Bibliometric characteristics of highly cited papers from Taiwan, 2000–2009

The present study analyzes bibliometric characteristics of Taiwan??s highly cited papers published from 2000 to 2009. During this period, Taiwan ranked within the top 30 countries by number of highly cited papers, defined in Thomson Reuters?? Essential Science Indicators (ESI) as those that rank in the top 1?% by citations for their category and year of publication. Taiwan made notable progress in world-class research in the two consecutive 5-year periods 2000?C2004 and 2005?C2009. For the group of highly cited papers from Taiwan, USA, China, Germany, and Japan were the top collaborating countries over the decade. In recent years, Taiwan has increasingly collaborated with European countries whose output of highly cited papers is relatively high and increasing, rather than with its neighboring countries in Asia. Overall, Taiwan produced highly cited papers in all the 22 ESI subject categories during the 10-year period. Taiwan??s output of highly cited papers was greatest in the categories of Engineering, Clinical Medicine, and Physics, while those in Agricultural Sciences and Mathematics exceeded the expected output level in relative terms. More detailed analyses would be useful for a holistic understanding of Taiwan??s research landscape and their progress in world-class research, combining both bibliometric and non-bibliometric data, such as researcher mobility, research grants, and output from internationally-collaborated research programs.     

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.     

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.     

The dangers of performance-based research funding in non-competitive higher education systems

An increasing number of nations allocate public funds to research institutions on the basis of rankings obtained from national evaluation exercises. Therefore, in non-competitive higher education systems where top scientists are dispersed among all the universities, rather than concentrated among a few, there is a high risk of penalizing those top scientists who work in lower-performance universities. Using a 5 year bibliometric analysis conducted on all Italian universities active in the hard sciences from 2004 to 2008, this work analyzes the distribution of publications and relevant citations by scientists within the universities, measures the research performance of individual scientists, quantifies the intensity of concentration of top scientists at each university, provides performance rankings for the universities, and indicates the effects of selective funding on the top scientists of low-ranked universities.     

Variability of research performance across disciplines within universities in non-competitive higher education systems

Many nations are adopting higher education strategies that emphasize the development of elite universities able to compete at the international level in the attraction of skills and resources. Elite universities pursue excellence in all their disciplines and fields of action. The impression is that this does not occur in “non-competitive” education systems, and that instead, within single universities excellent disciplines will coexist with mediocre ones. To test this, the authors measure research productivity in the hard sciences for all Italian universities over the period 2004–2008 at the levels of the institution, their individual disciplines and fields within them. The results show that the distribution of excellent disciplines is not concentrated in a few universities: top universities show disciplines and fields that are often mediocre, while generally mediocre universities will often include top disciplines.     

Explaining the transatlantic gap in research excellence

The paper exploits a newly created dataset offering several detailed bibliometric data and indicators on 251 subject categories for a large sample of universities in Europe, North America and Asia. In particular, it addresses the controversial issue of the distance between Europe and USA in research excellence (so called “transatlantic gap”). By building up indicators of objective excellence (top 10% worldwide in publications and citations) and subjective excellence (top 10% in the distribution of share of top journals out of total production at university level), it is shown that European universities fail to achieve objective measures of global excellence, while being competitive only in few fields. The policy implications of this state of affairs are discussed.     

A made-to-measure indicator for cross-disciplinary bibliometric ranking of researchers performance

This paper presents and discusses a new bibliometric indicator of research performance, designed with the fundamental concern of enabling cross-disciplinary comparisons. The indicator, called x-index, compares a researcher??s output to a reference set of research output from top researchers, identified in the journals where the researcher has published. It reflects publication quantity and quality, uses a moderately sized data set, and works with a more refined definition of scientific fields. x-index was developed to rank researchers in a scientific excellence award in the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto. The data set collected for the 2009 edition of the award is used to study the indicator??s features and design choices, and provides the basis for a discussion of its advantages and limitations.     

Authors’ sources of information: a new dimension in information scattering

The purpose of this study is to determine the usage patterns of core journals by scholars, and to address the differences among various academic disciplines. Thus, the references of 11,230 corresponding authors for the past 35?years from the world??s top five highly cited universities and institutions were analyzed. To build robust models of information scattering, we need a deeper understanding of this phenomenon. The results show that core journals usage is a social phenomenon, in exactly the same way as Bradford??s law, Zipf??s law and Lotka??s law. The analysis of author references shows that if core scientific journals are arranged in order of decreasing productivity, then they could be divided into a small group of highly cited periodicals and a large group of minimally cited ones. Scholars may do browsing and similar information-seeking activities to form their core journals, and the findings may support Bates??s hypothesis that Bradford??s core zone is best searched by browsing. Bradford??s law and relevant research may consequently help to solve many of the practical problems that practitioners of the profession face, particularly in collection development in libraries, and help users to gather highly scattered information.     

