Informetrics and the study of science–society communications: a bibliometric scoping review

Scientometrics - The identification of environmental factors that explain differences in efficiency is essential for improving the results of public universities. A two-stage, semi-parametric...     

Investigating the quantity–quality relationship in scientific creativity: an empirical examination of expected residual variance and the tilted funnel hypothesis

Scientometrics - Among scientists who study scientific production, the relationship between the quantity of a scientist’s production and the quality of their work has long been a topic of...     

Influence of the international collaboration in the field of metric studies of science and technology: the case of Mexico (1971–2018)

Scientometrics - We perform a bibliometric analysis of the research production and impact of Mexican scholars involved in the area of metric studies of science and technology in the period...     

Internet practice and professional networks in Chilean science: Dependency or progress?

The conventional view depicts scientific communities in the developing world as globally isolated and dependent. Recent studies suggest that individual scientists tend to favor either local or international ties. Yet there are good reasons to believe that both kinds of ties are beneficial for knowledge production. Since they allow for the more efficient management of social networks, Internet technologies are expected to resolve this inverse relationship. They are also expected to decentralize access to resources within developing regions that have traditionally reflected an urban male bias. Elaborating upon science, development and social network perspectives, we examine the impact of the Internet in the Chilean scientific community, addressing the questions ‘to what extent is Internet use and experience associated with the size of foreign and domestic professional networks?’ and ‘are professional network resources equitably distributed across regional and demographical dimensions?’ We offer results from a communication network survey of 337 Chilean researchers working in both academic departments and research institutes. We introduce a new measure, ‘collaboration range’, to indicate the extent to which scientists engage in work with geographically dispersed contacts. Results suggest that larger foreign networks are associated with higher email use and diversity, but local networks are smaller with longer use of the Internet. Diversity of email use is also associated with diverse geographical networks. Moreover, Internet use may be reducing the significance of international meetings for scientific collaboration and networking. Finally, results also show that in the Internet age professional network resources are distributed symmetrically throughout the Chilean scientific community.     

Introduction—Up,down, round and round: Verticalities in the history of science

History of science's spatial turn has focused on the horizontal dimension, leaving the role of the vertical mostly unexplored as both a condition and object of scientific knowledge production. This special issue seeks to contribute to a burgeoning discussion on the role of verticality in modern sciences, building upon a wider interdisciplinary debate about the importance of the vertical and the volumetric in the making of modern lifeworlds. In this essay and in the contributions that follow, verticality appears as a condition of knowledge production—a set of movements and mobilities, technical challenges, political negotiations, and bodily hardships—and an object of scientific inquiry, requiring new techniques of mapping and visualisation and generative of new insights into physical processes and temporal change. By foregrounding the vertical, historians of science can gain new insights and tell new stories about how science is done in the field, the observatory, and the laboratory, and about how those sciences have helped build a modern, three-dimensional world.     

Same data—different results? Towards a comparative approach to the identification of thematic structures in science

Science studies are persistently challenged by the elusive structures of their subject matter, be it scientific knowledge or the various collectivities of researchers engaged with its production. Bibliometrics has responded by developing a strong and growing structural bibliometrics, which is concerned with delineating fields and identifying thematic structures. In the course of these developments, a concern emerged and is steadily growing. Do the sets of publications, authors or institutions we identify and visualise with our methods indeed represent thematic structures? To what extent are results of topic identification exercises determined by properties of knowledge structures, and to what extent are they determined by the approaches we use? Do we produce more than artefacts? These questions triggered the collective process of comparative topic identification reported in this special issue. The introduction traces the history of bibliometric approaches to topic identification, identifies the major challenges involved in these exercises, and introduces the contributions to the special issue.     

The state of science and technology in Africa (2000–2004): A scientometric assessment

This article reports for first time the state of science and technology in the African Continent on the basis of two scientometric indicators — number of research publications and number of patents awarded. Our analysis shows that Africa produced 68,945 publications over the 2000–2004 period or 1.8% of the World’s publications. In comparison India produced 2.4% and Latin America 3.5% of the World’s research. More detailed analysis reveals that research in Africa is concentrated in just two countries — South Africa and Egypt. These two counties produce just above 50% of the Continent’s publications and the top eight countries produce above 80% of the Continent’s research. Disciplinary analysis reveals that few African countries have the minimum number of scientists required for the functioning of a scientific discipline. Examination of the Continent’s inventive profile, as manifested in patents, indicates that Africa produces less than one thousand of the world’s inventions. Furthermore 88% of the Continent’s inventive activity is concentrated in South Africa. The article recommends that the African Governments should pay particular attention in developing their national research systems.     

