SIS PhD student Fei Shu wins iFellowship award for national-scale digital research in Chinese bibliometrics
The ÎÛÎÛ²ÝÝ®ÊÓƵ School of Information Studies congratulates PhD in Information Studies student Fei Shu, recently selected for the iFellows Doctoral Fellowship program. Fei's thesis proposal was selected from a pool of applicants from 65 iSchools across the world. As an iFellow, Fei will receive a stipend of $50,000 USD over two years to pursue independent dissertation research that supports the goals of the Coherence at Scale Program.
Coherence at Scale is a broad-based program aimed at coordinating and aggregating national-scale digital projects to promote the development of new technology environments to support advanced scholarship across disciplines.
Fei's research interests are bibliometrics, informetrics, scholarly communication, and research evaluation. His dissertation research is anticipated to advance the field of bibliometrics and improve understanding of Chinese research activities and impact.
OVERVIEW
With the significant growth of Chinese scientific publication, an increasing number of bibliometric studies focus on China in an attempt to evaluate China’s contribution to the world’s scientific publications. However, current bibliometric studies on China’s research performance face significant challenges, as no single bibliometric database can currently cover all Chinese scientific literature existing in either Chinese or English. Although an increasing number of research papers written by Chinese scientists are published in English and indexed by international bibliometric databases, many Chinese scholars prefer to publish their manuscripts in Chinese academic journals indexed by local Chinese bibliometric databases. However, inconsistencies exist between international and local databases in terms of discipline classification systems.
This study will improve understanding of the differences between international and Chinese bibliometric databases and will also involve the creation of a Chinese Author Name Database (CAND) to better identify Chinese authors and their research impact. The implications of this research will help both international and Chinese bibliometricians improve their understanding of how to evaluate Chinese research performance by using international bibliographic databases.
Fei's supervisors are Dr. Charles-Antoine Julien and Dr. Vincent Larivière, EBSI, UdeM.
The is sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by the University of Pittsburgh's School of Information Sciences. The award is open to students from each of the 65 iSchools with membership in the international iSchools consortium. The iSchools organization is composed of research universities whose primary focus is to understand the relationships between information, technology, and people.
iFellows are committed to working with the Committee on Coherence at Scale, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), and the iSchools organization on a shared mission aimed at coordinating and aggregating national-scale digital projects in order to promote the development of new technology environments to support advanced scholarship across disciplines, as well as furthering the information sciences field as a whole. In particular, the iFellows will focus their independent PhD dissertation research on addressing an aspect of this goal.