The role of South African researchers in intercontinental collaboration

Scientometrics - The analysis presented here focuses on mapping, based on publication output, the scientific collaboration of African based researchers and the role of the South African research...     

Science and scientific collaboration in South Africa: apartheid and after

Scientific collaboration is growing in its importance; more so in Asian and African countries. This paper examines the scenario of science and scientific collaboration in South Africa which had passed through the colonial and apartheid regimes before it became a democracy in 1994. South African science under distinct political periods moved through some difficult periods but it did not badly affect the progress and direction of South African science. Science and scientific collaboration continued to grow under its major political phases amidst serious challenges. Despite internal conflict and boycott by the international scientific community, South Africa could move onto a stable and steady path of growth in science and collaboration under apartheid which is being carried on in the new South Africa. Collaborative research is encouraged at various levels of knowledge production and in science. The importance science and scientific development is gaining in today’s South Africa is remarkable.     

Chinese researchers returning home: Impacts of international mobility on research collaboration and scientific productivity

The aim of this study is to contribute to the debate on the relationship between scientific mobility and international collaboration. This case study deals with leading Chinese researchers in the field of plant molecular life sciences who returned to their home country. A correlation analysis of their mobility history, publication output, and international co-publication data, shows the relationship between scientific output, levels of international collaboration and various individual characteristics of returned researchers. The outcome of the analysis suggests that while host countries may loose human capital when Chinese scientists return home, the so-called “return brain drain”, they may also gain in terms of scientific linkages within this rapidly emerging and globalizing research field.     

Scientific knowledge in South Africa: information trends,patterns and collaboration

Scientometrics - South Africa has made remarkable progress in science and technology. In the production of scientific information it is a leading country not only in sub-Saharan Africa but also in...     

Publication productivity and professional position: Cross-national evidence on the role of organizations

Studies of strafication in science have increasingly accepted the idea that science is a highly stratified and elitist system with skewed distributions of productivity and rewards. Attempts to explain the higher productivity of higher status scientists by pointing to their greater ease of publication as far as acceptance of their work by journals and publishers is concerned were not supported by the data in some recent studies. If status in general does not confer greater ease of publication the present paper argues that position within a research organization does confer greater ease of author — or co-authorship — and this is the major explanatory variable accounting for productivity differences within research laboratories as far as quantity of articles (and books) is concerned. upward moves in a laboratory's formal or informal position hierarchy are associated with a change of a scientist's research involvement from goal executing to goal setting functions as well as with an increasing access to scientific manpower and project money. Goal setting tasks provide for a significant reduction of time-expenditures in research necessary to assure that the scientist is identified with the research results; consequently, they allow for an involvement in more research tasks than originally. Equivalently, resources in scientific manpower and project money act as a multiplying element as far as quantity of output is concerned.     

Scientific collaboration of researchers and organizations: a two-level blockmodeling approach

Scientometrics - The development and successful implementation of R&D policies depends on understanding patterns of scientific collaboration (SC). Existing studies on SC typically focus on...     

Cumulative manufacturing capabilities: an extended model and new empirical evidence

There has been intense debate in the manufacturing strategy literature on the way in which firms work on different manufacturing capabilities, with two opposing approaches considered – the trade-off model and the sand cone model. Analysis of these models has essentially been based on study of the links amongst four classic manufacturing capabilities (quality, delivery, flexibility, and cost efficiency) and has obviated the need to consider environmental protection as an important manufacturing capability. This study analyses the theoretical arguments and the prior empirical evidence on the two models, and proposes and tests an extended sand cone model which includes the environmental protection objective alongside the four traditional ones. The research uses structural equation modelling and data from a sample of 274 manufacturers to contribute additional empirical evidence on the existence of cumulative effects amongst manufacturing capabilities. It is observed that the predominant strategic model in these firms is one of multiple, non-incompatible capabilities with cumulative effects according to the following sequence: quality, delivery, flexibility, environmental protection, and cost efficiency.     

Research emphasis and collaboration in Africa

Scientific co-authorship of African researchers has become a fashionable topic in the recent scientometric literature. Researchers are investigating the effects, modes, dynamics and motives of collaboration in a continental research system which is in an embryonic stage and in different stages of development from country to country. In this article we attempt to provide some additional evidence by examining both patterns of collaboration at country and continental levels and the scientific disciplines emphasised. Our findings indicate that the continent’s research emphasises medical and natural resources disciplines to the detriment of disciplines supporting knowledge based economies and societies. Furthermore, we identify that the collaborative patterns in Africa are substantial higher than in the rest of the world. A number of questions related to research collaboration and its effects are raised.     

