A bibliometric tale of two cities: Hong Kong and Singapore

A research evaluation of the leading research universities globally using the curated bibliometric data from Shanghai Rankings Global Ranking of Academic Subjects 2018 shows Hong Kong at the top position. A X/GDP productivity criteria is used where each country’s scientific wealth is represented by X, a second-order bibliometric indicator, and its nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is taken as a measure of its economic wealth. Singapore appears at the fifth position. This brief communication looks at the anatomy of this exceptional performance of the two city states, which are similar in many ways and yet dissimilar in many other ways. Hong Kong has the slight edge over Singapore in translating economic wealth to scientific wealth.

     

Energy indicators and percentile ranking normalization

Scalar measures of research performance (Energy, Exergy, and Entropy or EEE) are based on what can be called the bibliometrics-thermodynamics consilience. Here, their application to the percentile ranking normalization scheme is demonstrated.     

Scientific wealth and inequality within nations

We show that the greater the scientific wealth of a nation, the more likely that it will tend to concentrate this excellence in a few premier institutions. That is, great wealth implies great inequality of distribution. The “scientific wealth” is interpreted in terms of citation data harvested by Google Scholar Citations for profiled institutions from all countries in the world.     

A three-dimensional bibliometric evaluation of recent research in India

In this paper a three-dimensional framework to see how Indian universities and research-focused institutions fare in the world of high end research in terms of excellence and diversity of its research base is proposed. At the country level scholarly performance is broken down into three components—size, excellence and balance or evenness. A web application available in the public domain which visualizes scientific excellence worldwide in several subject areas is used. India has a presence in fifteen of twenty-two subject areas in which there are at least 50 institutes globally that have published more than 500 papers. It has no institution which can be counted at this level of size and excellence in seven areas: Arts and Humanities; Business, Management and Accounting; Health Professions; Neuroscience; Nursing; Psychology; and Social Sciences. India’s research base is completely skewed towards the Physical Sciences and Engineering with very little for Biological Sciences and Medicine and virtually none in Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities when excellence at the highest level is considered. Its performance is also benchmarked against three nations, namely Australia, The Netherlands and Taiwan which are of similar size in terms of GDP and scientific output. It is seen that although India has the highest GDP among the four countries, its performance lags considerably behind. Even in terms of diversity, its performance is poor compared to the three comparator countries.     

Second order indicators for evaluating international scientific collaboration

We propose an indicator to “measure” the extent to which co-publication through international collaboration enhances the value of scientific output of an organisation or agency performing academic research. A second order approach is used which combines a quality proxy (impact) and a quantity or size proxy (number of papers published) to yield a trinity of energy like scalar proxies. From these it is possible to define an index of foreign collaboration and another evenness indicator that shows the size and unevenness of the role foreign collaboration plays in the total academic output of the organization.     

Going much beyond the Durfee square: enhancing the <Emphasis Type="Italic">h</Emphasis><Subscript>T</Subscript> index

The objective of this research is to develop a new patent bibliometric performance measure by using modified citation rate analyses with dynamic backward citation windows. Cited half-life employed in bibliometrics was adopted in order to establish a model of annual patent backward citation windows. Based on the dynamic behavior of backward citation windows, the annual backward patent citation rates for each technology domain can be calculated to measure its bibliometric performance. It was found that the dynamic backward citation window represents more accurately the citation cycle time which is a key factor on technology assessment. Because different technology domain may have disparate attributes, a normalized backward citation rate was developed to measure the corresponding rank for each domain respect to the entire industry. Three technology domains were then chosen for demonstrative case studies which represent semiconductor, LCD, and drug industries.     

The fractional and harmonic p-indices for multiple authorship

A proposal is made so that the p-index (a composite performance index that can effectively combine size and quality of scientific papers) can be extended for bibliometric research assessment in cases where multiple authorship is taken into account. The fractional and harmonic p-indices are applied to some recent examples to show their usefulness.