Effect of professional competence,managerial role and status of group leaders to R&D performance

This paper examines the following basic issues of leadership in research units: (1) characteristics of the leader and the functions performed by him that predict the image of his quality; and (2) the role of leadership in enhancing the performance of the research unit. Analysis is based on data collected on 1460 research units in six countries for the second round of International Comparative Study on Organization and Performance of Research Units. Variations in the characteristics and role of leadership in different institutional settings and countries are analyzed through POSCOR (ranking programme based on partially ordered sets). Stepwise multiple regression analysis was used to examine the common pattern of relationship of various indices of leadership with the image of leader's quality and three measures of effectiveness — scientific, user-oriented and administrative. Analysis was repeated for each country to explore the stability in the pattern of relationships and to identify universal indices that have consistent relationships across countries. Implications of the results are discussed.This is a revised version of the paper presented at XIth World Congress of Sociology, New Delhi, India, 18–22 August, 1986.     

China’s rising leadership in science and technology: quantitative and qualitative indicators

China has a long and proud history of world leadership in science and technology, but in the past two centuries it has experienced a period of instability that has challenged that leadership. However, since its political consolidation in the middle part of the 20th Century and its subsequent economic reforms, China’s rise in science has been meteoric. This rise was first detected by the scientometric community through its indicators, but it has now become obvious. Indeed in 2017 the question, “Will China come to lead world science?” was becoming to some, “Does China already lead world science?” This paper tries to make the case that the answer is “yes” (or at least “soon”)—but the answer depends on which metrics one considers. China already leads many countries in some measures of GDP, scientific paper production, researchers, plus high technology manufacturing and exports. China also recently passed the European Union in R&D investment. Even in some of those indicators where China has not yet taken the lead, reasonable forecasts predict that it soon will. However, there are some indicators where China is still far behind. For example while rising, it still lags the U.S. and EU in citations in Western publications, and will take years to catch up. Here, these quantitative measures are supplemented by qualitative ones from WTEC assessments and by survey results of scientists and the public, which present a more nuanced conclusion. While Chinese leadership may be difficult for Westerners to accept, it can be viewed as China merely regaining its historical position of leadership in science and technology.     

Scientific production in Computer Science: A comparative study of Brazil and other countries

In this paper we present a study about scientific production in Computer Science in Brazil and several other countries, as measured by the number of articles in journals and conference proceedings indexed by ISI and by Scopus. We compare the Brazilian production from 2001 to 2005 with some Latin American, Latin European, BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China), and other relevant countries (South Korea, Australia and USA). We also classify and compare these countries according to the ratio of publications in journals and conferences (the ones indexed by the two services). The results show that Brazil has by far the largest production among Latin American countries, has a production about one third of Spain’s, one fourth of Italy’s, and about the same as India and Russia. The growth in Brazilian publications during the period places the country in the mid-range group and the distribution of Brazilian production according to impact factor is similar to most countries.     

Toward an objective,reliable and accurate method for measuring research leadership

We compare a new method for measuring research leadership with the traditional method. Both methods are objective and reliable, utilize standard citation databases, and are easily replicated. The traditional method uses partitions of science based on journal categories, and has been extensively used to measure national leadership patterns in science, including those appearing in the NSF Science & Engineering Indicators Reports and in prominent journals such as Science and Nature. Our new method is based on co-citation techniques at the paper level. It was developed with the specific intent of measuring research leadership at a university, and was then extended to examine national patterns of research leadership. A comparison of these two methods provides compelling evidence that the traditional method grossly underestimates research leadership in most countries. The new method more accurately portrays the actual patterns of research leadership at the national level.     

Benjamin Robins (1707–1751): Opting not to be a commissary for Acadia but a fortifications engineer in East India

After the printing of his little “budget”‡ of New Principles of Gunnery in 1742 [1,2], Robins would seem to have become unsure as to what and where he should apply his talents. Not obtaining a permanent appointment as Professor of Fortification at the Woolwich Military Academy in 1741, his search for self-esteem in employment seems to have led him to accept the post, in 1749, of Director General of Engineering for the East India Company in the Carnatica, India, and where at work in 1751, he died of malaria one year after landing from England.

The paper describes some of the historical and technical background, e.g. of the military engineer and the establishment of some fortifications by the British in the 17th and 18th centuries on the eastern side of the Indian subcontinent, at the start of less than two centuries of subsequent Empire. Some account of one Western European nation's involvement in overseas military engineering is outlined; we do not restrict this only to Robins' period but indicate how it continued and developed for a generation after he died. Robins' decease at the height of his career in early middle age, surely cut by one half a great career of unfulfilled promise in engineering science and practice.

