Scientific publications and patenting by companies : a study of the whole population of Canadian firms over 25 years

There is evidence in the literature that technological inventions have an increasing connection to scientific knowledge. This raises two related questions: (1) Are firms increasingly conducting scientific basic research? (2) Is being at the scientific forefront helping firms to be closer to the technological frontier? This paper examines scientific output, as measured by numbers of papers, and technological output, as measured by patents granted to all Canadian firms, during the 1980 to 2005 period. Though the number of firms publishing papers and obtaining patents is increasing, scientific research and patenting by Canadian firms are at near ‘homeopathic’ levels. Firms that both publish papers and obtain patents (1) perform research that is more basic than firms that only publish scientific papers; (2) publish in more highly cited journals than firms that only perform scientific research; (3) publish papers that are more highly cited; and 4) hold patents that are more frequently cited

Yeast Polo-like kinase substrates are nailed with the right tools

A new approach to identifying kinase substrates reveals a novel role for yeast Polo-like kinase in mitosi

On the effects of the reunification on German researchers’ publication patterns

After developing independently following World War II, the research systems of East and West Germany reunited at the end of the Cold War, resulting in Westernization of East German Research institutions. Using data from the Web of Science over the 1980-2000 period, this paper analyses the effects of these political changes on the research activity of scholars from East and West Germany before and after the reunification. It shows that these groups differ in terms of levels of production, publication language, collaboration patterns and scientific impact and that, unsurprisingly, the scholarly output of the East became much more similar to that of the West after the reunification. At the level of individual researchers, analysis shows that East German researchers who had direct or indirect ties with the West prior to the 1990s were less affected by the reunification, or were perhaps quicker to adapt to this major change, than their colleagues who were more deeply rooted in the Eastern research system

The decline in the concentration of citations, 1900–2007

This article challenges recent research (Evans, 2008) reporting that the concentration of cited scientific literature increases with the online availability of articles and journals. Using Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science, the present article analyses changes in the concentration of citations received (2- and 5-year citation windows) by papers published between 1900 and 2005.Three measures of concentration are used: the percentage of papers that received at least one citation (cited papers); the percentage of papers needed to account for 20%,50%, and 80% of the citations; and the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI). These measures are used for four broad disciplines: natural sciences and engineering, medical fields, social sciences, and the humanities. All these measures converge and show that, contrary to what was reported by Evans, the dispersion of citations is actually increasing

Comparing bibliometric statistics obtained from the Web of Science and Scopus

For more than 40 years, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI, now part of Thomson Reuters) produced the only available bibliographic databases from which bibliometricians could compile large‐scale bibliometric indicators. ISI's citation indexes, now regrouped under the Web of Science (WoS), were the major sources of bibliometric data until 2004, when Scopus was launched by the publisher Reed Elsevier. For those who perform bibliometric analyses and comparisons of countries or institutions, the existence of these two major databases raises the important question of the comparability and stability of statistics obtained from different data sources. This paper uses macrolevel bibliometric indicators to compare results obtained from the WoS and Scopus. It shows that the correlations between the measures obtained with both databases for the number of papers and the number of citations received by countries, as well as for their ranks, are extremely high (R2 ≈ .99). There is also a very high correlation when countries' papers are broken down by field. The paper thus provides evidence that indicators of scientific production and citations at the country level are stable and largely independent of the database

Élaboration et étude préliminaire d'efficacité d'un guide d'interventions axées sur la mentalisation pour les jeunes hébergés en centre jeunesse

Cette étude propose d’utiliser la notion de mentalisation, soit la capacité qu’a un individu de percevoir et d’interpréter ses comportements et ceux d’autrui en fonction d’états mentaux (Allen & Fonagy, 2006), pour comprendre les difficultés que présentent les enfants hébergés en centre jeunesse et guider les interventions des éducateurs œuvrant auprès d’eux. De récents travaux documentent les liens existant entre les lacunes au sein de la capacité de mentalisation du parent et les traumas perpétrés dans la relation d’attachement avec son enfant (Allen, 2013; Slade, 2005; Slade, Grienenberger, Bernbach, Levy, & Locker, 2005). Ces traumas engendrent un développement altéré de la capacité de mentalisation chez l’enfant, lequel se lie à une autorégulation socioaffective déficitaire, marquée par l’agir et l’agressivité. Ces travaux suggèrent également qu’une intervention stimulant la reprise du développement de la capacité de mentalisation peut se traduire par une amélioration corollaire des mécanismes d’autorégulation, lesquels seraient alors opérés par la pensée plutôt que par l’agir (Gergely, 2003). En s’appuyant sur ces notions, un manuel d’interventions axées sur la notion de mentalisation destiné aux intervenants des centres jeunesse a été élaboré (Domon-Archambault & Terradas, 2012). Ce guide a été utilisé pour mener la formation des intervenants d’un centre jeunesse œuvrant auprès d’une clientèle d’enfants âgés de 6 à 12 ans. Le processus de théorisation et d’élaboration du manuel est décrit dans un premier article. Puis, l’évaluation préliminaire de l’efficacité de la formation s’appuyant sur ce manuel est abordée dans un deuxième article. Cette évaluation compare des mesures de la mentalisation prises chez les intervenants avant et après la formation. L’évaluation comprend également la comparaison des mesures, prises avant et après la formation, des difficultés émotionnelles et comportementales manifestées par les enfants vivant dans les milieux d’hébergement des centres jeunesse dans lesquelles ces intervenants travaillent. Bien que les résultats ne démontrent pas d’effet statistiquement significatif de la formation sur la capacité de mentalisation des éducateurs ciblés par celle-ci, les analyses statistiques effectuées attestent d’une réduction significative des symptômes dépressifs, des problèmes sociaux, de la somatisation, des troubles attentionnels de même que des troubles intériorisés totaux, suite à la formation, chez les enfants auprès desquels les éducateurs interviennent. Ces résultats confirment la possibilité d’adapter la compréhension et les interventions axées sur la mentalisation, étudiées par plusieurs auteurs chez une population adulte, aux enfants hébergés en centre jeunesse. Malgré les limites inhérentes à la nature exploratoire de l’étude, la réponse positive des intervenants suite à la formation de même que les impacts de celle-ci sur les difficultés comportementales et émotionnelles des enfants laissent croire qu’un tel projet serait pertinent à implanter et à évaluer de façon plus poussée en centre jeunesse

