The purpose of this review was to investigate the association between publication performance and the organizational and psychosocial work environment of academics in a university setting. In 2018 we conducted database searches in Web of Science, Medline and other key journals (hand-searched) from 1990 to 2017 based on population, exposure and outcome framework. We examined reference lists, and after a title and abstract scan and full-text reading we identified studies that were original research and fulfilled our inclusion criteria. Articles were evaluated as having a low, moderate or high risk of bias using a quality assessment form. From the studies (n = 32) identified and synthesized, work-environment characteristics could explain the quality and quantity aspects of publication performance of academics. Management practices, leadership and psychosocial characteristics are influential factors that affect academics’ publication productivity. Most of the reviewed studies were judged to be of moderate quality because of issues of bias, related to the measuring of publication outcome. The findings in the studies reviewed suggest that highly productive research academics and departments significantly tend to be influenced by the organizational and psychosocial characteristics of their working environment. The practical relevance of this review is that it highlights where academics’ performance needs support and how the work environment can be improved to bolster publication productivity.
We compared three different bibliometric evaluation approaches: two citation-based approaches and one based on manual classification of publishing channels into quality levels. Publication data for two universities was used, and we worked with two levels of analysis: article and department. For the article level, we investigated the predictive power of field normalized citation rates and field normalized journal impact with respect to journal level. The results for the article level show that evaluation of journals based on citation impact correlate rather well with manual classification of journals into quality levels. However, the prediction from field normalized citation rates to journal level was only marginally better than random guessing. At the department level, we studied three different indicators in the context of research fund allocation within universities and the extent to which the three indicators produce different distributions of research funds. It turned out that the three distributions of relative indicator values were very similar, which in turn yields that the corresponding distributions of hypothetical research funds would be very similar.
We compared three different bibliometric evaluation approaches: two citationbased approaches and one based on manual classification of publishing channels into quality levels. Publication data for two universities was used, and we worked with two levels of analysis: article and department. For the article level, we investigated the predictive power of field normalized citation rates and field normalized journal impact with respect to journal level. The results for the article level show that evaluation of journals based on citation impact correlate rather well with manual classification of journals into quality levels. However, the prediction from field normalized citation rates to journal level was only marginally better than random guessing. At the department level, we studied three different indicators in the context of research fund allocation within universities and the extent to which the three indicators produce different distributions of research funds. It turned out that the three distributions of relative indicator values were very similar, which in turn yields that the corresponding distributions of hypothetical research funds would be very similar.
In this study we tested the fruitfulness of advanced bibliometric methods for mapping subdomains in philosophy. The development of the number of publications on free will and sorites, the two subdomains treated in the study, over time was studied. We applied the cocitation approach to map the most cited publications, authors and journals, and we mapped frequently occurring terms, using a term co-occurrence approach. Both subdomains show a strong increase of publications in Web of Science. When we decomposed the publications by faculty, we could see an increase of free will publications also in social sciences, medicine and natural sciences. The multidisciplinary character of free will research was reflected in the cocitation analysis and in the term co-occurrence analysis: we found clusters/groups of cocited publications, authors and journals, and of co-occurring terms, representing philosophy as well as non-philosophical fields, such as neuroscience and physics. The corresponding analyses of sorites publications displayed a structure consisting of research themes rather than fields. All in all, both philosophers involved in this study acknowledge the validity of the various networks presented. Bibliometric mapping appears to provide an interesting tool for describing the cognitive orientation of a research field, not only in the natural and life sciences but also in philosophy, which this study shows.
Scientists collaborate increasingly on a global scale. Does this trend also hold for other bibliometric relations such as direct citations, cocitations and shared references? This study examines citation-based relations in publications published in the journal Scientometrics from 1981 to 2010. Different measures of Mean Geographical Distance (MGD) are tested. If we take all citation links into consideration, there is no indication of MGD increase, but when we look at maximum distances of each relation, a weak tendency of increasing MGD could be observed. One major factor behind the lack of growth of mean distances is the form of the distribution of citation links over distances. Our data suggest that the interactions might grow simultaneously for both short and long distances.
