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AbstractMany believe that the quality of a scientific publication is as good as the science it cites. However, quantifications of how features of reference lists affect citations remain sparse. We examined seven numerical characteristics of reference lists of 50,878 research articles published in 17 ecological journals between 1997 and 2017. Over this period, significant changes occurred in reference lists’ features. On average, more recent papers have longer reference lists and cite more high Impact Factor papers and fewer non-journal publications. We also show that highly cited articles across the ecological literature have longer reference lists, cite more recent and impactful references, and include more self-citations. Conversely, the proportion of ‘classic’ papers and non-journal publications cited, as well as the temporal span of the reference list, have no significant influence on articles’ citations. From this analysis, we distill a recipe for crafting impactful reference lists, at least in ecology.

The last glacial period is characterized by a number of millennial climate events that have been identified in both Greenland and Antarctic ice cores and that are abrupt in Greenland climate records. The mechanisms governing this climate variability remain a puzzle that requires a precise synchronization of ice cores from the two hemispheres to be resolved. Previously, Greenland and Antarctic ice cores have been synchronized primarily via their common records of gas concentrations or isotopes from the trapped air and via cosmogenic isotopes measured on the ice. In this work, we apply ice core volcanic proxies and annual layer counting to identify large volcanic eruptions that have left a signature in both Greenland and Antarctica. Generally, no tephra is associated with those eruptions in the ice cores, so the source of the eruptions cannot be identified. Instead, we identify and match sequences of volcanic eruptions with bipolar distribution of sulfate, i.e. unique patterns of volcanic events separated by the same number of years at the two poles. Using this approach, we pinpoint 82 large bipolar volcanic eruptions throughout the second half of the last glacial period (12–60 ka). This improved ice core synchronization is applied to determine the bipolar phasing of abrupt climate change events at decadal-scale precision. In response to Greenland abrupt climatic transitions, we find a response in the Antarctic water isotope signals (δ18O and deuterium excess) that is both more immediate and more abrupt than that found with previous gas-based interpolar synchronizations, providing additional support for our volcanic framework. On average, the Antarctic bipolar seesaw climate response lags the midpoint of Greenland abrupt δ18O transitions by 122±24 years. The time difference between Antarctic signals in deuterium excess and δ18O, which likewise informs the time needed to propagate the signal as described by the theory of the bipolar seesaw but is less sensitive to synchronization errors, suggests an Antarctic δ18O lag behind Greenland of 152±37 years. These estimates are shorter than the 200 years suggested by earlier gas-based synchronizations. As before, we find variations in the timing and duration between the response at different sites and for different events suggesting an interaction of oceanic and atmospheric teleconnection patterns as well as internal climate variability.

The ever-increasing number of published scientific articles has prompted the need for automated, data-driven approaches to summarizing the content of scientific articles. The Computational Linguistics Scientific Document Summarization Shared Task (CL-SciSumm 2019) has recently fostered the study and development of new text mining and machine learning solutions to the summarization problem customized to the academic domain. In CL-SciSumm, a Reference Paper (RP) is associated with a set of Citing Papers (CPs), all containing citations to the RP. In each CP, the text spans (i.e., citances) have been identified that pertain to a particular citation to the RP. The task of identifying the spans of text in the RP that most accurately reflect the citance is addressed using supervised approaches. This paper proposes a new, more effective solution to the CL-SciSumm discourse facet classification task, which entails identifying for each cited text span what facet of the paper it belongs to from a predefined set of facets. It proposes also to extend the set of traditional CL-SciSumm tasks with a new one, namely the discourse facet summarization task. The idea behind is to extract facet-specific descriptions of each RP consisting of a fixed-length collection of RP’s text spans. To tackle both the standard and the new tasks, we propose machine learning supported solutions based on the extraction of a selection of discriminating words, called pivot words. Predictive features based on pivot words are shown to be of great importance to rate the pertinence and relevance of a text span to a given facet. The newly proposed facet classification method performs significantly better than the best performing CL-SciSumm 2019 participant (i.e., the classification accuracy has increased by + 8%), whereas regression methods achieved promising results for the newly proposed summarization task.

Abstract: It is well known the harmful effects that savage capitalism has been causing to the environment since its introduction in a sphere in which a different logic and approach to nature are the essential conditions for the maintenance of the ecosystem and its complex relations between humans and non-human organisms. The amazon rainforest is a portion of the planet in which for thousands of years its human dwellers have been interacting with nature that it is understood beyond its physical condition. Thus, to what extent Amazonian’s approaches to nature could be considered as a moral philosophy through which the way of conceptualizing nature and its non-human denizens enhances the continuity of life and the intimate relations between entities? To answer this question, I will explore the cosmological system of the Shuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon with whom I lived for 5 months between July and November 2018, and thereby elucidate the spiritual relations that this society has with the metaphysical domain of nature.

We investigate the accuracy of how author names are reported in bibliographic records excerpted from four prominent sources: WoS, Scopus, PubMed, and CrossRef. We take as a case study 44,549 publications stored in the internal database of Sapienza University of Rome, one of the largest universities in Europe. While our results indicate generally good accuracy for all bibliographic data sources considered, we highlight a number of issues that undermine the accuracy for certain classes of author names, including compound names and names with diacritics, which are common features to Italian and other Western languages.

This paper presents the steps undertaken for building a word formation lexicon for Latin. The types of word formation rules are discussed and the semi-automatic procedure to pair their input and output lexical items is evaluated. An on-line graphical query system to access the lexicon is described as well. Questo articolo presenta le procedure di realizzazione di un lessico morfologico derivazionale per il latino. Sono descritti i tipi di regole di formazione di parola e viene valutata la qualità del sistema semi-automatico di individuazione delle parole in input e in output ad esse. Il sistema grafico d’interrogazione on-line dei dati è altresì presentato.

This paper investigates the fate of manuscripts that were rejected from JASSS-The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, the flagship journal of social simulation. We tracked 456 manuscripts that were rejected from 1997 to 2011 and traced their subsequent publication as journal articles, conference papers or working papers. We compared the impact factor of the publishing journal and the citations of those manuscripts that were eventually published against the yearly impact factor of JASSS and the number of citations achieved by the JASSS mean and top cited articles. Only 10% of the rejected manuscripts were eventually published in a journal that was indexed in the Web of Science, although most of the rejected manuscripts were published elsewhere. Being exposed to more than one round of reviews before rejection, having received a more detailed reviewer report and being subjected to higher inter-reviewer disagreement were all associated with the number of citations received when the manuscript was eventually published. This indicates that peer review could contribute to increasing the quality even of rejected manuscripts.