Quantity does matter as citation impact increases with productivity

Many scholars are encouraged to focus on the quality not the quantity of their publications, the rationale being that becoming too focused on productivity risks reducing the quality of one's work. But is this, in fact, the case? Peter van den Besselaar and Ulf Sandström have studied a large sample of researchers and found that, while results vary by field, there is a positive and stronger than linear relationship between productivity and quality (in terms of the top cited papers). This same pattern appears to apply to institutions as well as individual researchers

Past performance, peer review, and project selection: A case study in the social and behavioral sciences

Does past performance influence success in grant applications? In this study we test whether the grant allocation decisions of the Netherlands Research Council for the Economic and Social Sciences correlate with the past performances of the applicants in terms of publications and citations, and with the results of the peer review process organized by the Council. We show that the Council is successful in distinguishing grant applicants with above-average performance from those with below-average performance, but within the former group no correlation could be found between past performance and receiving a grant. When comparing the best performing researchers who were denied funding with the group of researchers who received it, the rejected researchers significantly outperformed the funded ones. Furthermore, the best rejected proposals score on average as high on the outcomes of the peer review process as the accepted proposals. Finally, we found that the Council under study successfully corrected for gender effects during the selection process. We explain why these findings may be more general than for this case only. However, if research councils are not able to select the 'best' researchers, perhaps they should reconsider their mission. In a final section with policy implications, we discuss the role of research councils at the level of the science system in terms of variation, innovation, and quality control

Social science for e-science in biodiversity research: a position paper on behalf of ViBRANT

The application of e-science, the use of information and communications technologies (ICT) to support scientific work, increases the scale, access and diversity of information and collaborations and enables research on complex and interdisciplinary questions. However, smart technologies alone do not make e-science a success. Insights on the user and usage and the understanding of the societal and organizational dimensions contribute to the design, user uptake and sustainable use of the infrastructure. Hence, social science has a significant contribution to make to the development and implementation of e-science facilities. The position we would like to bring forward to this meeting is based on our experience in the e-infrastructure project, called ViBRANT (http://vbrant.eu). Below we highlight why and how, according to us, social science contributes to ViBRANT, under what conditions and what issues still need attention