Which scientific elites? : on the concentration of research funds, publications and citations

Using the population of all university professors (N=13,479) in the province of Quebec (Canada), this paper analyses the concentration of funding, papers and citations at the level of individual researchers. It shows that each of these distributions is different, citations being the most concentrated followed by funding, papers published and, finally, number of funded projects. Concentration measures also vary between disciplines; social sciences and humanities generally being the most concentrated. The paper also shows that the correspondence between the elites defined by each of these measures is limited. In fact, only 3.2% of the researchers are in the top 10% for all indicators, while about 20% are in the top 10% for at least one of the indicators. The paper concludes with a discussion of the causes of these observed differences and formulates a few hypotheses

Abitbol : un langage sur mesure pour la métaprogrammation

Ce mémoire a pour thèse que les fonctions devraient être transparentes lors de la phase de métaprogrammation. En effet, la métaprogrammation se veut une possibilité pour le programmeur d’étendre le compilateur. Or, dans un style de programmation fonctionnelle, la logique du programme se retrouve dans les définitions des diverses fonctions le composant. Puisque les fonctions sont généralement opaques, l’impossibilité d’accéder à cette logique limite les applications possibles de la phase de métaprogrammation. Nous allons illustrer les avantages que procurent les fonctions transparentes pour la métaprogrammation. Nous donnerons notamment l’exemple du calcul symbolique et un exemple de nouvelles optimisations désormais possibles. Nous illustrerons également que la transparence des fonctions permet de faire le pont entre les datatypes du programme et les fonctions. Nous allons également étudier ce qu'implique la présence de fonctions transparentes au sein d'un langage. Nous nous concentrerons sur les aspects reliés à l'implantation de ces dernières, aux performances et à la facilité d'utilisation. Nous illustrerons nos propos avec le langage Abitbol, un langage créé sur mesure pour la métaprogrammation.Our main thesis is that functions should be transparent during the metaprogramming stage. Metaprogramming is intended as a possibility for the programmer to extend the compiler. But in a functional programming style, the program logic is found in the definition of its functions. Since functions are generally opaque, it is impossible for the programmer to access this information and this limits the metaprogramming possibilities. We will illustrate the benefits of transparent functions for metaprogramming. We will give the example of symbolic computation and also show new forms of optimizations now available at the metaprogramming stage. We will also illustrate that transparency allows us to bridge the gap between the datatypes of a program and its functions. We will also examine how transparent functions affects other aspects of the language. We will focus on how to implement them, their performance impact and their ease of use. We illustrate our thesis with Abitbol, a language designed for metaprogramming

The place of serials in referencing practices: Comparing natural sciences and engineering with social sciences and humanities

Journal articles constitute the core documents for the diffusion of knowledge in the natural sciences. It has been argued that the same is not true for the social sciences and humanities where knowledge is more often disseminated in monographs that are not indexed in the journal-based databases used for bibliometric analysis. Previous studies have made only partial assessments of the role played by both serials and other types of literature. The importance of journal literature in the various scientific fields has therefore not been systematically characterized. The authors address this issue by providing a systematic measurement of the role played by journal literature in the building of knowledge in both the natural sciences and engineering and the social sciences and humanities. Using citation data from the CD-ROM versions of the Science Citation Index (SCI), Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), and Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) databases from 1981 to 2000 (Thomson ISI, Philadelphia, PA), the authors quantify the share of citations to both serials and other types of literature. Variations in time and between fields are also analyzed. The results show that journal literature is increasingly important in the natural and social sciences, but that its role in the humanities is stagnant and has even tended to diminish slightly in the 1990s.\ud Journal literature accounts for less than 50% of the citations in several disciplines of the social sciences and humanities; hence, special care should be used when using bibliometric indicators that rely only on journal literature