Regional analysis on Chinese scientific output

Based on data from the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and using scientometric methods, we conducted a systematic analysis of Chinese regional contributions and international collaboration in terms of scientific publications, publication activity, and citation impact. We found that regional contributions are highly skewed. The top positions measured by number of publications or citations, share of publications or citations are taken by almost the same set of regions. But this is not the case when indicators for relative citation impact are used. Comparison between regional scientific output and R&D expenditure shows that Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient between the two indicators is rather low among the leading publication regions.     

Heterogeneity of collaboration and its relationship with research impact in a biomedical field

This paper analyses existing trends in the collaborative structure of the Pharmacology and Pharmacy field in Spain and explores its relationship with research impact. The evolution in terms of size of the research community, the typology of collaborative links (national, international) and the scope of the collaboration (size of links, type of partners) are studied by means of different measures based on co-authorship. Growing heterogeneity of collaboration and impact of research are observed over the years. Average journal impact (MNJS) and citation score (MNCS) normalised to world average tend to grow with the number of authors, the number of institutions and collaboration type. Both national and international collaboration show MNJS values above the country’s average, but only internationally co-authored publications attain citation rates above the world’s average. This holds at country and institutional sector levels, although not all institutional sectors obtain the same benefit from collaboration. Multilateral collaboration with high-level R&D countries yields the highest values of research impact, although the impact of collaboration with low-level R&D countries has been optimised over the years. Although scientific collaboration is frequently based on individual initiative, policy actions are required to promote the more heterogeneous types of collaboration.     

Global knowledge management research: A bibliometric analysis

The present study characterizes the dynamic publication activity of global knowledge management (KM) by data collected through a search restricted to articles in ISI Web of Science.A total of 2727 unique authors had contributed 1407 publications since 1975. The overwhelming majority (2349 or 86%) of them wrote one publication. The productive authors, their contribution and authorship position are listed to indicate their productivity and degree of involvement in their research publications. The sum of research output of the first or responsible authors from USA, UK and Germany reaches 57% of the total productivity. The distribution of articles is rather widespread - they published in 462 titles of serials, spanning 110 Journal Citation Reports subject categories. The higher quality journals make publication of findings more visible. A Pearson's correlation coefficient is statistically found to be significant between citation frequency of article and impact factor of journal, instead of authorship pattern. The results also indicate that R&D expenditures were actually not proportional to research productivity or citation counts. As the subject highly interacts with other disciplines, the field of KM has not yet developed its own body of literature. KM might have been evolving an interdisciplinary theory that is developing at the boundaries of scientific disciplines. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The role of government-industry-academia partnership in business incubation: Evidence from new R&D institutions in China

it is very important to encourage the incubation of new companies for innovative economic growth. Many countries in the world are encouraging “innovation orchards” in the form of government-industry-academia partnership to facilitate the incubation of new technology enterprises. The research focuses on the impact of this partnership between the government, industry, and academia in establishing new R&D institutions on business incubation. Specifically, the research aims to investigate what is the separate effect of the government, enterprises, universities, and public institutions in the establishment of new R&D institutions on enterprise incubation, and the role of cooperation between government-enterprise-academia in the enterprise incubation of new R&D institutions. In empirical tests using data from the 2020 official survey of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, the results show that for each single cooperator, participation in the establishment of governments, academia has a positive impact on start-ups, while the participation of enterprises has no significant impact. In terms of cooperation, the co-established new R&D institutions are better in business incubation than the single establishment of new R&D institutions. The cooperation between government and academia in the establishment of new R&D institutions has a positive effect on business incubation, and other types of cooperation between government-industry, industry-academia, and government-industry-academia have no significant impact on business incubation. The research conclusion can provide a policy reference for optimizing the holding mode of new R&D institutions.     

