930 research outputs found
Evaluating a Departmentās Research: Testing the Leiden Methodology in Business and Management
The Leiden methodology (LM), also sometimes called the ācrown indicatorā, is a quantitative method for evaluating the research quality of a research group or academic department based on the citations received by the group in comparison to averages for the field. There have been a number of applications but these have mainly been in the hard sciences where the data on citations, provided by the ISI Web of Science (WoS), is more reliable. In the social sciences, including business and management, many journals and books are not included within WoS and so the LM has not been tested here. In this research study the LM has been applied on a dataset of over 3000 research publications from three UK business schools. The results show that the LM does indeed discriminate between the schools, and has a degree of concordance with other forms of evaluation, but that there are significant limitations and problems within this discipline
Universities Scale Like Cities
Recent studies of urban scaling show that important socioeconomic city
characteristics such as wealth and innovation capacity exhibit a nonlinear,
particularly a power law scaling with population size. These nonlinear effects
are common to all cities, with similar power law exponents. These findings mean
that the larger the city, the more disproportionally they are places of wealth
and innovation. Local properties of cities cause a deviation from the expected
behavior as predicted by the power law scaling. In this paper we demonstrate
that universities show a similar behavior as cities in the distribution of the
gross university income in terms of total number of citations over size in
terms of total number of publications. Moreover, the power law exponents for
university scaling are comparable to those for urban scaling. We find that
deviations from the expected behavior can indeed be explained by specific local
properties of universities, particularly the field-specific composition of a
university, and its quality in terms of field-normalized citation impact. By
studying both the set of the 500 largest universities worldwide and a specific
subset of these 500 universities -- the top-100 European universities -- we are
also able to distinguish between properties of universities with as well as
without selection of one specific local property, the quality of a university
in terms of its average field-normalized citation impact. It also reveals an
interesting observation concerning the working of a crucial property in
networked systems, preferential attachment.Comment: 16 pages, 17 figure
Universality of citation distributions revisited
Radicchi, Fortunato, and Castellano [arXiv:0806.0974, PNAS 105(45), 17268]
claim that, apart from a scaling factor, all fields of science are
characterized by the same citation distribution. We present a large-scale
validation study of this universality-of-citation-distributions claim. Our
analysis shows that claiming citation distributions to be universal for all
fields of science is not warranted. Although many fields indeed seem to have
fairly similar citation distributions, there are quite some exceptions as well.
We also briefly discuss the consequences of our findings for the measurement of
scientific impact using citation-based bibliometric indicators
Exploring the relationship between the Engineering and Physical Sciences and the Health and Life Sciences by advanced bibliometric methods
We investigate the extent to which advances in the health and life sciences
(HLS) are dependent on research in the engineering and physical sciences (EPS),
particularly physics, chemistry, mathematics, and engineering. The analysis
combines two different bibliometric approaches. The first approach to analyze
the 'EPS-HLS interface' is based on term map visualizations of HLS research
fields. We consider 16 clinical fields and five life science fields. On the
basis of expert judgment, EPS research in these fields is studied by
identifying EPS-related terms in the term maps. In the second approach, a
large-scale citation-based network analysis is applied to publications from all
fields of science. We work with about 22,000 clusters of publications, each
representing a topic in the scientific literature. Citation relations are used
to identify topics at the EPS-HLS interface. The two approaches complement each
other. The advantages of working with textual data compensate for the
limitations of working with citation relations and the other way around. An
important advantage of working with textual data is in the in-depth qualitative
insights it provides. Working with citation relations, on the other hand,
yields many relevant quantitative statistics. We find that EPS research
contributes to HLS developments mainly in the following five ways: new
materials and their properties; chemical methods for analysis and molecular
synthesis; imaging of parts of the body as well as of biomaterial surfaces;
medical engineering mainly related to imaging, radiation therapy, signal
processing technology, and other medical instrumentation; mathematical and
statistical methods for data analysis. In our analysis, about 10% of all EPS
and HLS publications are classified as being at the EPS-HLS interface. This
percentage has remained more or less constant during the past decade
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