Kernel based collaborative recommender system for e-purchasing

Recommender system a new marketing strategy plays an important role particularly in an electronic commerce environment. Among the various recommender systems, collaborative recommender system (CRS) is widely used in a number of different applications such as recommending web pages, movies, tapes and items. CRS suffers from scalability, sparsity, and cold start problems. An intelligent integrated recommendation approach using radial basis function network (RBFN) and collaborative filtering (CF), based on Cover’s theorem, is proposed in order to overcome the traditional problems of CRS. The proposed system predicts the trend by considering both likes and dislikes of the active user. The empirical evaluation results reveal that the proposed approach is more effective than other existing approaches in terms of accuracy and relevance measure of recommendations.     

Short-term effects of non-competitive funding to single academic researchers

Scientometrics - Research funding is essential to promote the scientific activity of researchers and the dissemination of their results. Simplifying, funding schemes can be classified in two...     

The national system of researchers in Mexico: implications of publication incentives for researchers in social sciences

Scientometrics - This article explores the effects of the Mexican National System of Researchers (SNI) on social science researchers’ scientific output and publication practices. SNI operates...     

Online retailer recommender systems: a competitive analysis

As thriving and fast-moving technologies, recommender systems have been widely adopted by online retailers to increase their sales recently. This has significant impacts on the stakeholders in the online supply chain. How an online retailer uses recommender systems to maximise its profit through choosing different recommendation strategies for two upstream competing manufacturers is explored in this paper. In particular, a game between one online retailer and two competitive manufacturers is constructed in which these manufacturers can be selectively and strategically recommended by the retailer. The analytical results show that as the recommendation strength of recommender systems increases, neither manufacturers nor the retailer can always enjoy higher profits, which is counterintuitive. Furthermore, this study reveals that (i) a recommended manufacturer may enjoy a higher profit through sharing the recommendation market with its rival than through monopolising this market; (ii) recommending two manufacturers in both is the most feasible way for the online retailer to benefit from controlling the supply chain. Finally, it is interesting that recommender systems are found to be good mechanisms to help to coordinate the online supply chain with one retailer and two manufacturers because the recommendation market generated by recommender systems alleviates channel conflict.     

Highly cited researchers: a moving target

Scientometrics - Highly cited researchers are a category of researchers defined by scientometric rules relating to counts of citations to their scholarly articles. The designation often refers to...     

Is patenting activity impeding the academic performance of South African University researchers?

The present study investigates whether activities related to the patenting of inventions impede or are in conflict with the academic performance of university professors, particularly the publication or the production of public knowledge. The Poisson regression model is used taking into account the confounding effects of other variables deemed to affect the publication productivity, viz.; research/faculty orientation, collaboration, etc. The study is conducted in South Africa, where university R&D is highly funded by the private sector, compared to other countries, viz. USA, UK, Germany, etc. Furthermore, within the South African institutions of learning, there are more incentives to publish than to invent. It is found that: (i) inventiveness and academic performance can co-exist and re-enforce each other, (ii) professors who are inventive have a broader network of researchers-collaborators and (iii) perform highly academically (from the NRF-rating perspective) and publish more than those who do not invent at all.     

基于复杂结构数据聚类的推荐系统

针对目前推荐系统存在的不能处理结构复杂、语义丰富领域的推荐问题以及对项目空间和用户空间本质特征理解的狭窄性和简单性、稀疏性问题、可扩展性问题,研究了基于复杂结构数据聚类的推荐方法,提出了一个新颖、有效、具有高可扩展性的基于复杂结构数据聚类的混合型推荐系统HRSCCSD.该系统能同时融合用户语义、项目语义和项目协同多方面...     

International temporary mobility of researchers: a cross-discipline study

The increasing literature addressing international mobility of researchers has repeatedly pointed out the lack of empirical data compiled over the last two decades, jeopardizing progress in the understanding of the characteristics and impacts of such human flows. This paper makes a contribution to the field by exploring the extent to which information obtained from researchers’ electronic curriculum vitae (CV) may be used to study temporary geographical mobility. We exploit a new type of data set—a comprehensive database of electronic CVs—developing a broad set of cross-discipline mobility indicators to assess the dimensions and characteristics of international research visits among a population of over 10,000 researchers. The sample population is made up of PhD holders working in the regional research system of Andalusia, Spain. Information regarding their international research visits over the last four decades is downloaded from CVs contained in the electronic scientific information system of the region. We assess mobility rates and the characteristics of the temporary mobile population. The analysis of visiting patterns shows significant differences in mobility profiles in terms of frequency, duration and destination of visits, across disciplines, career stages and time periods. The study also shows how different definitions of international mobility lead to substantial variations in cross-discipline mobility rates.     

The relation between the quality of research,researchers’ experience,and their academic environment

This article investigates to what extent researchers’ experience and the solidity of their academic environment influence the quality of their research. The hypotheses are derived from the assumptions that experience matters for quality research and that there are great intellectual synergies to be obtained from interacting with many colleagues who are active researchers. All articles published between 2000 and 2006 in five leading transportation journals are included in the analysis, and their research quality is measured by the number of times each article is cited by August 2016. Controlling for other factors influencing citations, such as article age and the number of references, the most important finding is that both experience and academic environment matter for performing quality research. When the authors’ experience, measured by the number of previous publications, increases by 1% from its average level, their published articles are expected to garner 0.31% more citations. Moreover, when the research activity at the unit to which the authors are affiliated, measured by the unit’s total number of publications, increases by 1% from its average level, the number of times their articles are cited will increase by 0.19%. This signals that, relatively speaking, the researchers’ own experience and merits mean more than the academic environment with regard to producing high-quality research. The above results enable us to discuss how researchers’ experience can compensate for working in less active academic communities holding research quality constant.     