Citation frequencies and journal impact factors (JIFs) are being used more and more to assess the quality of research and allocate research resources. If these bibliometric indicators are not an adequate predictor of research quality, there could be severe negative consequences for research. To analyse to which extent citation frequencies and journal impact factors correlate with the methodological quality of clinical research articles included in an SBU systematic review of antibiotic prophylaxis in surgery. All 212 eligible original articles were extracted from the SBU systematic review "Antibiotic Prophylaxis in Surgery" and categorized according to their methodological rigourness as high, moderate or low quality articles. Median of citation frequencies and JIFs were compared between the methodological quality groups using Kruskal-Wallis non-parametric test. An in-depth study of low-quality studies with higher citation frequencies/JIFs was also conducted. No significant differences were found in median citation frequencies (p = 0.453) or JIFs (p = 0.185) between the three quality groups. Studies that had high citation frequencies/JIFs but were assessed as low-quality lacked control groups, had high dropout rates or low internal validity. This study of antibiotic prophylaxis in surgery does not support the hypothesis that bibliometric indicators are a valid instrument for assessing methodological quality in clinical trials. This is a worrying observation, since bibliometric indicators have a major influence on research funding. However, further studies in other areas are needed.
This paper studies the production of dissertations in eight research fields in the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. In using doctoral dissertations it builds on De Solla Prices seminal study which used PhD dissertations as one of several indicators of scientific growth (Price, Little science, big science, 1963). Data from the ProQuest: Dissertations and Theses database covering the years 1950-2007 are used to depict historical trends, and the Gompertz function was used for analysing the data. A decline in the growth of dissertations can be seen in all fields in the mid-eighties and several fields show only a modest growth during the entire period. The growth profiles of specific disciplines could not be explained by traditional dichotomies such as pure/applied or soft/hard, but rather it seems that the age of the discipline appears to be an important factor. Thus, it is obvious that the growth of dissertations must be explained using several factors emerging both inside and outside academia. Consequently, we propose that the output of dissertations can be used as an indicator of growth, especially in fields like the humanities, where journal or article counts are less applicable.
This paper studies the production of dissertations in eight research fields in thenatural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. In using doctoral dissertations itbuilds on De Solla Prices seminal study which used PhD dissertations as one of severalindicators of scientific growth (Price, Little science, big science, 1963). Data from theProQuest: Dissertations and Theses database covering the years 1950–2007 are used todepict historical trends, and the Gompertz function was used for analysing the data. Adecline in the growth of dissertations can be seen in all fields in the mid-eighties andseveral fields show only a modest growth during the entire period. The growth profiles ofspecific disciplines could not be explained by traditional dichotomies such as pure/appliedor soft/hard, but rather it seems that the age of the discipline appears to be an importantfactor. Thus, it is obvious that the growth of dissertations must be explained using severalfactors emerging both inside and outside academia. Consequently, we propose that theoutput of dissertations can be used as an indicator of growth, especially in fields like thehumanities, where journal or article counts are less applicable.
Europe has a long history as a global center of scientific research, but not all European regions are alike. Regions such as Île de France and the corridor that stretches from Cambridge to Oxford via London produce a disproportionate share of Europe’s science output. An econometric analysis sheds light on the factors that explain the spatial distribution of European science. One result is that the regional volume of Web of Science publications depends on the regional number of researchers in higher education institutions. This is however not the only cause of high output. Universities and their surrounding regions are slowly evolving institutional structures. Some regions host universities that are more than 500 years old. A second key result is that an increase in the age of a region’s oldest university is associated with greater output, other things being equal. Third, interregional accessibility via road, rail, and air networks is important for small regions, but not for large ones. Conversely, regional high-tech R&D employment is important for large but not for small regions.
Europe has a long history as a global center of scientific research, but not all European regions are alike. Regions such as ile de France and the corridor that stretches from Cambridge to Oxford via London produce a disproportionate share of Europe's science output. An econometric analysis sheds light on the factors that explain the spatial distribution of European science. One result is that the regional volume of Web of Science publications depends on the regional number of researchers in higher education institutions. This is however not the only cause of high output. Universities and their surrounding regions are slowly evolving institutional structures. Some regions host universities that are more than 500 years old. A second key result is that an increase in the age of a region's oldest university is associated with greater output, other things being equal. Third, interregional accessibility via road, rail, and air networks is important for small regions, but not for large ones. Conversely, regional high-tech R&D employment is important for large but not for small regions.
