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.     

Is science driven by principal investigators?

Scientometrics - In this paper we consider the question what is the scientific and career performance of principal investigators (PI’s) of publicly funded research projects compared to...