An impact indicator for researchers

The assessment of individual researchers using bibliometric indicators is more complex than that of a region, country or university. For large scientific bodies, averages over a large number of researchers and their outputs is generally believed to give indication of the quality of the research work. For an individual, the detailed peer evaluation of his research outputs is required and, even this, may fail in the short term to make a final, long term assessment of the relevance and originality of the work. Scientometrics assessment at individual level is not an easy task not only due to the smaller number of publications that are being evaluated, but other factors can influence significantly the bibliometric indicators applied. Citation practices vary widely among disciplines and sub disciplines and this may justify the lack of good bibliometric indicators at individual level. The main goal of this study was to develop an indicator that considers in its calculation some of the aspects that we must take into account on the assessment of scientific performance at individual level. The indicator developed, the h _nf index, considers the different cultures of citation of each field and the number of authors per publication. The results showed that the h _nf index can be used on the assessment of scientific performance of individual researchers and for following the performance of a researcher.     

Determinants of success for biomedical researchers: a perception-based study in a health science research environment

New institutions are coming to the fore as stakeholders in research, particularly hospitals and clinical departments involved in providing health care. As a result, new environments for research are gaining importance. This study aims to investigate how different individual characteristics, together with collective and contextual factors, affect the activity and performance of researchers in the particular setting of hospitals and research centres affiliated with the Spanish National Health System (NHS). We used a combination of quantitative science indicators and perception-based data obtained through a survey of researchers working at NHS hospitals and research centres. Inbreeding and involvement in clinical research is the combination of factors with the greatest influence on scientific productivity, because these factors are associated with increased scientific output both overall as well as in high-impact journals. Ultimately, however, satisfaction with human resources in research group combined with gender (linked in turn to leadership) is the combination of factors associated most clearly with the most relevant indicator of productivity success, i.e. the number of articles in high-impact journals as principal author. Researchers’ competitiveness in obtaining research funding as principal investigator is associated with a combination of satisfaction with research autonomy and involvement in clinical research. Researchers’ success is not significantly related with their age, seniority and international experience. The way health care institutions manage and combine the factors likely to influence research may be critical for the development and maintenance of research-conducive environments, and ultimately for the success of research carried out in hospitals and other settings within the national public health system.     

Examining the relationship of co-authorship network centrality and gender on academic research performance: the case of chemistry researchers in Pakistan

This research examines the association of co-authorship network centrality (degree, closeness and betweeness) and the academic research performance of chemistry researchers in Pakistan. Higher centrality in the co-authorship network is hypothesized to be positively related to performance, in terms of academic publication, with gender having a positive moderating effect for female researchers. Using social network analysis, this study examines the bibliometric data (2002–2009) from ISI Web of Science for the co-authorship network of 2,027 Pakistani authors publishing in the field of Chemistry. A non-temporal analysis using node-level regression reports positive impact of degree and closeness and negative impact of betweeness centrality on research performance. Temporal analysis using node-level regression (time 1: 2002–2005; time 2: 2006–2009) confirms the direction of causality and demonstrates the positive association of degree and closeness centrality on research performance. Findings indicate a moderating role of gender on the relationship of both degree and closeness centrality with research performance for Pakistani female authors.     

SentCite: a sentence-level citation recommender based on the salient similarity among multiple segments

Scientometrics - Efficiently making adequate citations is becoming more challenging due to the rapidly increasing volume of publications. In practice, citing the appropriate references is a...     

Scientific Quality Index: a composite size-independent metric compared with h-index for 480 medical researchers

Scientometrics - The goal of this study was to measure the scientific output of 480 authors—leaders in 12 selected branches of medicine, using the Hirsch index (the h-index) and a newly...     

Scientific collaboration of researchers and organizations: a two-level blockmodeling approach

Scientometrics - The development and successful implementation of R&D policies depends on understanding patterns of scientific collaboration (SC). Existing studies on SC typically focus on...     

Evaluation index system for academic papers of humanities and social sciences

An index system for evaluating academic papers is constructed and verified based on the empirical analysis of papers that has gained the 6th Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Award for Outstanding Achievements. Some new index, such as paper discipline impact factor, discipline average cited rate per paper and discipline average downloaded rate per paper have been put forward in this paper. The empirical research results show that the ranking of papers calculated by this evaluation index system is in conformity with the awards determined by peer review in general, but still needs to be verified and improved in practice.     

Evaluating scholars based on their academic collaboration activities: two indices, the RC-index and the CC-index, for quantifying collaboration activities of researchers and scientific communities

Although there are many studies for quantifying the academic performance of researchers, such as measuring the scientific performance based on the number of publications, there are no studies about quantifying the collaboration activities of researchers. This study addresses this shortcoming. Based on three measures, namely the collaboration network structure of researchers, the number of collaborations with other researchers, and the productivity index of co-authors, two new indices, the RC-Index and CC-Index, are proposed for quantifying the collaboration activities of researchers and scientific communities. After applying these indices on a data set generated from publication lists of five schools of information systems, this study concludes with a discussion of the shortcomings and advantages of these indices.