Correlation between quality and quantity in scientific production: A case study of Iranian organizations from 1997 to 2006

In order to prevent the formation of a gap between the quality and quantity in Iranian scientific publications, this study makes an effort to analyze Iranian scientific publications indexed on the ISI Web of Science database using quantitative and qualitative scientometrics criteria over a ten year period. As a first step, all Iranian institutes were divided into three categories; universities, research institutes and other organizations. Then they were compared according to quantitative and qualitative criteria. Second, the correlation between the quality and quantity of the publications was measured. The research findings indicated that, according to qualitative criteria (citation, citation impact and percentage of cited documents) there are no meaningful differences among the three groups, while regarding quantitative criterion(number of papers), universities rank higher than the other two groups. The results also indicated that there is a positive and meaningful correlation among qualitative and quantitative criteria in the scholarly scientific publications conducted by Iranian organizations. In other words, in Iranian organizations the quality of publications increases as their quantity increases. The comparison of magnitude of correlation between these two criteria in the three categories reveals the fact that the correlation between number of papers and citations criterion in research institutes is stronger than the other two groups.     

Quality is in the eye of the beholder? An evaluation of impact factors and perception of journal prestige in the UK

A number of proxy measures have been used as indicators of journal quality. The most recent and commonly employed are journal impact factors. These measures are somewhat controversial, although they are frequently referred to in establishing the impact of published journal articles. Within psychology, little is known about the relationship between the ‘objective’ impact factors of journals and the ‘subjective’ ratings of prestige and perceived publishing difficulty amongst academics. In order to address this, a cross-sectional web-based survey was conducted in the UK to investigate research activity and academics’ views of journals within three fields of psychology; cognitive, health and social. Impact factors for each journal were correlated with individual academic’s perceptions of prestige and publishing difficulty for each journal. A number of variables pertaining to the individual academic and their place of work were assessed as predictors of these correlation values, including age, gender, institution type, and a measure of departmental research activity. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to perceptions of journal prestige and publishing difficulty, higher education in general and the assessment of research activity within academic institutions.     

Document categories in the ISI Web of Knowledge: Misunderstanding the Social Sciences?

Thomson Reuter’s ISI Web of Knowledge (or ISI for short) is used in the majority of benchmarking analyses and bibliometric research projects. Therefore, it is important to be aware of the limitations of data provided by ISI. This article deals with a limitation that disproportionally affects the Social Sciences: ISI’s misclassification of journal articles containing original research into the “review” or “proceedings paper” category. I report on a comprehensive, 11 year analysis, of document categories for 27 journals in nine Social Science and Science disciplines. I show that although ISI’s “proceedings paper” and “review” classifications seem to work fairly well in the Sciences, they illustrate a profound misunderstanding of research and publication practices in the Social Sciences.     

Collaboration network patterns and research performance: the case of Korean public research institutions

This study examines the impact of collaborating patterns on the R&;D performance of public research institutions (PRIs) in Korea’s science and engineering fields. For the construction of R&;D collaborating networks based on the co-authorship data of 127 institutions in Scopus, this paper proposes four types of collaborations by categorizing network analyses into two dimensions: structural positions (density, efficiency, and betweeness centrality) and the relational characteristics of individual nodes (eigenvector and closeness centralities). To explore the research performance by collaboration type, we employ a data envelopment analysis window analysis of a panel of 23 PRIs over a 10-year period. Comparing the R&;D productivities of each group, we find that the PRIs of higher productivity adhere to a cohesive networking strategy, retaining intensive relations with their existing partners. The empirical results suggest that excessively cohesive alliances might end up in ‘lock-in’ relations, hindering the exploitation of new opportunities for innovation. These findings are implicit in relation to the Korean Government’s R&;D policies on collaborating strategies to produce sustained research results with the advent of the convergence research era.     

Progress of ecomaterials toward a sustainable society

This review paper provides an overview of research activities in Japan in the field of ecomaterials. Ecomaterials are the materials which are used in the life-cycle design of products aimed at reducing environmental impact. Ecomaterials research includes the fields of ‘materials containing less hazardous substances’, ‘materials with green environmental profiles’, ‘materials with a higher potential for recycling’, and ‘materials with higher resource productivity’. They are evolving from being an idealised concept to produce real solutions for materials selection. As part of this trend, multi-performance capability, as required for usage including processability, is becoming an important problem to be solved by materials scientists and engineers.     

