From technical standards to good practices in quantitative assessment of S&T

Trabajo presentado al‌ 3rd Steering Committee Meeting de la OECD celebrado en PAris el 25 de Marzo de 2013.Peer reviewe

Diversity and network coherence as indicators of interdisciplinarity: Case studies in bionanoscience

Interdisciplinary research, nanotechnology, nanoscience, diversity, indicators, network analysis

Knowledge integration and diffusion: Measures and mapping of diversity and coherence

Ying Ding, Ronald Rousseau, Wolfram Dietmar (Editors).In this chapter, I present a framework based on the concepts of diversity and coherence for the analysis of knowledge integration and diffusion. Visualisations that help to understand insights gained are also introduced. The key novelty offered by this framework compared to previous approaches is the inclusion of cognitive distance (or proximity) between the categories that characterise the body of knowledge under study. I briefly discuss different methods to map the cognitive dimension.I acknowledge support from the UK ESRC grant RES-360-25-0076 (>Mapping the dynamics of emergent technologies>) and the US National Science Foundation (Award#1064146->Revealing Innovation Pathways: Hybrid Science Maps for 16 Technology Assessment and Foresight>).Peer Reviewe

Science and technology indicators in & for the peripheries. A research agenda

Trabajo presentado a la 15th International Conference on Scientometrics & Informetrics, celebrada en Estambúl (Turquia) del 29 de junio al 4 de julio de 2015.This paper aims to propose a research agenda that explores the problems that emerge when S&T indicators are used in peripheral contexts, that is, in geographical or social spaces that are somehow marginal to the centres of scientific activity. In these situations evaluators and decision-makers are likely to use indicators that were designed to reflect variables relevant in the dominant social and geographical contexts --i.e. in the leading countries, languages, disciplines, etc.--, but that are usually not adequate in peripheral contexts. We propose to examine various dimensions of periphery. First, the cognitive dimension: areas of research, such as the humanities that capture less attention (and resources) than the more prestigious disciplines, such as molecular biology. Second, the geographical dimension: e.g. global south vs. global north, regions vs. metropolises. Third, the social group dimension: women, the poor, or perhaps the elderly have social needs that are different from those of richer or more powerful groups --and the problems affecting the former tend be less researched than those of the later. The research agenda proposed would investigate the mechanisms by which performance indicators tend to be biased against the peripheries (e.g. bias in language, journal or topic coverage in conventional databases). We suggest how these biases may suppress scientific diversity and shift research towards a higher degree of homogeneity.Peer reviewe

Interdisciplinarity and research on local issues: evidence from a developing country

This paper explores the relationship between interdisciplinarity and research pertaining to local issues. Using Colombian publications from 1991 until 2011 in the Web of Science, we investigate the relationship between the degree of interdisciplinarity and the local orientation of the articles. We find that a higher degree of interdisciplinarity in a publication is associated with a greater emphasis on Colombian issues. In particular, our results suggest that research that combines cognitively disparate disciplines, what we refer to as distal interdisciplinarity, tends to be associated with more local focus of research. We discuss the implications of these results in the context of policies aiming to foster the local socio-economic impact of research in developing countries.Comment: 24 page

Interdisciplinarity and research on local issues: evidence from a developing country

This paper examines the role of interdisciplinarity on research pertaining to local issues. Using Colombian publications from 1991 until 2011 in the Web of Science, we investigate the relationship between the degree of interdisciplinarity and the local orientation of the articles. We find that a higher degree of interdisciplinarity in a publication is associated with a greater emphasis on local issues. In particular, our results support the view that research that combines cognitively disparate disciplines, what we refer to as distal interdisciplinarity, is associated with more local focus of research. We discuss the policy implications of these results in the context of national research assessments targeting excellence and socio-economic impact

Scientometric mapping as a strategic intelligence tool for the governance of emerging technologies

How can scientometric mapping function as a tool of ’strategic intelligence’ to aid the governance of emerging technologies? The present paper aims to address this question by focusing on a set of recently developed scientometric techniques, namely overlay mapping. We examine the potential these techniques have to inform, in a timely manner, analysts and decision-makers about relevant dynamics of technical emergence. We investigate the capability of overlay mapping in generating informed perspectives about emergence across three spaces: geographical, social, and cognitive. Our analysis relies on three empirical studies of emerging technologies in the biomedical domain: RNA interference (RNAi), Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) testing technologies for cervical cancer, and Thiopurine Methyltransferase (TPMT) genetic testing. The case-studies are analysed and mapped longitudinally by using publication and patent data. Results show the variety of ’intelligence’ inputs overlay mapping can produce for the governance of emerging technologies. Overlay mapping also confers to the investigation of emergence flexibility and granularity in terms of adaptability to different sources of data and selection of the levels of the analysis, respectively. These features make possible the integration and comparison of results from different contexts and cases, thus providing possibilities for a potentially more ’distributed’ strategic intelligence. The generated perspectives allow triangulation of findings, which is important given the complexity featuring in technical emergence and the limitations associated with the use of single scientometric approaches

Interactive Overlays: A New Method for Generating Global Journal Maps from Web-of-Science Data

Recent advances in methods and techniques enable us to develop an interactive overlay to the global map of science based on aggregated citation relations among the 9,162 journals contained in the Science Citation Index and Social Science Citation Index 2009 combined. The resulting mapping is provided by VOSViewer. We first discuss the pros and cons of the various options: cited versus citing, multidimensional scaling versus spring-embedded algorithms, VOSViewer versus Gephi, and the various clustering algorithms and similarity criteria. Our approach focuses on the positions of journals in the multidimensional space spanned by the aggregated journal-journal citations. A number of choices can be left to the user, but we provide default options reflecting our preferences. Some examples are also provided; for example, the potential of using this technique to assess the interdisciplinarity of organizations and/or document sets