Sustainability science is, per se, a topic that is inherently interdisciplinarity and orientedtowards the resolution of societal problems. In this paper, we propose a classifcation ofscientifc journals that composes the journal category “Green and Sustainable Science andTechnology” in the period 2014–2018 through the entropy-based disciplinarity indicator(EBDI). This indicator allows the classifcation of scientifc journals in four types based onthe citing and cited dimensions: knowledge importer, knowledge exporter, disciplinary andinterdisciplinarity. Moreover, the relationship between this taxonomy and the JCR bibliometric indicators and its predictive capacity of the taxonomy is explored through a CHAIDtree. As well, relations between the Web of Science categories, journals and taxonomy areexplored by the co-occurrence of categories and correspondence analysis. Results suggestthat the great majority of journals in this feld are specialized or interdisciplinary. However,over the 5-year period proposed in this study, interdisciplinary journals tend to be far morestable than specialized ones. The decision tree has shown that the number of citations is thevariable with the greatest discriminating capacity.
This paper looks at peer review as a cooperation dilemma through a game-theory framework. We built an agent-based model to estimate how much the quality of peer review is influenced by different resource allocation strategies followed by scientists dealing with multiple tasks, i.e., publishing and reviewing. We assumed that scientists were sensitive to acceptance or rejection of their manuscripts and the fairness of peer review to which they were exposed before reviewing. We also assumed that they could be realistic or excessively over-confident about the quality of their manuscripts when reviewing. Furthermore, we assumed they could be sensitive to competitive pressures provided by the institutional context in which they were embedded. Results showed that the bias and quality of publications greatly depend on reviewer motivations but also that context pressures can have a negative effect. However, while excessive competition can be detrimental to minimising publication bias, a certain level of competition is instrumental to ensure the high quality of publication especially when scientists accept reviewing for reciprocity motives.
Citation time series are not easy to compile from the most popular databases. The Data for Research service of the JSTOR journal database is a large and high-quality sample of citations, weighted towards humanities and social sciences. It provides time series citation data over many decades, back to the origins of the constituent journals. The citation trajectories of Nobel Prize winners in economics are analyzed here from 1930 to 2005. They are described mathematically by means of the Bass model of the diffusion of innovations. A bell-shaped curve provides a good fit with most prize winner citation trajectories, and suggests that economic knowledge follows the typical innovation cycle of adoption, peak, and decline within scholarly careers and shortly afterwards. Several variant trajectories are described.
This longitudinal survey of Swedish biomedical PhDs from 1991 to 2009 found a 2.5-fold increase in biomedical PhD graduates, especially women, and mainly non-MDs, while the number of MDs remained fairly constant. The proportion obtaining a biomedical PhD in Sweden in 2006 was two and a half times that in USA compared to population and three and a half times by GDP, but similar to that of the Netherlands. Female non-MD but not female MD candidates were more likely than men to be examined by female examiners. Fewer of the non-MD than MD women continued to publish in English after their PhD. The median number of authors per paper in a thesis had increased by 1 (from 4 to 5) compared with 15–20 years ago. Swedish biomedical research was already well internationalized in 1991, when 38% of the external examiners came from abroad. This rose to 53% in 2003 but in 2009 had returned to 42%. USA and UK were the most common countries but Australia accounted for 2%. When assessed by connection with foreign research teams, Swedish researchers were also internationally well connected. Studies in other countries are needed to assess how generally applicable these findings are. Our findings suggest that the policy and management of Swedish scientific research systems needs revision to harmonize with the national economic capacity.