Originally, as a consequence of the signing of the terms of the peace treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, after the War of the Austrian Succession, Robins was offered the opportunity to go to Paris, “as a commissary to set the limits of Acadia”. This he declined, choosing rather to go out East.

English mid-18th century sensitivity to events in Acadia is fully described. The contest between the English and French for Empire in Southern India and Nova Scotia is described (relatively) extensively and reveals the depth of competition between the nations. Details pertaining to Acadia are given in Part I and to India in Part II.     

Introduction: Editorship and the editing of scientific journals, 1750–1950

The editors of scientific journals are key gatekeepers for building careers and communicating knowledge, but we know far less about them than about scientific authors and readers. Using a variety of methodological approaches, this issue of Centaurus investigates the motivations for editorship, and the practices,strategies and resources needed to carry it out successfully. It asks us to reflect on how editors, editing and editorship have differed across countries, and over two centuries.     

Dimensions of research planning: Comparative study of research units in six countries

This paper seeks to examine the characteristics and quality of research planning at the level of microcosm of the research unit in six countries — Argentina, Egypt, India, Republic of Korea, Poland and USSR. It is concerned basically with the following aspects: (i) differences in the characteristics and quality of research planning in research units in different countries and institutional settings; (ii)pattern of relationships between the indices of planning and three measures of effectiveness—scientific, user-oriented and administrative; and (iii) stability in the pattern of relationships across countries and measures of performance. As a result of analysis, a few universal indices have been identified that have consistent relationships across countries. It is concluded that the determinants of effectiveness of research planning depend upon the criteria used for measuring the performance of the research unit. Besides specificity of research goals, the most important predictors of performance are: conceptual challenge of the research programme and external linkages of the research group—linkages with scientific peers and potential users of research results.This is a revised version of the paper presented at XIth World Congress of Sociology, New Delhi, India, August 18–22, 1986.     

A three-dimensional bibliometric evaluation of recent research in India

In this paper a three-dimensional framework to see how Indian universities and research-focused institutions fare in the world of high end research in terms of excellence and diversity of its research base is proposed. At the country level scholarly performance is broken down into three components—size, excellence and balance or evenness. A web application available in the public domain which visualizes scientific excellence worldwide in several subject areas is used. India has a presence in fifteen of twenty-two subject areas in which there are at least 50 institutes globally that have published more than 500 papers. It has no institution which can be counted at this level of size and excellence in seven areas: Arts and Humanities; Business, Management and Accounting; Health Professions; Neuroscience; Nursing; Psychology; and Social Sciences. India’s research base is completely skewed towards the Physical Sciences and Engineering with very little for Biological Sciences and Medicine and virtually none in Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities when excellence at the highest level is considered. Its performance is also benchmarked against three nations, namely Australia, The Netherlands and Taiwan which are of similar size in terms of GDP and scientific output. It is seen that although India has the highest GDP among the four countries, its performance lags considerably behind. Even in terms of diversity, its performance is poor compared to the three comparator countries.     

International collaboration in science: Participation by the Asian giants

Science in the last few years has become increasingly global and collaborative. The number of internationally coauthored papers has been increasing steadily. We have counted internationally jointly authored papers involving authors from the advanced countries and the Third World countries, usingSCI 1991. We have looked at the number of papers resulting from collaboration among authors residing in the countries of the North (e.g. EC and OECD countries), authors residing in the South (e.g. India and Bangladesh, Mexico and Brazil, China and Pakistan) and papers resulting from collaboration between authors residing in the countries of the South and the North (e.g. India and UK, China and USA). Despite its late start, China has published many more collaborative papers with most Asian countries and the advanced countries of the West except the UK than India — confirming the effectiveness of the open door policy of post-Mao China. Both India and China collaborate with USA much more often in physics than in other areas, followed by clinical medicine. However, India collaborates more with USA in chemistry than China. In Indo-US and Sino-US collaborations, collaborating institutions are mostly universities and institutes of higher learning in India and USA, whereas in China several institutions under the Academies also take part. The percentage of collaborative papers involving authors from India is even smaller than the percentage of journal articles originating from India. In general, papers resulting from international collaboration appear in better journals and are cited more often than papers that are the outcome of local research.Paper presented at the Fourth International Conference on Bibliometrics, Informetrics and Scientometrics in Berlin (Germany), September 11–15, 1993.     

