Product and process innovation in manufacturing firms: a 30-year bibliometric analysis

In recent decades, internationalization of research activities has increased, as demonstrated by the phenomena of international scientific collaboration and international mobility of researchers. This paper investigates whether the international scientific collaboration is explained by researchers’ motivation as well as their international migration. Using metadata from papers published in Nature and Science from 1989 to 2009, count data estimation was conducted. The results illustrate those researchers’ international migration and motivation, shown by both synergy and difference effects between countries, explain international collaboration. This implies that international co-authorship in recent decades has been based on researchers’ motivation as well as their networking. The positive result for synergy effects also means that pairs of countries with rich research environments tended to have more international collaboration, which may lead to the convergence of qualified research output in advanced scientific countries. Our findings also support the conclusion that researchers move to countries with better research environments, but networks created through international collaboration are not a factor in international migration. The relationship between international mobility and collaboration is confirmed as going in one direction, from mobility to collaboration.     

International collaboration: Will it be keeping alive East European research?

International scientific collaboration is very sensitive to political and economic changes in a country or a geopolitical region. Collaboration in research is reflected by the corresponding coauthorship of the published results which can be analysed with the help of bibliometric methods. Based on data from theScience Citation Index (SCI), the change of annual international coauthorship patterns ofBulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland andRomania have been analysed for the periods 1981–1985 and 1984–1993, respectively. It is shown that international collaboration was not developing similarly in the countries under study. Whilst scientific communities of Hungary and Poland have already been opening in the early 80s, the international collaboration of the other East-European countries was still dominated by COMECON relations till 1989. As expected, since 1990 an increasing scientific collaboration with highly developed countries can be observed in all five countries. At the same time, scientific collaboration with the former communist countries shows a clear decline. The great share of international co-authorship links is some countries reflect various tendencies part of which are interpreted with the help of a cardiologic model.     

The evolutionary patterns of knowledge production in Korea

The recent trend of rapid growth in the scientific and engineering activities in East Asian Newly Industrializing Economies (NIEs) resulted in a change in the structure of world knowledge production. In South Korea, particularly, not only the numbers of publications have increased, but there is a noticeable change in the composition of scientific and engineering activities. This paper notes the most of the research on the knowledge production of advanced countries, along with a handful of studies about the knowledge production of latecomers. Recent changes in the patterns of knowledge production in latecomer countries provoke the deeper understanding about the underlying mechanisms of ongoing change. Therefore, this paper explores the patterns of knowledge production activities in latecomers by analyzing scientific and engineering capabilities using empirical evidence from Korea. The results suggest that the patterns of accumulation of knowledge production in Korea gradually evolved from engineering to scientific activities. Important policy implications can be drawn from the findings for supporting scientific and engineering research activity in the latecomers in general and NIEs in particular.     

Regulating research: a tale of two technologies

This paper challenges the widely held view that research activities are impaired by the imposition of any form of governmental regulation. Research on topics which raise ethical concerns requires guidelines or rules along with an administrative apparatus in order for significant levels of research activity to be undertaken. This regulatory framework can emerge only after the ethical issues are addressed. Thus, there is a direct connection between the resolution of ethical issues and the production of new scientific information. Two research areas which have strong ethical overtones are compared. In the case of recombinant DNA technology, consideration of ethical issues has led to the establishment guidelines and a regulatory apparatus and has made possible the vigorous development of this field. In the reproductive technologies, such as in vitro fertilization, the failure to confront the ethical dilemmas in the US has prevented guidelines from being established and has severely handicapped the development of research programs. Other countries, such as the UK, by taking account of the ethical issues have been able to create policies thatpermit research to proceed.     

