Quantifying the ease of scientific discovery

It has long been known that scientific output proceeds on an exponential increase, or more properly, a logistic growth curve. The interplay between effort and discovery is clear, and the nature of the functional form has been thought to be due to many changes in the scientific process over time. Here I show a quantitative method for examining the ease of scientific progress, another necessary component in understanding scientific discovery. Using examples from three different scientific disciplines - mammalian species, chemical elements, and minor planets - I find the ease of discovery to conform to an exponential decay. In addition, I show how the pace of scientific discovery can be best understood as the outcome of both scientific output and ease of discovery. A quantitative study of the ease of scientific discovery in the aggregate, such as done here, has the potential to provide a great deal of insight into both the nature of future discoveries and the technical processes behind discoveries in science.     

Ranking scientific publications considering the aging characteristics of citations

Ranking the significance of scientific publications has been a challenging topic for a long time. So far, many ranking methods have been proposed, one of which is the well-known PageRank algorithm. In this paper, we introduce aging characteristics to the PageRank algorithm via considering only the first 10 year citations when aggregating resource from different nodes. The validation of our new method is performed on the data of American Physical Society journals. The results indicate that taking into account aging characteristics improves the performance of the PageRank algorithm in terms of ranking accuracy for both papers and authors. Though our method is only applied to citation networks in this paper, it can be naturally used in many other real systems and similar improvements are expected.

     

Delineating the scientific footprint in technology: Identifying scientific publications within non-patent references

Indicators based on non-patent references (NPRs) are increasingly being used for measuring and assessing science–technology interactions. But NPRs in patent documents contain noise, as not all of them can be considered ‘scientific’. In this article, we introduce the results of a machine-learning algorithm that allows identifying scientific references in an automated manner. Using the obtained results, we analyze indicators based on NPRs, with a focus on the difference between NPR- and scientific non-patent references-based indicators. Differences between both indicators are significant and dependent on the considered patent system, the applicant country and the technological domain. These results signal the relevancy of delineating scientific references when using NPRs to assess the occurrence and impact of science–technology interactions.     

Review and analysis of publications on scientific mobility: assessment of influence,motivation, and trends

Scientometrics - The phenomenon of scientific mobility, actively developing in recent decades, attracts increasing attention of researchers in view of its importance for the development of science,...     

A nonlinear collective credit allocation in scientific publications

Scientometrics - Collaboration among researchers plays an important role in scientific discoveries, especially in multidisciplinary research. How to allocate credit reasonably to coauthors of a...     

Delimitation of scientific subfields using cognitive words from corporate addresses in scientific publications

An appropriate delimitation of scientific subfields constitutes one of the key problems in bibliometrics. Several methods have been explored for this task. The main ones are co-citation analysis, co-word analysis, the use of indexing systems based on controlled or uncontrolled keywords, and finally the use of a classification of scientific journals into subfields or categories. In our contribution we will explore a new method, which is based on cognitive words from addresses (corporate sources) in scientific publications. Cognitive address words are words referring to scientific (sub)fields, methods or objects of research, that appear in the institutional affiliations of the publishing authors (e.g., Department of Pharmacology, AIDS Research Center). We will focus on theScience Citation Index (SCI), published by the Institute for Scientific Information. Our methods will be applied to a multidisciplinary set of articles extracted from the journalsScience andNature.     

Evaluation of some methods for the relative assessment of scientific publications

Some bibliometric methods for the assessment of the publication activity of research units are discussed on the basis of impact factors and citations of papers. Average subfield impact factor of periodicals representing subfields in chemistry is suggested. This indicator characterizes the average citedness of a paper in a given subfield. Comparing the total sum of impact factors of corresponding periodicals divided by the number of papers published by a research team to the average subfield impact factor a publication strategy indicator can be derived. A new bibliometric indicator, relative subfield impact, is introduced which compares the number of citations received by papers of a research unit to the average subfield impact factor.     

Do age and professional rank influence the order of authorship in scientific publications? Some evidence from a micro-level perspective

Scientific authorship has important implications in science since it reflects the contribution to research of the different individual scientists and it is considered by evaluation committees in research assessment processes. This study analyses the order of authorship in the scientific output of 1,064 permanent scientists at the Spanish CSIC (WoS, 1994–2004). The influence of age, professional rank and bibliometric profile of scientists over the position of their names in the byline of publications is explored in three different research areas: Biology and Biomedicine, Materials Science and Natural Resources. There is a strong trend for signatures of younger researchers and those in the lower professional ranks to appear in the first position (junior signing pattern), while more veteran or highly-ranked ones, who tend to play supervisory functions in research, are proportionally more likely to sign in the last position (senior signing pattern). Professional rank and age have an effect on authorship order in the three fields analysed, but there are inter-field differences. Authorship patterns are especially marked in the most collaboration-intensive field (i.e. Biology and Biomedicine), where professional rank seems to be more significant than age in determining the role of scientists in research as seen through their authorship patterns, while age has a more significant effect in the least collaboration-intensive field (Natural Resources).     

