Science and Technology Studies: Exploring the Knowledge Base

Science and Technology Studies (STS) is one of a number of new research fields to emerge over the last four or five decades. This paper attempts to identify its core academic contributions using the references that are most cited by the authors of chapters in a number of authoritative ‘handbooks’. The study then analyses the impact of these contributions by exploring the research fields, journals, and geographical location of the researchers that have cited these core contributions in their own work. Together, these two analyses reveal the various phases in the development of STS and the various aspects of convergence and divergence of the field as the quantitative studies of science and technology gradually separated from the main body of STS. The paper ends with some conclusions about the evolution of STS such as the role of ‘institution builders’ in developing new research fields and the structures required to hold them together.science studies, STS, knowledge base, handbooks, core contributions

Data extracted from PubMed records are not reliable

Bibliometrics on a research subject needs a careful selection of bibliographic records to be retrieved and downloaded. Whenever national production is evaluated or international output is compared, it is essential to have full information on institutional and country affiliation of every author. As Medline offers only the affiliation of the first author, it is mandatory to combine its results with other databases. Scopus is the obvious choice because it offers common elements in its data schema (such as PMID and Indexterms) and complete information on authors’ affiliation

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

Ingenio Working Paper SeriesWe propose the concept of pro-social research as reflecting the adoption of conducts that place social relevance as a critical goal of research. We argue that prosocial conducts represent a behavioural antecedent of the actual engagement of scientists in knowledge transfer activities. Our study investigates the impact that different cognitive aspects have on the development of pro-social research behaviour. In particular, we examine if certain types of research skills (i.e. cognitive diversity and research excellence) have a positive impact in shaping a pro-social research behaviour and, more critically, if they act as substitutes for prior experience in knowledge transfer activities. The main source of data comes from a large scale survey conducted on all scientists at the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC).N

Do University-Industry co-publication volumes correspond with university funding from business firms?

Trabajo presentado a la 19th Science and Technology Indicators Conference: "Context counts: Pathways to Master Big and Little Data" celebrada en leiden (Paises Bajos) del 3 al 9 de 2014.Analysts of university-industry interaction sometimes measure it through numbers of university-industry co-publications (UICs), because of their relative availability and international comparability. However, we do not know whether UICs correspond to a more direct measure of interaction: university funding from firms. We propose a conceptual model on four types of relationships between UICs and university funding from firms, emphasising the interactive nature of their relation. We test the model with UIC and income data from the Polytechnic University of Valencia at individual level: around 6-7% of researchers participating in projects with firms were authors of UICs published in 2008-2011; and around 27% of those UIC authors were participating in projects with firms during that period. Overall, we do not find evidence of any significant positive correlation between UIC output and university funding from the business sector in general. The one exception is a minority of authors who participate in business-funded projects, where we found a positive association of current UICs and business funding.Peer Reviewe

Exploring why global health needs are unmet by research efforts: the potential influences of geography, industry and publication incentives

Abstract Background: It has been well established that research is not addressing health needs in a balanced way ¿ much more research is conducted on diseases with more burden in high-income countries than on those with more burden in lower-income countries. In this study, we explore whether these imbalances persist and inquire about the possible influence of three factors, namely geography, industry and publication incentives. Methods: We use WHO data on the Global Burden of Disease as a proxy measure of health needs and bibliometric information as a proxy for research efforts. Scientific publications on diseases were collected from MEDLINE using MeSH terms to identify relevant publications. We used Web of Science to collect author affiliations and citation data. We developed a correspondence table between WHO ICD-10 and MeSH descriptors to compare global health needs and research efforts. This correspondence table is available as supplementary material. Results: Research output is heavily concentrated in high-income countries and is mainly focused on their health needs, resulting in a relative lack of attention to diseases in lower income countries. A new finding is that diseases with a similar burden in high- and middle-income countries are also under-researched, both globally and in relation to disease burden in high- and middle-income countries. Global industrial R&D is found to be very similar to the focus of public research. Diseases more prevalent in high-income countries generate ten-fold more research attention than those in low-income countries. We find no discernible preference towards diseases of high-income countries versus those of low-income countries in the top 25% most prestigious journals. However, in middle-income countries, citation rates are substantially lower for diseases most prevalent in low- and middle-income countries. Conclusions: From a global perspective, the imbalance between research needs and research efforts persists as most of the research effort concentrates on diseases affecting high-income countries. Both pharmaceutical companies and the public sector also tend to focus on diseases with more burden in high-income countries. Our findings indicate that researchers in middle-income countries receive more citations when researching diseases more prevalent in high-income countries, and this may divert the attention of researchers in these countries from diseases more prevalent in their contexts

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

[EN] Analysts of university-industry interaction sometimes measure it through numbers of university-industry co-publications (UICs), because of their relative availability and international comparability. However, we do not know whether UICs correspond to another measure of interaction: university funding from firms. We propose a conceptual model on four types of relationships between UICs and university funding from firms, emphasizing the interactive nature of their relation, e.g. not only funding can lead to UICs, but also UICs can signal competences that motivate funding. We test the model with UIC and income data from the Polytechnic University of Valencia at individual level: around 6-7% of researchers participating in projects with firms were authors of UICs published in 2008-11; and around 27% of those UIC authors were participating in projects with firms during that period. Overall, we do not find evidence of any significant positive correlation between UIC output and university funding from the business sector in general. The one exception is a minority of authors who participate in business-funded projects, where we find a positive association of current UICs and business funding.A.Y.Y. and R.J.W.T. received financial support from the CWTS-CHERPA research project (funded by the Netherlands Ministry for Education, Culture and Science).Yegros Yegros, A.; Azagra Caro, JM.; López Ferrer, MT.; Tijssen, RJ. (2016). Do university-industry co-publication outputs correspond with university funding from firms?. Research Evaluation. 25(2):136-150. doi:10.1093/reseval/rvv045S13615025

The many faces of mobility : using bibliometric data to measure the movement of scientists

This paper presents a methodological framework for developing scientific mobility indicators based on bibliometric data. We identify nearly 16 million individual authors from publications covered in the Web of Science for the 2008–2015 period. Based on the information provided across individuals’ publication records, we propose a general classification for analyzing scientific mobility using institutional affiliation changes. We distinguish between migrants--authors who have ruptures with their country of origin--and travelers--authors who gain additional affiliations while maintaining affiliation with their country of origin. We find that 3.7% of researchers who have published at least one paper over the period are mobile. Travelers represent 72.7% of all mobile scholars, but migrants have higher scientific impact. We apply this classification at the country level, expanding the classification to incorporate the directionality of scientists’ mobility (i.e., incoming and outgoing). We provide a brief analysis to highlight the utility of the proposed taxonomy to study scholarly mobility and discuss the implications for science policy