Page:EPIC Oxford report.pdf/27

 Overall Judgment:

This dimension represents the overall opinion of the reviewer and is computed by averaging the scores ranking the article's citability in an academic and non-academic piece of work. Citability was chosen to represent the reviewer's overall judgment of the article, as it was believed that a reviewer who considered an article to be of poor quality would be less likely to cite the article as compared to an article that he/ she considered to be of high quality. Citability was rated as cite worthy (1) and not cite worthy (0) and the score was averaged, thereby yielding a range from 0 to 1.

Overall Quality Score:

The overall quality score summarises the reviewer's opinion on the overall quality of the article. This is obtained by averaging the scores on the preceding four dimensions, i.e. accuracy, references, style/ readability and overall judgment.

Accuracy, references, style/ readability, overall judgment and overall quality scores were calculated per reviewer per article.

4.2 Quantitative Analysis

Fig. 4.2 depicts the stages in the quantitative analysis of the data. All quantitative data analysis was performed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 15 licensed to the University of Oxford, UK. These various stages were carried out in order to explore the viability of arriving at findings about the overall spread of articles, and about distinct aspects of the articles (i.e. different languages and disciplines) that were specifically of interest within the study. The small scale of the present study does, it must be emphasised, mean that these detailed findings should be treated with some caution, but such tentative findings are valuable in indicating possible areas for future enquiry.

27