The increasing dominance of science in the economy: Which nations are successful?

Scientometrics - We analyzed breakthrough patents that serve as the basis of emerging technological trajectories and paradigm over 25-years. The results showed that although technological fields...     

Investigating different types of research collaboration and citation impact: a case study of Harvard University’s publications

This study aims to investigate the influence of different patterns of collaboration on the citation impact of Harvard University’s publications. Those documents published by researchers affiliated with Harvard University in WoS from 2000–2009, constituted the population of the research which was counted for 124,937 records. Based on the results, only 12% of Harvard publications were single author publications. Different patterns of collaboration were investigated in different subject fields. In all 22 examined fields, the number of co-authored publications is much higher than single author publications. In fact, more than 60% of all publications in each field are multi-author publications. Also, the normalized citation per paper for co-authored publications is higher than that of single author publications in all fields. In addition, the largest number of publications in all 22 fields were also published through inter-institutional collaboration and were as a result of collaboration among domestic researchers and not international ones. In general, the results of the study showed that there was a significant positive correlation between the number of authors and the number of citations in Harvard publications. In addition, publications with more number of institutions have received more number of citations, whereas publications with more number of foreign collaborators were not much highly cited.     

Patterns of authors’ information scattering: towards a causal explanation of information scattering from a scholarly information-seeking behavior perspective

This study primarily aims to reveal the worldwide patterns of authors’ information scattering through illustrating the possible differences among authors based on subject, country, geographic region, institution, economic and scientific level factors. Second, changes in patterns of information scattering during the past 21 years are checked. Finally, a hypothesis aimed at demonstrating a probable relationship among the three research domains including information scattering, scholarly information-seeking behavior and scholarly journal usage is presented. 176,943 authors, who have more than ten papers in WoS from 1990 to 2010 were examined. The findings revealed that patterns of information scattering have changed during the past 21 years, and the number of journals in the core and middle zones has almost doubled. It was also found that authors tend to use a small number of journals to retrieve the majority of their required information, while a small amount of their information needs come from a wide variety of journals. However, with regard to patterns of information scattering, some differences exist among authors based on factors including institutions, countries and subject fields. In addition, this study shows that information-scattering patterns might be affected by scholars’ information-seeking behaviors. A causal explanation of information scattering through scholarly information-seeking behavior has, without a doubt, the potential to provide practical solutions to better meet scholars’ information needs and requirements.     

Authors’ sources of information: a new dimension in information scattering

The purpose of this study is to determine the usage patterns of core journals by scholars, and to address the differences among various academic disciplines. Thus, the references of 11,230 corresponding authors for the past 35?years from the world??s top five highly cited universities and institutions were analyzed. To build robust models of information scattering, we need a deeper understanding of this phenomenon. The results show that core journals usage is a social phenomenon, in exactly the same way as Bradford??s law, Zipf??s law and Lotka??s law. The analysis of author references shows that if core scientific journals are arranged in order of decreasing productivity, then they could be divided into a small group of highly cited periodicals and a large group of minimally cited ones. Scholars may do browsing and similar information-seeking activities to form their core journals, and the findings may support Bates??s hypothesis that Bradford??s core zone is best searched by browsing. Bradford??s law and relevant research may consequently help to solve many of the practical problems that practitioners of the profession face, particularly in collection development in libraries, and help users to gather highly scattered information.