Scholarly communication in transition: The use of question marks in the titles of scientific articles in medicine, life sciences and physics 1966–2005

The titles of scientific articles have a special significance. We examined nearly 20 million scientific articles and recorded the development of articles with a question mark at the end of their titles over the last 40 years. Our study was confined to the disciplines of physics, life sciences and medicine, where we found a significant increase from 50% to more than 200% in the number of articles with question-mark titles. We looked at the principle functions and structure of the titles of scientific papers, and we assume that marketing aspects are one of the decisive factors behind the growing usage of question-mark titles in scientific articles

The elite brain drain

We collect data on the movement and productivity of elite scientists. Their mobility is remarkable: nearly half of the world’s most-cited physicists work outside their country of birth. We show they migrate systematically towards nations with large R&D spending. Our study cannot adjudicate on whether migration improves scientists’ productivity, but we find that movers and stayers have identical h-index citations scores. Immigrants in the UK and US now win Nobel Prizes proportionately less often than earlier. US residents’ h-indexes are relatively high. We describe a framework where a key role is played by low mobility costs in the modern world

Factors affecting inter-regional academic scientific collaboration within Europe: the role of economic distance

This paper offers some insights into scientific collaboration (SC) at the regional level by drawing upon two lines of inquiry. The first involves examining the spatial patterns of university SC across the EU-15 (all countries belonging to the European Union between 1995 and 2004). The second consists of extending the current empirical analysis on regional SC collaboration by including the economic distance between regions in the model along with other variables suggested by the extant literature. The methodology relies on co-publications as a proxy for academic collaboration, and in order to test the relevance of economic distance for the intensity of collaboration between regions, we put forward a gravity equation. The descriptive results show that there are significant differences in the production of academic scientific papers between less-favoured regions and core regions. However, the intensity of collaboration is similar in both types of regions. Our econometric findings suggest that differences in scientific resources (as measured by R&D expenditure) between regions are relevant in explaining academic scientific collaborations, while distance in the level of development (as measured by per capita GDP) does not appear to play any significant role. Nevertheless, other variables in the analysis, including geographical distance, specialization and cultural factors, do yield significant estimated coefficients, and this is consistent with the previous literature on regional SC

Evolving cohesion metrics of a research network on rare diseases: a longitudinal study over 14 years

