Co-contributorship Network and Division of Labor in Individual Scientific Collaborations

Collaborations are pervasive in current science. Collaborations have been studied and encouraged in many disciplines. However, little is known how a team really functions from the detailed division of labor within. In this research, we investigate the patterns of scientific collaboration and division of labor within individual scholarly articles by analyzing their co-contributorship networks. Co-contributorship networks are constructed by performing the one-mode projection of the author-task bipartite networks obtained from 138,787 papers published in PLoS journals. Given a paper, we define three types of contributors: Specialists, Team-players, and Versatiles. Specialists are those who contribute to all their tasks alone; team-players are those who contribute to every task with other collaborators; and versatiles are those who do both. We find that team-players are the majority and they tend to contribute to the five most common tasks as expected, such as "data analysis" and "performing experiments". The specialists and versatiles are more prevalent than expected by a random-graph null model. Versatiles tend to be senior authors associated with funding and supervisions. Specialists are associated with two contrasting roles: the supervising role as team leaders or marginal and specialized contributions.Comment: accepted by JASIS

The effect of collaborative networks on healthcare research performance

We can all use assessment and appraisal to help us improve our performance in any area of life. Healthcare researchers are no exception. For healthcare researchers a system is required to measure research performance according to an accepted global benchmark. While there are existing systems that have been created to measure research performance in general, and healthcare research performance has been appraised with several bibliometric indicators, there is a lack of evidence to prove their validity and a deficiency of indicators that embrace social behaviours such as collaboration. In this thesis we endeavoured to enhance knowledge on healthcare research performance assessment, which has the potential to be integrated into systems that specifically appraise healthcare research performance. Ultimately, these systems may promote a performance-based culture that better reflects the quality and impact of healthcare research.Open Acces

Study on open science: The general state of the play in Open Science principles and practices at European life sciences institutes

Nowadays, open science is a hot topic on all levels and also is one of the priorities of the European Research Area. Components that are commonly associated with open science are open access, open data, open methodology, open source, open peer review, open science policies and citizen science. Open science may a great potential to connect and influence the practices of researchers, funding institutions and the public. In this paper, we evaluate the level of openness based on public surveys at four European life sciences institute

Science in Pieces: Public Science in the Deformation Age

This dissertation investigates how public information about new scientific research flows through the contemporary media system. Arguing that public science is governed more by entropy than inertia, this project investigates the people, technologies, and processes through which difference is brought into flows of information about direct detection of dark matter experiments. Over six empirical chapters, the project considers how three types of organizational mediators of public science—multi-institution collaborations, communication offices at national laboratories, and science journalists—translate, move, preserve, and/or deconstruct information. To do so, it draws on diverse methods, including 62 semi-structured interviews with members of these organizations and an interpretive textual analysis of hundreds of news articles, press releases, and organizational documents. This project makes three broad contributions. First, it provides a detailed account of how science organizations are adopting new practices, structures, and formats to reach new audiences amid changing technologies, economic pressures, and cultures. Second, it extends Bruno Latour’s circulating reference to present a new descriptive and normative model of the epistemology of public science communication that acknowledges how the reduction of technical complexity can productively afford an expansion of public meaning. It argues that good public communication must shepherd the relationships and connections that allow truth to circulate across time, space, and reference, while simultaneously working to open content for public discussion, consideration, and meaning making. Finally, this project considers what happens when these mediations go wrong. Instead of mis or disinformation—information lacking truth—this project recognizes another form of information degradation: deformation. Deformations are structural artifacts of the contemporary media system: pieces and fragments broken off in the grinding of disparate logics, systems, technologies, and messages. They emerge when information loses its organization, its formation. Observing deformation in science and beyond, this project ultimately argues that despite decades of scholarship on the “information society,” ours is better recognized as the “deformation society.”Doctor of Philosoph

The Linguistics of Newswriting

The Linguistics of Newswriting focuses on text production in journalistic media as both a socially relevant field of language use and as a strategic field of applied linguistics. The book discusses and paves the way for scientific projects in the emerg­ing field of linguistics of newswriting. From empirical micro and theoretical macro perspectives, strategies and practices of research development and knowledge transformation are discussed. Thus, the book is addressed to researchers, teachers and coaches interested in the linguistics of professional writing in general and news­writing in particular. Together with the training materials provided on the internet www.news-writing.net, the book will also be useful to anyone who wants to become a more “discerning consumer" (Perry, 2005) or a more reflective producer of language in the media

Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge

The intersection of scholarly communication librarianship and open education offers a unique opportunity to expand knowledge of scholarly communication topics in both education and practice. Open resources can address the gap in teaching timely and critical scholarly communication topics—copyright in teaching and research environments, academic publishing, emerging modes of scholarship, impact measurement—while increasing access to resources and equitable participation in education and scholarly communication. Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge is an open textbook and practitioner’s guide that collects theory, practice, and case studies from nearly 80 experts in scholarly communication and open education. Divided into three parts: *What is Scholarly Communication? *Scholarly Communication and Open Culture *Voices from the Field: Perspectives, Intersections, and Case Studies The book delves into the economic, social, policy, and legal aspects of scholarly communication as well as open access, open data, open education, and open science and infrastructure. Practitioners provide insight into the relationship between university presses and academic libraries, defining collection development as operational scholarly communication, and promotion and tenure and the challenge for open access. Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge is a thorough guide meant to increase instruction on scholarly communication and open education issues and practices so library workers can continue to meet the changing needs of students and faculty. It is also a political statement about the future to which we aspire and a challenge to the industrial, commercial, capitalistic tendencies encroaching on higher education. Students, readers, educators, and adaptors of this resource can find and embrace these themes throughout the text and embody them in their work