Knowledge mapping of the Iranian nanoscience and technology: a text mining approach

Nanoscience and technology (NST) is a relatively new interdisciplinary scientific domain, and scholars from a broad range of different disciplines are contributing to it. However, there is an ambiguity in its structure and in the extent of multidisciplinary scientific collaboration of NST. This paper investigates the multidisciplinary patterns of Iranian research in NST based on a selection of 1,120 ISI??indexed articles published during 1974?C2007. Using text mining techniques, 96 terms were identified as the main terms of the Iranian publications in NST. Then the scientific structure of the Iranian NST was mapped through multidimensional scaling, based upon the co-occurrence of the main terms in the academic publications. The results showed that the NST domain in Iranian publications has a multidisciplinary structure which is composed of different fields, such as pure physics, analytical chemistry, chemistry physics, material science and engineering, polymer science, biochemistry and new emerging topics.     

Inconsistent transliteration of Iranian university names: a hazard to Iran’s ranking in ISI Web of Science

Today, university ranking has turned into a critical issue in the world. Each university is identified with a surface form under which the whole performance of that university is assessed. This article intends to provide a clear picture of the inconsistencies observed in recording Iranian university titles by their affiliated authors and to clarify the negative impact of such inconsistencies in positioning Iranian universities in global university ranking systems. To collect various surface forms of Iranian university names, use was made of ISI Web of Science through keywords Cu = Iran and py = 2000–2009. Only MSRT universities were considered. Two M.A. experts listed all variant forms of a single university under that name. The form publicized in a university’s website was considered as its entry name. The major sources of variation identified were as follows: Acronyms, misspellings, abbreviations, space variations, syntactic permutation, application of vowels/consonants and vowel/consonant combinations, /a/vs./aa/, Tashdid, Kasra ezafe, redundancy, downcasing, voiceless glottal stop sound /?/, shortening and deletion of titles. It was found that at its present shape Iranian universities are not receiving the rank they really deserve simply because authors affiliated to a university use university title forms inconsistently. It was recommended that authors follow the surface form publicized by universities in their websites, use the help of an editor in their works, and not be credited for their articles in case the forms deviate from those publicized through the websites. A spell checker, as an add-ins software is highly needed to homogenize Iranian university surface forms by replacing the variants by the dominant form proposed.     

Do men and women differ in their use of tables and graphs in academic publications?

In psychological research there is huge literature on differences between the sexes. Typically it used to be thought that women were more verbally and men more spatially oriented. These differences now seem to be waning. In this article we present three studies on sex differences in the use of tables and graphs in academic articles. These studies are based on data mining from approximately 2,000 articles published in over 200 peer-reviewed journals in the sciences and social sciences. In Study 1 we found that, in the sciences, men used 26 % more graphs and figures than women, but that there were no significant differences between them in their use of tables. In Study 2 we found no significant differences between men and women in their use of graphs and figures or tables in social science articles. In Study 3 we found no significant differences between men and women in their use of what we termed ‘data’ and ‘text’ tables in social science articles. It is possible that these findings indicate that academic writing is now becoming a genre that is equally undertaken by men and women.     

Gender comparisons of social work faculty using H-Index scores

The objective of this study is to determine the role of gender and faculty rank in explaining variance in individual research impact and productivity for social work doctoral faculty. Research impact and productivity were assessed with the H-Index, which is a widely used citation index measure that assesses the quality and quantity of published research articles. We compared the individual H-Index scores for all doctoral level social work faculty from doctoral programs in the United States (N = 1699). Differences in H-Index means were assessed between genders at each tenure-track faculty rank, and between faculty ranks for each gender. Both gender and faculty rank were associated with differences in scholarly impact and productivity. Although men had higher H-Index scores than women in all faculty ranks, the gender gap was the greatest between men and women at the Full Professor level. The gender gap was least pronounced at the Associate Professor level, where women’s H-Index scores were closer to those of men. Results support previous studies in which women in the social sciences have lower H-Index scores than men. The diminished gap between men and women at the Associate Professor level may suggest that women get promoted to Full Professor less frequently than men at comparable career milestones. While the results of this study are consistent with the argument that women face unique barriers to academic promotion and other forms of academic success in social work, these results do not explain any specific barriers that may cause the gender gap.     

Research productivity in soil science in the Philippines

Understanding the direction and magnitude of soil science publication in the Philippines is crucial in formulating research priorities and funding allocation. There is no consensus on the current state of soil science publication in the Philippines, thus this study was conducted to elucidate the trend in the soil science publication. We conducted an in-depth analysis on the total number of publications and the total number of citations of soil science publications collected from Thomson ISI database. Results revealed an upsurge in soil science publication from 1970 to 2000 with no indication that this trend is slowing down. Increases in the number of citations with time are consistent with increases in the total number of publications (r = 0.93; p < 0.05). Results further revealed that the soil science publication in the Philippines is biased towards rice research particularly soil water with very few studies were published for plant nutrition and soil chemistry. The present study highlights the need for a paradigm shift in soil science research from mostly rice related research to environmental research. Ways to increase soil science publication among Filipino soil scientist’s particularly in academic institutions is proposed. Finally, since only a few government-funded research have been published, future studies should stress on identifying factors that influence scientific productivity of most soil scientists in the Philippines.     