A survey of 170 Swedish mentors of PhD-students found that expertise in the research field and avoidance of conflict of interest were big motivators for finding an examiner from abroad for PhD theses. The survey also identified that concern by supervisors for facilitating the career paths of younger scientists in terms of introductions to potential labs for post-doctoral work and obtaining high quality neutral review of one's research was also important, as was the desire to set up collaborations. An expectation from the management of one's university of the PR-value of a foreign senior person as examiner also played a part. Although few were willing to admit that PR for one's own group was a motivating factor. A small fraction of responders expressed concern that, as some of the costs of the PhD-examination were being shifted on to the research groups themselves, this might impact the current situation. Language also played a subordinate role. To get the best out of the visiting examiner, it was important to educate and instruct them in their role in a Swedish PhD-examination protocol. Male supervisors had had more PhD-candidates than female, but they also had used more Sweden-based examiners than their female colleagues. We conclude that using a foreign examiner was motivated by factors that are likely to prevail for the foreseeable future. This Swedish practice may also provide a template for a common standard.
A survey of 170 Swedish mentors of PhD-students found that expertise in the research field and avoidance of conflict of interest were big motivators for finding an examiner from abroad for PhD theses. The survey also identified that concern by supervisors for facilitating the career paths of younger scientists in terms of introductions to potential labs for post-doctoral work and obtaining high quality neutral review of one’s research was also important, as was the desire to set up collaborations. An expectation from the management of one’s university of the PR-value of a foreign senior person as examiner also played a part. Although few were willing to admit that PR for one’s own group was a motivating factor. A small fraction of responders expressed concern that, as some of the costs of the PhD-examination were being shifted on to the research groups themselves, this might impact the current situation. Language also played a subordinate role. To get the best out of the visiting examiner, it was important to educate and instruct them in their role in a Swedish PhD-examination protocol. Male supervisors had had more PhD-candidates than female, but they also had used more Sweden-based examiners than their female colleagues. We conclude that using a foreign examiner was motivated by factors that are likely to prevail for the foreseeable future. This Swedish practice may also provide a template for a common standard.
A review of 649 PhDs undertaken by Swedish nurses and midwives found no evidence that they stop publishing in English after their PhD. The proportion of 70% for any publication in English was similar to that of MDs. A higher proportion of male than female nurses were high publishers of six or more (52% vs. 23%) and eight or more papers (44% vs. 14%) in a 5 year period. The standard of the PhDs of Swedish nurses was comparable to those of other biomedical PhDs and was consistent in pattern over the past two decades. The gender pattern of external examiners of female nurses evolved in that 1992–94, 75% were men, during 1996–97, 54% were men and from 2000 onwards 46% were men. Nurses were examined by foreign examiners in 20% of examinations. They came primarily from Norway and USA.
Even if integrative and complementary medicine (ICM) is a growing scientific field, it is also a highly contested area in terms of scientific legitimacy. The aim of this article is to analyze the reception of ICM research in scientific journals. Is this kind of research acknowledged outside the ICM context, for example, in general or specialized medicine? What is the impact of ICM research? and Is it possible to identify any shift in content, from the original ICM research to the documents where it is acknowledged? The material consisted of two sets: documents published in 12 ICM journals in 2007; and all documents citing these documents during the years 2007-2012. These sets were analyzed with help from citation and co-word analysis. When analyzing the citation pattern, it was clear that a majority of the cited documents were acknowledged in journals and documents that could be related to research areas outside the ICM context, such as pharmacology & pharmacy and plant science-even if the most frequent singular journals and subject categories were connected to ICM. However, after analyzing the content of cited and citing documents, it was striking how similar the content was. It was also evident that much of this research was related to basic preclinical research, in fields such as cell biology, plant pharmacology, and animal experiments.
In this article we analyse how research on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) break through into one established scientific arena, namely academic journals. With help from bibliometric methods we analyse publication of CAM articles, in the Medline database, during the period 1966–2007. We also analyse the general content of the articles and in what journals they get published. We conclude that the publication activity of CAM articles increases rapidly, especially in the late 1990s, and that the changing growth rate is not due to the general expansion of Medline. The character of CAM articles has changed towards more clinical oriented research, especially in subfields such as acupuncture and musculoskeletal manipulations. CAM articles are found both in core clinical journals and in specialized CAM journals. Even though a substantial part of the articles are published in CAM journals, we conclude that the increasing publication activity is not restricted to the expansion of these specialized journals.