Heterogeneous Partners,R&D cooperation and corporate innovation capability: Evidence from Chinese manufacturing firms

In this paper, we examine the differential impact of cooperation with heterogeneous partners on firms' innovation capabilities. We use the number of joint patent applications of Chinese manufacturing firms from 2008 to 2018 to measure cooperation with different types of partners and the number of corporate patents to measure the innovation capability of firms. The results indicate that R&D cooperation with other enterprises, universities, and research institutions all have a significantly positive impact on the innovation capability of enterprises. However, R&D cooperation with universities or research institutions has a higher positive impact on innovation capability than that with other firms. Different internal and external factors moderate the relationship between heterogeneous partners and the innovation capability of firms. Specifically, firms with higher absorptive capacity will benefit more from R&D cooperation with corporate partners. In contrast, in industries with higher market concentration or where firms are at the technological frontier, cooperation with universities will positively impact their innovation capabilities. Further research demonstrates that absorptive capacity has a more positive moderating effect when the cooperation is between firms in the same industry, compared to R&D cooperation between firms in different industries.     

Science and technology in the region: The output of regional science and technology, its strengths and its leading institutions

Summary We operationalize scientific output in a region by means of the number of articles (as in the SciSearch database) per year and technology output by means of the number of patent applications (as in the database of the European Patent Office) per priority year. All informetric analyses were done using the DIALOG online-system. The main research questions are the following: Which scientific and technological fields or topics are most influent within a region and which institutions or companies are mainly publishing articles or holding patents? Do the distributions of regional science and technology fields and of publishing institutions follow the well-known informetric function? Are there - as it is expected - only few fields and few institutions which dominate the region? Is there a connection between the economic power of a region and the regional publication and patent output? Examples studied in detail are seven German regions: Aachen, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Köln (Cologne), Leipzig - Halle - Dessau, München (Munich), and Stuttgart. Three different indicators were used, science and technology attraction of a region (number of scientific articles and patents), science and technology intensity (articles and patents per 1,000 inhabitants), and science and technology density (articles and patents per 1 billion EURO gross value added). Top region concerning both attraction and intensity is Munich, concerning density it is Aachen.     

Evaluating research institutions: the potential of the success-index

Similarly to the h-index and other indicators, the success-index is a recent indicator that makes it possible to identify, among a general group of papers, those of greater citation impact. This indicator implements a field-normalization at the level of single paper and can therefore be applied to multidisciplinary groups of articles. Also, it is very practical for normalizations aimed at achieving the so-called size-independency. Thanks to these (and other) properties, this indicator is particularly versatile when evaluating the publication output of entire research institutions. This paper exemplifies the potential of the success-index by means of several practical applications, respectively: (i) comparison of groups of researchers within the same scientific field, but affiliated with different universities, (ii) comparison of different departments of the same university, and (iii) comparison of entire research institutions. A sensitivity analysis will highlight the success-index’s robustness. Empirical results suggest that the success-index may be conveniently extended to large-scale assessments, i.e., involving a large number of researchers and research institutions.     

Application and success of R&D subsidies: what is the role of firm age?

This article evaluates the propensity of firms to apply for R&D public grants, their capacity for obtaining subsides and how these relate to the firm age. This analysis is particularly relevant in understanding why young firms may be more or less successful in their application for public subsidies. Using data from an extensive database of 19,236 firms in Catalonia, we estimate a maximum likelihood probit model with sample selection. Our results show that firm age does not exert a significant direct impact on the application propensity in R&D public call, but younger firms tend to show a larger propensity to receive an R&D subsidy. They also show that firm age exerts a moderating role through different internal resources. They highlight the need to design R&D public policies that explicitly favour applications by young firms to help overcome their obstacles to innovation.     

The effects of R&D subsidies and network embeddedness on R&D output: evidence from the German biotech industry

Although policy makers subsidize firms’ R&D projects to increase innovational output in an industry, region, or country, it remains unclear whether such subsidization triggers additional R&D efforts or crowds out private investments. To address this question, we assess the effectiveness of subsidization for individual and collaborative research in the German biotech industry while also examining the relevance of network embeddedness for patent output. Our results indicate that subsidies do lead to increased patent output, with additional benefits from involvement in more than one project. However, the amount of money is only significant under certain circumstances. Also, it is higher degree centrality in the firm network that significantly increases R&D success.     

Systemic aspects of R&D policy subsidies for R&D collaborations and their effects on private R&D

This paper analyses how context- and time-dependent factors determine the impact of R&D subsidies on firm behaviour with respect to private R&D expenditures. Based on German R&D survey data, we combine propensity score matching with a difference-in-difference estimator in order to measure the causal influence of public direct R&D project funding on firm behaviour. Our results indicate that (i) repeated participation in R&D projects on average leads to a higher increase in R&D expenditures than once-off funding; (ii) the aggregate effect of R&D funding on R&D expenditures of business firms is somewhat higher for business–business collaboration projects than for science–business collaboration projects; (iii) R&D expenditures of business firms that cooperate with science show a higher share of external R&D spending. Results of one particular cluster programme indicate that at least the short-term development of R&D does not so much depend on which programme direct R&D project funding is applied to.     

