Research Collaboration Analysis Using Text and Graph Features

Patterns of scientific collaboration and their effect on scientific production have been the subject of many studies. In this paper we analyze the nature of ties between co-authors and study collaboration patterns in science from the perspective of semantic similarity of authors who wrote a paper together and the strength of ties between these authors (i.e. how much have they previously collaborated together). These two views of scientific collaboration are used to analyze publications in the TrueImpactDataset [11], a new dataset containing two types of publications - publications regarded as seminal and publications regarded as literature reviews by field experts. We show there are distinct differences between seminal publications and literature reviews in terms of author similarity and the strength of ties between their authors. In particular, we find that seminal publications tend to be written by authors who have previously worked on dissimilar problems (i.e. authors from different fields or even disciplines), and by authors who are not frequent collaborators. On the other hand, literature reviews in our dataset tend to be the result of an established collaboration within a discipline. This demonstrates that our method provides meaningful information about potential future impacts of a publication which does not require citation information

Text and Graph Based Approach for Analyzing Patterns of Research Collaboration: An analysis of the TrueImpactDataset

Patterns of scientific collaboration and their effect on scientific production have been the subject of many studies. In this paper, we analyze the nature of ties between co-authors and study collaboration patterns in science from the perspective of semantic similarity of authors who wrote a paper together and the strength of ties between these authors (i.e. how frequently have they previously collaborated together). These two views of scientific collaboration are used to analyze publications in the TrueImpactDataset (Herrmannova et al., 2017) (Herrmannova et al., 2017), a new dataset containing two types of publications – publications regarded as seminal and publications regarded as literature reviews by field experts. We show there are distinct differences between seminal publications and literature reviews in terms of author similarity and the strength of ties between their authors. In particular, we find that seminal publications tend to be written by authors who have previously worked on dissimilar problems (i.e. authors from different fields or even disciplines), and by authors who are not frequent collaborators. On the other hand, literature reviews in our dataset tend to be the result of an established collaboration within a discipline. This demonstrates that our method provides meaningful information about potential future impacts of a publication which does not require citation information

Watta satta : bride exchange and women's welfare in rural Pakistan

In a setting where husbands wield considerable coercive power, forms of marriage should adapt to protect the interests of women and their families. The authors study the pervasive marriage custom of watta satta in rural Pakistan, a bride exchange between families coupled with a mutual threat of retaliation. They show that watta satta may be a mechanism to coordinate the actions of two sets of in-laws, each of whom wish to restrain their sons-in-law but who only have the ability to restrain their sons. The authors'empirical results support this view. The likelihood of marital inefficiency, as measured by estrangement, domestic abuse, and wife's mental health, is significantly lower in watta satta arrangements as compared with conventional marriages, but only after properly accounting for selection.Population&Development,Anthropology,Education and Society,Gender and Law,Gender and Law

Semantometrics: Fulltext-Based Measures for Analysing Research Collaboration

The aim of this article is to demonstrate some of the possible uses of a novel set of metrics called Semantometrics in relation to the role of "bridges" in scholarly publication networks. In contrast to the existing metrics such as Bibliometrics, Altmetrics or Webometrics, which are based on measuring the number of interactions in the scholarly network, Semantometrics build on the premise that full-text is needed to understand scholarly publication networks and the value of publications

Does Culture Affect Divorce Decisions? Evidence from European Immigrants in the US

This paper explores the role of culture in determining divorce decisions by examining country of origin differences in divorce rates of immigrants in the United States. Because childhood-arriving immigrants are all exposed to a common set of US laws and institutions, we interpret relationships between their divorce tendencies and home country divorce rates as evidence of the effect of culture. Our results are robust to controlling for several home country variables including average church attendance and GDP. Moreover, specifications with country of origin fixed effects suggest that divorce probabilities are especially low for immigrants from countries with low divorce rates that reside amidst a large number of co-ethnics. Supplemental analyses indicate that divorce culture has a stronger impact on the divorce decisions of females than of males pointing to a potentially gendered nature of divorce taboos.immigrants, culture, divorce