[EN] Research collaboration is necessary, rewarding, and beneficial. Cohesion between team members is related to their collective efficiency. To assess collaboration processes and their eventual outcomes, agencies need innovative methods-and social network approaches are emerging as a useful analytical tool. We identified the research output and citation data of a network of 61 research groups formally engaged in publishing rare disease research between 2000 and 2013. We drew the collaboration networks for each year and computed the global and local measures throughout the period. Although global network measures remained steady over the whole period, the local and subgroup metrics revealed a growing cohesion between the teams. Transitivity and density showed little or no variation throughout the period. In contrast the following points indicated an evolution towards greater network cohesion: the emergence of a giant component (which grew from just 30 % to reach 85 % of groups); the decreasing number of communities (following a tripling in the average number of members); the growing number of fully connected subgroups; and increasing average strength. Moreover, assortativity measures reveal that, after an initial period where subject affinity and a common geographical location played some role in favouring the connection between groups, the collaboration was driven in the final stages by other factors and complementarities. The Spanish research network on rare diseases has evolved towards a growing cohesion-as revealed by local and subgroup metrics following social network analysis.The Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness partially supported this research (Grant Number ECO2014-59381-R).Benito Amat, C.; Perruchas, F. (2016). Evolving cohesion metrics of a research network on rare diseases: a longitudinal study over 14 years. Scientometrics. 108(1):41-56. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-1952-zS41561081Aymé, S., & Schmidtke, J. (2007). Networking for rare diseases: A necessity for Europe. Bundesgesundheitsblatt - Gesundheitsforschung - Gesundheitsschutz, 50(12), 1477–1483. doi: 10.1007/s00103-007-0381-9 .Barabási, A. L., Jeong, H., Néda, Z., Ravasz, E., Schubert, A., & Vicsek, T. (2002). Evolution of the social network of scientific collaborations. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 311(3–4), 590–614. doi: 10.1016/S0378-4371(02)00736-7 .Bettencourt, L. M. A., Kaiser, D. I., & Kaur, J. (2009). Scientific discovery and topological transitions in collaboration networks. Journal of Informetrics, 3(3), 210–221. doi: 10.1016/j.joi.2009.03.001 .Bian, J., Xie, M., Topaloglu, U., Hudson, T., Eswaran, H., & Hogan, W. (2014). Social network analysis of biomedical research collaboration networks in a CTSA institution. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 52, 130–140. doi: 10.1016/j.jbi.2014.01.015 .Bordons, M., Aparicio, J., González-Albo, B., & Díaz-Faes, A. A. (2015). The relationship between the research performance of scientists and their position in co-authorship networks in three fields. Journal of Informetrics, 9(1), 135–144. doi: 10.1016/j.joi.2014.12.001 .Börner, K., Dall’Asta, L., Ke, W., & Vespignani, A. (2005). Studying the emerging global brain: Analyzing and visualizing the impact of co-authorship teams. Complexity, 10(4), 57–67. doi: 10.1002/cplx.20078 .Casey-Campbell, M., & Martens, M. L. (2009). Sticking it all together: A critical assessment of the group cohesion–performance literature. International Journal of Management Reviews, 11(2), 223–246. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2370.2008.00239.x .Chiocchio, F., & Essiembre, H. (2009). Cohesion and performance: A meta-analytic review of disparities between project teams, Production teams, and service teams. Small group research, 40(4), 382–420. doi: 10.1177/1046496409335103 .Cho, A. (2011). Particle physicists’ new extreme teams. Science, 333(6049), 1564–1567. doi: 10.1126/science.333.6049.1564 .Cooke, N. J., & Hilton, M. L. (2015). Enhancing the effectiveness of team science. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press. Recuperado a partir de http://www.nap.edu/catalog/19007/enhancing-the-effectiveness-of-team-science .Cugmas, M., Ferligoj, A., & Kronegger, L. (2015). The stability of co-authorship structures. Scientometrics, 106(1), 163–186. doi: 10.1007/s11192-015-1790-4 .Estrada, E. (2011). The structure of complex networks: Theory and applications. Oxford: University Press.Gallivan, M., & Ahuja, M. (2015). Co-authorship, homophily, and scholarly influence in information systems research. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 16(12), 980.Ghosh, J., Kshitij, A., & Kadyan, S. (2014). Functional information characteristics of large-scale research collaboration: Network measures and implications. Scientometrics, 102(2), 1207–1239. doi: 10.1007/s11192-014-1475-4 .Heymann, S. (2014). Gephi. In R. Alhajj & J. Rokne (Eds.), Encyclopedia of social network analysis and mining (pp. 612–625). New York: Springer.Himmelstein, D. S., & Powell, K. (2016). Analysis for “the history of publishing delays” blog post v1.0. Zenodo,. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.45516 .Hunt, J. D., Whipple, E. C., & McGowan, J. J. (2012). Use of social network analysis tools to validate a resources infrastructure for interinstitutional translational research: A case study. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 100(1), 48–54. doi: 10.3163/1536-5050.100.1.009 .Kolaczyk, E. D., & Csardi, G. (2014). Statistical analysis of network data with R (Vol. 65). New York: Springer.Kumar, S. (2015). Efficacy of a giant component in co-authorship networks: Evidence from a Southeast Asian dataset in economics. Aslib Journal of Information Management, 68(1), 19–32. doi: 10.1108/AJIM-12-2014-0172 .Larivière, V., Gingras, Y., Sugimoto, C. R., & Tsou, A. (2015). Team size matters: Collaboration and scientific impact since 1900. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66(7), 1323–1332. doi: 10.1002/asi.23266 .Laudel, G. (2002). What do we measure by co-authorships? Research Evaluation, 11(1), 3–15. doi: 10.3152/147154402781776961 .Liu, X., Bollen, J., Nelson, M. L., & Van de Sompel, H. (2005). Co-authorship networks in the digital library research community. Information Processing and Management, 41(6), 1462–1480. doi: 10.1016/j.ipm.2005.03.012 .Liu, P., & Xia, H. (2015). Structure and evolution of co-authorship network in an interdisciplinary research field. Scientometrics, 103(1), 101–134. doi: 10.1007/s11192-014-1525-y .Ministerio de Sanidad y Consumo. 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Does distance hinder the collaboration between Australian universities in the humanities, arts and social sciences?