Neo-colonial science by the most industrialised upon the least developed countries in peer-reviewed publishing

We are currently experiencing an era that is facing increasing global environmental and societal problems (e.g., climate change, habitat destruction and economic recession). Scientific research projects are often required to emphasize and counter the effects of inequity and globalisation, and prioritise cooperation supported by cooperative research. This paper investigates whether publication of research that is carried out in least developed countries is done in cooperation with research institutes from these countries. The study uses the Current Contents database of peer-reviewed publications from more than 7,000 journals in all sciences (Biology and environmental sciences; Physical, chemical and earth sciences; Engineering, computing and technology; Life sciences; Clinical medicine; Arts and humanities; Social and behavioral sciences) published between 1 January 1999 and 3 November 2000. From a total of 1,601,196 papers published, 2,798 articles of research activities carried out in the 48 least developed countries were selected using title information as an indicator. Collaborative relationships between research institutions involved was then analysed within and between countries and sciences. Our results show that publications of research, carried out in the least developed countries, do not have co-authorship of local research institutes in 70% of the cases, and that a majority of the papers is published by research institutes from the most industrialised countries in the world. We employed the use of questionnaires sent to authors from papers in the above-mentioned database to detect possible causes of this high percentage of lack of authorship in the essential academic currency that 'publications' are. 'Neo-colonial science' is identified as one of them. In addition, there exists a large discrepancy between what the surveyed scientists say they find important in international collaboration and joint publishing, and the way they act to it. However, the interpretation given to the fact that institutional co-authorship is underrepresented for local research institutions in the least developed countries is less important than the fact itself, and future research should concentrate on a scientific way to equilibrate this adverse trend. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Intellectual structure of Antarctic science: A 25-years analysis

To delineate the intellectual structure of Antarctic science, the research outputs on Antarctic science have been analyzed for a period of 25 years (1980–2004) through a set of scientometrics and network analysis techniques. The study is based on 10,942 records (research articles, letters, reviews, etc.), published in 961 journals/documents, and retrieved from the Science Citation Index (SCI) database. Over the years interest in Antarctic science has increased, as is evident from the growing number of ratified countries and research stations. During the period under study, the productivity has increased 3-times and there is a 13-fold increase in collaborative articles. Attempt has been made to identify important players like scientists, organizations and countries working in the field and to identify frontier areas of research that is being conducted in this continent. The highest 41% scientific output is contributed by the USA and the UK, followed by Australia and Germany. British Antarctic Survey (BAS), UK and Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar & Marine Research, Germany are the most productive institutes in Antarctic science. Maximum number of research articles on Antarctic science, have been published in the journal Polar Biology, indicating substantial work being done on the biology of this continent. The journals — Nature and Science — are the highly-cited journals in Antarctic science. The paper written by J. C. Farman et al., published in Nature in 1985, reporting depletion of ozone layer, is the most-cited article. Semantic relationships between cited documents were measured through co-citation analysis. J. C. Farman and S. Solomon are co-cited most frequently.     

Characterizing a scientific elite (B): publication and citation patterns of the most highly cited scientists in environmental science and ecology

Science is principally driven by the efforts of a vanishingly small fraction of researchers publishing the majority of scientific research and garnering the majority of citations. Despite this well-established trend, knowledge of exactly how many articles these researchers publish, how highly they are cited, and how they achieved their distinctive accomplishments is meager. This article examines the publication and citation patterns of the world’s most highly cited environmental scientists and ecologists, inquiring into their levels of scientific productivity and visibility, examining relationships between scientific productivity and quality within their research programs, and considering how different publication strategies contribute to these distinctive successes. Generally speaking, highly cited researchers are also highly productive, publishing on average well over 100 articles each. Furthermore, articles published by this group are more highly cited on average than articles published in premier generalist journal like Nature and Science, and their citation to publication ratios are more equitably distributed than is typical. Research specialization and primacy of authorship are important determinants of citation frequency, while geographic differences and collaborative propensity matter less. The article closes with a set of suggestions for those wishing to increase the use of their research by the scientific community.     

