Establishment of computational biology in Greece and Cyprus: Past, present, and future.

We review the establishment of computational biology in Greece and Cyprus from its inception to date and issue recommendations for future development. We compare output to other countries of similar geography, economy, and size—based on publication counts recorded in the literature—and predict future growth based on those counts as well as national priority areas. Our analysis may be pertinent to wider national or regional communities with challenges and opportunities emerging from the rapid expansion of the field and related industries. Our recommendations suggest a 2-fold growth margin for the 2 countries, as a realistic expectation for further expansion of the field and the development of a credible roadmap of national priorities, both in terms of research and infrastructure funding

Multi-faceted insights of entrepreneurship facing a fast-growing economy: A literature review

This study explores entrepreneurship research in Vietnam, a lower-middle-income country in Southeast Asia that has witnessed rapid economic growth since the 1990s but has nonetheless been absent in the relevant Western-centric literature. Using an exclusively developed software, the study presents a structured dataset on entrepreneurship research in Vietnam from 2008 to 2018, highlighting: low research output, low creativity level, inattention to entrepreneurship theories, and instead, a focus on practical business matters. The scholarship remains limited due to the detachment between the academic and entrepreneur communities. More important are the findings that Vietnamese research on entrepreneurship, still in its infancy, diverges significantly from those in developed and emerging economies in terms of their content and methods. These studies are contextualized to a large extent to reflect the concerns of a developing economy still burdened by the high financial and nonfinancial costs

The contribution of higher education institutions to the South African economy

We present the direct and indirect contributions of higher education institutions in South Africa to certain macroeconomic indicators such as GDP and employment, with the ultimate purpose of establishing their importance for the country. Taking this a step further, funding of these institutions is crucial in order for them to continuously produce outcomes in terms of research and skilled graduates. Hence, we compare the South African research and development (R&D) expenditure with international best practice. Policy implications are also discussed, especially in the light of the new funding formula for universities to be announced by the Department of Higher Education and Training.http://www.sajs.co.za/am201

Does Research Output Matter for Economic Growth in Sub Saharan African Countries? Quantity and Quality Analysis

We study the link between university rankings and economic growth in Sub Saharan African Countries (SSA)? By applying the panel data analysis method and the system GMM technique used on a sample of 43 SSA countries during the period 1996-2015. Our results indicate that academic research exerts a positive and significant effect on the level of economic growth for both fixed and random effect. However, this relation seems to be insignificant when we run GMM in system regression. Also, findings show that domestic investment (INVES) and gross domestic savings (GDSAV) are considered as key factors for boosting economic growth in the SSA region. Contrary, the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) is positive but not significant for fixed and random effect regressions

International co-authorships and the role of the European Union as a funder: an Eastern European perspective

The paper investigates internationally co-authored publications between countries between 1995 and 2015. The paper tests if the European Union funding agency (as defined by InCites Web of Knowledge) has favoured Eastern European countries (East-E) comparing all publications against EU funded ones. This research question tentatively exposes the advantages in publishing under European Union schemes by the type of affiliation to the European Union itself. To do so, it identifies three sub-regions a priori: members of the European Union (East-EU); being an affiliated country to EU research schemes (East-AC); or neither (East-Ext). This is tested at three levels: number of publications (articles co-authored with at least one East-E presence); centrality of a given country in the global network of collaborations; and influence of research (average of categorical normalised citations index –CNCI). The findings show that the EU as a funder does play a positive role, although national differences within these three types of affiliation are more relevant than those between the three sub-regions. Findings suggest further research directed at understanding national policies concerning research, and how the European Union might consider its contribution in the wider European Research Area. These findings also suggest further research concerning the future of Eastern Europe, especially in a possible scenario of “two-speeds integration” of the European Union and the European Research Area

Indicators of the scientific impact of nations revisited

An improved Indicator of a Nation’s Scientific Impact (INSI), which, in addition to citation rates, takes into account how many research areas in which each nation has exceeded the entrance thresholds of the Essential Science Indicators (ESI, Clarivate Analytics), was proposed. This indicator provided a more realistic estimate of nations’ scientific impact, which was better predicted from the societal factors that are related to the quality of scientific output. The strongest predictor of countries’ scientific impact was good governance, while economic wealth and research and development expenditure played a relatively minor role in predicting research impact. We conclude that good governance is needed to create an environment, which can facilitate the translation of money invested into the production of high-impact scientific output

How economic variables influence citations?

This paper explores the influence of select economic variables on total citations and citations per document as obtained from Scopus from 2016 to 2018. The analysis considered 32 countries that contribute 90% of the scholarly output. Variables considered in the study included citations, citable documents, total expenditure on R&D per capita ($), researchers in R&D per capita, GDP (PPP) per capita and university education index. Based on multiple regression equation, the output broadly confirms the earlier observation of citation intensity going with wealth intensity of nations. However, on closer examination based on the obtained regression equation, aberration between expected and obtained total citations and citations per document could be observed for India and several other countries. The paper sees a need to include a taxonomy of motivations to cite and contributor taxonomy to make the citation measures meaningful

Research output and economic growth in G7 countries : new evidence from asymmetric panel causality testing

Recent studies have shown increasing interest on the relationship between research output and economic growth. The study of such a relationship is not only of theoretical interest, but it can also influence specific policies to improve the quality, and probably the quantity of research output. This paper has studied this relationship in G7 countries using the asymmetric panel causality test of Hatemi-J (2011). Our results show that only the United Kingdom shows a causal relationship from the output of research to real GDP. However, when the signs of variations are taken into account, there is an asymmetric causality running from negative research output shocks to negative real GDP shocks.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/raec202017-05-30am201

Global Trends and Regional Variations in Studies of HIV/AIDS

We conduct textual analysis of a sample of more than 200,000 papers written on HIV/AIDS during the past three decades. Using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation method, we disentangle studies that address behavioral and social aspects from other studies and measure the trends of different topics as related to HIV/AIDS. We show that there is a regional variation in scientists' approach to the problem of HIV/AIDS. Our results show that controlling for the economy, proximity to the HIV/AIDS problem correlates with the extent to which scientists look at the behavioral and social aspects of the disease rather than biomedical

How economic variables influence citations?

326-334This paper explores the influence of select economic variables on total citations and citations per document as obtained from Scopus from 2016 to 2018. The analysis considered 32 countries that contribute 90% of the scholarly output. Variables considered in the study included citations, citable documents, total expenditure on R&D per capita ($), researchers in R&D per capita, GDP (PPP) per capita and university education index. Based on multiple regression equation, the output broadly confirms the earlier observation of citation intensity going with wealth intensity of nations. However, on closer examination based on the obtained regression equation, aberration between expected and obtained total citations and citations per document could be observed for India and several other countries. The paper sees a need to include a taxonomy of motivations to cite and contributor taxonomy to make the citation measures meaningful