30,179 research outputs found
Geographical trends in research: a preliminary analysis on authors' affiliations
In the last decade, research literature reached an enormous volume with an unprecedented current annual increase of 1.5 million new publications. As research gets ever more global and new countries and institutions, either from academia or corporate environment, start to contribute with their share, it is important to monitor this complex scenario and understand its dynamics.
We present a study on a conference proceedings dataset extracted from Springer Nature Scigraph that illustrates insightful geographical trends and highlights the unbalanced growth of competitive research institutions worldwide. Results emerged from our micro and macro analysis show that the distributions among countries of institutions and papers follow a power law, and thus very few countries keep producing most of the papers accepted by high-tier conferences. In addition, we found that the annual and overall turnover rate of the top 5, 10 and 25 countries is extremely low, suggesting a very static landscape in which new entries struggle to emerge. Finally, we highlight the presence of an increasing gap between the number of institutions initiating and overseeing research endeavours (i.e. first and last authors' affiliations) and the total number of institutions participating in research. As a consequence of our analysis, the paper also discusses our experience in working with affiliations: an utterly simple matter at first glance, that is instead revealed to be a complex research and technical challenge yet far from being solved
Usage Bibliometrics
Scholarly usage data provides unique opportunities to address the known
shortcomings of citation analysis. However, the collection, processing and
analysis of usage data remains an area of active research. This article
provides a review of the state-of-the-art in usage-based informetric, i.e. the
use of usage data to study the scholarly process.Comment: Publisher's PDF (by permission). Publisher web site:
books.infotoday.com/asist/arist44.shtm
Homi Jehangir Bhabha as a Knowledge Generating System: A Longitudinal Cognition Study
Quantitative analysis of the events of synchronous references in the research papers followed throughout the publishing career of an individual scientist revealed interesting highlights on the knowledge-generating-system. In the case study of Homi Jehangir Bhabha first quinquennium and fifth quinquennium of his research career had low Self-references; third quinquennium and fourth quinquennium had moderate Self-references; whereas second quinquennium had highest Self-references. The two major clusters of Self-references occurring during the second and third quinquennium were indicators of active periods of knowledgegenerating and faster communications
An investigation into the tourism and hospitality scholarly activity currently being undertaken in Irish higher education institutions
The purpose of this article is to describe the tourism and hospitality scholarly activity currently taking place in Irish higher education (HE) institutions. A number of approaches to tourism and hospitality research are identified in the literature. In order to understand the policy and practice within the Irish HE sector, qualitative research was conducted through a survey of tourism and hospitality academics and researchers within Irish HE institutions. The findings suggest that tourism and hospitality scholarly activity in Ireland is being carried out in many ways, including through joint research projects between Irish HE institutions and industry. This is a positive step towards achieving research and industry harmony. The development of stand-alone research centres within these institutions can also promote and attract funding for tourism and hospitality research activities
Will This Paper Increase Your h-index? Scientific Impact Prediction
Scientific impact plays a central role in the evaluation of the output of
scholars, departments, and institutions. A widely used measure of scientific
impact is citations, with a growing body of literature focused on predicting
the number of citations obtained by any given publication. The effectiveness of
such predictions, however, is fundamentally limited by the power-law
distribution of citations, whereby publications with few citations are
extremely common and publications with many citations are relatively rare.
Given this limitation, in this work we instead address a related question asked
by many academic researchers in the course of writing a paper, namely: "Will
this paper increase my h-index?" Using a real academic dataset with over 1.7
million authors, 2 million papers, and 8 million citation relationships from
the premier online academic service ArnetMiner, we formalize a novel scientific
impact prediction problem to examine several factors that can drive a paper to
increase the primary author's h-index. We find that the researcher's authority
on the publication topic and the venue in which the paper is published are
crucial factors to the increase of the primary author's h-index, while the
topic popularity and the co-authors' h-indices are of surprisingly little
relevance. By leveraging relevant factors, we find a greater than 87.5%
potential predictability for whether a paper will contribute to an author's
h-index within five years. As a further experiment, we generate a
self-prediction for this paper, estimating that there is a 76% probability that
it will contribute to the h-index of the co-author with the highest current
h-index in five years. We conclude that our findings on the quantification of
scientific impact can help researchers to expand their influence and more
effectively leverage their position of "standing on the shoulders of giants."Comment: Proc. of the 8th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data
Mining (WSDM'15
Gender Disparities in Science? Dropout, Productivity, Collaborations and Success of Male and Female Computer Scientists
Scientific collaborations shape ideas as well as innovations and are both the
substrate for, and the outcome of, academic careers. Recent studies show that
gender inequality is still present in many scientific practices ranging from
hiring to peer-review processes and grant applications. In this work, we
investigate gender-specific differences in collaboration patterns of more than
one million computer scientists over the course of 47 years. We explore how
these patterns change over years and career ages and how they impact scientific
success. Our results highlight that successful male and female scientists
reveal the same collaboration patterns: compared to scientists in the same
career age, they tend to collaborate with more colleagues than other
scientists, seek innovations as brokers and establish longer-lasting and more
repetitive collaborations. However, women are on average less likely to adapt
the collaboration patterns that are related with success, more likely to embed
into ego networks devoid of structural holes, and they exhibit stronger gender
homophily as well as a consistently higher dropout rate than men in all career
ages
Andrzej Pekalski networks of scientific interests with internal degrees of freedom through self-citation analysis
Old and recent theoretical works by Andrzej Pekalski (APE) are recalled as
possible sources of interest for describing network formation and clustering in
complex (scientific) communities, through self-organisation and percolation
processes. Emphasis is placed on APE self-citation network over four decades.
The method is that used for detecting scientists field mobility by focusing on
author's self-citation, co-authorships and article topics networks as in [1,2].
It is shown that APE's self-citation patterns reveal important information on
APE interest for research topics over time as well as APE engagement on
different scientific topics and in different networks of collaboration. Its
interesting complexity results from "degrees of freedom" and external fields
leading to so called internal shock resistance. It is found that APE network of
scientific interests belongs to independent clusters and occurs through rare or
drastic events as in irreversible "preferential attachment processes", similar
to those found in usual mechanics and thermodynamics phase transitions.Comment: 7 pages, 1 table, 44 references, submitted to Int J Mod Phys
The role of handbooks in knowledge creation and diffusion: A case of science and technology studies
Genre is considered to be an important element in scholarly communication and
in the practice of scientific disciplines. However, scientometric studies have
typically focused on a single genre, the journal article. The goal of this
study is to understand the role that handbooks play in knowledge creation and
diffusion and their relationship with the genre of journal articles,
particularly in highly interdisciplinary and emergent social science and
humanities disciplines. To shed light on these questions we focused on
handbooks and journal articles published over the last four decades belonging
to the research area of Science and Technology Studies (STS), broadly defined.
To get a detailed picture we used the full-text of five handbooks (500,000
words) and a well-defined set of 11,700 STS articles. We confirmed the
methodological split of STS into qualitative and quantitative (scientometric)
approaches. Even when the two traditions explore similar topics (e.g., science
and gender) they approach them from different starting points. The change in
cognitive foci in both handbooks and articles partially reflects the changing
trends in STS research, often driven by technology. Using text similarity
measures we found that, in the case of STS, handbooks play no special role in
either focusing the research efforts or marking their decline. In general, they
do not represent the summaries of research directions that have emerged since
the previous edition of the handbook.Comment: Accepted for publication in Journal of Informetric
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