The international centre for genetic engineering and biotechnology: A new international scientific organization

How will the developing countries best employ the advanced biotechnologies, particularly genetic engineering, to help solve their problems and further development? One mechanism to help the Third World gain the requisite capabilities is being set up by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), namely the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB). Made up of two components in New Delhi, India, and Trieste, Italy, it has four major functions: to perform research of importance to the Third World; to train scientific personnel from developing countries; to be a conduit for the international transfer of scientific and technical information; and to be the focal point of a network of affiliated national and regional R&D centers. The long and tortuous process of establishing the ICGEB is described. The reasons for the actions taken are analyzed, as are the real and potential problems facing the Centre.     

Scientific research in the Indian subcontinent: selected trends and indicators 1973–2007 comparing Bangladesh,Pakistan and Sri Lanka with India,the local giant

As part of a research program to analyse research in Bangladesh we provide a comparison between research indicators related to India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. In this investigation we make use of Web of Science (WoS) data as well as Scopus data (using the SCImago website). Special attention is given to collaboration data and to the evolution of country h-indices. A comparison based on relative quality indicators shows that Sri Lanka is the best performer among these four countries. Such a result agrees with the ranking of these countries according to the United Nations’ Human Development Index (HDI).     

Use of bibliometrics for research evaluation in emerging markets economies: a review and discussion of bibliometric indicators

Scientometrics - The governments of most ‘emerging market’ (EM) countries (e.g., India, Mexico, and Brazil) have invested significantly in scientific research over the past decades....     

Visualizing cooperation networks of elite institutions in India

In this paper we have analyzed the pattern of cooperation links among fifty most prolific institutions (hereafter called “elite institutions”) in India. The network of relationships among these institutions is sparse and more than two thirds of the cells in the collaboration matrix are empty. The network is centralized, but no institution dominates the network. It is only a set of few institutions that dominate the network. We have constructed a measure (Bonacich eigenvector centrality index) to assess the position of each institution in the network. Barring a few notable exceptions, scientific size of an institution is directly related to its position in the network. We have graphically depicted the network of relationships among these institutions above a certain threshold of cooperation strength. The network incorporating 50 nodes and 171 arcs provides a synoptic view of bilateral relations among the institutions, but it is quite complex. We have therefore developed a block model of the network to assess the macro level features of cooperation links among the institutions. The block model indicates the isolation and marginality of certain clusters (or blocks) of institutions. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Bibliometric analysis of articles published in ISI dental journals, 2007–2011

In recent years there have been few bibliometric evaluations in dental sciences with an international approach. The aim of this study is to describe the scientific production of original and review articles published in ISI dental journals for the period 2007–2011, considering qualitative and quantitative measures across countries. In this study documents indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded of Web of Science were reviewed between January 2007 and December 2011. All “Article” and “Review” document types in the “Dentistry, Oral Medicine and Surgery” category were included. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed. A total of 37,571 documents were found for the entire period, growing 24.3 % annually from 2007 to 2011. The publication language was mostly English (98.6 %), and 54.5 % of productivity was concentrated in five countries. A total of 44 countries had at least 100 documents and were included in the analysis, representing 36,532 (97.23 %) documents. It was concluded that increasing productivity in some countries, such as Brazil, China, India, and Turkey, was observed. High levels and stability in terms of impact was determined in the Nordic countries. The USA continues to lead in terms of overall productivity.     

Stocktaking scientific publication on bi-regional collaboration between Europe 28 and Latin America and the Caribbean

Mapping bi-regional scientific collaboration demands multiple approaches to obtain a picture as complete as possible. Usually, the first approach is the measuring of the number and typology of scientific co-publications in the most visible indexes of journals and publications covered by databases like Web of Science or Scopus, among others. This paper analyzes scientific publications listed by Web of Science (WoS), which comprises authors from the 28 EU countries and Latin American and Caribbean countries (EULAC) between 2005 and 2016. The following questions have been addressed: How are bi-regional scientific relations between EULAC countries reflected by international collaboration? What effects does this scientific collaboration have in smaller or emerging countries? Which area of knowledge has more international collaborations? The study highlights the existence of a growing global network of researchers from several countries that collaborate on their research. EULAC scientific collaboration cannot be understood in isolation from this global network.

