Invisible colleges in the adult education research world

Invisible colleges - researchers’ networks of communicating academic work – are power-generating actors shaping research fields. A key question concerns the relation between local research communities and their dependence on global actors. A key arena is articles and citations in academic journals. An actor-network-inspired empirical investigation of the geographical origin of articles and references in the journal “Studies in the Education of Adults” and a check of references to journals in “Adult Education Quarterly” was made. The origin of articles and study objects in the International journal of Lifelong education was also analysed. Some conclusions can be drawn from the material. One is the heavy impact of “real” geographical location, i.e. the origins of texts and references are located in very specific areas on the map, i.e. in spite of the possibilities of cyberspace and global mobility. Another conclusion is the unilateral relation between an Anglo-American centre and a periphery in the distribution systems of texts. Adult education is faced with a contradictory situation between culturing invisible colleges in adult education and getting resources in the emerging economy of publications and citations through membership in other invisible colleges. (DIPF/orig.

Citation gaming induced by bibliometric evaluation: a country-level comparative analysis

It is several years since national research evaluation systems around the globe started making use of quantitative indicators to measure the performance of researchers. Nevertheless, the effects on these systems on the behavior of the evaluated researchers are still largely unknown. We attempt to shed light on this topic by investigating how Italian researchers reacted to the introduction in 2011 of national regulations in which key passages of professional careers are governed by bibliometric indicators. A new inwardness measure, able to gauge the degree of scientific self-referentiality of a country, is defined as the proportion of citations coming from the country itself compared to the total number of citations gathered by the country. Compared to the trends of the other G10 countries in the period 2000-2016, Italy's inwardness shows a net increase after the introduction of the new evaluation rules. Indeed, globally and also for a large majority of the research fields, Italy became the European country with the highest inwardness. Possible explanations are proposed and discussed, concluding that the observed trends are strongly suggestive of a generalized strategic use of citations, both in the form of author self-citations and of citation clubs. We argue that the Italian case offers crucial insights on the constitutive effects of evaluation systems. As such, it could become a paradigmatic case in the debate about the use of indicators in science-policy contexts

Proposed methods for reviewing the outcomes of health research: the impact of funding by the UK's Arthritis Research Campaign

Background: External and internal factors are increasingly encouraging research funding bodies to demonstrate the outcomes of their research. Traditional methods of assessing research are still important, but can be merged into broader multi-dimensional categorisations of research benefits. The onus has hitherto been on public sector funding bodies, but in the UK the role of medical charities in funding research is particularly important and the Arthritis Research Campaign, the leading medical charity in its field in the UK, commissioned a study to identify the outcomes from research that it funds. This article describes the methods to be used. Methods: A case study approach will enable narratives to be told, illuminating how research funded in the early 1990s was (or was not) translated into practice. Each study will be organised using a common structure, which, with careful selection of cases, should enable cross-case analysis to illustrate the strengths of different modes and categories of research. Three main interdependent methods will be used: documentary and literature review; semi-structured interviews; and bibliometric analysis. The evaluative framework for organising the studies was previously used for assessing the benefits from health services research. Here, it has been specifically amended for a medical charity that funds a wide range of research and is concerned to develop the careers of researchers. It was further refined in three pilot studies. The framework has two main elements. First, a multi-dimensional categorisation of benefits going from the knowledge produced in peer reviewed journal articles through to the health and potential economic gain. The second element is a logic model, which, with various stages, should provide a way of organising the studies. The stock of knowledge is important: much research, especially basic, will feed into it and influence further research rather than directly lead to health gains. The cross-case analysis will look for factors associated with outcomes. Conclusions: The pilots confirmed the applicability of the methods for a full study which should assist the Arthritis Research Campaign to demonstrate the outcomes from its funding, and provide it with evidence to inform its own policies

Diversity and network coherence as indicators of interdisciplinarity: Case studies in bionanoscience

