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Our Recent Productions

Datasets, working papers, and peer-reviewed articles produced by MultiObs researchers.

Showing 1–3 of 3

  1. Article2026
    Beyond counting tweets: An exploration of scholarly conversations on Twitter(opens in a new tab)

    Shen, Yan; Dudek, Jonathan; Costas, Rodrigo

    Funded by China Scholarship Council

    Academic discussions on Twitter have increased over the past decade. This study analyzes ca. 1.3 million scholarly conversations on Twitter, examining their temporal evolution, topical distribution, and associated publications. The results show a steady growth in the number of scholarly conversations, accompanied by rising proportions of longer and multi‐topic conversations. The visibility of different disciplines and topics varies significantly, with popular themes often closely related to societal events. By comparing topic co‐occurrence networks in Twitter conversations with co‐citation networks in scholarly literature, the study reveals both commonalities and differences in topic structures across academic and non‐academic communication contexts. Moreover, publications that appear in multiple conversations are associated with higher citation counts, suggesting a potential link between conversational engagement and scholarly impact. These findings highlight that the feature of conversations on social media has value not only for refining indicators of scholarly attention and influence beyond simple mention counts, but also to capture more broadly how research is disseminated online.

  2. Article2026Open Access
    Who Needs National Journals? Dissemination Strategies in Canadian Scholarly Communication(opens in a new tab)

    Pradier, Carolina; Céspedes, Lucía; van Bellen, Simon; Alperín, Juan Pablo; Larivière, Vincent

    The dominance of English-language journals marginalizes national and local scholarly publications. Focusing on Canada’s bilingual (English and French), community‑oriented and Open Access‑rich journal ecosystem, this study uses comprehensive data to ask who relies on Canadian journals, how language and research focus affect reach, and what that reveals about balancing local relevance with global visibility. Drawing on two major bibliometric databases (OpenAlex and Dimensions), we show that Canadian journals play a key role as venues for the dissemination of locally relevant research while also contributing to the global infrastructure for scholarly communication. Most articles published in Canadian journals are authored by researchers affiliated with foreign institutions, and most research authored by Canadians is published in journals based outside Canada. We find that Canadian authors are most likely to publish their work in national journals when they are in decision-making roles, when the language of publication is French, or when the topics are locally relevant. Our findings also challenge the notion that only the Social Sciences and Humanities are locally bound: for the Canadian case, Life and earth sciences and Biomedical and health sciences were also found to be linguistically and geographically grounded. Finally, while researchers affiliated with government institutions are the most likely to publish in Canadian journals and to engage in research that has a Canadian object of study, researchers affiliated with French-speaking Québec-based universities stand out as the largest contributors to the Canadian journal ecosystem and account for the highest volume of French-language publications.

  3. Working Paper2026Open Access
    English dominance in scholarly communication: Historical roots and bibliometric evidence(opens in a new tab)

    Brasil, André

    English functions as the principal shared language of international scholarly communication, but its dominance also creates inequalities in the production, dissemination, visibility, and assessment of research. Developed as a complementary output of the CoARA Working Group on Multilingualism and Language Biases in Research Assessment, this report examines the historical development of English dominance and the contemporary mechanisms through which it is reproduced. It combines evidence from the literature with descriptive bibliometric analyses based on Web of Science, Scopus, OpenAlex, and CWTS Journal Indicators. The findings show that English is especially dominant in journals with high field normalised citation impact and in the selective segments of scholarly communication most frequently used in research evaluation. However, the extent of this dominance varies considerably across disciplines and countries, and publication in national languages remains important in the social sciences, humanities, and fields directed toward local professional and societal audiences. The report also demonstrates how database selection, metadata quality, and analytical choices affect the visibility of multilingual scholarship. Web of Science and Scopus predominantly represent English language journal literature, whereas OpenAlex reveals a much broader body of multilingual research, although incomplete language, authorship, and institutional metadata remain important limitations. The report further examines the financial, linguistic, and time burdens associated with English language publication and considers how publishing infrastructures, bibliometric indicators, rankings, and assessment practices influence which research becomes visible and valued. This report contributes to the landscape analysis conducted by the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) Working Group (WG) on Multilingualism and language biases in research assessment and it complements the Implementation proposal for language-aware assessments (Annex II.3).