The use of citation speed to understand the effects of a multi-institutional science center

The extent to which an article attracts citations has long been of interest. However, recent research has emphasized not just the receipt but also the pacing of citation. Citation speed has been shown to be affected by journal prestige and self-citation but also public funding of research. Amidst these viewpoints, this paper explores the speed of article citation of a multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary publicly funded research center relative to that of a comparison group of articles. Results indicate that articles by authors affiliated with the center are significantly more likely to have early-cited papers within the year of publication than the random comparison group, with controls by field also being significant. Implications for the ability of a publicly funded center to attract attention toward articles are discussed.     

Using a bibliometric approach to support research policy making: The case of the Flemish BOF-key

In this paper, we describe the development of a methodology and an instrument to support a major research funding allocation decision by the Flemish government. Over the last decade, and in parallel with the decentralization and the devolution of the Belgian federal policy authority towards the various regions and communities in the country, science and technology policy have become a major component of regional policy making. In the Flemish region, there has been an increasing focus on basing the funding allocation decisions that originate from this policy decentralization on “objective, quantifiable and repeatable” decision parameters. One of the data sources and indicator bases that have received ample attention in this evolution is the use of bibliometric data and indicators. This has now led to the creation of a dedicated research and policy support staff, called “Steunpunt O&O Statistieken,” and the first time application of bibliometric data and methods to support a major inter-university funding allocation decision. In this paper, we analyze this evolution. We show how bibliometric data have for the first time been used to allocate 93 million Euro of public research money between 6 Flemish universities for the fiscal year 2003, based on Web-of-Science SCI data provided to “Steunpunt O&O Statistieken” via a license agreement with Thomson-ISI. We also discuss the limitations of the current approach that was based on inter-university publication and citation counts. We provide insights into future adaptations that might make it more representative of the total research activity at the universities involved (e.g., by including data for the humanities) and of its visibility (e.g., by including impact measures). Finally, based on our current experience and interactions with the universities involved, we speculate on the future of the specific bibliometric approach that has now been adopted. More specifically, we hypothesize that the allocation method now developed and under further improvement will become more criticized if it turns out that it (1) also starts influencing intra-university research allocation decisions and, as a consequence (2) introduces adverse publication and citation behaviors at the universities involved. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Collaboration in theoretical population genetics speciality

Analyses the growth of funded and collaborative research publications and authors as reflected in selected theoretical population genetics literature from 1956–60 to 1976–80. Indicates that the number of funded and collaborated publications has not proportionally increased along with the growth of total research publications and authors with time, but however, there is a strong correlation between the two. Indicates the extent of multi-authored research publications in different countries, and studies the growth of multi-authored publications from 1956–60 to 1976–80. Studies the impact of funding and collaboration on the productivity of authors over a period of time. Concludes that the authors who are more productive are generally found to be more collaborative and funded. The average productivity per author is observed to be larger in funded and collaborated authors subset and smaller in non-funded and non-collaborated authors subset, than the average productivity per author in the total authors subset in all the five block years studied. There is a systematic increase with time in the average productivity per author in the funded and collaborated authors subset. Studies the nature and type of collaborated research from 1956–60 to 1976–80, and the role of funding. Highlights the research priorities of few important countries in collabortive research. Indicates the collaboration linkages among various countries in transnational collaborative research. Concludes that with time, the focus of research is slowly shifting from internal collaration to domestic and international collaboration, supported by increasing funding from government agencies in theoretical population genetics research.     

Knowledge creation and diffusion of Taiwan's universities: Knowledge trajectory from patent data

The university sector, receiving government funding to perform basic research, is designated to produce and widely disseminate innovative knowledge to industry in many countries, particularly in latecomer countries such as Taiwan. Knowledge flows occurring in university research can be traced with patent data. This exploratory study aims to investigate knowledge creation and diffusion of Taiwan's universities by using university patents as the proxy. The empirical analysis finds a dramatic increase in the number of university patents after 2002. Some implications are derived based on this empirical analysis. Moreover, the cross-national citation behavior of university research would be worthwhile for conceptualizing transnational innovation networks in future studies.     