Australia is a vast country with an average distance of 1911 km between its eight state capital cities. The quantitative impact of this distance on collaboration practices between Australian universities and between different types of Australian universities has not been examined previously and hence our knowledge about the spatial distribution effects, if any, on collaboration practices and opportunities is very limited. The aim of the study reported here was therefore to analyse the effect of distance on the collaboration activities of humanities, arts and social science scholars in Australia, using co-authorship as a proxy for collaboration. In order to do this, gravity models were developed to determine the distance effects on external collaboration between universities in relation to geographic region and institutional alliance of 25 Australian universities. Although distance was found to have a weak impact on external collaboration, the strength of the research publishing record within a university (internal collaboration) was found to be an important factor in determining external collaboration activity levels. This finding would suggest that increasing internal collaboration within universities could be an effective strategy to encourage external collaboration between universities. This strategy becomes even more effective for universities that are further away from each other. Establishing a hierarchical structure of different types of universities within a region can optimise the location advantage in the region to encourage knowledge exchange within that region. The stronger network could also attract more collaboration between networks

The dynamics of university units as a multi-level process. Credibility cycles and resource dependencies

This paper presents an analysis of resource acquisition and profile development of institutional units within universities. We conceptualize resource acquisition as a two level nested process, where units compete for external resources based on their credibility, but at the same time are granted faculty positions from the larger units (department) to which they belong. Our model implies that the growth of university units is constrained by the decisions of their parent department on the allocation of professorial positions, which represent the critical resource for most units’ activities. In our field of study this allocation is largely based on educational activities, and therefore, units with high scientific credibility are not necessarily able to grow, despite an increasing reliance on external funds. Our paper therefore sheds light on the implications that the dual funding system of European universities has for the development of units, while taking into account the interaction between institutional funding and third-party funding

Systematic Grant and Funding Body Acknowledgment Data for Publications: An Examination of New Dimensions and New Controversies for Bibliometrics

Bibliographic databases are beginning to provide systematic grant and funding body acknowledgement data for the publications they index. This paper considers how this new data might be used for policy purposes and the key issues that are likely to arise in its use. While the attempt to provide this kind of systematic data is in its relative infancy, there is already sufficient information within the WOS database to examine a number of controversies in science studies. This paper considers one such issue, namely the relationship between the number of funding sources acknowledged and the citation impact of publications where a positive relationship has been assumed to exist. Analyses of sets of publications from 2009 from the journals Cell and Physical Review Letters give contrasting results, suggesting that our understanding of the issue of the relationship between the impact of a publication and the number of funding sources which it acknowledges is not fully understood and may be more complicated that previously considered. It is proposed that scientific research findings are packaged by researchers into papers in a variety of ways for a wide variety of purposes. Individual funding quanta from whatever source are not therefore inputs to papers directly; rather, such funding supports a process that has amongst its outcomes, the production of papers

Proximity Dimensions and Scientific Collaboration among Academic Institutions in Europe: The Closer, the Better?

The main objective of this paper is to examine the effect of various proximity dimensions (geographical, cognitive, institutional, organizational, social and economic) on academic scientific collaborations (SC). The data to capture SC consists of a set of co-authored articles published between 2006 and 2010 by universities located in EU-15, indexed by the Science Citation Index (SCI Expanded) of the ISI Web of Science database. We link this data to institution-level information provided by the EUMIDA dataset. Our final sample consists of 240,495 co-authored articles from 690 European universities that featured in both datasets. Additionally, we also retrieved data on regional R&D funding from Eurostat. Based on the gravital equation, we estimate several econometrics models using aggregated data from all disciplines as well as separated data for Chemistry & Chemical Engineering, Life Sciences and Physics & Astronomy. Our results provide evidence on the substantial role of geographical, cognitive, institutional, social and economic distance in shaping scientific collaboration, while the effect of organizational proximity seems to be weaker. Some differences on the relevance of these factors arise at discipline level