Benchmarking international scientific excellence: Are highly cited research papers an appropriate frame of reference?

This paper introduces a citation-based "systems approach" for analyzing the various institutional and cognitive dimensions of scientific excellence within national research systems. The methodology, covering several aggregate levels, focuses on the most highly cited research papers in the international journal literature. The distribution of these papers across institutions and disciplines enables objective comparisons their (possible) international-level scientific excellence. By way of example, we present key results from a recent series of analyses of the research system in the Netherlands in the mid 1990s, focussing on the performance of the universities across the various major scientific disciplines within the context of the entire system"s scientific performance. Special attention is paid to the contribution in the world"s top 1% and top 10% most highly cited research papers. The findings indicate that these high performance papers provide a useful analytical framework - both in terms of transparency, cognitive and institutional differentiation, as well as its scope for domestic and international comparisons - providing new indicators for identifying "world class" scientific excellence at the aggregate level. The average citation scores of these academic "Centres of Scientific Excellence" appear to be an inadequate predictor of their production of highly cited papers. However, further critical reflection and in-depth validation studies are needed to establish the true potential of this approach for science policy analyses and evaluation of research performance. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Visibility in international rankings. Strategies for enhancing the competitiveness of Spanish universities

The world-wide popularity of university rankings has spurred the debate about the quality and performance of higher education systems and has had a considerable impact on global society in light of the internationalisation of higher education. While useful for policy makers, such rankings also furnish information on an institution’s “prestige”, which may in turn contribute to more effective resource capture (students, funding, projects). Certain university profiles and missions may prevent many universities from climbing to higher positions, however. One important question in this regard is: how many of a country’s universities can stand at the top of international rankings? The present article attempts to answer this question on the grounds of a study of the Spanish higher education system, and more specifically of an institutional alliance consisting of four high quality universities. A series of research activity indicators drawn from the IUNE Observatory are used to compare this alliance to leading Spanish and international universities and explore whether their visibility and consequently their position in international rankings would be enhanced if they were able to appear under a joint identity. This prospective study also addresses a series of strategies that the Spanish higher education system might implement to successfully rise to the challenges posed by future scenarios.     

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.     

Research evaluation of research-oriented universities in Taiwan from 1993 to 2003

Publications have been regarded as the most significant output indicating the research performance of universities. This paper uses ISI Essential Science Indicators (ESI) database to investigate the academic performance of research-oriented universities in Taiwan, adopting the bibliometric method from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. The data cover the time span for 11 years from 1993 to 2003. The performance indicators applied in this study includes the number of papers, the number of citations, the average citations per paper, the number of highly cited papers, the number of hot papers, and the number of top papers. The research performance and the strength of those universities are revealed in this study, and it is found that National Taiwan University leads among these universities though each university still shows strengths in various specific fields.     

China and India: The two new players in the nanotechnology race

Nanotechnology is promising to be the ??transformative?? technology of the 21st century with its boundless potential to revolutionize a wide range of industries. Stakes are high as projected estimate of market value and economic and social benefits are immense for countries that can attain competency in this technology. This has stimulated OECD countries as well as emerging economies to channel huge resources for developing core capabilities in this technology. Unlike, other key technologies, recent influential reports highlight China in particular and to some extent India, Brazil and other emerging economies competing with advanced OECD countries in ??nanotechnology??. The present paper investigates through bibliometric and innovation indicators to what extent China and India have been able to assert their position in the global stage. The paper also underscores the importance of capturing indications from standards and products/processes along with publications and patents to capture more accurately the latent variable ??performance??. Study shows that China??s progress is remarkable; it has already attained leading position in publications and standard development. India is making its presence more visible particularly in publications. China??s research is more sophisticated and addresses nano-materials and its applications whereas India??s research shows healthy trend towards addressing developmental problems.     

The different flavors of research collaboration: a case study of their influence on university excellence in four world regions

This study on research collaboration (RC) is an attempt to estimate the degree of internationalization of academic institutions and regions. Furthermore potential influences of RC on excellence initiatives of modern universities are investigated relying on source data obtained from SCImago Institutions Rankings. A positive correlation exists between the degree of collaboration and the normalized impact. However, in contrast to output the normalized impact increase progression is non-linear and fluctuating. Differences occur regarding output volume and normalized impact at geographical region level for the leading universities. Different patterns of the Brute force distribution for each collaboration type were also observed at region level as well as at subject area level. A continuously reduced percentage of the domestic (non-collaboration) academic output is a world trend, whereas a steady increase of ??international?+?national?? collaboration is observed globally, however, less distinctive in Asia than in the other regions. The impact of Latin American papers originating from domestic production as well as from national collaboration remains considerably below world average values.     