Interdisciplinary research, nanotechnology, nanoscience, diversity, indicators, network analysis

A Review of Theory and Practice in Scientometrics

Scientometrics is the study of the quantitative aspects of the process of science as a communication system. It is centrally, but not only, concerned with the analysis of citations in the academic literature. In recent years it has come to play a major role in the measurement and evaluation of research performance. In this review we consider: the historical development of scientometrics, sources of citation data, citation metrics and the “laws" of scientometrics, normalisation, journal impact factors and other journal metrics, visualising and mapping science, evaluation and policy, and future developments

Fuzzy Logic and Its Uses in Finance: A Systematic Review Exploring Its Potential to Deal with Banking Crises

The major success of fuzzy logic in the field of remote control opened the door to its application in many other fields, including finance. However, there has not been an updated and comprehensive literature review on the uses of fuzzy logic in the financial field. For that reason, this study attempts to critically examine fuzzy logic as an effective, useful method to be applied to financial research and, particularly, to the management of banking crises. The data sources were Web of Science and Scopus, followed by an assessment of the records according to pre-established criteria and an arrangement of the information in two main axes: financial markets and corporate finance. A major finding of this analysis is that fuzzy logic has not yet been used to address banking crises or as an alternative to ensure the resolvability of banks while minimizing the impact on the real economy. Therefore, we consider this article relevant for supervisory and regulatory bodies, as well as for banks and academic researchers, since it opens the door to several new research axes on banking crisis analyses using artificial intelligence techniques

Global Research Report – South and East Asia

Global Research Report – South and East Asia by Jonathan Adams, David Pendlebury, Gordon Rogers & Martin Szomszor. Published by Institute for Scientific Information, Web of Science Group

The skewness of computer science

Computer science is a relatively young discipline combining science, engineering, and mathematics. The main flavors of computer science research involve the theoretical development of conceptual models for the different aspects of computing and the more applicative building of software artifacts and assessment of their properties. In the computer science publication culture, conferences are an important vehicle to quickly move ideas, and journals often publish deeper versions of papers already presented at conferences. These peculiarities of the discipline make computer science an original research field within the sciences, and, therefore, the assessment of classical bibliometric laws is particularly important for this field. In this paper, we study the skewness of the distribution of citations to papers published in computer science publication venues (journals and conferences). We find that the skewness in the distribution of mean citedness of different venues combines with the asymmetry in citedness of articles in each venue, resulting in a highly asymmetric citation distribution with a power law tail. Furthermore, the skewness of conference publications is more pronounced than the asymmetry of journal papers. Finally, the impact of journal papers, as measured with bibliometric indicators, largely dominates that of proceeding papers.Comment: I applied the goodness-of-fit methodology proposed in: A. Clauset, C. R. Shalizi, M. E. J. Newman. Power-law distributions in empirical data. SIAM Review 51, 661-703 (2009

Forest Ecosystem Services: An Analysis of Worldwide Research

The relevance of forests to sustain human well-being and the serious threats they face have led to a notable increase of research works on forest ecosystem services during the last few years. This paper analyses the worldwide research dynamics on forest ecosystem services in the period from 1998 to 2017. A bibliometric analysis of 4284 articles was conducted. The results showed that the number of published research articles has especially increased during the last five years. In total, 68.63% of the articles were published in this period. This research line experiences a growing trend superior to the general publishing trend on forest research. In spite of this increase, its relative significance within the forest research is still limited. The most productive subject areas corresponded to Environmental Science, Agricultural and Biological Sciences and Social Sciences Economic topics are understudied. The scientific production is published in a wide range of journals. The three first publishing countries are United States, China and the United Kingdom. The most productive authors are attached to diverse research centres and their contributions are relatively recent. A high level of international cooperation has been observed between countries, institutions and authors. The findings of this study are useful for researchers since they give them an overview of the worldwide research trends on forest ecosystem services