56,413 research outputs found
Statistical evaluation of research performance of young university scholars: A case study
The research performance of a small group of 49 young scholars, such as doctoral students, postdoctoral and junior researchers, working in different technical and scientific fields, was evaluated based on 11 types of research outputs. The scholars worked at a technical university in the fields of Civil Engineering, Ecology, Economics, Informatics, Materials Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Safety Engineering. Principal Component Analysis was used to statistically analyze the research outputs and its results were compared with factor and cluster analysis. The metrics of research productivity describing the types of research outputs included the number of papers, books and chapters published in books, the number of patents, utility models and function samples, and the number of research projects conducted. The metrics of citation impact included the number of citations and h-index. From these metrics -the variables -the principal component analysis extracted 4 main principal components. The 1st principal component characterized the cited publications in high-impact journals indexed by the Web of Science. The 2nd principal component represented the outputs of applied research and the 3rd and 4th principal components represented other kinds of publications. The results of the principal component analysis were compared with the hierarchical clustering using Ward's method. The scatter plots of the principal component analysis and the Mahalanobis distances were calculated from the 4 main principal component scores, which allowed us to statistically evaluate the research performance of individual scholars. Using variance analysis, no influence of the field of research on the overall research performance was found. Unlike the statistical analysis of individual research metrics, the approach based on the principal component analysis can provide a complex view of the research systems.Web of Science30217716
The effect of multidisciplinary collaborations on research diversification
This work verifies whether research diversification by a scientist is in some
measure related to their collaboration with multidisciplinary teams. The
analysis considers the publications achieved by 5300 Italian academics in the
sciences over the period 2004-2008. The findings show that a scientist's
outputs resulting from research diversification are more often than not the
result of collaborations with multidisciplinary teams. The effect becomes more
pronounced with larger and particularly with more diversified teams. This
phenomenon is observed both at the overall level and for the disciplinary
macro-areas
On the shoulders of students? The contribution of PhD students to the advancement of knowledge
Using the participation in peer reviewed publications of all doctoral
students in Quebec over the 2000-2007 period this paper provides the first
large scale analysis of their research effort. It shows that PhD students
contribute to about a third of the publication output of the province, with
doctoral students in the natural and medical sciences being present in a higher
proportion of papers published than their colleagues of the social sciences and
humanities. Collaboration is an important component of this socialization:
disciplines in which student collaboration is higher are also those in which
doctoral students are the most involved in peer-reviewed publications. In terms
of scientific impact, papers co-signed by doctorate students obtain
significantly lower citation rates than other Quebec papers, except in natural
sciences and engineering. Finally, this paper shows that involving doctoral
students in publications is positively linked with degree completion and
ulterior career in research.Comment: 41 pages, 7 figures, forthcoming in Scientometric
Quantifying the impact of weak, strong, and super ties in scientific careers
Scientists are frequently faced with the important decision to start or
terminate a creative partnership. This process can be influenced by strategic
motivations, as early career researchers are pursuers, whereas senior
researchers are typically attractors, of new collaborative opportunities.
Focusing on the longitudinal aspects of scientific collaboration, we analyzed
473 collaboration profiles using an ego-centric perspective which accounts for
researcher-specific characteristics and provides insight into a range of
topics, from career achievement and sustainability to team dynamics and
efficiency. From more than 166,000 collaboration records, we quantify the
frequency distributions of collaboration duration and tie-strength, showing
that collaboration networks are dominated by weak ties characterized by high
turnover rates. We use analytic extreme-value thresholds to identify a new
class of indispensable `super ties', the strongest of which commonly exhibit
>50% publication overlap with the central scientist. The prevalence of super
ties suggests that they arise from career strategies based upon cost, risk, and
reward sharing and complementary skill matching. We then use a combination of
descriptive and panel regression methods to compare the subset of publications
coauthored with a super tie to the subset without one, controlling for
pertinent features such as career age, prestige, team size, and prior group
experience. We find that super ties contribute to above-average productivity
and a 17% citation increase per publication, thus identifying these
partnerships - the analog of life partners - as a major factor in science
career development.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 1 Tabl
A bibliometric analysis of Australia's international research collaboration in science and technology: analytical methods and initial findings
This paper presents the initial findings from an exploratory bibliometric analysis of Australia's international collaboration in science and technology. This paper is focusses on:
(a) Assessing the methodological challenges faced in comprehensively mapping Australia's science and technology research activity from an international engagement perspective;
(b) Suggesting solutions to these challenges;
(c) Providing some policy-relevant findings of potential use to the Australian Government and the European Commission
Learning more from crossing levels: Investigating agility at three levels of the organization
Scholars have tried to explain how organizations can build agile teams by
only looking at one level of analysis. We argue in this short paper that
lessons can be learned from organizational science results explaining variance
on three different abstraction levels of organizations. We suggest agility
needs to be explained from organizational (macro), the team (meso), and
individual (micro) levels to provide useful and actionable guidelines to
practitioners. We are currently designing such studies and hope that they will
eventually result in validated measurements that can be used to prevent
companies from investing in the wrong areas when trying to move towards more
agility
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