Basic science in the Islamic Republic of Iran

The population of Iran has nearly doubled in less than 25 years, while the number of university students has increased more than 10 times and 720 Ph. D. degrees have been awarded in basic science in the past 10 years. Despite the great difficulties that the Iranian scientists have been facing for more than two decades (as a consequence of a social revolution, 8 years of a destructive war imposed by Iraq, excessive brain drain, discriminatory practices by some international journals in publishing the Iranian articles, and unfair sanctions imposed by the industrialized countries) Iran's science is still thriving and the current number of yearly scientific publications exceeds 1500. When normalized with respect to the number of researchers and the research budget, the Iranian scientists seem to outperform most of their counterparts in the advanced industrialized nations. Main reason: total engagement in truncated research activities (basic or applied) leading solely to pure publications; lack of infrastructure for developmental research activities leading to new technologies. The average impact factor of the papers in various fields of basic science seems quite satisfactory considering the difficult conditions the Iranian scientists are working under. Should the research budgets and conditions improve and the unfair sanctions currently imposed by the world politics be eliminated, a far better contribution to the world science can be expected. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Scientific relations between Spain and central-Eastern European countries for the period 1982–1992

This paper analyzes the scientific relationships between Spain and the Eastern European countries (EEc), including the former USSR, from 1982 to 1992. The study considers the number of co-authored papers as well as the number of stays which reflect to the exchange of scientists among them. The total number of co-authored papers of Spanish scientists with their colleagues of those countries is 664 as recorded in theScience Citation Index. During the last three years, a significative increase in the number of co-signed papers has been observed. From the sample considered, the percentage of bilateral and multilateral co-authored papers is 43.8 and 56.2 respectively. In absolute figures, USSR and Poland are the countries with highest number of collaborative papers with Spain. However, in relation to their scientific output, Poland and Hungary show a higher percentage of co-authored papers than the rest of EEc. On the other hand, previous data, provided by the Spanish Secretary of State for Research and Universities (SEUI), related to the flow of scientists on sabbatical year to and from Spain,¹ showed that from 1984 to 1994, a total of 213 researches come from the EEc to Spain, while the number of Spanish scientists going to those countries was extremely scarce.     

On the supplementary functions of science and technology indicators

Starting from a simple phase model for scientific and technological progress the supplementary functions of various science and technology indicators are discussed. In particular, patent and literature indicators in the field of telecommunicationsR&D in West Germany are presented and compared. In addition, a few selected technometric,R&D expenditure, and trade data are included for the sake of completeness. This network of science and technology indicators is employed to analyse the institutional set up and the trends in telecommunicationsR&D on the macro-level (national level) as well as for singleR&D actors (institutional or micro-level). Further, the role of academic and other publicR&D in West Germany, including the regional distribution of activities and the specialization with respect to telecommunication subfields, are assessed. It is concluded that the various science and technology indicators — at least in the case of West German telecommunications —supplement each other. Synergisms between indicators do exist and should be explored better in future work. The case of telecommunications is ideal for such an exploratory assessment as it includes basic and applied research as well as strong industrial development activities.     

Citation frequency: A biased measure of research impact significantly influenced by the geographical origin of research articles

Context. The use of citation frequency and impact factor as measures of research quality and journal prestige is being criticized. Citation frequency is augmented by self-citation and for most journals the majority of citations originate from a minority of papers. We hypothesized that citation frequency is also associated with the geographical origin of the research publication. Objective. We determined whether citations originate more frequently from institutes that are located in the same country as the authors of the cited publication than would be expected by chance. Design. We screened citations referring to 1200 cardiovascular publications in the 7 years following their publication. For the 1200 citation recipient publications we documented the country where the research originated (9 countries/regions) and the total number of received citations. For a selection of 8864 citation donor papers we registered the country/region where the citing paper originated. Results. Self-citation was common in cardiovascular journals (n = 1534, 17.8%). After exclusion of self-citation, however, the number of citations that originated from the same country as the author of the citation recipient was found to be on average 31.6% higher than would be expected by chance (p<0.01 for all countries/regions). In absolute numbers, nation oriented citation bias was most pronounced in the USA, the country with the largest research output (p<0.001). Conclusion. Citation frequency was significantly augmented by nation oriented citation bias. This nation oriented citation behaviour seems to mainly influence the cumulative citation number for papers originating from the countries with a larger research output.     

