Simulations of opinion changes in scientific communities

We present a computer model of opinion changes in a scientific community. The study takes into account two mechanisms of opinion formation for individual scientists: influence of coworkers with whom there is direct interaction and cumulative influence of the subject literature. We analyze the evolution of relative popularity of different competing theories, depending on their accuracy in describing observed phenomena and on current social support of the theory. We include such aspects as finite lifetime of publication impact and tendency to ‘defend’ one’s own opinions, especially if they were already published. A special class of publications, delivering crucial observational or experimental data, which may revolutionize the scientific worldview is considered. The goal of the model is to discover which conditions lead to quick domination of one theory over others, or, conversely, in which situations one may expect several explanations to co-exist.     

Mainstream and non mainstream scientific literature in four peripheral Asian scientific communities

This paper describes the mainstream scientific output of the scientific communities of four newly industrializing Asian countries (Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) and considers its adequacy for describing local scientific activities in biochemistry, biology, physics, electrical engineering, and computer science. An examination of non mainstream scientific literature in these specialties shows that a high proportion of non mainstream authors also publish in mainstream literature. Data concerning degree of parochialism, age of references and use of vernacular literature are examined. The paper argues that it is misleading to characterize these peripheral scientific communities as principally stratified in function of local scientists' participation in mainstream science.     

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.     

The interest of scientific communities in sea-related research topics

Articles on sea-related topics such as ocean, fishery, crimes at sea, law of the sea, distress at sea and others were counted for journals in the fields supposedly comprising sea-related specialties such as policy/political science, law and its enforcement, agriculture, transportation, and operational research. The number of such articles was found very few in all the surveyed journals. The follow-up search was made for other journals of the same specialties, obtaining the same result. Further, the same result was found to hold for other issues of the journals published in different years: That is, this phenomenon was found stable for years. Its reasons were discussed, and some interpretation and their policy implications were presented.     

Radon exposure in Slovenian spas

Radon and gamma dose rates were surveyed in five Slovenian spas, at Rogaska Slatina, Radenci, Moravci, Podcetrtek, and Catez. Due to effective ventilation systems, the indoor air radon concentration rarely exceeds 200 Bq x m(-3) and is usually lower. Uncer the present operationsal conditions and working regimes of the spas, there is no basis for concern about elevated exposure of personnel to radon.     

A new model of scientific collaboration part 2. Collaboration patterns in Indian medicine

Collaboration in science has become a prevailing trend and it will be worthwhile to study the patterns of co-authorships in scientific research. In this study a three-dimensional behavioural pattern of Indian medicinal co-authorship network is presented. The high evenness of this pattern has caused us to carry out a non-linear regression analysis. The pattern of Indian Medicinal coauthorships can be described by the same non-linear mathematical function that describes the behavioural patterns of international medicine co-authorship networks and networks of other scientific disciplines. The following question has arise: Is there a general validity of this function in co-authorship networks?     

Locating active actors in the scientific collaboration communities based on interaction topology analyses

While implementing a large-scale research project, it is necessary to appoint some principle scientists, and let each principle scientist lead a research group. In a scientific collaboration community, different scientists perform different roles while they implement the project, and some scientists may be more active than others; these active scientists often undertake the role of leadership or key coordinator in the project. Obviously, we should assign the role of principle scientists onto those active actors in the communities. In this paper, we present the model and algorithms for locating active actors in the community based on the analyses of scientists’ interaction topology, the actors with high connection degrees in the interaction topology can be considered as active ones. Finally, we make some case studies for our model and algorithms.     

Dynamics of a scientific field analysed by co-subfield structures

This paper discusses the possibility to represent scientific development by second-order networks in different modalities. In particular, a specific modality structured by subfield-to-subfield relations is presented. By constructing such co-subfield maps for successive periods of time, we were able to describe the changing subfield relations within the field of chemical engineering. In this way, dynamical processes in the development of a field as a whole can be revealed. Advantages and disavantages as compared to co-citation and co-word mapping techniques are discussed and the importance of developing combined techniques is stressed.     

Understanding scientific communities: a social network approach to collaborations in Talent Management research

Synthetic biology is an emerging domain that combines biological and engineering concepts and which has seen rapid growth in research, innovation, and policy interest in recent years. This paper contributes to efforts to delineate this emerging domain by presenting a newly constructed bibliometric definition of synthetic biology. Our approach is dimensioned from a core set of papers in synthetic biology, using procedures to obtain benchmark synthetic biology publication records, extract keywords from these benchmark records, and refine the keywords, supplemented with articles published in dedicated synthetic biology journals. We compare our search strategy with other recent bibliometric approaches to define synthetic biology, using a common source of publication data for the period from 2000 to 2015. The paper details the rapid growth and international spread of research in synthetic biology in recent years, demonstrates that diverse research disciplines are contributing to the multidisciplinary development of synthetic biology research, and visualizes this by profiling synthetic biology research on the map of science. We further show the roles of a relatively concentrated set of research sponsors in funding the growth and trajectories of synthetic biology. In addition to discussing these analyses, the paper notes limitations and suggests lines for further work.     

Identification of sources of high radon levels in Slovenian schools

The sources of radon were investigated in twenty selected schools with high room levels of radiation. A combination of radon measuring techniques was applied: etched track and electret detectors to obtain average indoor air radon concentration. devices to record radon concentration continuously and thus characterise its diurnal variation, and alpha scintillation cells to analyse air from potential sources of radon entry. In some cases, a single strong source was identified (e.g. sinks, sub-floor channels), while in others the poor quality of the basic concrete slab was responsible for high indoor radon concentrations. The combination of etched track and electret detectors and alpha scintillation cells was essential for locating these sources.     