Competition in the university system of the Federal Republic of Germany

Although the university system in theFRG is largely regulated by the state, the freedom of research, teaching and study guaranteed by the constitution leaves room for competition between the universities. In research, there is competition with institutions outside the universities and with the research departments of large companies. There is also severe competition for the research funds provided by the Federal Government, theDeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and German trade and industry. In teaching, research projects are being carried out in order to develop criteria for the measurement of performance. This, together with a system of reporting, will facilitate comparisons and thus encourage competition. TheBMBW has contributed to these processes in teaching and research by funding projects on the development of performance criteria and by preparing legislative measures designed to promote competition.     

Driving factors of external funding and funding effects on academic innovation performance in university–industry–government linkages

This study focuses on analyzing the driving factors of government and industry funding and the effects of such funding on academic innovation performance in the Taiwan’s university–industry–government (UIG) collaboration system. This research defines the relationships of the triple helix in the UIG collaboration system as a complex intertwined combination that covers demography, financial support, and innovation performance. These relationships are simultaneously modeled by a multivariate technique, structural equation modeling, to investigate the causal-effect relationship among the antecedent factors on the subsequent ones. This model will enable us to investigate three questions: (1) Is government funding or industry funding tied to university demography, to university innovation performance, or to both? (2) Does government funding lead industry funding? (3) Is government funding or industry funding conducive to more university innovation performance? In addition to verifying the model against all participating universities in the UIG collaboration, we also categorize them into two tiers in terms of whether or not universities have been selected for the incentive programs of UIG collaboration so as to explore groups’ differences.     

An analysis of global research funding from subject field and funding agencies perspectives in the G9 countries

This study analyzed journal articles published by authors from the G9 countries (Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) to identify the distribution of research funding and funding agencies in these countries. A total of 5,856,744 articles published between 2009 and 2014 were collected from the Web of Science database. The results showed that China had the highest proportion of funded papers among its overall scientific output, while Italy had the lowest funded paper ratio. The leading sponsoring countries of papers by other countries were China and the United States, with China having a sponsorship surplus with all the other G9 countries, and the United States having a sponsorship surplus with seven other countries excepting China. Furthermore, governmental agencies were the major sponsors of funded papers in the G9 countries. The field of life sciences had the highest proportion of funded papers among the field’s total paper output; while natural sciences had the highest proportion of papers among all funded papers of a country. Regarding funding agencies, the top three funding agencies in each G9 country were primarily domestic agencies; and a large proportion of the funding provided by these agencies were granted to domestic research projects.     

Heterogeneous Partners,R&D cooperation and corporate innovation capability: Evidence from Chinese manufacturing firms

In this paper, we examine the differential impact of cooperation with heterogeneous partners on firms' innovation capabilities. We use the number of joint patent applications of Chinese manufacturing firms from 2008 to 2018 to measure cooperation with different types of partners and the number of corporate patents to measure the innovation capability of firms. The results indicate that R&D cooperation with other enterprises, universities, and research institutions all have a significantly positive impact on the innovation capability of enterprises. However, R&D cooperation with universities or research institutions has a higher positive impact on innovation capability than that with other firms. Different internal and external factors moderate the relationship between heterogeneous partners and the innovation capability of firms. Specifically, firms with higher absorptive capacity will benefit more from R&D cooperation with corporate partners. In contrast, in industries with higher market concentration or where firms are at the technological frontier, cooperation with universities will positively impact their innovation capabilities. Further research demonstrates that absorptive capacity has a more positive moderating effect when the cooperation is between firms in the same industry, compared to R&D cooperation between firms in different industries.     