In this paper, we compare two sophisticated publication-level approaches to ex-post citation normalization: an item-oriented approach and an approach falling under the general algorithmically constructed classification system approach. Using articles published in core journals in Web of Science (SCIE, SSCI & A&HCI) during 2009 (n=955,639), we first examine, using the measure Proportion explained variation (PEV), to what extent the publication-level approaches can explain and correct for variation in the citation distribution that stems from subject matter heterogeneity. We then, for the subset of articles from life science and biomedicine (n=456,045), gauge the fairness of the normalization approaches with respect to their ability to identify highly cited articles when subject area is factored out. This is done by utilizing information from publication-level MeSH classifications to create high quality subject matter baselines and by using the measure Deviations from expectations (DE). The results show that the item-oriented approach had the best performance regarding PEV. For DE, only the most fine-grained clustering solution could compete with the item-oriented approach. However, the item-oriented approach performed better when cited references were heavily weighted in the similarity calculations.
The measurement of similarity between objects plays a role in several scientific areas. In this article, we deal with document-document similarity in a scientometric context. We compare experimentally, using a large dataset, first-order with second-order similarities with respect to the overall quality of partitions of the dataset, where the partitions are obtained on the basis of optimizing weighted modularity. The quality of a partition is defined in terms of textual coherence. The results show that the second-order approach consistently outperforms the first-order approach. Each difference between the two approaches in overall partition quality values is significant at the 0.01 level.
The measurement of similarity between objects plays a role in several scientific areas. In this article, we deal with document–document similarity in a scientometric context. We compare experimentally, using a large dataset, first-order with second-order similarities with respect to the overall quality of partitions of the dataset, where the partitions are obtained on the basis of optimizing weighted modularity. The quality of a partition is defined in terms of textual coherence. The results show that the second-order approach consistently outperforms the first-order approach. Each difference between the two approaches in overall partition quality values is significant at the 0.01 level.
Tho key features of science are its rapid growth and its continuous differentiation. The establishment of new journals can be seen as an expression of both growth and differentiation. In this study of the network among management journals, the focus is on forms of differentiation, i.e., the relationship between stratification and specialization in a network of journals. The question asked in this study is whether the different position of American and European journals corresponds with different levels of specialization. A tendency toward such a structuration of the journal network would indicate an interregional integration of management research. Articles published in six of the most influential American and European journals covering the period from 1981 to 1998 have been downloaded. The findings in this study indicate that even though European journals formed a periphery in relation to the American journals in terms of clearly asymmetrical exchange relations, it was the European journals that seemed to be more comprehensive in scope. The tendency during the investigated period indicated differentiation in terms of segmentation rather than specialization.
Many new journals are started in response to increasing specialization and limited space in existing journals. In this study two journals in organization research are studied,Administrative Science Quarterly as the first mover in the field andOrganization Studies as the challenger. It is shown that the new journal gradually differ from the old in terms of the national origin of its authors as well as the documents cited. It is concluded that the scientific journal market may not mirror the copy-cat behaviour found among newspapers or companies in other markets.
There are fewer female than male professors in the world (21–79 distribution in the country of examination). The unequal distribution of male and female professors has usually been taken to indicate that men and women have not had equal opportunities to achieve professorship. At the same time, the increase in the proportion of female professors has been taken as evidence that academia is becoming more gender equal. It is possible that both of these assumptions are flawed, and that the gender distribution among professors is the result of demographic inertia, i.e., affected by the previous distribution of men and women within the system, and how fast the distribution has changed.This study examines whether the chances, for men and women, of becoming a full professor changes over time, and whether gender differences may possibly depend on early career events. It concludes that women are significantly less likely than men to become professors and that this situation is not improving over time. In spite of policies that have tried to increase the proportion of female professors, the chances of a woman becoming a professor do not change over time. We also show that these gender differences in promotion rate can be attributed to early career events.