Medical research in South Africa: a scientometric analysis of trends,patterns, productivity and partnership

Being a scientifically active country in Africa, South Africa has made significant strides in the production of scientific publications. Medicine is one branch of science that has achieved a remarkable position in this regard. Extracting and analyzing medical publications for three decades and at regular intervals (1975–2005) from the SCI database, this paper pioneers an attempt to find out whether the reported pace of growth in the production of scientific papers in medicine is an effect of partnerships that scholars have with their counterparts within the organization, within the country, or with those in other countries. This paper also presents the unique patterns of scientific research in medicine, taking into account factors such as the count and fractional count of papers, citations, trends of growth, sectoral participation, partners, and publication outlets, and seeks to provide new insights into the directions medical science is taking in South Africa today.     

International collaboration clusters in Africa

Recent discussion about the increase in international research collaboration suggests a comprehensive global network centred around a group of core countries and driven by generic socio-economic factors where the global system influences all national and institutional outcomes. In counterpoint, we demonstrate that the collaboration pattern for countries in Africa is far from universal. Instead, it exhibits layers of internal clusters and external links that are explained not by monotypic global influences but by regional geography and, perhaps even more strongly, by history, culture and language. Analysis of these bottom-up, subjective, human factors is required in order to provide the fuller explanation useful for policy and management purposes.     

Neo-colonialism and research collaboration in Central Africa

The study examines aspects of both neo-colonial ties and neo-colonial science in research papers produced by Central African countries. The primary focus is on the extent and pattern of neo-colonial ties and other foreign participation in the co-authorship of Central African research papers. The analysis revealed that 80% of Central Africa’s research papers are produced in collaboration with a partner from outside the region. Moreover, 46% of papers are produced in collaboration with European countries as the only partner, and 35% in collaboration with past colonial rulers. The top collaborating countries are France (32%), the USA (14%), and the UK and Germany (both 12%). Foreign powers also facilitate the production of regionally and continentally co-authored papers in Central Africa, where European countries participate in 77% of regionally co-authored papers. The practice of neo-colonial science, on the other hand, features in a survey of reprint authors of Cameroonian papers. The survey investigated specific contributions made by Cameroon coauthors to the research processes underlying a paper. Cameroonian researchers contribute intellectually and conceptually to the production of research papers, irrespective of whether the collaboration involves partners from past colonial or non-colonial countries. Their most frequent role in collaborative research with foreign researchers remains the conduct of fieldwork.     

Scientometric impact assessment of a research policy instrument: the case of rating researchers on scientific outputs in South Africa

The influence of the National Research Foundation’s (NRF) rating system on the productivity of the South African social science researchers is investigated scientometrically for the period from 1981 to 2006. Their output performance is mainly indicated by their research publications. Following international best practice in scientometrics as well as the behavioural reinforcement theory, we employed the “before/after control impact (BACI) method”, as well as the well known econometric breakpoint test as proposed by Chow. We use as control group the publications in the field of clinical medicine. The field is not supported by NRF and hence clinical medicine researchers are not affected by the evaluation and rating system. The findings show a positive impact of the NRF programme on the research outputs of social sciences researchers and the implementation of the programme has increased the relevant population of research articles by an average of 24.5% (during the first 5 years) over the expected number of publication without the programme. The results confirm the scientometric findings of other studies (e.g. that of Nederhof) that ratings promulgate research productivity.     

Sixty-four years of informetrics research: productivity,impact and collaboration

This paper analyses the information science research field of informetrics to identify publication strategies that have been important for its successful researchers. The study uses a micro-analysis of informetrics researchers from 5,417 informetrics papers published in 7 core informetrics journals during 1948–2012. The most productive informetrics researchers were analysed in terms of productivity, citation impact, and co-authorship. The 30 most productive informetrics researchers of all time span several generations and seem to be usually the primary authors of their research, highly collaborative, affiliated with one institution at a time, and often affiliated with a few core European centres. Their research usually has a high total citation impact but not the highest citation impact per paper. Perhaps surprisingly, the US does not seem to be good at producing highly productive researchers but is successful at producing high impact researchers. Although there are exceptions to all of the patterns found, researchers wishing to have the best chance of being part of the next generation of highly productive informetricians may wish to emulate some of these characteristics.     