The S & T potential of Mexico and Hungary

Mexico and Hungary carried out a survey of their national S & T potential in 1985–86, under the framework of the UNESCO International Comparative Study on the Organization and Performance of Research Units (ICSOPRU). A set of questionnaires were administered to heads of research institutions, heads of research units, and core members of research units. Comparison between both S & T systems shows that science is in a more advanced development stage in Hungary than in Mexico. The Hungarian scientific infrastructure is larger than the Mexican one by a factor of four. Also, science as an organized body of researchers is older in Hungary than in Mexico. Science in Hungary is more practically oriented than in Mexico. The S & T system in Hungary has strong links with the productive sector and hance gets substantial support from it. Mexican science, in contrast, is not strongly related to the productive sector, and does not get much financial support from it. Hungarian science is more internationally oriented. Hungarian researchers publish more than Mexican researchers, although a fraction of Mexican units have a publication rate comparable to highly productive Hungarian units. Both S & T systems have many needs in terms of human and material resources for work over the next four to six years. In-depth analysis of available data will shed more light about the S & T potential of both countries.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the XI. World Congress of Sociology, August, 1986, New Delhi, India.     

Scientific co-operation in Europe and the citation of multinationally authored papers

Under the sponsorship of the U.S. National Science Foundation, CHI Research, Inc. developed the bibliometric indicators for the U.S. National Science Board'sScience Indicators Reports starting withScience Indicators 1972. In the work reported here, for the Commission of the European Communities, CHI has extended the Science Indicators techniques and database to a study of publication, coauthorship and citation within 28 scientific fields related to various European Community programs.Perhaps the most important finding of the research was that internationally coauthored papers — papers authored by scientists affiliated with institutions in more than one EC country — were cited two times as highly as papers authored by scientists working at a single institution within a single country. These EC-EC internationally coauthored papers were cited as highly as EC-Non EC and Non-EC papers. This indicates that the internationally linked European science is of as high impact as any other science in the world.A second key finding was that, after compensating for national scientific size, the degree of international coauthorship did not appear to be particularly dependent upon size. However, linguistic and cultural factors were found to be very strong. The patterns of coauthorship amongst the European countries are far from homogeneous, and are quite heavily affected by linguistic, historical, and cultural factors.Finally, it was found that international coauthorship is increasing steadily, both within and outside of the Community, with some evidence that international cooperation is increasing more rapidly in scientific fields that have been targeted by the Commission.This work has been sponsored by the MONITOR programme of the Commission of the European Communities.     

Alphonse de Candolle's early scientometrics(1883, 1885) with references to recent trends in the field (1978–1983)

De Candolle analyzed in 1883 and 1885, respectively two important fields of human cultural evolution: the domestication of crop plants and the emergence of modern science. In hisHistoire de science et des savants depuis deux sciecles, principles were established, science indicators outlined, interactions examined and mathematical methods applied to the study of a selected data set related to scientific development. In order to compare national and international scientific communities twenty standard factors were considered and national participation in international scientific societies was analysed for 14 European countries and the United States.De Candolle was the first to analyse mathematically the number, dynamics and national distribution of scientists in their professional organisations, the specialization and professionalization of scientists and characterized the scientific potential of different countries with the number of international science society members per inhabitant per period (1750–1884). The role ofde Candolle as a forerunner of modern scientometrics and the science of science is revealed in a comparison of his work with recent trends. In the first five volumes of the journalScientometrics 51 papers were identified dealing with topics related to those dealt with byde Candolle.     