In this study we investigated whether open access could assist the broader dissemination of scientific research in Climate Action (Sustainable Development Goal 13) via news outlets. We did this by comparing (i) the share of open and non-open access documents in different Climate Action topics, and their news counts, and (ii) the mean of news counts for open access and non-open access documents. The data set of this study comprised 70,206 articles and reviews in Sustainable Development Goal 13, published during 2014–2018, retrieved from SciVal. The number of news mentions for each document was obtained from Altmetrics Details Page API using their DOIs, whereas the open access statuses were obtained using Unpaywall.org. The analysis in this paper was done using a combination of (Latent Dirichlet allocation) topic modelling, descriptive statistics, and regression analysis. The covariates included in the regression analysis were features related to authors, country, journal, institution, funding, readability, news source category and topic. Using topic modelling, we identified 10 topics, with topics 4 (meteorology) [21%], 5 (adaption, mitigation, and legislation) [18%] and 8 (ecosystems and biodiversity) [14%] accounting for 53% of the research in Sustainable Development Goal 13. Additionally, the results of regression analysis showed that while keeping all the variables constant in the model, open access papers in Climate Action had a news count advantage (8.8%) in comparison to non-open access papers. Our findings also showed that while a higher share of open access documents in topics such as topic 9 (Human vulnerability to risks) might not assist with its broader dissemination, in some others such as topic 5 (adaption, mitigation, and legislation), even a lower share of open access documents might accelerate its broad communication via news outlets.
This paper analyzes, using Web of Science publications and two time periods (2004-2006 and 2014-2016), the disciplinary structures in the three prestigious journals Nature, Science and PNAS, compared with two baselines: Non-NSP_Multi (multidisciplinary publications that have other source journals than Nature, Science and PNAS), and Non-Multi (publications assigned to other categories than Multidisciplinary). We analyze the profiles at two levels, journal and country. The results for the journal level show that for Nature and Science, the publications are considerably less concentrated to certain disciplines compared to PNAS. Biology is the dominant discipline for all the three journals. Nature and Science have similar publication shares in Medicine, Geosciences, Physics, Space science, and Chemistry. The publications of PNAS are highly concentrated to two disciplines: Biology and Medicine. Compared with Non-NSP_Multi and Non-Multi, the shares of Biology in NSP journals are higher, whereas the share of Medicine is lower. At the country level, 14 countries are included, among them the five BRICS countries. With respect to the NSP journals, the emphasis disciplines (in terms of world share of publications) of most countries other than USA are the disciplines in which USA has its weakest performance. The disciplinary structures of USA and of most of the other studied countries therefore tend to be different. Regarding Non-NSP_Multi and Non-Multi, the shapes of the disciplinary structures of the 14 countries can be roughly grouped into three groups, while there are more types of shapes for the countries in the NSP journals. For all five units of analysis, the discipline structures of most countries generally change only slightly between different time periods. The structures of some BRICS countries, however, change to a relatively large extent.
Understanding the nature and value of scientific collaboration is essential for sound management and proactive research policies. One component of collaboration is the composition and diversity of contributing authors. This study explores how ethnic diversity in scientific collaboration affects scientific impact, by presenting a conceptual model to connect ethnic diversity, based on author names, with scientific impact, assuming novelty and audience diversity as mediators. The model also controls for affiliated country diversity and affiliated country size. Using path modeling, we apply the model to the Web of Science subject categories Nanoscience & Nanotechnology, Ecology and Information Science & Library. For all three subject categories, and regardless of if control variables are considered or not, we find a weak positive relationship between ethnic diversity and scientific impact. The relationship is weaker, however, when control variables are included. For all three fields, the mediated effect through audience diversity is substantially stronger than the mediated effect through novelty in the relationship, and the former effect is much stronger than the direct effect between the ethnic diversity and scientific impact. Our findings further suggest that ethnic diversity is more associated with short-term scientific impact compared to long-term scientific impact.
