Is the United States losing ground in science? A global perspective on the world science system

Based on the Science Citation Index-Expanded web-version, the USA is still by far the strongest nation in terms of scientific performance. Its relative decline in percentage share of publications is largely due to the emergence of China and other Asian nations. In 2006, China has become the second largest nation in terms of the number of publications within this database. In terms of citations, the competitive advantage of the American “domestic market” is diminished, while the European Union (EU) is profiting more from the enlargement of the database over time than the USA. However, the USA is still outperforming all other countries in terms of highly cited papers and citation/publication ratios, and it is more successful than the EU in coordinating its research efforts in strategic priority areas like nanotechnology. In this field, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has become second largest nation in both numbers of papers published and citations behind the USA.     

Is the science citation index US-biased?

The Western European science policy establishment often claims that US articles are more frequently cited than articles of the European Union's scientists because they are published in journals with a large number of US publications and that these journals are forming the ‘core’ of the SCI. For the disciplines covered by the SCI, no significant correlation has been found between the ratio of the average number of citations per publication for publications with at least one EU address and at least one US address, respectively, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the ratio of the corresponding number of publications per journal.     

Uncertainty in macroeconomic policy-making: art or science?

Uncertainty is pervasive in economic policy-making. Modern economies share similarities with other complex systems in their unpredictability. But economic systems also differ from those in the natural sciences because outcomes are affected by the state of beliefs of the systems' participants. The dynamics of beliefs and how they interact with economic outcomes can be rich and unpredictable. This paper relates these ideas to the recent crisis, which has reminded us that we need a financial system that is resilient in the face of the unpredictable and extreme. It also highlights how such uncertainty puts a premium on sound communication strategies by policy-makers. This creates challenges in informing others about the uncertainties in the economy, and how policy is set in the face of those uncertainties. We show how the Bank of England tries to deal with some of these challenges in its communications about monetary policy.     

Bernard Shaw, ‘Unmechanical’ Photography and unconventional science

Abstract

It certainly is true that George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright and essayist, was fond of provocation and paradox. Yet, as our epigraph suggests, his writings always build on a core of truth. For Shaw, truth was defined by his socialism as well as by relations among art, science, and religion. These ideas merge in his provocative essay of 1902, ‘The Unmechanicalness ofPhotography’,² written when the focus of his photographic criticism was shifting from primarily political! economic concerns to a synthesis of social, aesthetic, metaphysical, and scientific ideas. Although his essay has been reprinted since 1902,³ the broader context that lends meaning to Shaw's otherwise peculiar remarks about painting and photography has not been explored sufficiently; that is our goal here.     

Do interdisciplinary research teams deliver higher gains to science?

The present paper takes its place in the stream of studies that analyze the effect of interdisciplinarity on the impact of research output. Unlike previous studies, in this study the interdisciplinarity of the publications is not inferred through their citing or cited references, but rather by identifying the authors’ designated fields of research. For this we draw on the scientific classification of Italian academics, and their publications as indexed in the WoS over a 5-year period (2004–2008). We divide the publications in three subsets on the basis the nature of co-authorship: those papers coauthored with academics from different fields, which show high intensity of inter-field collaboration (“specific” collaboration, occurring in 110 pairings of fields); those papers coauthored with academics who are simply from different “non-specific” fields; and finally co-authorships within a single field. We then compare the citations of the papers and the impact factor of the publishing journals between the three subsets. The results show significant differences, generally in favor of the interdisciplinary authorships, in only one third (or slightly more) of the cases. The analysis provides the value of the median differences for each pair of publication subsets.     

基于web of science的体育康复研究现状及热点分析

基于web of science对国内外"Sports rehabilitation"(体育康复)学术研究现状进行综合分析,通过对作者、国家/地区、机构、来源出版物名称等进行国内外研究水平的比较分析,寻找我国研究现状与国外的差距,了解我国具有的优势,并针对现状提出应该在交叉学科方向、高水平期刊上以及ORTHOPEDICS(骨外科学)方向上加大研究力度。     

Academics’ “ambidextrous behavior” and doctoral science mentoring practices

Although academics (academic scientists) are the vanguards in mentoring doctoral science students, emergent science policies increasingly push academics to venture into industrial science work with industrial scientists. This puts academics in a situation of heightened role strain given that academic life is already exacting in terms of teaching, research, and service. Now, academics have to balance between intrinsic and extrinsic demands. In this paper, we examine how academics’ involvement in academic and in industrial science activities impacts how academic scientists mentor doctoral students. We introduce the idea of academics’ “ambidextrous behavior” and apply it in three scientific activities, namely: (1) formally collaborating in academic and in industrial research projects, (2) informally networking with academic and with industrial scientists, and (3) producing patents and publications. We test the hypothesis that academics, who exhibit ambidextrous behavior, manifest mentoring practices that differ from colleagues who do not exhibit such behavior. We adduce evidence from a face-to-face survey of 104 East Asian chemical science professors, and analyze data using principal component and regression analyses. Our results provide insights on how academics’ involvement in both academic and industrial science activities shapes the way doctoral students are mentored. Our work also exemplifies how the concept of ambidextrous behavior can be applied in examining aspects of scientific apprenticeship in academia at a time when knowledge production increasingly takes place at the intersecting sectors of Etzkowitz’s (Res Policy 27(8):823–833, 1998) Triple Helix science (i.e., academia, government, and industry).     

Crystal design of organic pigments — a prototype discipline of materials science

The significance of crystal properties for the product performance of organic pigments has always required special efforts to analyze, to control and to design these materials. In this article recent developments and the modern scientific facets of pigments research (e.g. crystal structure prediction and polymorphism, electronic structures of molecular crystals, and crystal morphology determination) will be discussed. The broad interest in these topics is shared with many other areas of scientific and industrial research on molecular solids.     

Mapping of Indian computer science research output, 1999�C2008

The research output of India in computer science during 1999?C2008 is analyzed in this paper on several parameters including total research output, its growth, rank and global publication share, citation impact, share of international collaborative papers and major collaborative partner countries and patterns of research communication in most productive journals. It also analyses the characteristics of most productive institutions, authors and high-cited papers. The publications output and impact of India is also compared with China, South Korea, Taiwan and Brazil.