The production of science in Africa: an analysis of publications in the science disciplines, 2000–2015

The importance of science in Africa has been gaining the interest of scholars and policymakers alike who find that the relationship between science and development is getting stronger than ever. Science in Africa continues to find its own place in the global world of science. However, there have not been any attempts in recent years to study the production of science in all African countries taken as a whole. In this bibliometric study, science in Africa is analyzed using the publications African countries have produced in the last 15 years i.e. from 2000 to 2015. It is not only the number of publications but also the research areas which are of great importance. Not many recent studies have examined the publication productivity of all African countries. The analysis undertaken here shows that a few countries, namely, South Africa, Egypt, Tunisia, Nigeria and Algeria are the leading countries. These produced the highest number of publications during 2000–2015. At the same time, some of the weakest countries in Africa have strengths in specific research areas and are thus able to contribute to knowledge production in those areas. The findings presented in the paper suggest the implications for development in Africa and the measures which could be taken.     

Road safety development in Europe: A decade of changes (2001–2010)

To evaluate the road safety development of a country over time, the percentage change in the number of road fatalities is traditionally the main indicator. However, simply considering the reduction in the road fatalities may not correctly reflect the real improvement in road safety because the transport circumstances of a country underlying the road fatalities also change every year. In this study, we present a new way for measuring the road safety performance change over time, which is to use the technique of data envelopment analysis (DEA) and the Malmquist productivity index. In doing so, we can not only focus on the evolution of road safety final outcomes within a given period, but also take the changes of different measures of exposure in the same period into account. In the application, the DEA-based Malmquist productivity index (DEA-MI) is used to measure the extent to which the EU countries have improved their road safety performance over the period 2001–2010. More objective and insightful results are obtained compared to the ones based on the traditional indicator. The results show considerable road safety progress in most of the Member States during these ten years, and the fatality risk rather than the fatality number on Europe's roads has actually been reduced by approximately half. However, the situation differed considerably from country to country. The decomposition of the DEA-MI into ‘efficiency change’ and ‘technical change’ further reveals that the bulk of the improvement during the last decade was attained through the adoption of productivity-enhancing new technologies throughout the road transport sector in Europe, rather than through the relatively underperforming countries catching up with those best-performing ones.     

Structure and evolution of innovation research in the last 60 years: review and future trends in the field of business through the citations and co-citations analysis

The field of innovation studies has grown considerably in the last four decades, which has led to the emergence of new approaches and theoretical aspects that need to be examined and considered. Therefore, this paper aims to understand what are the main theoretical pillars that support the structure of innovation theories and fields, how it evolved over the years and what are the directions that lead to future trends in innovation research. The procedure consists in a mix-methods using the citation and co-citation analysis associated with bibliometric methods, Social Network Analysis, and a systematic review of the literature. The results were validated by Delphi with academic specialists in innovation. Considering publications between 1956 and 2016 divided into four 15-years timespan, the longitudinal analysis results indicate the evolution of the main streams of thoughts that support the current innovation research fields and depict a research orientation for future works that can be developed to generate relevant contributions for the theoretical development of the area. This paper differentiates itself bringing results based on a large database, by the research methods employed, and by the perspective adopted provides solid contributions to the understanding of the past, present, and future of the scientific research in innovation to business administration field.     

What's New about the New Economy? Sources of Growth in the Managed and Entrepreneurial Economies

The purpose of this paper is to document the fundamental shiftthat is taking place in OECD countries. This shift is from themanaged economy to the entrepreneurial economy. While politiciansand policymakers have made a plea for guidance in the era ofentrepreneurship, scholars have been slow to respond. This paperattempts to make a first step identifying and articulating thesedifferences. We do this by contrasting the most fundamentalelements of the newly emerging entrepreneurial economy withthose of the managed economy. We identify 14 trade-offs confrontingthese two polar worlds. The common thread throughout these trade-offsis the increased role of new and small enterprises in the entrepreneurialeconomy. A particular emphasis is placed on changes in economicpolicy demanded by the entrepreneurial economy vis-à-visthe managed economy.     