Although there are now several bibliographic databases of research publications, such as Google Scholar, Pubmed, Scopus, and the Web of Science (WoS), and some also include counts of citations, there is at present no similarly comprehensive database of the rapidly growing number of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs), with their references, which sometimes number in the hundreds. CPGs have been shown to be useful for the evaluation of clinical (as opposed to basic) biomedical research, which often suffers from relatively low counts of citations in the serial literature. The objectives were to introduce a new citation database, clinical impact (R), and demonstrate how it can be used to evaluate research impact of clinical research publications by exploring the characteristics of CPG citations of two sets of papers, as well as show temporal variation of clinical impactand the WoS. The paper includes the methodology used to retain the data and also the rationale adopted to achieve data quality. The analysis showed that although CPGs tend preferentially to cite papers from their own country, this is not always the case. It also showed that cited papers tend to have a more clinical research level than uncited papers. An analysis of diachronous citations in both clinical impactand the WoS showed that although the WoS citations showed a decreasing trend after a peak at 2-3 years after publication, this was less clear for CPG citations and a longer timescale would be needed to evaluate their impact on these documents.
Recently, in the four top journals of humanities, an institutional bias towards publication of authors from Harvard and Yale was shown. The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) is today the highest ranked general medical journal. It is unknown if there exists institutional bias favoring publication of articles originating from Harvard University, since the NEJM is produced by the Massachusetts Medical Society with close connections to the Harvard University. We examined if studies originating from the Harvard University published in the NEJM were noninferior in terms of citation rates compared to articles with an origin outside Harvard University. We evaluated original research articles published in the NEJM in 2000 up until June 2001. A two-sample noninferiority test based on the primary endpoint of citations was performed. Twenty-two studies were affiliated to the Harvard University and 280 studies were not affiliated to the Harvard University. The mean number of citations for Harvard affiliated studies was 625 (95% CI 358-952, median 354) and for non-Harvard affiliated studies 493 (95% CI 421-569, median 303). The mean difference was not statistically different between affiliations, but fulfilled the requirements for noninferiority [132 (95% CI - 138-402, P = 0.343), Delta 200]. In summary, citation rates were comparable between studies origination from the Harvard University compared to non-Harvard Institutions. Based on these results there appears to be low risk of institutional bias in the publishing process of original studies in the NEJM.
To analyse the words and expressions used in peer reviews of manuscripts that were later published as original research in the BMJ. Secondary aims were to estimate the differences in net sentiment between peer review reports on manuscripts subject to one or more rounds of peer review and and review reports on initially rejected manuscripts that were accepted after appeal. This observational study included all peer review reports published in the BMJ from September 2014 until the end of 2017. The study analysed the frequency of specific words in peer review reports for accepted manuscripts, identifying the most commonly occurring positive and negative words and their context, as well as the most common expressions. It also quantified differences in net sentiment in peer review reports between manuscripts accepted after appeal and manuscript accepted without appeal. The dataset consisting of 1716 peer review reports contained 908,932 word tokens. Among the most frequent positive words were "well", "important", "clear", "while the negative words included "risk", "bias", and "confounding". The areas where the reviewer makes the most positive and negative comments included: "well-written paper", "well-written manuscript", "this is an important topic", "answers an important question", "high risk of bias" and "selection bias". The sentiment analysis revealed that manuscripts accepted after appeal had lower scores on review reports for joy and positive sentiment, in addition to having higher scores for negative words expressing sadness, fear, disgust and anger compared with manuscripts that were not initially rejected. Peer review comments were mainly related to methodology rather than the actual results. Peer review reports on initially rejected manuscripts were more negative and more often included expressions related to a high risk of bias.
University-industry (U-I) collaboration takes on many forms, from research services, teaching and training, to curiosity-led research. In the chemical industries, academic chemists generate new knowledge, address novel problems faced by industry, and train the future workforce in cutting-edge methods. In this study, we examine the dynamic structures of collaborative research contracts and grants between academic and industry partners over a 5-year period within a research-intensive Australian university. We reconstruct internal contract data provided by a university research office as records of its collaborations into a complex relational database that links researchers to research projects. We then structure this complex relational data as a two-mode network of researcher-project collaborations for utilisation with Social Network Analysis (SNA)-a relational methodology ideally suited to relational data. Specifically, we use a stochastic actor-oriented model (SAOM), a statistical network model for longitudinal two-mode network data. Although the dataset is complicated, we manage to replicate it exactly using a very parsimonious and relatable network model. Results indicate that as academics gain experience, they become more involved in direct research contracts with industry, and in research projects more generally. Further, more senior academics are involved in projects involving both industry partners and other academic partners of any level. While more experienced academics are also less likely to repeat collaborations with the same colleagues, there is a more general tendency in these collaborations, regardless of academic seniority or industry engagement, for prior collaborations to predict future collaborations. We discuss implications for industry and academics.