Renewable energy research 1995–2009: a case study of wind power research in EU, Spain, Germany and Denmark

The paper reports the developments and citation patterns over three time periods of research on Renewable Energy generation and Wind Power 1995–2011 in EU, Spain, Germany and Denmark. Analyses are based on Web of Science and incorporate journal articles as well as conference proceeding papers. Scientometric indicators include publication collaboration ratios, top-player distribution as well as citedness and correspondence analyses of citing publications, relative citation impact, distributions of top-cited as well as top-citing institutions and publication sources and cluster analysis of citing title terms to map knowledge export areas. Findings show an increase in citation impact for Renewable Energy and Wind Power research albeit hampered by scarcely cited conference papers. Although EU maintains its global top position in producing Renewable Energy and Wind Power research the developments of EU and German world shares as well as citation impact are negative during the most recent 7 year period. During the same time the citation impact of Spain and Denmark increase and place both nations among the top-ranking countries in Wind Power research. Spain is the only EU country that increases its world production share from 2000. China is currently ranked three after EU and USA in research output, however with a very low citation impact. Spain, Denmark and Germany each demonstrates distinct collaboration patterns and publication source and citation distribution profiles. More than half the citations to EU Wind Power research are EU-self citations. An expected intensified EU collaboration in the Wind Energy field does not come about. The most productive research institutions in Denmark and Spain are also the most cited ones.     

Assessing the Effects of International Trade on Private R&D Expenditures in the Food Processing Sector

This study empirically investigates the effects of imports and exports on private research and development (R&D) expenditures in the food processing sector. An analytical framework discussing the various effects of international trade on R&D activities is presented. This is followed by an empirical analysis that uses a dynamic empirical specification for current R&D expenditures and for a cumulative measure of R&D stock. The empirical investigation is applied to a panel dataset covering Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's countries. The empirical results show that increases in import intensity levels induce reductions in private R&D expenditures whereas increases in export intensity levels promote larger private R&D expenditures. These outcomes imply that the R&D-enhancing effects of exports are countered by the R&D-reducing effects of imports.     

Status of physics research in India: An analysis of research output during 1993–2001

The paper reviews the present status of Indian physics research, in particular its nature of research system, nature of institutions involved, type of education offered and outturn at postgraduate and Ph.D level, the extent to which extra-mural funding support is available from various governmental R&D agencies, and the nature of professional organizations involved. The study is based on analysis of Indian physics output, as indexed in Expanded Science Citation Index (Web of Science) during 1993–2001. The study also discusses various features of Indian physics research such as its growth in terms of research papers, institutional publication productivity, nature of collaboration, and the quality and impact of its research output.     

A bibliometric analysis of research related to ocean circulation

This study is a bibliometric analysis on ocean circulation-related research for the period 1991–2005. Selected documents included “ocean circulation, sea circulation, seas circulation, marine circulation, and circulation ocean” as a part of the title, abstract or keywords. Analyzed parameters included the document type, the article output, the article distribution in journals, the publication activity of countries, and institutes and the authorship. An indicator, citation per publication (CPP) was applied to evaluate the scientific impact of a publication. The relationship between cumulative articles and the year was modeled. Three dominant categories were picked out, and their output increase was modeled. The USA was found to be leading the research with 47% share of total articles, with a CPP up to 5.9. Woods Hole Oceanography Institute in the USA was the most productive institute with a CPP of 6.8. In the citation analysis, a 5th year citation mode was found. A paper life model was applied to compare the cumulative citations increasing rates of different years.     