International research collaboration in Africa: a bibliometric and thematic analysis

It is widely recognised that science in Africa will benefit from international research collaboration (IRC), and therefore studies have been done on IRC in Africa (hereafter: Africa-related IRC research). However, there is no information on the development of Africa-related IRC research, the geographical location of the scientists interested in the topic, the visibility of the literature and the themes researched. This information makes it possible to understand relevant aspects in the context of IRC in Africa, which are useful for identifying IRC strengths, weaknesses and opportunities. It also allows paving the way for future research on this topic. Using discipline–specific terms, bibliometric, and thematic analysis, I collected the literature on Africa-related IRC research indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS). The results showed that the number of publications on the topic has increased, few African countries have researched the topic, a third of the publications were written exclusively by African scientists, and the topic has high visibility. The panoply of publications revealed that patterns, driving factors, effects, networks, asymmetries, and policies concerning IRC were the main themes researched.

     

Publication, cooperation and productivity measures in scientific research

The literature on publication counting demonstrates the use of various terminologies and methods. In many scientific publications, no information at all is given about the counting methods used. There is a lack of knowledge and agreement about the sort of information provided by the various methods, about the theoretical and technical limitations for the different methods and about the size of the differences obtained by using various methods. The need for precise definitions and terminology has been expressed repeatedly but with no success. Counting methods for publications are defined and analysed with the use of set and measure theory. The analysis depends on definitions of basic units for analysis (three chosen for examination), objects of study (three chosen for examination) and score functions (five chosen for examination). The score functions define five classes of counting methods. However, in a number of cases different combinations of basic units of analysis, objects of study and score functions give identical results. Therefore, the result is the characterization of 19 counting methods, five complete counting methods, five complete-normalized counting methods, two whole counting methods, two whole-normalized counting methods, and five straight counting methods. When scores for objects of study are added, the value obtained can be identical with or higher than the score for the union of the objects of study. Therefore, some classes of counting methods, including the classes of complete, complete-normalized and straight counting methods, are additive, others, including the classes of whole and whole-normalized counting methods, are non-additive. An analysis of the differences between scores obtained by different score functions and therefore the differences obtained by different counting methods is presented. In this analysis we introduce a new kind of objects of study, the class of cumulative-turnout networks for objects of study, containing full information on cooperation. Cumulative-turnout networks are all authors, institutions or countries contributing to the publications of an author, an institute or a country. The analysis leads to an interpretation of the results of score functions and to the definition of new indicators for scientific cooperation. We also define a number of other networks, internal cumulative-turnout networks, external cumulative-turnout networks, underlying networks, internal underlying networks and external underlying networks. The networks open new opportunities for quantitative studies of scientific cooperation.     

Scientific collaboration of Cuban researchers working in Europe: understanding relations between origin and destination countries

The global network of scientific collaboration created by researchers opens new opportunities for developing countries to engage in the process of knowledge creation historically lead by institutions in the developed world. The results discussed here explore how Cubans working in European science and technology might contribute to extending the scientific collaboration of the country through their ties with Cuban institutions mainly in the academic sector. A bibliometric method was used to explore the pattern of collaboration of Cuban researchers in Europe using the institutional affiliation of authors and collaborators. The records of scientific publications of the defined sample were obtained from Scopus database for the period between 1995 and 2014. The network of collaboration was generated using the affiliations of Cuban authors in Europe and co-authors with worldwide affiliations shown in the records of publications of each Cuban researcher of the study. The analysis of aggregate values of the output of Cuban researchers in Europe (1995–2014) reveals that their collaboration with Cuba correlates moderately with their performance in Europe. However, when taking into account their time publishing in Europe, the collaboration with Cuba decreases the longer they remain away from home. The network of collaborating Cuban researchers in Europe comprises 991 different affiliations from 58 countries: 698 from Europe, 118 from North America, 96 from Latin America and 79 from the rest of the world. K-core analysis of centrality shows two Cuban universities sharing the central position with another 24 institutions worldwide of which 18 belong to higher education.     

Nobel laureates: Their publication productivity,collaboration and authorship status

Summary The application of the measurement of scientific and technical activities has been a lengthy process of the appropriate metrics and the assignment of the standards and benchmarks for their usage. Although some studies have addressed issues of the management of science and technology and their relation to scientometrics and infometrics, there is nevertheless a need to consider the linkages between the conceptual background of scientific generation and progress - and the measurement of its process and outcomes. This paper first reviews the three main approaches to the generation and progress of human knowledge in general and scientific activity in particular. These approaches are reviewed in terms of the demands they would make on the measurement of scientific process and outputs. The paper then examines the currently used categories of metrics, and arrives at several conclusions. The paper provides an analysis of these conclusions and their implications to the generation and utilization of metrics of science and its outcomes. The review of the conceptual or philosophical foundations for the measurement of science offers an in-depth examination, resulting in the correlation of these foundations with the metrics we now use to measure science and its outcomes. The paper suggests research directions for a much needed link between theories of science and knowledge, and the application of metrics used to measure them. Finally, the paper offers several hypotheses and proposes potential empirical studies.