The law of limited excellence: publication productivity of Israel Prize laureates in the life and exact sciences

The present paper extends Lotka’s theorem—which we rename as “the law of limited excellence”—while empirically modelling the scientific productivity of 46 Israel Prize laureates in the life and exact sciences—a group best described as ‘Star Scientists’. By focusing on this highly selective group we expose unequal scientific productivity even amongst Israel’s most prolific scientists. Specifically, we test the invariance of Lotka’s law by focusing attention on the extreme tail of publication distributions while empirically exploring the non-linearity of its seemingly “flat” tail. By exposing the rarity of excellence even in this extreme end of publication productivity we extend the generality of Lotka’s theorem and expose that—like a fractal—the tail of excellence behaves as the entire distribution. We end this empirical contribution by suggesting a few implications for research and policy.     

New bibliometric tools for the assessment of national research performance: Database description,overview of indicators and first applications

This paper gives an outline of a new bibliometric database based upon all articles published by authors from the Netherlands, and processed during the time period 1980–1993 by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) for theScience Citation Index (SCI),Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) andArts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI). The paper describes various types of information added to the database: data on articles citing the Dutch publications; detailed citation data on ISI journals and subfields; and a classification system of publishing main organizations, appearing in the addresses. Moreover, an overview is given of the types of bibliometric indicators that were constructed. Their relationship to indicators developed by other researchers in the field is discussed. Finally, two applications are given in order to illustrate the potentials of the database and of the bibliometric indicators derived from it. The first represents a synthesis of ‘classical’ macro indicator studies at the one hand, and bibliometric analyses of research groups or institutes at the other. The second application gives for the first time a detailed analysis of a country's publication output per institutional sector.     

Synergy or separation mode: the relationship between the academic research and the knowledge-transfer activities of Korean academics

What factors influence the relationship between the academic research and the knowledge- transfer activities of academics, in particular in ‘catch-up’ countries like South Korea? To address this research question, after first conducting a critical review of existing theoretical and empirical studies, we put forward a conceptual framework based on the twin concepts of ‘synergy’ and ‘separation’ modes, together with a number of accompanying hypotheses. These hypotheses, along with others that emerged from subsequent interviews, are then tested using various statistical models. After taking into account the specific characteristics of scientific communities in rapidly catching-up counties such as Korea, we find that not only are individual characteristics (such as the gender, age, discipline, and patenting activity) of academics significantly related to the generation of a ‘synergy mode’ (i.e. a positive relationship between academic research and knowledge-transfer activities) among academics, but so too are a number of contextual characteristics (e.g. laboratory size and type of university).     

Reliability and validity of findings in ergonomics research

Evaluation of findings in ergonomics/human factors (E/HF) research suffers from misconceived assessments in terms of reliability and validity. Evaluation of E/HF studies published after 2000 confirms these observations. With an eye on these misconceived assessments, the present paper focuses on the consequences of various types of human involvement in (co-)shaping the phenomena to be evaluated. Issues addressed include the questionability of the inter-individual equivalence of findings, the defectiveness of the reliability coefficient as dispersion measure and the elusiveness of intended/presumed measurement as a validity criterion. These deficiencies are at odds with the zeal of E/HF authors to flag their findings as ‘reliable’ and ‘valid’. In particular, positive evaluations of findings may show off as rhetoric. An evaluation procedure of consecutive constituents in a flowchart is proposed as an aid for appropriate evaluations. Various conditions are discussed that may encourage the adoption of correct procedures.     

Performance obstacles for direct and indirect labour in high technology manufacturing

Performance obstacles are factors in the work environment that restrict productivity by inhibiting employees in the execution of task responsibilities. In spite of their apparent importance, little research has been done to describe, categorize, or assess these obstacles. A research project carried out in 12 United States electronics firms demonstrates that employees in two groups (circuit board assemblers and manufacturing engineers) view performance obstacles as having a significant influence on their performance. Materials and information obstacles emerged as being the most important to the circuit board assemblers. For the engineers, information and control/authority were the most important obstacle categories. Managers tended to agree with circuit board assemblers about the importance of obstacles for that employee group. However, managers tended to disagree with the engineers, giving lower ratings of importance than the engineers did in several categories. The research provides a step toward a typology of performance obstacles, demonstrating similarities and differences between employee groups and it suggests that at least in some areas managers may not be as accurate as they could be in assessing the influence of performance obstacles on their employees. The findings indicate that the themes that have prevailed in the research on operations management (i.e. materials, quality, scheduling) are viewed by employees as being predominant factors in the productivity equation.