Magnetically Induced Potential Noise (MIPN)—A New Method for the Characterization of Magnetic Materials and for New Sensor Applications

Abstract

This paper discusses a new methodology for characterizing the magnetic properties of ferromagnetic materials. The method uses an alternating electric current to periodically magnetize ferromagnetic materials. The periodic magnetization generates a high-frequency electric potential noise between two electrodes within the excitation circuit. The magnetically induced electric potential noise (MIPN) is related to the discontinuous processes that occur during magnetization similar to magnetic Barkhausen noise. This paper discusses the results of several experiments that measured both electric potential noise and Barkhausen noise signal. A comparison of the results showed that the MIPN correlates directly to magnetic Barkhausen noise. The MIPN signal is small when compared to Barkhausen noise, but it is still easy to measure under laboratory conditions. Therefore, MIPN could be an efficient technique for materials characterization and sensor technology, for example, as fiber stress sensors in a composite aircraft component.     

Patent research in the field of library and information science: Less useful or difficult to explore?

Patents and relevant topics are gaining momentum in economic analysis and scientific research with the rapid global intellectual property filings growth. However, a corresponding increase seems to be unspectacular in patent research publications, especially under the category of information science and library science. This paper provided a retrospect to the existing studies on patents collected from web of science and emphatically characterized the current situation through performing a series of bibliometric analysis. Prominent authors and institutions from mainland China, Taiwan and Belgium have carried out various studies on patent separately or jointly. Topics involved in 884 journal papers are reclassified from perspectives of the development, application and analysis of patents based on the results of keyword co-occurrence and typical publications in each stage. The final, but the novel part of this study was a sentence-by-sentence analysis of conclusive and citing ideas of recent publications, for tracing problems and potential researchable topics and indicating that patent research still has more spaces to move up.     

Mechanical properties of (Y-TZP) — alumina-silicon carbide nanocomposites and the phase stability of Y-TZP particles in it

Al₂O₃-SiC-ZrO₂ composites were investigated to obtain a better understanding of the effect of SiC particles and the stress-induced transformation of Y-TZP on its mechanical properties. The Al₂O₃-SiC-ZrO₂ composites were fabricated by hot pressing using -Al₂O₃, SiC and ZrO₂ mixtures. Fracture toughness and strength of Al₂O₃ were greatly improved by incorporating SiC and ZrO₂ particles which were located mainly inside and between Al₂O₃ grains, respectively. The toughening and strengthening mechanism of these composites and the phase stability of the tetragonal ZrO₂ in the composites before and after high-temperature annealing were investigated by scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction. It was observed that there is a critical volume fraction of zirconia, above which the phase stability of the tetragonal zirconia increases, despite the grain growth of the zirconia. It is considered that another phenomenon, the residual stresses, affect the phase stability of the tetragonal zirconia. To remove the residual stresses the composites were annealed at 1100 °C. After slow cooling, the tetragonal zirconia became very unstable, especially in samples with the highest fabrication temperature and increasing zirconia content. Even quenching from 1100 °C caused an increase in the monoclinic phase of these samples.     

Nanoscience in the era of global science and global change—Cooperative,quantitative, and focused on benefit to humanity

Nanoscience has emerged as a powerful new discipline that unites and empowers conventionally disparate scientific and engineering disciplines with a common perspective.     

Carbonation in concrete infrastructure in the context of global climate change – Part 1: Experimental results and model development

There is nearly unanimous consensus amongst scientists that increasing greenhouse gas emissions, including CO₂ generated by human activity, are effecting the Earth’s climate. Increasing atmospheric CO₂ emissions will likely increase the rates of carbonation in reinforced concrete structures. However, there is a lack of reliable models to predict the depth of carbonation as a function of time.To address this deficiency, a numerical model involving simultaneous solution of the transient diffusion and reaction equations of CO₂ and Ca(OH)₂ was developed. The model successfully includes the effects of variations in various properties such as porosity, humidity, temperature, atmospheric CO₂ concentrations and chemical reaction rates.The applicability of the model was confirmed after calibration using data from accelerated carbonation experiments, and the model is used to evaluate the possible effects of climate change by inputting various future climate scenarios in Part 2.     

The dynamics of the studies of China’s science,technology and innovation (STI): a bibliometric analysis of an emerging field

Scientometrics - Since 1978, alongside China’s rise as a leading country in science, technology and innovation (STI), the studies of the country’s STI have been emerging as a field...     

Letters to the editor in exercise science and physical therapy journals: an examination of content and “authorship inflation”

Scientometrics - Letters to the editor are often critiques of published research papers. Journal editors acknowledge the importance of letters in post-publication review, yet the themes of letters...     

The increasing dominance of science in the economy: Which nations are successful?

Scientometrics - We analyzed breakthrough patents that serve as the basis of emerging technological trajectories and paradigm over 25-years. The results showed that although technological fields...