Absolute and specific measures of research group excellence

A desirable goal of scientific management is to introduce, if it exists, a simple and reliable way to measure the scientific excellence of publicly funded research institutions and universities to serve as a basis for their ranking and financing. While citation-based indicators and metrics are easily accessible, they are far from being universally accepted as way to automate or inform evaluation processes or to replace evaluations based on peer review. Here we consider absolute measurements of research excellence at an amalgamated, institutional level and specific measures of research excellence as performance per head. Using biology research institutions in the UK as a test case, we examine the correlations between peer review-based and citation-based measures of research excellence on these two scales. We find that citation-based indicators are very highly correlated with peer-evaluated measures of group strength, but are poorly correlated with group quality. Thus, and almost paradoxically, our analysis indicates that citation counts could possibly form a basis for deciding on, how to fund research institutions, but they should not be used as a basis for ranking them in terms of quality.     

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.     

Taiwan��s National Health Insurance Research Database: administrative health care database as study object in bibliometrics

The trend to use administrative health care databases as research material is increasing but not well explored. Taiwan??s National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD), one of the largest administrative health care databases around the world, has been used widely in academic studies. This study analyzed 383 NHIRD studies published between 2000 and 2009 to quantify the effects on overall growth, scholar response, and spread of the study fields. The NHIRD studies expanded rapidly in both quantity and quality since the first study was published in 2000. Researchers usually collaborated to share knowledge, which was crucial to process the NHIRD data. However, once the fundamental problem had been overcome, success to get published became more reproducible. NHIRD studies were also published diversely in a growing number of journals. Both general health and clinical science studies benefited from NHIRD. In conclusion, this new research material widely promotes scientific production in a greater magnitude. The experience of Taiwan??s NHIRD should encourage national- or institutional-level data holders to consider re-using their administrative databases for academic purposes.     

Regional development and interregional collaboration in the growth of nanotechnology research in China

China is becoming a leading nation in terms of its share of the world??s publications in the emerging nanotechnology domain. This paper demonstrates that the international rise of China??s position in nanotechnology has been underwritten by the emergence of a series of regional hubs of nanotechnology R&D activity within the country. We develop a unique database of Chinese nanotechnology articles covering the period 1990 to mid-2006 to identify the regional distribution of nanotechnology research in China. To build this database, a new approach was developed to clean and standardize the geographical allocation of Chinese publication records. We then analyze the data to understand the regional development of nanotechnology research in China over our study period and to map interregional and international research collaboration linkages. We find that the geographical distribution of China??s domestic nanotechnology research is characterized by regional imbalance, with most of the leading regions located in eastern China, including not only Beijing and Shanghai but also a series of other new regional hubs. There is much less development of nanotechnology research in central and western China. Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong are among the leading Chinese regions for international nanotechnology research collaboration. Other Chinese nanotechnology regions are less focused on international collaboration, although they have developed domestic interregional collaborations. Although new regional research hubs have emerged in the nanotechnology domain, the paper notes that their concentration in eastern China reinforces existing imbalances in science and technology capabilities in China, and in turn this may further reinforce the dominant position of eastern China in the commercialization of new technologies such as nanotechnology.     

浅谈动画专业素描基础教育的创造性培养

每年大量涌入高校的艺术类新生源源不绝,面对绘画基础仅仅为应试水平的大一新生,大多高校往往按照传统的培养模式,走流程式的完成教学任务,学生依然延续着高中的应试绘画与思想理念,往往不知大学继续学习素描有何作用。此类基础课程与自身专业有何联系,故此导致教学效果欠佳,如果学校依旧不采取有效调整教学,必将是一个恶性循环。这是笔者作为一名动画教师在长年的基础教学中的观察与体会。如今的专业基础教育还需要很多的改善与完备之处,希望早日改变目前的教育现状,使学生能从基础课就开始进入专业状态,使学生真正的学有所用。     

Performance evaluation of research universities in Mainland China,Hong Kong and Taiwan: based on a two-dimensional approach

For a long time, rankings overused in evaluating Chinese universities’ research performance. The relationship between research production and research quality hasn’t been taken seriously in ranking systems. Most university rankings in China put more weight on research production rather than research quality. Recently, the developmental strategy of Chinese universities has shifted from ‘quantity’ to ‘quality’. As a result, a two-dimensional approach was developed in this article to balance ‘quantity’ and ‘quality’. The research production index and the research quality index were produced to locate research universities (RU) from Mainland China, Hong Kong (HK) and Taiwan (TW) in the two-dimensional graph. Fifty-nine RU were classified into three categories according to their locations, which indicated the relevant level of research performance. University of Hong Kong, National Taiwan University, Tsing Hua University and Peking University appeared to be leading universities in research performance. The result showed that the mainland universities were generally of higher research production and lower research quality than HK and TW universities, and proved that the merging tides of Chinese universities enlarged their research production while causing a low level of research quality as well.