A new parameter for (normalized) evaluation of H-index: countries as a case study

It is known that the H-indexes of individuals, research groups, institutions, scientific journals, and countries strongly depend on the field of study, slowly increase with the number of publications, N, and can be described by empirical power-law functions of the type H?=?C?×?N^a (C and a are constants and depend on the specific field being analyzed). In this paper, we use this function and propose a new index [Montazerian–Zanotto–Eckert (MZE)], which is normalized by the number of publications and typically varies from ??1 to +?1, to characterize the relative standing of a research group, institution, or author to those of his/her peer groups. Due to the rich statistics available, as an example, here we analyzed and tested the new parameter against the citation-related performance (H-index) of countries. We found that the MZE index readily distinguishes between countries that stand above or below the average (for any given number of publications). Generally, publications of countries with a positive MZE index are more interesting or visible than the average. Analyzing publication output in this manner instead of the H-index allows for a less biased comparison between researchers, journals, universities, or countries for any particular combination of H-index and publication output.

     

Reasons for and developments in international scientific collaboration: does an Asia–Pacific research area exist from a bibliometric point of view?

This paper describes the different forms of and tries to give reasons for international scientific collaboration in general. It focuses on eleven countries in the Asia–Pacific region by evaluating their national research output with the help of bibliometric indicators in particular. Over two million journal articles published by these countries between 1998 and 2007 in ISI-listed periodicals are analyzed. Discipline-specific publication and citation profiles reveal national strengths and weaknesses in the different research domains. The exponential increase in publication output by China over the last few years is astonishing, but in terms of visibility, i.e. citation rates, China cannot keep up with leading science nations, remaining below the world average. A discipline-specific analysis shows that Chinese authors took an active part in more than a quarter of all articles and reviews published in the field of materials science in 2007, while their contribution to medical research is very low. Co-publication networks among the eleven countries are generated to observe the development of cooperation bonds in the region. Applying Salton’s measure of international collaboration strength, an above-average strengthening of scientific collaboration in the Asia–Pacific region can be observed.     

Modelling and measuring multilateral co-authorship in international scientific collaboration. Part I. Development of a new model using a series expansion approach

International co-operation has strongly intensified during the last decades owing to rapid developments in scientific communication. Economic, political, and intra-scientific factors also strongly influence international collaboration links among individual countries. Obviously research results of international scientific co-operation are reflected in the documented scientific communication as international co-authorship links in scientific publications. Most bibliometric studies on this issue pertain to the share of international co-authored papers in national publication output and their impact on national and international research, or to the analysis and mapping of the structure of collaboration links. The present study attempts to develop a model to measure and analyse the extent of multilateral international co-authorship links. A new indicator, the Multilateral Collaboration Index (ρ) is introduced and analysed as a function of the share of internationally co-authored papers (f). Based onf a series expansion approach is applied that can be considered an extension of a fractionation model byNederhof andMoed and allows classifying the extent of multilateral links both among science fields and among individual countries. The paper is concluded by a first attempt to estimate the errors involved in our approach.     

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.

     

Modelling and measuring multilateral co-authorship in international scientific collaboration. Part II. A comparative study on the extent and change of international scientific collaboration links

The present study is focused on international collaboration in science, involving more than two countries. The authors developed a promising model to measure and analyse the extent of multilateral co-authorship links in a previous study. The model is based on a series expansion approach which relates a new indicator, the Multilateral Collaboration Index (ρ), to the share of internationally co-authored papers (f). The model was found suitable to classify both the share of international papers, as well as the extent of multilateral links through the deviations from their expectations. A comparative analysis is made of changing collaboration patterns between 1983 and 1993 for 8 selected subfields, as well as all fields combined of the most active 38 countries. As expected an intensification of international scientific collaboration was observed, especially for a number of former COMECON countries. Different types of behaviour for different countries and science subfields emerged.