The scientific impact and partner selection in collaborative research at Korean universities

This study seeks to bridge the gap between scientometrics literature on scientific collaboration and science and technology management literature on partner selection by linking scientists’ collaborator preferences to the marginal advantage in citation impact. The 1981–2010 South Korea NCR (National Citation Report), a subset of the Web of Science that includes 297,658 scholarly articles, was used for this research. We found that, during this period, multi-author scientific articles increasingly dominated single-author articles: multi-university collaboration grew significantly; and the numbers of research publications produced by teams working within a single institution or by a single author diminished. This study also demonstrated that multi-university collaboration produces higher-impact articles when it includes “Research Universities,” that is, top-tier university schools. We also found that elite universities experienced impact degradation of their scientific results when they collaborated with lower-tier institutions, whereas their lower-tier partners gained impact benefits from the collaboration. Finally, our research revealed that Korean universities are unlikely to work with other universities in the same tier. This propensity for cross-tier collaboration can be interpreted as strategic partner selection by lower-tier schools seeking marginal advantage in citation impact.     

Multi-views on Nature Index of Chinese academic institutions

The Nature Index (NI) has become a rather powerful tool to identify emerging trends in various research fields. According to the NI 2015 released at the beginning of 2016, China, the world’s second largest producer of research papers, maintains a strong momentum on scientific output. Based on online source metrics such as Mendeley bookmarks, we evaluated multi-viewed impact of the top 50 academic institutions in the NI China. For the selection of multiple metrics, we investigated the presence and coverage of different kinds of online metrics, with a particular focus on their correlations with traditional citation-based metrics. In addition, Mendeley, Twitter, and Scopus are chosen as the complementary sources for multi-metrics. We sorted three ranks of the top 50 institutions in the NI China based on citation counts in Scopus, reader counts on Mendeley, and Twitter counts and we analyzed the differences among various ranking results. The diverse metrics revealed different aspects on institutions’ academic impact.     

Contribution of Indian universities to the mainstream scientific literature: A bibliometric assessment

This paper examines the contribution of Indian universities to the mainstream scientific literature during 1987–1989 along two distinct, but inter-related dimensions of quantity and quality of research output. The quantity of output is assessed through the number of articles published in journals covered byScience Citation Index, while the quality of output is assessed through the impact factors of journals in which the articles are published. The impact factors are normalized to eliminate the confounding effects of their covariates,viz. the subject field and the nature of journal. A number of relative indicators are constructed for inter-field and inter-institution comparisons,viz. publication effectiveness index,¹ relative quality index,² activity index³ and citability index⁴. Inter-field comparisons are made at the level of eight macrofields: Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Earth & Space Sciences, Agriculture, Medical Sciences and Engineering & Technology. Inter-institution comparisons cover thirty three institutions which had published at least 150 articles in three years. The structure of correlations of these institutions with eight macrofields is analyzed through correspondence analysis of the matrices of activity and citability profiles. Correspondence analysis yields a mapping of institutions which reveals the structure of science as determined by the cumulative effect of resource allocation decisions taken in the past for different fields and institutions i.e. the effect of national science policy.     

National research contributions: A case study on Finnish biomedical research

The long-term influence and contribution of research can be evaluated relatively reliably by bibliometric citation analysis. Previously, productivity of nations has been estimated by using either the number of published articles or journal impact factors and/or citation data. These studies show certain trends, but detailed analysis is not possible due to the assumption that all articles in a journal were equally cited. Here we describe the first comprehensive, longterm, nationwide analysis of scientific performance. We studied the lifetime research output of 748 Finnish principal investigators in biomedicine during the years 1966–2000, analysed national trends, and made a comparison with international research production. Our results indicate that analyses of the scientific contribution of persons, disciplines, or nations should be based on actual publication and citation counts rather than on derived information like impact factors. 51% of the principal investigators have published altogether 75% of the articles; however, the whole scientific community has contributed to the growth of biomedical research in Finland since the Second World War.     

Firm growth and R&D investment: SVAR evidence from the world’s top R&D investors

Understanding causal relationships among key economic variables is crucial for policy makers, who wish to e.g. stimulate private R&D growth. To this end, we applied a technique recently imported from the Machine Learning community (Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVARs) identified using Independent Components Analysis (ICA)) to a data-set of the world’s largest R&D investors. Our analysis highlights the key role of firm growth in the areas of employment and sales, rather than growth of profits or market capitalization, in stimulating R&D growth. R&D growth appears toward the end of the causal ordering of the growth process. Our results suggest that policies to increase private R&D would do better to target growth of sales and employment rather than market capitalization or profits.