Geographical trends in research: a preliminary analysis on authors' affiliations

In the last decade, research literature reached an enormous volume with an unprecedented current annual increase of 1.5 million new publications. As research gets ever more global and new countries and institutions, either from academia or corporate environment, start to contribute with their share, it is important to monitor this complex scenario and understand its dynamics. We present a study on a conference proceedings dataset extracted from Springer Nature Scigraph that illustrates insightful geographical trends and highlights the unbalanced growth of competitive research institutions worldwide. Results emerged from our micro and macro analysis show that the distributions among countries of institutions and papers follow a power law, and thus very few countries keep producing most of the papers accepted by high-tier conferences. In addition, we found that the annual and overall turnover rate of the top 5, 10 and 25 countries is extremely low, suggesting a very static landscape in which new entries struggle to emerge. Finally, we highlight the presence of an increasing gap between the number of institutions initiating and overseeing research endeavours (i.e. first and last authors' affiliations) and the total number of institutions participating in research. As a consequence of our analysis, the paper also discusses our experience in working with affiliations: an utterly simple matter at first glance, that is instead revealed to be a complex research and technical challenge yet far from being solved

Reviewing, indicating, and counting books for modern research evaluation systems

In this chapter, we focus on the specialists who have helped to improve the conditions for book assessments in research evaluation exercises, with empirically based data and insights supporting their greater integration. Our review highlights the research carried out by four types of expert communities, referred to as the monitors, the subject classifiers, the indexers and the indicator constructionists. Many challenges lie ahead for scholars affiliated with these communities, particularly the latter three. By acknowledging their unique, yet interrelated roles, we show where the greatest potential is for both quantitative and qualitative indicator advancements in book-inclusive evaluation systems.Comment: Forthcoming in Glanzel, W., Moed, H.F., Schmoch U., Thelwall, M. (2018). Springer Handbook of Science and Technology Indicators. Springer Some corrections made in subsection 'Publisher prestige or quality

Do social sciences and humanities behave like life and hard sciences?

The quantitative evaluation of Social Science and Humanities (SSH) and the investigation of the existing similarities between SSH and Life and Hard Sciences (LHS) represent the forefront of scientometrics research. We analyse the scientific production of the universe of Italian academic scholars , over a 10-year period across 2002–2012, from a national database built by the Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes. We demonstrate that all Italian scholars of SSH and LHS are equals, as far as their publishing habits. They share the same general law, which is a lognormal. At the same time, however, they are different, because we measured their scientific production with different indicators required by the Italian law; we eliminated the “silent” scholars and obtained different scaling values—proxy of their productivity rates. Our findings may be useful to further develop indirect quali–quantitative comparative analysis across heterogeneous disciplines and, more broadly, to investigate on the generative mechanisms behind the observed empirical regularities. © 2017, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary