We compare the network of aggregated journal-journal citation relations provided by the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 2012 of the Science and Social Science Citation Indexes (SCI and SSCI) with similar data based on Scopus 2012. First, global maps were developed for the two sets separately; sets of documents can then be compared using overlays to both maps. Using fuzzy-string matching and ISSN numbers, we were able to match 10,524 journal names between the two sets; that is, 96.4% of the 10,936 journals contained in JCR or 51.2% of the 20,554 journals covered by Scopus. Network analysis was then pursued on the set of journals shared between the two databases and the two sets of unique journals. Citations among the shared journals are more comprehensively covered in JCR than Scopus, so the network in JCR is denser and more connected than in Scopus. The ranking of shared journals in terms of indegree (that is, numbers of citing journals) or total citations is similar in both databases overall (Spearman's \r{ho} > 0.97), but some individual journals rank very differently. Journals that are unique to Scopus seem to be less important--they are citing shared journals rather than bein
Rankings of scholarly journals based on citation data are often met with skepticism by the scientific community. Part of the skepticism is due to disparity between the common perception of journals' prestige and their ranking based on citation counts. A more serious concern is the inappropriate use of journal rankings to evaluate the scientific influence of authors. This paper focuses on analysis of the table of cross-citations among a selection of Statistics journals. Data are collected from the Web of Science database published by Thomson Reuters. Our results suggest that modelling the exchange of citations between journals is useful to highlight the most prestigious journals, but also that journal citation data are characterized by considerable heterogeneity, which needs to be properly summarized. Inferential conclusions require care in order to avoid potential over-interpretation of insignificant differences between journal ratings. Comparison with published ratings of institutions from the UK's Research Assessment Exercise shows strong correlation at aggregate level between assessed research quality and journal citation `export scores' within the discipline of Statistics.
Interdisciplinary research is critical for innovation and addressing complex societal issues. We characterise the interdisciplinary knowledge structure of PubMed research articles in medicine as correlation networks of medical concepts and compare the interdisciplinarity of articles between high-ranking (impactful) and less high-ranking (less impactful) medical journals. We found that impactful medical journals tend to publish research that are less interdisciplinary than less impactful journals. Observing that they bridge distant knowledge clusters in the networks, we find that cancer-related research can be seen as one of the main drivers of interdisciplinarity in medical science. Using signed difference networks, we also investigate the clustering of deviations between high and low impact journal correlation networks. We generally find a mild tendency for strong link differences to be adjacent. Furthermore, we find topic clusters of deviations that shift over time. In contrast, topic clusters in the original networks are static over time and can be seen as the core knowledge structure in medicine. Overall, journals and policymakers should encourage initiatives to accommodate int
This study examines the social media uptake of scientific journals on two different platforms - X and WeChat - by comparing the adoption of X among journals indexed in the Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCIE) with the adoption of WeChat among journals indexed in the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD). The findings reveal substantial differences in platform adoption and user engagement, shaped by local contexts. While only 22.7% of SCIE journals maintain an X account, 84.4% of CSCD journals have a WeChat official account. Journals in Life Sciences & Biomedicine lead in uptake on both platforms, whereas those in Technology and Physical Sciences show high WeChat uptake but comparatively lower presence on X. User engagement on both platforms is dominated by low-effort interactions rather than more conversational behaviors. Correlation analyses indicate weak-to-moderate relationships between bibliometric indicators and social media metrics, confirming that online engagement reflects a distinct dimension of journal impact, whether on an international or a local platform. These findings underscore the need for broader social media metric frameworks that incorporate locally dom
An exploratory, descriptive analysis is presented of the national orientation of scientific, scholarly journals as reflected in the affiliations of publishing or citing authors. It calculates for journals covered in Scopus an Index of National Orientation (INO), and analyses the distribution of INO values across disciplines and countries, and the correlation between INO values and journal impact factors. The study did not find solid evidence that journal impact factors are good measures of journal internationality in terms of the geographical distribution of publishing or citing authors, as the relationship between a journal's national orientation and its citation impact is found to be inverse U-shaped. In addition, journals publishing in English are not necessarily internationally oriented in terms of the affiliations of publishing or citing authors; in social sciences and humanities also USA has their nationally oriented literatures. The paper examines the extent to which nationally oriented journals entering Scopus in earlier years, have become in recent years more international. It is found that in the study set about 40 per cent of such journals does reveal traces of internati
Overlay journals are characterised by their articles being published on open access repositories, often already starting in their initial preprint form as a prerequisite for submission to the journal prior to initiating the peer-review process. In this study we aimed to identify currently active overlay journals and examine their characteristics. We utilised an explorative web search and contacted key service providers for additional information. The final sample consisted of 34 overlay journals. While the results show that new overlay journals have been actively established within recent years, the current presence of overlay journals remains diminutive compared to the overall number of open access journals. Most overlay journals publish articles in natural sciences, mathematics or computer sciences, and are commonly published by groups of academics rather than formal organisations. They may also rank highly within the traditional journal citation metrics. None of the investigated journals required fees from authors, which is likely related to the cost-effective aspects of the overlay publishing model. Both the growth in adoption of open access preprint repositories and researcher
Using the Scopus dataset (1996-2007) a grand matrix of aggregated journal-journal citations was constructed. This matrix can be compared in terms of the network structures with the matrix contained in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) of the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI). Since the Scopus database contains a larger number of journals and covers also the humanities, one would expect richer maps. However, the matrix is in this case sparser than in the case of the ISI data. This is due to (i) the larger number of journals covered by Scopus and (ii) the historical record of citations older than ten years contained in the ISI database. When the data is highly structured, as in the case of large journals, the maps are comparable, although one may have to vary a threshold (because of the differences in densities). In the case of interdisciplinary journals and journals in the social sciences and humanities, the new database does not add a lot to what is possible with the ISI databases.
Interdisciplinary research, a process of knowledge integration, is vital for scientific advancements. It remains unclear whether prestigious journals that are highly impactful lead in disseminating interdisciplinary knowledge. In this paper, by constructing topic-level correlation networks based on publications, we evaluated the interdisciplinarity of more and less prestigious journals in medicine. We found research from prestigious medical journals tends to be less interdisciplinary than research from other medical journals. We also established that cancer-related research is the main driver of interdisciplinarity in medical science. Our results indicate a weak tendency for differences in topic correlations between more and less prestigious journals to be co-located. Accordingly, we identified that interdisciplinarity in prestigious journals mainly differs from interdisciplinarity in other journals in areas such as infections, nervous system diseases and cancer. Overall, our results suggest that interdisciplinarity in science could benefit from prestigious journals easing rigid disciplinary boundaries.
What does Artificial Intelligence (AI) have to contribute to health care? And what should we be looking out for if we are worried about its risks? In this paper we offer a survey, and initial evaluation, of hopes and fears about the applications of artificial intelligence in medicine. AI clearly has enormous potential as a research tool, in genomics and public health especially, as well as a diagnostic aid. It's also highly likely to impact on the organisational and business practices of healthcare systems in ways that are perhaps under-appreciated. Enthusiasts for AI have held out the prospect that it will free physicians up to spend more time attending to what really matters to them and their patients. We will argue that this claim depends upon implausible assumptions about the institutional and economic imperatives operating in contemporary healthcare settings. We will also highlight important concerns about privacy, surveillance, and bias in big data, as well as the risks of over trust in machines, the challenges of transparency, the deskilling of healthcare practitioners, the way AI reframes healthcare, and the implications of AI for the distribution of power in healthcare ins
The academic journal zoning system is central to evaluating research talent, funding, and institutions. The CAS journal partition system, one of East Asia's most widely used tools, will cease operation in March 2026, creating a policy gap. Existing alternatives have major limitations: JCR depends on paid databases and excludes conferences; Scimago/CiteScore relies on Elsevier proprietary data; expert-based rankings such as CCF and CORE lack quantitative foundations and update slowly. This paper proposes the General Science Ranking (GSR), a multidimensional bibliometric framework built entirely on open-source data. GSR covers 500 computer science venues (397 journals and 103 conferences) and 500 medical journals using OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar. Scores combine four indicators: field-weighted citation impact (FWCI), two-year impact factor (IF2), five-year h-index (h5), and citation CAGR. For CS conferences lacking citation time-series data, IF2-approx was estimated from calibration on 1.41 million OpenAlex journal papers. Rankings adopt fixed quotas: Q1 (1-50), Q2 (51-100), Q3 (101-200), and Q4 (201+). All code and data are open source. In CS rankings, conferences and journals eac
A number of journal classification systems have been developed in bibliometrics since the launch of the Citation Indices by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) in the 1960s. These systems are used to normalize citation counts with respect to field-specific citation patterns. The best known system is the so-called "Web-of-Science Subject Categories" (WCs). In other systems papers are classified by algorithmic solutions. Using the Journal Citation Reports 2014 of the Science Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index (n of journals = 11,149), we examine options for developing a new system based on journal classifications into subject categories using aggregated journal-journal citation data. Combining routines in VOSviewer and Pajek, a tree-like classification is developed. At each level one can generate a map of science for all the journals subsumed under a category. Nine major fields are distinguished at the top level. Further decomposition of the social sciences is pursued for the sake of example with a focus on journals in information science (LIS) and science studies (STS). The new classification system improves on alternative options by avoiding the problem
