Does sport prevent heart attacks?” the Science Checker finds 420 sources, of which only the first 20 relevant ones are included in the first probability calculation. Click on “Add” to add the next 20 articles or on “All” to calculate the total. Since the latter takes some time, a notification is sent out by e-mail as soon as the result is available.

We have already introduced the idea behind the Science Checker in the article “Opscidia: Fighting Fake News via Open Access”. To get a practical impression of the tool’s possibilities, we recommend simply trying it out yourself: to the Science Checker.

In this interview, we talk to Sylvain Massip, one of five members of the Science Checker team, about his experiences during the first five months that the tool has been online in a beta version. He explains who the Science Checker is aimed at, how it is financed and what contribution libraries can make.

What happened since you introduced your idea to use Open Access (OA) to fight fake news a year ago here at ZBW MediaTalk?

We have now developed a beta version of the Science Checker, which is available and usable by everyone online. It is a tool for journalists and fact-checkers which works with an Artificial Intelligence (AI) pipeline that retrieves the articles of interest for the request of the user, and classifies them as supporting and contradicting the original claim entered by the user, or neutral in some cases. The data used for the Science Checker comes from a dump of Open Access articles from Europe PMC.

For whom did you create the Science Checker?

Our first targeted audience are the scientific journalists and scientific fact-checkers.
But the Science Checker carries the will of Opscidia to make scientific literature more and more accessible beyond academic circles only. That’s why we aim for a larger use of it, open to all curious people.

The Science Checker has been launched in July 2021. So, it is online for about five months now. What are your first experiences and feedback? What were your biggest challenges?

Since the release of the Science Checker, it has been tried by more than 400 people. It is indeed a relatively slow uptake, but that was to be expected with a beta version. Our main challenge now is to find the right partners to help us in two aspects: increasing the accuracy of the tool and its growth potential.

What role does Artificial Intelligence play?

In simple words, AI is trained by our developers to be able to read articles, to understand it and to get the essential information out of it. Thanks to this upstream process, the AI used in the Science Checker will analyse millions of articles in a very short time in order to give you an answer based on many different sources of information.

Why is it so important that there are practical application examples for the use of OA?

Open Access is an important issue of our era. The free diffusion of academic knowledge is of paramount importance for many topics, from sanitary crisis to sustainable development. The OA community has to show the real value of it, that its activity is useful even outside of academia and related to global challenges. Open Access should not stay a topic for academic activists, it should spread for the common good.

You told us that there are now five people working on the Science Checker. How is it financed? Who pays the bill?

Yes, there are indeed five people who took part in the project, but in different ways. One main developer has shaped the Science Checker, Loic Rakotoson, who worked for more than four months full time on it. But he is not the only developer who has worked on it actually. Frejus Laleye and Timothée Babinet have developed part of the code used by the Science Checker. Charles Letaillieur, Opscidia’s CTO, has managed the project technically and Sylvain Massip, Opscidia’s CEO, has done most of the scientific design. In addition, together with Enzo Rodrigues, I also did a lot of work for the promotion of the Science Checker in conferences and on social media.

Financially, this beta version of the Science Checker was developed as a project, which is now over. This project was funded by the Vietsch Foundation, that we would like to thank warmly for their support.

We see it as a first step, and now that we have done a successful first draft, we are looking for the funding of our next iteration to keep the process going and build a second version of our Science Checker.

How can you guarantee its sustainability?

For the time being, we try to ensure its sustainability by focusing our maintenance on the very most important things, as we are doing it with Opscidia’s own funds. But in the future, our goal is to have a major partner, such as a large media company, in order to fund its development, communication and maintenance.

How can libraries and information infrastructures support you? Which role do they play in the project?

First of all, libraries can fund Open Science, Opscidia’s and others, to ensure that initiatives such as the Science Checker have the data they need. Indeed, we are directly dependent on information sources, their quantity and their quality.

They can also help us by spreading the word about the Science Checker and Opscidia’s other activities, and of course, we are happy to partner with any interested party for the continuation of the project.

Are you still looking for partners/support for the Science Checker? Who? How can you be supported?

We want to continue to develop the Science Checker to improve the results and optimise its performance. It is also possible that we will have to develop additional features to the tool, if we identify other needs for the user. Thus, we continue to seek funding to help us in this direction. Moreover, we are quite open to potential technological partnerships if they are relevant for the evolution of the Science Checker. Furthermore, anyone can support us by providing feedback on its use. This is an essential source of information for us and has very often allowed us to match our tools to the needs of the users.

Is your system open and can be (re-)used by others?

Yes, absolutely. Our system is totally open, but we do not own the data. It comes from the Europe PMC database. The system is Open Source, the source code is accessible for anybody in our Github and can be reused freely as long as it is for non-commercial applications.

What is your vision for the Science Checker? Where do you see it in, say, five years?

In terms of software development, the next objectives are to increase the size of the dataset that we use, make it more precise and more general. By that, we mean that we aim for a tool capable of doing the same work for all scientific fields and not just medical sciences.

In terms of usage, we want to partner with major media so that our Science Checker could be used on a daily basis for fact checking purposes.