Analysis of Slovenian research community through bibliographic networks

Science is a societal process, designed on widely accepted general rules which facilitate its development. Productive researchers are viewed from the perspective of a social network of their interpersonal relations. In this paper we address performance of Slovenian research community using bibliographic networks between the years 1970 and 2015 from various aspects which determine prolific science. We focus on basic determinants of research performance including productivity, collaboration, internationality, and interdisciplinarity. For each of the determinants, we select a set of statistics and network measures to investigate the state of each in every year of the analyzed period. The analysis is based on high quality data from manually curated information systems. We interpret the results by relating them to important historical events impacting Slovenia and to domestic expenditure for research and development. Our results clearly demonstrate causal relations between the performance of research community and changes in wider society. Political and financial stability together with concise measuring of scientific productivity established soon after Slovenia won independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 had positive influence on all determinants. They were further leveraged by foundation of Slovenian research agency and joining EU and NATO. Publish and perish phenomenon, negative impacts of financial crisis in 2008–2014 and reshaping the domestic expenditure for research and development after 2008 have also clear response in scientific community. In the paper, we also study the researcher’s career productivity cycles and present the analysis of the career productivity for all registered researchers in Slovenia.     

A comparative study of communal practice: Assessing the effects of taken-for-granted-ness on citation practice in scientific communities

Summary Building on the findings of recent ethnographic studies of scientific practice, I develop and test theory about the impact of taken-for-granted-ness on citation practice in scientific communities. Using data gathered from special issues of scientific journals I find support for the hypothesized differences in the practices of natural and social science communities. Post hoc analysis uncovers evidence of a third pattern of citation practice associated in part with engineering and technology research, and evidence that organization studies and strategic management communities tend to employ extreme versions of social science citation practices. I discuss the implications of the study for our understanding of communities of practice, for our beliefs about differences between the branches of science, and about science as a productive enterprise.     

Studying the characteristics of scientific communities using individual-level bibliometrics: the case of Big Data research

Scientometrics - Unlike most bibliometric studies focusing on publications, taking Big Data research as a case study, we introduce a novel bibliometric approach to unfold the status of a given...     

Collaboration and cross-disciplinarity in autoimmune diseases

Collaboration and cross-disciplinarity are important features in autoimmune disease research. Taking co-authorship as an indicator for research collaboration, for selected European countries it was found that 91% to 99% of all publications are based on collaboration. International collaboration affects about 27% of all publications. Small countries like Sweden and Finland pursue international collaboration more intensively than larger countries like Germany or the UK. Different collaboration strategies were found for nationally co-authored papers, for instance, Germany seems to focus more on intra-departmental collaboration, while France and Italy have stronger inter-institutional links. About 54% of all publications are based on cross-disciplinary The term ‘cross-disciplinarity’ is used to highlight the fact that contributions from more than one discipline are made and required. This more general term is used—rather than the term ‘interdisciplinarity’—because it collaboration, which was found to be even more important in international collaboration. is hard or even impossible to distinguish interdisciplinary from multi-disciplinary work based on the data used. For a more detailed discussion of the terminology see e.g. Refs 1–5.     

International Collaboration in Indian Scientific Papers

Internationally co-authored publications may be regarded as an indicator of scientific co-operation between countries and is of interest in science policy. In this study, the extent of international collaboration in Indian science has been estimated from SCI data in 1990 and 1994. We find an increase in collaboration both in terms of output and the extent of the network and significantly higher impact (IF) associated with internationally co-authored papers in several disciplines. However, there was no significant increase in IF of collaborative papers over time, whereas Indian papers in general showed a statistically significant, though small, increase in average impact from 1990 to 1994. The bulk of Indian scientific co-operation was with the developed Western nations and Japan, but it was often the smaller countries with a few co-authored papers which showed higher average impact. Co-operation with South Asian countries, initially low, has doubled in four years. By a combination of multivariate data analysis techniques the relative positions of India's partners in scientific collaboration have been mapped with respect to the fields of co-operation.     

Depicting communities of Romani studies: on the who,when and where of Roma related scientific publications

Scientometrics - Contemporary research on Roma from diverse disciplines has grown strongly during the last years. This is the first bibliometric study on the field of Romani studies considering the...     

Collaboration in theoretical population genetics speciality

Analyses the growth of funded and collaborative research publications and authors as reflected in selected theoretical population genetics literature from 1956–60 to 1976–80. Indicates that the number of funded and collaborated publications has not proportionally increased along with the growth of total research publications and authors with time, but however, there is a strong correlation between the two. Indicates the extent of multi-authored research publications in different countries, and studies the growth of multi-authored publications from 1956–60 to 1976–80. Studies the impact of funding and collaboration on the productivity of authors over a period of time. Concludes that the authors who are more productive are generally found to be more collaborative and funded. The average productivity per author is observed to be larger in funded and collaborated authors subset and smaller in non-funded and non-collaborated authors subset, than the average productivity per author in the total authors subset in all the five block years studied. There is a systematic increase with time in the average productivity per author in the funded and collaborated authors subset. Studies the nature and type of collaborated research from 1956–60 to 1976–80, and the role of funding. Highlights the research priorities of few important countries in collabortive research. Indicates the collaboration linkages among various countries in transnational collaborative research. Concludes that with time, the focus of research is slowly shifting from internal collaration to domestic and international collaboration, supported by increasing funding from government agencies in theoretical population genetics research.     

Collaboration patterns in theoretical population genetics

The paper points out that the characteristic properties of general social networks are reflected in co-authorship patterns of theoretical population genetics as studied from 1900 to 1980. The results are consistent with the analyses of bibliographies where the co-authorship networks in invisible colleges probably have shown the same behavioural patterns as the non-scientific populations. The patterns of behaviour are portrayed in two-dimensional as well as three-dimensional representations of co-authorship data in theoretical population genetics.