Impact of SERC's funding on research in chemical sciences

The paper assesses impact of Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) funding in chemical sciences during 1976–1989 using scientometric techniques. Other indicators like awards won, fellowship to prestigious academies, membership to editorial boards received by the project investigators, Ph.D. degrees awarded, collaborations established and new courses introduced due to SERC funding have also been analyzed. The study indicates that activity index of research out put in various frontier areas of chemical sciences have gone up despite a decrease in Indian activity index in these areas. The growth pattern of papers for “Organometallic and Organometalloidal Compounds” are similar for India and world. Contribution of SERC's project investigators in high impact factor (≥2) journals and the citations received by the papers published by them are higher than Indian contributions in chemical sciences. The SERC funding has resulted in a three fold increase in the number of Ph.D. degrees awarded in chemical sciences and SERC project investigators have won many prestigious awards, fellowship to academies and membership of the editorial board of the journals. The SERC funded research has also resulted in new courses at various universities.     

Science and technology metrics for research policy evaluation: some insights from a Moroccan experience

If peer review has been and is continuing to be an acceptable approach for evaluation, Science and technology (S&T) metrics have been demonstrated to be a more accurate and objectively independent tools for evaluation. This article provides insights from an example of a relevant use of S&T metrics to assess a national research policy and subsequently universities achievements within this policy. One of the main findings were that just by setting S&T metrics as objective indicators there was an increasing research outputs: productivity, impact, and collaboration. However, overall productivity is still far low when brought to academic staff size and that a huge difference exists among universities achievements. The reliability of scientometric evaluation’s use as a performance tool is increasing in universities and the culture of this evaluation usefulness in research policy has widely spread. Surprisingly, this evaluation shows that even if S&T metrics have substantially increased, funds execution as means of rate of payment on total budget was less than 15 % due mainly to the high and unusual increase in funding allocations than was before the policy, a fact to which universities were managerially not well prepared. Finally, future evaluation should follow in the very short-term to quantify the impact extent of the policy revealed in this annual evaluation.     

Rankings,research styles,and publication cultures: a study of American sociology departments

Rankings have become a major form of quality assessment in higher education over the past few decades. Most rankings rely, to varying extent, on bibliometric indicators intended to capture the quantity and quality of the scientific output of institutions. The growing popularity of this practice has raised a number of concerns, one of the most important being whether evaluations of this sort treat different work styles and publication habits in an unbiased manner and, consequently, whether the resulting rankings properly respect the particular modes of research characteristic of various disciplines and subdisciplines. The research reported in this paper looked at this issue, using data on more than one hundred US sociology departments. Our results showed that institutions that are more quantitative in character are more likely to favor journals over books as the dominant form of scientific communication and fare, in general, considerably better on the National Research Council’s assessment than their qualitative equivalents. After controlling for differences in publication practices, the impact of research style declined but remained statistically significant. It thus seems that the greater preference of qualitative departments for books over articles as publication outlets puts them at a disadvantage as far as quality assessments are concerned, although their lagging behind their quantitative counterparts cannot fully be explained by this factor alone.     

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.     

A bibliometric analysis of NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research

Bibliometric analysis techniques are increasingly being used to analyze and evaluate scientific research produced by institutions and grant funding agencies. This article uses bibliometric methods to analyze journal articles funded by NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research (OER), an extramural grant-funding agency focused on the scientific exploration of the world’s oceans. OER-supported articles in this analysis were identified through grant reports, personal communication, and acknowledgement of OER support or grant numbers. The articles identified were analyzed to determine the number of publications and citations received per year, subject, and institution. The productivity and citation impact of institutions in the US receiving OER grant funding were mapped geographically. Word co-occurrence and bibliographic coupling networks were created and visualized to identify the research topics of OER-supported articles. Finally, article citation counts were evaluated by means of percentile ranks. This article demonstrates that bibliometric analysis can be useful for summarizing and evaluating the research performance of a grant funding agency.     

