Conducting pro-social research: Cognitive diversity, research excellence and awareness about the social impact of research

Merit, Expertise and Measuremen

University–industry R&D linkage metrics: Validity and applicability in world university rankings

Merit, Expertise and Measuremen

The relationships between university IP regimes and scientists´ motivations and their engagement with research commercialisation in Europe

Many policy makers regard Technology Transfer Offices as a vehicle for Intellectual Property regimes and a main driver for research commercialisation. The involvement of scientists in the process of research commercialisation is often taken for granted. National regulations can determine the IP regimes at universities and their decisions about the ownership of scientific research results. This paper describes the relationships between four university IP regimes and identifies three driving forces, which motivate individual scientists to engage with the commercialisation of their own research, and the real involvement of scientists with research commercialisation. A representative survey of approximately 2,660 scientists working in all disciplines at some 150 universities in 30 European countries, covering a time frame from 2010 till 2015, shows that around 32% of the scientists are engaged in various pathways of research commercialisation. We found significantly higher percentages of scientists who are involved in research commercialisation at universities that hold IP ownership on research results and that have obligatory Technology Transfer Office services. The individual driving forces are positively associated with significantly higher levels of engagement with research commercialisation, double the amount of patenting and a threefold higher involvement with spin-off companies. Involvement with a spin-off formation was only positively correlated with scientists-related driving forces, not with the intellectual property regime of the university where they work. We conclude that the driving forces of scientists and university IP regimes are both factors that can contribute to increased levels of research commercialisation. Our data suggest that the former factor is by far the more important.Merit, Expertise and Measuremen

Long term productivity and collaboration in information science

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Springer in Scientometrics on 02/07/2016, available online: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2061-8 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Funding bodies have tended to encourage collaborative research because it is generally more highly cited than sole author research. But higher mean citation for collaborative articles does not imply collaborative researchers are in general more research productive. This article assesses the extent to which research productivity varies with the number of collaborative partners for long term researchers within three Web of Science subject areas: Information Science & Library Science, Communication and Medical Informatics. When using the whole number counting system, researchers who worked in groups of 2 or 3 were generally the most productive, in terms of producing the most papers and citations. However, when using fractional counting, researchers who worked in groups of 1 or 2 were generally the most productive. The findings need to be interpreted cautiously, however, because authors that produce few academic articles within a field may publish in other fields or leave academia and contribute to society in other ways

Changing Directions: Steering science, technology and innovation towards the Sustainable Development Goals

Science, technology and innovation are failing to address the world’s most urgent sustainability challenges, according to a major new report from the STRINGS project. ‘Changing Directions: Steering science, technology and innovation towards the Sustainable Development Goals’ is the final report of an in-depth study involving collaborators from across the globe. It highlights a glaring mismatch between the priorities of the world’s scientific communities and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, which were set up to drive change across all areas of social justice and environmental issues

Research integrity at stake: conflicts of interest and industry ties in scientific publications

Trabajo presentado en la 26th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators, celebrada en Granada (España) del 07 al 09 de septiembre de 2022.Large-scale and systematic analysis of CoI remained largely untapped due to major scientific databases' lack of indexing (Giles & Council, 2004). The situation changed in 2008 when the Web of Science (WoS) started to collect information on the funding acknowledgements of scientific publications. This has led to a renewed interest in analysing acknowledgements as paratextual traces of research practices (Desrochers et al., 2016). Nevertheless, most studies on the topic have been confined to the analysis of trends and patterns related to funding sources (for a review, see Álvarez-Bornstein and Montesi, 2021) or have dealt with acknowledgements as sources that provide new insights on influential contributions to scientific work (Cronin, Shaw & La Barre, 2003; Giles & Council, 2004; Díaz-Faes & Bordons, 2014). However, few studies have provided fine-grained analyses of CoI statements. A worth mentioning exception is Lewison & Sullivan (2015), who studied the presence of CoI financial statements on a sample of nearly 200,000 papers but focused only on the top 10 pharmaceutical companies in terms of R&D expenditures at that time. In this study, however, we conduct a large-scale analysis of CoI statements related to public-private partnerships, based on scientific outputs published between 2010 and 2020, to address the questions as follows: 1) What percentage of publications include CoI linked to the industry? 2) What is the distribution of publications disclosing CoI across research domains? 3) What industry ties are more frequently mentioned as representing potential CoI

Do university-industry co-publication outputs correspond with university funding from firms?

Merit, Expertise and Measuremen