European knowledge transfer reflected by research collaboration and patent citations indicators

Knowledge transfer consists of activities that aim to capture and transmit knowledge, skills and competence from those who generate them to those who will transform them into socio-economic outcomes. In the context of the March 2000 Lisbon strategy and its aim to make the European Union the “world's most dynamic and competitive knowledge economy”, knowledge transfer is considered to play an important role in helping to overcome obstacles such as a weak environment to stimulate high quality research and exploit research results. The introduction of new funding schemes and policies aimed at increasing knowledge flow between countries and sectors in Europe has increased the demand for studies of the impact of such policies and funding mechanisms and the development of relevant and accurate indicators related to them. The aim of this thesis was to study the dynamics of knowledge transfer in Europe and to examine how knowledge transfer can be measured and analysed through different indicators. This was done by studying co-authorships and collaborations within Europe as indicators of geographical knowledge transfer and patent citations as an indicator of sectoral knowledge flow. The results showed that researchers from smaller countries co-authored more with other EU countries than those from bigger countries, while the co-authorship rate with extra-EU partners was not dependent on a country’s size. Co-authorship patterns were also found to depend on the scientific field. The analysis also indicated that multilateral collaborations funded through the EU Framework Programmes are more exclusively European in nature. In contrast, co-publication patterns in multilateral collaborations suggested that European researchers tend to co-author more with global, rather than exclusively European partners and that this global multilateral orientation in copublications continues to rise. When using co-publications as an indicator for geographical knowledge flow, the results demonstrated that European research policy most likely has had an impact on research collaboration patterns. However, the results also strongly suggested that any direct impact was limited and did not over-ride self-selected collaboration patterns that continue to drive a more global, rather than exclusively European, research collaboration orientation. A more disaggregated scrutiny of publication patterns also underscored very clearly that collaboration strategies show considerable diversity across scientific fields, as well as countries. Further, the results suggest that some policies, to support innovation in regions with a low absorptive capacity (weak innovation activities and a low tech profile) e.g. supporting regional R&D through subsidies, may be less successful than the incorporation of qualified personnel at firms or the increase of local university-industry links. The thesis also made several contributions to the discussion of research methods in this field by investigating the utility of some central indicators and approaches. The results showed that the corresponding author is most likely to appear first and thereafter most-likely to appear last in the byline. However, the analysis also indicated that these results are dependent on the number of authors in a paper and that national differences also exist, thus arguing for a fine-tuning of bibliometric tools, in order to more effectively capture the relative importance of author contributions. Similarly, the analysis examined the use of patent citations as an indicator for science-industry links and geographical localization at a regional level. It found that there are reasons to question the use of this indicator, specifically in a region with low absorptive capacity. The related results also highlighted that there is a need to differentiate between applicant and examiner citations when examining the knowledge base since examiners and applicants add different types of knowledge

Journalistic Practice and the Cultural Valuation of New Media: Topicality, Objectivity, Network

Around the turn of the twenty-first century, American journalism is undergoing an existential crisis provoked by the emergence of digital and networked communication. As the economic model of producing journalism is undergoing significant changes, this study argues that the crisis of journalism is primarily a cultural crisis of valuation. Because the practices that traditionally defined the exclusivity of journalism as a form of public communication have been transposed to the online and digital environment through social media and blogs, such practices no longer value journalism in the same terms like in the age of mass media. The key to understanding the cultural crisis of journalism in the present, this study argues, is to revise the traditional narrative and its associated terminologies of the institutionalization of journalism. Journalism is thus defined as a structure of public communication, which needs to be enacted by producers and audiences alike to become socially meaningful. The consequence of seeing journalism as a structure sustained through social practices is that it allows to see the relation between audiences and their journalistic media as constitutive for the social function of new media in journalism. Through the analytically central dimension of practice, the study presents key moments in the history of modern journalism, where the meaning of new media was negotiated. These moments include the emergence of topical news media oriented toward a mass market (the penny press in the 1830s) and the definition of a schema of objectivity which valued journalistic practice in professional and scientific terms around the turn of the twentieth century in analogy to photographic media. In each phase, material, cognitive and social practices helped to define the value of a given new medium for journalism. Through the schemas of topicality and objectivity, journalistic practice institutionalized a privileged structure of public communication. The legacy of defining these schemas is then regarded as the central reason for the cultural crisis of journalistic practice in the present, as practices have been transposed and re-valued to sustain either forms of alternative journalism (as peer-production) or forms of self-communication in network media like blogs. Neither the form nor the technology of the blog alone can explain this differential social relevance but only the different ways in which social practices integrated and value new media. The study synthesizes an interdisciplinary array of concepts from cultural studies, sociology and journalism studies on subjects such as public communication, interaction, news production and cultural innovation. The theoretical framework of practice theories is then applied to an extensive body of primary and secondary source material, in order to retrace the cultural valuation of new media in a historically-comparative perspective. The study offers a theoretical and empirical contribution to the analysis of cultural innovation, which can be adopted to other cultural forms and media

Theories of Informetrics and Scholarly Communication

Scientometrics have become an essential element in the practice and evaluation of science and research, including both the evaluation of individuals and national assessment exercises. Yet, researchers and practitioners in this field have lacked clear theories to guide their work. As early as 1981, then doctoral student Blaise Cronin published The need for a theory of citing - a call to arms for the fledgling scientometric community to produce foundational theories upon which the work of the field could be based. More than three decades later, the time has come to reach out the field again and ask how they have responded to this call. This book compiles the foundational theories that guide informetrics and scholarly communication research. It is a much needed compilation by leading scholars in the field that gathers together the theories that guide our understanding of authorship, citing, and impact