Changing publication patterns in the Social Sciences and Humanities, 2000–2009

An analysis of the changing publication patterns in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) in the period 2000?C2009 is presented on the basis of the VABB-SHW, a full coverage database of peer reviewed publication output in SSH developed for the region of Flanders, Belgium. Data collection took place as part of the Flemish performance-based funding system for university research. The development of the database is described and an overview of its contents presented. In terms of coverage of publications by the Web of Science we observe considerable differences across disciplines in the SSH. The overall growth rate in number of publications is over 62.1%, but varies across disciplines between 7.5 and 172.9%. Publication output grew faster in the Social Sciences than in the Humanities. A steady increase in the number and the proportion of publications in English is observed, going hand in hand with a decline in publishing in Dutch and other languages. However, no overall shift away from book publishing is observed. In the Humanities, the share of book publications even seems to be increasing. The study shows that additional full coverage regional databases are needed to be able to characterise publication output in the SSH.     

Size and ageing of the scientific community in Chile

The size and ageing of the Chilean scientific community was studied using as data the individuals actively engaged in research projects funded by the National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (FONDECYT). Between 1982 and 1991, 4966 individuals participated at least once, either as responsible for the research or as qualified associate in one term of the funding period. From this population, 2765 persons can be considered further committed with scientific research. As for sex, about 30% of the researchers are women. Taking into account all the disciplines, and in addition to the fact that the size of the Chilean scientific community seems to be subcritical, the study reveals that the workforce has been ageing dangerously through the years. The number of young scientists becoming part of the scientific workforce is decreasing. Research in mathematics, physics and chemistry, although qualitatively competitive, relies only on an extremely small group of excellent scientists, situation which is seriously affecting the scientific capacity that the country needs. Biology, although with a higher number of individuals, exhibits a pattern of ageing which will also affects the possibilities to strengthen the scientific demands. The global context in which science develops, leads to a brain drain that Third World countries will have to overcome, implementing public policies to offer the support that young people require to nurture the scientific strength. Indigenous Ph. D. programs demand urgent attention of policy decision makers as well as from research universities which need to offer opportunities to substitute, when existing, their incompetent faculty.     

The funding factor: a cross-disciplinary examination of the association between research funding and citation impact

This paper intends to illuminate the relationship between science funding and citation impact in seven STEMM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine). Using a regression model with Heckman bias correction, we find that funding has a positive, significant association with a paper’s citations in STEMM fields. Further analyses show that this association is magnified by the factors of multiple authorship and multiple institutions. For funded papers in STEM, multi-author and multi-institution papers tend to receive even more citations than single-authored and single-institution papers; however, funded papers in Medicine received less gain in citation impact when either factor is considered. Based on the finding that funding support has a stronger association with citation impact when it is treated as a binary variable than as a count variable, this paper recommends the allocation of funding to researchers without active funding support, instead of giving awards to those with multiple funding supports at hand.     

Funding information in Web of Science: an updated overview

Despite the limitations of funding acknowledgment (FA) data in Web of Science (WoS), studies using FA information have increased rapidly over the last several years. Considering this WoS’ recent practice of updating funding data, this paper further investigates the characteristics and distribution of FA data in four WoS journal citation indexes. The research reveals that FA information coverage variances persist cross all four citation indexes by time coverage, language and document type. Our evidence suggests an improvement in FA information collection in humanity and social science research. Departing from previous studies, we argue that FA text (FT) alone no longer seems an appropriate field to retrieve and analyze funding information, since a substantial number of documents only report funding agency or grant number information in respective fields. Articles written in Chinese have a higher FA presence rate than other non-English WoS publications. This updated study concludes with a discussion of new findings and practical guidance for the future retrieval and analysis of funded research.

     

Scientometric research in South Africa and successful policy instruments

This document provides an analysis of scientometric research in South Africa and it discusses sources of growth in the country’s research literature in general. South Africa is identified to have limited expertise in the field revealed mainly during the last decade. However, the country is ranked 21st in the world among the countries publishing in the journal Scientometrics and it is the only African country with such a standing in the field. Identification of the forces affecting positively the growth in the number of research publications in the country indicates that the primary incentive fuelling the recent growth is the new funding formula in the country which subsidizes the universities by more than R100 000 for each publication that their staff produces. The increase in the number of journals indexed in the ISI Thomson Reuters database and the incorporation of social sciences at the NRF have also affected the growth of research publications, but to a lesser extent.