Using three years of the Journal Citation Reports (2011, 2012, and 2013), indicators of transitions in 2012 (between 2011 and 2013) are studied using methodologies based on entropy statistics. Changes can be indicated at the level of journals using the margin totals of entropy production along the row or column vectors, but also at the level of links among journals by importing the transition matrices into network analysis and visualization programs (and using community-finding algorithms). Seventy-four journals are flagged in terms of discontinuous changes in their citations; but 3,114 journals are involved in "hot" links. Most of these links are embedded in a main component; 78 clusters (containing 172 journals) are flagged as potential "hot spots" emerging at the network level. An additional finding is that PLoS ONE introduced a new communication dynamics into the database. The limitations of the methodology are elaborated using an example. The results of the study indicate where developments in the citation dynamics can be considered as significantly unexpected. This can be used as heuristic information; but what a "hot spot" in terms of the entropy statistics of aggregated cit
Recent studies indicate that Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 with Vision (GPT-4V) outperforms human physicians in medical challenge tasks. However, these evaluations primarily focused on the accuracy of multi-choice questions alone. Our study extends the current scope by conducting a comprehensive analysis of GPT-4V's rationales of image comprehension, recall of medical knowledge, and step-by-step multimodal reasoning when solving New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) Image Challenges - an imaging quiz designed to test the knowledge and diagnostic capabilities of medical professionals. Evaluation results confirmed that GPT-4V performs comparatively to human physicians regarding multi-choice accuracy (81.6% vs. 77.8%). GPT-4V also performs well in cases where physicians incorrectly answer, with over 78% accuracy. However, we discovered that GPT-4V frequently presents flawed rationales in cases where it makes the correct final choices (35.5%), most prominent in image comprehension (27.2%). Regardless of GPT-4V's high accuracy in multi-choice questions, our findings emphasize the necessity for further in-depth evaluations of its rationales before integrating such multimodal AI m
One of the most frequent and severe aftermaths of a stroke is the loss of upper limb functionality. Therapy started in the sub-acute phase proved more effective, mainly when the patient participates actively. Recently, a novel set of rehabilitation and support robotic devices, known as supernumerary robotic limbs, have been introduced. This work investigates how a surface electromyography (sEMG) based control strategy would improve their usability in rehabilitation, limited so far by input interfaces requiring to subjects some level of residual mobility. After briefly introducing the phenomena hindering post-stroke sEMG and its use to control robotic hands, we describe a framework to acquire and interpret muscle signals of the forearm extensors. We applied it to drive a supernumerary robotic limb, the SoftHand-X, to provide Task-Specific Training (TST) in patients with sub-acute stroke. We propose and describe two algorithms to control the opening and closing of the robotic hand, with different levels of user agency and therapist control. We experimentally tested the feasibility of the proposed approach on four patients, followed by a therapist, to check their ability to operate th
Physical rehabilitation exercises suggested by healthcare professionals can help recovery from various musculoskeletal disorders and prevent re-injury. However, patients' engagement tends to decrease over time without direct supervision, which is why there is a need for an automated monitoring system. In recent years, there has been great progress in quality assessment of physical rehabilitation exercises. Most of them only provide a binary classification if the performance is correct or incorrect, and a few provide a continuous score. This information is not sufficient for patients to improve their performance. In this work, we propose an algorithm for error classification of rehabilitation exercises, thus making the first step toward more detailed feedback to patients. We focus on skeleton-based exercise assessment, which utilizes human pose estimation to evaluate motion. Inspired by recent algorithms for quality assessment during rehabilitation exercises, we propose a Transformer-based model for the described classification. Our model is inspired by the HyperFormer method for human action recognition, and adapted to our problem and dataset. The evaluation is done on the KERAAL d
In recent years, the research of rehabilitation robot technology has become a hotspot in the field of rehabilitation medicine engineering and robotics. To assist active rehabilitation in patients with unilateral lower extremity injury, we propose a new self-service rehabilitation training method to control the injured lower extremity through its contralateral healthy upper limbs. Firstly, the movement data of upper limbs and lower limbs of healthy people in normal walking state are obtained by gait measurement experiment. Secondly, the eigenvectors of upper limb and lower limb movements in a single movement cycle are extracted respectively. Thirdly, the linear mapping relationship between the upper limbs movement and the lower limbs movement is identified using the least squares method. Finally, the simulation experiment of self-service rehabilitation training is implemented on MATLAB/Simulink. The results indicate that the identified linear mapping model can achieve good accuracy and adaptability. The self-service rehabilitation training method is effective for helping patients with unilateral limb injury to make rehabilitation training on themselves.