Participation of Mexican Civil Society Organizations in scientific publications

Scientometrics - We present a bibliometric study, from the perspective of the mode 2 knowledge production, from a transdisciplinary point of view (Gibbons et al. in The new production of knowledge:...     

Retraction of global scientific publications from 2001 to 2010

Retraction is a self-cleaning activity done in the global science community. In this study, the retraction of global scientific publications from 2001 to 2010 was quantitatively analyzed by using the Science Citation Index Expanded. The results indicated that the number of retractions increased faster compared to the number of global scientific publications. Three very different patterns of retraction existed in each field. In the multi-disciplinary category and in the life sciences, retraction was relatively active. The impact factor strongly correlated with the number of retractions, but did not significantly correlate with the rate of retraction. Although the increases in the number of publications in China, India, and South Korea were faster, their retraction activities were higher than the worldwide average level.     

Citation histories of scientific publications. The data sources

Some 160 data-containing studies on the citation aging of scientific literature are reviewed. The hitherto proposed time-distribution models are examined for relevant parameter values.     

Quantifying scientific collaboration impact by exploiting collaboration-citation network

Despite the growing interest in exploring the collaboration patterns and the structure of collaboration networks, the impact of collaboration associated with time-varying scholarly networks is hardly known. This paper investigates collaboration and productivity in a science career and quantifies the impact of collaboration in the collaboration-citation network. Moreover, this paper also investigates collaboration patterns and examines the typical duration of research collaborations. A SCIRank model is proposed to quantify the impact of scientific collaboration, which not only reveals the impact of co-author pairs but also identifies scholarly papers with the outstanding impact that leads to Nobel Prize awards.

     

Distribution of publications as an indicator for the evaluation of scientific programs

This article describes investigations into the publication behaviour of scientific authors from the GDR. The obtained data revealed that — analogous to the Lotka-distribution — not only a fifth of all authors produce half of the publications of a certain institute, but that these authors also have a quicker reaction time and receptivity to new international research problems. These findings may make it possible to substantiate proposals by guiding scientists in the direction of themes, respectively to help the science policy in the process of the elaboration of new research programs.     

Measuring the impact of scientific publications. The case of the biomedical sciences

The bibliometric indicators currently used to assess scientific production have a serious flaw: a notable bias is produced when different subfields are compared. In this paper we demonstrate the existence of this bias using the impact factor (IF) indicator. The impact factor is related to the quality of a published article, but only when each specific subfield is taken separately: only 15.6% of the subfields we studied were found to have homogeneous means. The bias involved can be very misleading when bibliometric estimators are used as a basis for assigning research funds. To improve this situation, we propose a new estimator, the RPU, based on a normalization of the impact factor that minimizes bias and permits comparison among subfields. The RPU of a journal is calculated with the formula: RPU=10(1-exp (-IF/x)), where IF is the impact factor of the journal and x the mean IF for the subfield in which the journal belongs. The RPU retains the advantages of the impact factor: simplicity of calculation, immediacy and objectivity, and increases homogeneous subfields from 15.6% to 93.7%.     

Statistical reliability of comparisons based on the citation impact of scientific publications

A method for estimating the standard error of mean citation rates per publication is proposed and examplified on journal impact factors. The use of the standard error values in statistical tests is also illustrated.     

Collaboration patterns of Taiwanese scientific publications in various research areas

This paper employs bibliometric methods to observe collaboration patterns of scientific publications in biotechnology, information and computer technology, future energy, and nanotechnology among different institutions in Taiwan. The results show primary domestic and international collaborative patterns, the effect of collaborative papers on the world-wide average, collaborative networks, and the distribution of institutions on global map. The findings suggest that domestic collaboration in each area is higher in proportion than international collaboration. Biotechnology leads in both domestic and international collaborative percentage. Among cooperative benchmarking countries, the US and China are the main partners. Collaboration among research institutes and universities is the most frequent collaborative pattern in each area except biotechnology, which tends to occur between hospitals and universities. On average, international collaborative papers tend to have greater effect, except in nanotechnology. Academia Sinica collaborated frequently with foreign institutes in each research field. A further analysis on how each collaborative group forms is recommended, especially collaboration among the Triple-Helix relationships.