In the current appendix present a first heuristic study about the scientific publications related to computer science and the human factors that make that some contents travel through highways and others in back roads of scientific information. We also present the first elements which generate that parallel information of the scientific work for financial and/or commercial reasons. Finally, a set of rhetoric questions link two decades of experiences in the university educational context, research and development (R&D) and Transfer of Technology (TOT) in the Mediterranean South and make up a first evaluation guide.
TopIntroduction
If we analyze some data bases where are indexed the scientific works in the computer science context, and all its derivations (multimedia, Web 2.0, computer graphics, scientific visualization, etc.), of the authors, we can see quickly that whether the authors have travelled through a highway of the scientific publications or not. We understand as highways of the scientific publications those that through associations such ACM (Association for Computing Machinery –www.ieee.org), to mention a couple of examples are automatically indexed in their data bases. In the current work we do not go into the details of how those works are indexed, in relation to the names and/or surnames of their authors, which in the Spanish case of the double surnames in many cases two different pages can be seen in the digital library. In one of them the surnames are separate and in others together, through the use of a hyphen. They even change the historic affiliation of the author or co-author of those works, as can be seen in the Figures 1 and 2.
Figure 1. The author, whose surnames are linked by a hyphen, appears affiliate to the Barcelona University
Figure 2. The same author appears affiliated historically to another two universities: Stanford (USA) y Pompeu Fabra (Spain)
Another of the problems is the reliability of the indexed information as they appear in the Figures 1 and 2 in the total of works. In short, the indexation method does not offer a reliable information to the potential users who access that digital library.
Aside from these technical remarks, the works that accumulate in that page may have been published by that association, which makes them easy to distinguish, since they have the logo up front and those stemming from magazines, books chapters, etc. Which have been accepted in the current database. The acceptation of those works derives from the intensity of the influence that the scientific committee of the magazine, book, conference or workshop has towards that association in order to get its sponsoring. Through it those works will be automatically included in the database. In other cases, the included works stem from associations of peers, such as ACM, IEEE, etc. or from projects deriving from data bases such as the initials DBLP (Digital Bibliogrpahy & Library Project).
In the DBLP it is easy to observe the amount of works that an author has, classified in decreasing order from the temporal point of view and where that register originated, that is, if it belongs to a conference (letter c), a journal (letter j), etc. At the end, there is the alphabetic index of the authors with which he has collaborated. Here it can also be seen how sometimes that index doesn’t follow an alphabetic order. In the Figure 3, we see how the co-author “de-Castro-Lozano” occupies the last place in the table, when in fact he should be among the authors a and b. Once again, a reliability mistake can be seen at the moment of accessing the information stored in the hyperbase.
Figure 3. Failing in the alphabetic order of the authors listing