Current medical retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches overlook evidence-based medicine (EBM) principles, leading to two key gaps: (1) the lack of PICO alignment between queries and retrieved evidence, and (2) the absence of evidence hierarchy considerations during reranking. We present SR-RAG, an EBM-adapted GraphRAG framework that integrates the PICO framework into knowledge graph construction and retrieval, and proposes Bayesian Evidence Tier Reranking (BETR) to calibrate ranking scores by evidence grade without predefined weights. Validated in sports rehabilitation, we release a knowledge graph (357,844 nodes, 371,226 edges) and a benchmark of 1,637 QA pairs. SR-RAG achieves 0.812 evidence recall@10, 0.830 nugget coverage, 0.819 answer faithfulness, 0.882 semantic similarity, and 0.788 PICOT match accuracy, substantially outperforming five baselines. Five expert clinicians rated the system 4.66--4.84 on a 5-point Likert scale, and system rankings are preserved on a human-verified gold subset (n=80).
Using "Analyze Results" at the Web of Science, one can directly generate overlays onto global journal maps of science. The maps are based on the 10,000+ journals contained in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) of the Science and Social Science Citation Indices (2011). The disciplinary diversity of the retrieval is measured in terms of Rao-Stirling's "quadratic entropy." Since this indicator of interdisciplinarity is normalized between zero and one, the interdisciplinarity can be compared among document sets and across years, cited or citing. The colors used for the overlays are based on Blondel et al.'s (2008) community-finding algorithms operating on the relations journals included in JCRs. The results can be exported from VOSViewer with different options such as proportional labels, heat maps, or cluster density maps. The maps can also be web-started and/or animated (e.g., using PowerPoint). The "citing" dimension of the aggregated journal-journal citation matrix was found to provide a more comprehensive description than the matrix based on the cited archive. The relations between local and global maps and their different functions in studying the sciences in terms of journal lit
This paper presents GARD, an upper limb end-effector rehabilitation device developed for stroke patients. GARD offers assistance force along or towards a 2D trajectory during physical therapy sessions. GARD employs a non-backdrivable mechanism with novel motor velocity-control-based algorithms, which offers superior control precision and stability. To our knowledge, this innovative technical route has not been previously explored in rehabilitation robotics. In alignment with the new design, GARD features two novel control algorithms: Implicit Euler Velocity Control (IEVC) algorithm and a generalized impedance control algorithm. These algorithms achieve O(n) runtime complexity for any arbitrary trajectory. The system has demonstrated a mean absolute error of 0.023mm in trajectory-following tasks and 0.14mm in trajectory-restricted free moving tasks. The proposed upper limb rehabilitation device offers all the functionalities of existing commercial devices with superior performance. Additionally, GARD provides unique functionalities such as area-restricted free moving and dynamic Motion Restriction Map interaction. This device holds strong potential for widespread clinical use, poten
This paper introduces the Unique Citing Documents Journal Impact Factor(Uniq-JIF) as a supplement to the traditional Journal Impact Factor(JIF). The Uniq-JIF counts each citing document only once, aiming to reduce the effects of citation manipulations. Analysis of 2023 Journal Citation Reports data shows that for most journals, the Uniq-JIF is less than 20% lower than the JIF, though some journals show a drop of over 75%. The Uniq-JIF also highlights significant reductions for journals suppressed due to citation issues, indicating its effectiveness in identifying problematic journals. The Uniq-JIF offers a more nuanced view of a journal's influence and can help reveal journals needing further scrutiny.