104 research outputs found
Universities Scale Like Cities
Recent studies of urban scaling show that important socioeconomic city
characteristics such as wealth and innovation capacity exhibit a nonlinear,
particularly a power law scaling with population size. These nonlinear effects
are common to all cities, with similar power law exponents. These findings mean
that the larger the city, the more disproportionally they are places of wealth
and innovation. Local properties of cities cause a deviation from the expected
behavior as predicted by the power law scaling. In this paper we demonstrate
that universities show a similar behavior as cities in the distribution of the
gross university income in terms of total number of citations over size in
terms of total number of publications. Moreover, the power law exponents for
university scaling are comparable to those for urban scaling. We find that
deviations from the expected behavior can indeed be explained by specific local
properties of universities, particularly the field-specific composition of a
university, and its quality in terms of field-normalized citation impact. By
studying both the set of the 500 largest universities worldwide and a specific
subset of these 500 universities -- the top-100 European universities -- we are
also able to distinguish between properties of universities with as well as
without selection of one specific local property, the quality of a university
in terms of its average field-normalized citation impact. It also reveals an
interesting observation concerning the working of a crucial property in
networked systems, preferential attachment.Comment: 16 pages, 17 figure
Exploring the relationship between the Engineering and Physical Sciences and the Health and Life Sciences by advanced bibliometric methods
We investigate the extent to which advances in the health and life sciences
(HLS) are dependent on research in the engineering and physical sciences (EPS),
particularly physics, chemistry, mathematics, and engineering. The analysis
combines two different bibliometric approaches. The first approach to analyze
the 'EPS-HLS interface' is based on term map visualizations of HLS research
fields. We consider 16 clinical fields and five life science fields. On the
basis of expert judgment, EPS research in these fields is studied by
identifying EPS-related terms in the term maps. In the second approach, a
large-scale citation-based network analysis is applied to publications from all
fields of science. We work with about 22,000 clusters of publications, each
representing a topic in the scientific literature. Citation relations are used
to identify topics at the EPS-HLS interface. The two approaches complement each
other. The advantages of working with textual data compensate for the
limitations of working with citation relations and the other way around. An
important advantage of working with textual data is in the in-depth qualitative
insights it provides. Working with citation relations, on the other hand,
yields many relevant quantitative statistics. We find that EPS research
contributes to HLS developments mainly in the following five ways: new
materials and their properties; chemical methods for analysis and molecular
synthesis; imaging of parts of the body as well as of biomaterial surfaces;
medical engineering mainly related to imaging, radiation therapy, signal
processing technology, and other medical instrumentation; mathematical and
statistical methods for data analysis. In our analysis, about 10% of all EPS
and HLS publications are classified as being at the EPS-HLS interface. This
percentage has remained more or less constant during the past decade
Universality of citation distributions revisited
Radicchi, Fortunato, and Castellano [arXiv:0806.0974, PNAS 105(45), 17268]
claim that, apart from a scaling factor, all fields of science are
characterized by the same citation distribution. We present a large-scale
validation study of this universality-of-citation-distributions claim. Our
analysis shows that claiming citation distributions to be universal for all
fields of science is not warranted. Although many fields indeed seem to have
fairly similar citation distributions, there are quite some exceptions as well.
We also briefly discuss the consequences of our findings for the measurement of
scientific impact using citation-based bibliometric indicators
Sleeping Beauties Cited in Patents: Is there also a Dormitory of Inventions?
A Sleeping Beauty in Science is a publication that goes unnoticed (sleeps)
for a long time and then, almost suddenly, attracts a lot of attention (is
awakened by a prince). In our foregoing study we found that roughly half of the
Sleeping Beauties are application-oriented and thus are potential Sleeping
Innovations. In this paper we investigate a new topic: Sleeping Beauties that
are cited in patents. In this way we explore the existence of a dormitory of
inventions. We find that patent citation may occur before or after the
awakening and that the depth of the sleep, i.e., citation rate during the
sleeping period, is no predictor for later scientific or technological impact
of the Sleeping Beauty. Inventor-author self-citations occur only in a small
minority of the Sleeping Beauties that are cited in patents, but other types of
inventor-author links occur more frequently. We analyze whether they deal with
new topics by measuring the time-dependent evolution in the entire scientific
literature of the number of papers related to both the precisely defined topics
as well as the broader research theme of the Sleeping Beauty during and after
the sleeping time. We focus on the awakening by analyzing the first group of
papers that cites the Sleeping Beauty. Next, we create concept maps of the
topic-related and the citing papers for a time period immediately following the
awakening and for the most recent period. Finally, we make an extensive
assessment of the cited and citing relations of the Sleeping Beauty. We find
that tunable co-citation analysis is a powerful tool to discover the prince and
other important application-oriented work directly related to the Sleeping
Beauty, for instance papers written by authors who cite Sleeping Beauties in
both the patents of which they are the inventors, as well as in their
scientific papers.Comment: 30 pages, 17 figure
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