     

Adoption of green supply chain management practices and their impact on performance: an exploratory study of Indian manufacturing firms

Research on green supply chain management (GSCM) or sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) has attracted increased attention in recent years. Although GSCM/SSCM has been studied for developed and developing countries, there has been little information about the adoption of GSCM/SSCM practices in India. This article presents one of the earliest surveys on GSCM practices in Indian manufacturing firms. The items for the survey were developed based on the extant literature and feedback from corporates. Some of the major findings of the survey are as follows. We found that the state of adoption of GSCM practices by Indian firms was still in its infancy, the awareness of environmental sustainability was quite low among consumers, and the regulatory framework was also lacking in terms of promoting environmental sustainability. Results of data analysis showed that supplier collaboration for environmental sustainability had a positive impact on environmentally sustainable product design and logistics, which in turn was positively related to competitiveness and economic performance of the firm. We compared the results with the observations made by other researchers for developed and developing countries and provided managerial implications for the government and manufacturers as to what steps need to be taken to generate awareness towards environmental sustainability and facilitate the adoption of GSCM practices among Indian firms to a greater extent. We conclude the paper by indicating directions for future research on GSCM/SSCM.     

Aerobic degradation of technical hexachlorocyclohexane by a defined microbial consortium

Organochlorine pesticides including hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH) and dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) are largely used in developing countries like India for public health and agricultural purposes. Even though the agricultural use of technical mixture (tech-HCH) is banned, countries like India are still using gamma-HCH for economic purposes. Thus, in addition to already contaminated sites, new sites are being contaminated with gamma-HCH and its stereoisomers. In the environment, these isomers have a half-life of 8-10 years. In our laboratory, we developed a microbial consortium capable of degrading tech-HCH. Conditions such as induction, inoculum level, concentration of the substrate, pH of degradation and interaction between isomers were optimized for tech-HCH degradation. Up to 25 ppm tech-HCH was degraded at an inoculum level of 100 microg protein/mL, pH 7.5 at ambient temperature (26-28 degrees C). The degradation of HCH-isomers was in the order of gamma>alpha>beta>delta. The rate of degradation was also determined.     

Dentistry scientometric analysis: a comparative study between Brazil and other most productive countries in the area

This research aims at performing a comparative study between the Brazilian scientific production in Dentistry, from 2000 to 2009 and countries that contribute with at least 2 % of the world’s scientific production indexed in the Scopus database. More specifically, we intend to assess the annual Brazilian scientific production by comparing it to the other countries’, analyze the Brazilian and other countries’ publications in journals with higher impact factors, as well as to highlight the scientific production from these countries and its international visibility, measured by its total and by its average of citations and normalized citation index per year, by comparing the countries, and to compare the index h of such countries. As work procedure, the SCImago Journal and Country Rank was used as source, identifying the group of producing countries in the Dentistry area from 1996 to 2009. From a total of 136 countries, 13 were highlighted as the most productive, each one of them accounting for at least 2 % the worldwide scientific production in the area. The following indicators were raised for each country: number of produced documents, total of citations, self-citations, average of citations per document and index h. We verified that Brazil is the only country in Latin America that is pictured among the most productive ones in the Dentistry area. We observed that Brazil presents a growing visibility and impact in the international scenery, what suggests that its production is constantly consolidating, with Brazilian scientific recognition in the main vehicles of dissemination in the area.     

Autonomy, security, and inequality: China, India, the United States, and the globalization of science and technology

Perhaps no three countries have benefited from the globalization of science and technology (S&T) more than India, China, and the United States. All three have leveraged the growing internationalization of innovation to offset weaknesses in their own national innovation systems. Still, globalization raises critical questions of autonomy, security, and equality, and in turn the political struggle over these three issues shapes the pace and scope of the globalization of S&T. Significant deterioration on any one of these criterion could lead to substantially less support among policy makers and the public for the globally networked system of innovation that appears to be emerging.     

International scientific collaboration of China: collaborating countries, institutions and individuals

Using bibliometric methods, we investigate China’s international scientific collaboration from three levels of collaborating countries, institutions and individuals. We design a database in SQL Server, and make analysis of Chinese SCI papers based on the corresponding author field. We find that China’s international scientific collaboration is focused on a handful of countries. Nearly 95 % international co-authored papers are collaborated with only 20 countries, among which the USA account for more than 40 % of all. Results also show that Chinese lineage in the international co-authorship is obvious, which means Chinese immigrant scientists are playing an important role in China’s international scientific collaboration, especially in English-speaking countries.