Mining Scholarly Publications for Research Evaluation

Scientific research can lead to breakthroughs that revolutionise society by solving long-standing problems. However, investment of public funds into research requires the ability to clearly demonstrate beneficial returns, accountability, and good management. At the same time, with the amount of scholarly literature rapidly expanding, recognising key research that presents the most important contributions to science is becoming increasingly difficult and time-consuming. This creates a need for effective and appropriate research evaluation methods. However, the question of how to evaluate the quality of research outcomes is very difficult to answer and despite decades of research, there is still no standard solution to this problem. Given this growing need for research evaluation, it is increasingly important to understand how research should be evaluated, and whether the existing methods meet this need. However, the current solutions, which are predominantly based on counting the number of interactions in the scholarly communication network, are insufficient for a number of reasons. In particular, they struggle in capturing many aspects of the academic culture and often significantly lag behind current developments. This work focuses on the evaluation of research publications and aims at creating new methods which utilise publication content. It studies the concept of research publication quality, methods assessing the performance of new research publication evaluation methods, analyses and extends the existing methods, and, most importantly, presents a new class of metrics which are based on publication manuscripts. By bridging the fields of research evaluation and text- and data-mining, this work provides tools for analysing the outcomes of research, and for relieving information overload in scholarly publishing

Higher aspirations: an agenda for reforming European universities

Since the introduction of the Shanghai ranking of the worldâ??s universities it has been clear that European universities are underperforming. This blueprint discusses the potential explanations and points at different reform priorities for higher education in Europe.

Understanding gendered influences on women's reproductive health in Pakistan: Moving beyond the autonomy paradigm

Recent research and policy discourse commonly view the limited autonomy of women in developing countries as a key barrier to improvements in their reproductive health. Rarely, however, is the notion of women's autonomy interrogated for its conceptual adequacy or usefulness for understanding the determinants of women's reproductive health, effective policy formulation or program design. Using ethnographic data from 2001, including social mapping exercises, observation of daily life, interviews, case studies and focus group discussions, this paper draws attention to the incongruities between the concept of women's autonomy and the gendered social, cultural, economic and political realities of women's lives in rural Punjab, Pakistan. These inadequacies include: the concept's undue emphasis on women's independent, autonomous action; a lack of attention to men and masculinities; a disregard for the multi-sited constitution of gender relations and gender inequality; an erroneous assumption that uptake of reproductive health services is an indicator of autonomy; and a failure to explore the interplay of other axes of disadvantage such as caste, class or socio-economic position. This paper calls for alternative, more nuanced, theoretical approaches for conceptualizing gender inequalities in order to enhance our understanding of women's reproductive wellbeing in Pakistan. The extent to which our arguments may be relevant to the wider South Asian context, and women's lives in other parts of the world, is also discussed

Spatial-Temporal Evolution of Scientific Production about Genetically Modified Maize

Maize is the grain cereal that is the basis of human and animal diets in Mexico and Latin America; it constitutes an essential crop for global food security. The objective of this study was to analyze the spatial–temporal evolution of scientific production on the theme of GMO maize, through a bibliometric analysis of the texts available in the main editorial houses (Elsevier, Scopus, and Springer), open access journal articles database (Conricyt, Scielo, Redalyc, Latindex, Claryvate Analytics, Periodica, and DOAJ), and freely accessible web search engine Google Scholar, to determine the factors that influence the impact of the studies. From 1991 to 2019, 917 texts were found whose spatial–temporal evolution showed a linear growth that concentrated in Latin America (58.56%). The low impact (measured by the number of bibliographic citations) of scientific studies developed in countries of Latin America was related to their publication in journals edited in their own countries and in Spanish, which restricts the constructive criticism of peer review. For the case of Mexico, a spatial discrepancy was also found between research centers and production areas, which limits the transference of technology; and no specialized author in theme of GMO maize was found; the researchers responded to “scientific trends” in agreement with the agrarian policies of the timeS

Does Culture Affect Divorce? Evidence From European Immigrants in the United States

This article explores the role of culture in determining divorce by examining country-of-origin differences in divorce rates of immigrants in the United States. Because childhood-arriving immigrants are all exposed to a common set of U.S. laws and institutions, we interpret relationships between their divorce tendencies and home-country divorce rates as evidence of the effect of culture. Our results are robust to controlling for several home-country variables, including average church attendance and gross domestic product (GDP). Moreover, specifications with country-of-origin fixed effects suggest that immigrants from countries with low divorce rates are especially less likely to be divorced if they reside among a large number of coethnics. Supplemental analyses indicate that divorce culture has a stronger impact on the divorce decisions of females than of males, pointing to a potentially gendered nature of divorce taboos