Serious concerns have been raised on the potentially negative impact of public measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic on academic research, including the closure of research facilities, and the challenges of lockdown. However, it is unclear whether COVID-related mobility restrictions have penalized academic productivity, and if this is the case, whether it has had an equal impact on all research areas and countries. Here, we examined about 9.2 million submissions to 2689 Elsevier journals in all research areas in 2018-2021 and estimated the impact of anti-COVID mobility restriction policies on submissions to journals. Results showed that anti-contagion public measures had a positive impact on academic productivity. However, submission patterns changed more in non-Western academic countries, with the exception of Italy, which had stringent lock-down measures. During the early stages of the pandemic, the abnormal peak of submission was dominated by health & medical researchers, whereas later, there was an increase in submissions to social science & economics journals. Although anti-contagion public measures have contributed to change academic work, it is difficult to estimate whether they will have any potentially long-term effect on the academic community- either positive or negative.
Recent studies have reported on a steady decline of Sweden's relative citation impact in almost all science fields, above all in the life sciences. The authors attempt to shed light on the observed decline in Swedish neuroscience through a detailed citation analysis at different level of aggregations. Thus national citation data are decomposed to the institutional, departmental and individual level. Both, the decomposition of national science indicators and changing collaboration patterns in Swedish neuroscience reveal interesting details on the 'anatomy' of a decline.
This is a cross-field literature review and comparison of the fields webometrics (cybermetrics) and web (data) mining.
Although the nuclear era and the Cold War superpower competition have long since passed, governments are still investing in Big Science, although these large facilities are nowadays mostly geared towards areas of use closer to utility. Investments in Big Science are also motivated not only by promises of scientific breakthroughs but also by expectations (and demands) of measurable impact, and with an emerging global market of competing user-oriented Big Science facilities, quantitative measures of productivity and quality have become mainstream. Among these are rather simple and one-sided publication counts. This article uses publication counts and figures of expenditure for three cases that are disparate but all represent the state-of-the-art of Big Science of their times, discussing at depth the problems of using simple publication counts as a measure of performance in science. Showing, quite trivially, that Big Science is very expensive, the article also shows the absurd consequences of consistently using simple publication counts to display productivity and quality of Big Science, and concludes that such measures should be deemed irrelevant for analyses on the level of organizations in science and replaced by qualitative assessment of the content of the science produced.
Big Science accelerator complexes are no longer mere tools for nuclear and particle physics, but modern-day experimental resources for a wide range of natural sciences and often named instrumental to scientific and technological development for innovation and economic growth. Facilities compete on a global market to attract the best users and facilitate the best science, and advertise the achievement of their users as markers of quality and productivity. Thus a need has risen for (quantitative) quality assessment of science on the level of facilities. In this article, we examine some quantitative performance measurements frequently used by facilities to display quality: technical reliability, competition for access, and publication records. We report data from the world's three largest synchrotron radiation facilities from the years 2004-2010, and discuss their meaning and significance by placing them in proper context. While we argue that quality is not possible to completely capture in these quantitative metrics, we acknowledge their apparent importance and, hence, we introduce and propose facilitymetrics as a new feature of the study of modern big science, and as a new empirical focus for scientometrical study, in the hope that future studies can contribute to a deeper, much-needed analysis of the topic.
This article studies interdisciplinarity and the intellectual base of 34 literaturejournals using citation data from Web of Science. Data from two time periods, 1978–1987and 1998–2007 were compared to reveal changes in the interdisciplinary citing ofmonographs. The study extends the analysis to non-source publications; using the classificationof monographs to show changes in the intellectual base. There is support forincreased interdisciplinary citing of sources, especially to the social sciences, and changesin the intellectual base reflect this. The results are explained using theories on the intellectualand social organization of scientific fields and the use of bibliometric methods onthe humanities is discussed. The article demonstrates how citation analysis can provideinsights into the communication patterns and intellectual structure of scholarly fields in thearts and humanities.