Should scientists communicate--and if so, with whom?

The contemporary criterion of professional success for an academic scientist is primarily his rate of publication in scholarly journals. This distorted and relatively uncritical valuation of the communication aspects of science has promoted an increasing deluge of increasingly redundant, dilute, and trivial publications. In a modern well-equipped research laboratory, producing publishable new observations can be a fairly simple process in many fields, especially if the relevance of the observations to either the advancement of the scientific world view or to a social need is inconsequential. This easy currency of rampant new observations has obscured the creative process of formulating new scientific concepts which are the ultimate refined product of the scientific enterprise. Perhaps scientists should talk less and think more.     

Exploring scientists’ working timetable: A global survey

In our previous study (Wang et al., 2012), we analyzed scientists’ working timetable of 3 countries, using realtime downloading data of scientific literatures. In this paper, we make a through analysis about global scientists’ working habits. Top 30 countries/territories from Europe, Asia, Australia, North America, Latin America and Africa are selected as representatives and analyzed in detail. Regional differences for scientists’ working habits exists in different countries. Besides different working cultures, social factors could affect scientists’ research activities and working patterns. Nevertheless, a common conclusion is that scientists today are often working overtime. Although scientists may feel engaged and fulfilled about their hard working, working too much still warns us to reconsider the work–life balance.     

Could scientists use Altmetric.com scores to predict longer term citation counts?

Altmetrics from Altmetric.com are widely used by publishers and researchers to give earlier evidence of attention than citation counts. This article assesses whether Altmetric.com scores are reliable early indicators of likely future impact and whether they may also reflect non-scholarly impacts. A preliminary factor analysis suggests that the main altmetric indicator of scholarly impact is Mendeley reader counts, with weaker news, informational and social network discussion/promotion dimensions in some fields. Based on a regression analysis of Altmetric.com data from November 2015 and Scopus citation counts from October 2017 for articles in 30 narrow fields, only Mendeley reader counts are consistent predictors of future citation impact. Most other Altmetric.com scores can help predict future impact in some fields. Overall, the results confirm that early Altmetric.com scores can predict later citation counts, although less well than journal impact factors, and the optimal strategy is to consider both Altmetric.com scores and journal impact factors. Altmetric.com scores can also reflect dimensions of non-scholarly impact in some fields.     

Movers’ advantages: The effect of mobility on scientists’ productivity and collaboration

With the rapid globalization of science, mobility is perceived as an important driver of scientific progress and innovation success. However, we have little knowledge about whether and how scientists’ mobility influences their career development, especially scientists’ productivity and collaboration. In this case study, using the data on 62,330 scientists, the Chinese computer scientists who published at least one computer science paper and published no fewer than 10 papers in total from 2000 to 2012, we apply difference in differences models in conjunction with PSM methods to show the effect of domestic mobility (i.e., moving inside China) on scientists’ research quantity and quality by distinguishing the direction of mobility. In contrast to the existing literature that documents a short-term negative effect due to adaption costs or disruption of routines and social capital, we do not observe an initial detrimental impact of following moves on productivity and collaboration, even for non-upward moves. We further find that mobility leads to increased collaboration with new partners without dampening scientists’ collaboration with previous collaborators. However, scientists have a higher probability of collaborating with new collaborators, as evidenced by the decreased share of previous collaborators to the total co-authors after they move. The findings of this case study imply that the benefits of mobility might outweigh its costs and that mobility improves scientists’ productivity and collaboration for prolific scientists in emerging countries.     

Research complexity increases with scientists’ academic age: Evidence from library and information science

With the continued aging of the scientific workforce, the impact of this trend on scientists’ research performance has attracted increasing attention. The literature has predominantly focused on the productivity, impact, and collaboration pattern of scientists of different ages. A research gap is found in investigating the differences in the research topics studied by junior and senior scientists. This study focuses on the complexity of a scientist's research portfolio (RPC). Based on the concept of economic complexity, RPC was measured to characterize the capability of scientists to study complex research topics. An economic algorithm was adopted to estimate RPC on heterogeneous author-topic bipartite networks using bibliographic data from the field of Library and Information Science between 1971 and 2020. Through comparisons among scientist groups, RPC shows promise in distinguishing outstanding scientists from peers who have similar values of other indicators (e.g., citations and H-index). The change in RPC was further probed across scientists’ careers and an increasing trend with academic age was found, even after removing the accumulated advantages of senior scientists. Moreover, top-ranked scientists distinguish themselves from their peers by a higher RPC in the first year and a greater growth rate during their careers. While many researchers have their highest RPC in the first year, most top-ranked scientists reach their peak RPC later in their careers. The results provide helpful references for studies on the aging effect in academia.     

We Are Hardworking and Ambitiours (二) Bridging the Gaps between Librarians and Information scientists

<正> I classify myself as a perennial student. I'm one of those people who's always excited about learning new things, from both the library and non-library field and applying them whenever I see fit.As an undergraduate at the University of Taiwan, I majored in English literature and languages. After graduation, I was awarded a highly competitive fellowship, the Barbour Scholarship, to come to the U.S. and study at the University     

An investigation of the relationship between scientists’ mobility to/from China and their research performance

A large number of overseas elites were brought back to China by the policy in the past decade. However, name disambiguation defied investigations on the relationship between their mobility and research performance. By taking advantage of the ORCID website and applying causal inference strategies, we investigated 2489 China-connected scientists’ academic performance in the Web of Science database in terms of their job mobility, including 1388 scientists who moved to China the treatment group, and 1101 scientists with a possibility to move to China the control group. The results show that first, scientists moving to China have a new growth pattern where both their productivity and the rates of being corresponding authors in publications grew more rapidly than before; however, they made fewer contributions to the four top journals, Nature, Science, Cell, and PNAS. Second, the research performance of the scientists is affected by the time of mobility towards China, the countries from which they moved, and the disciplines of their publications. Last, China now maintains symmetrical inflow-outflow patterns with most countries, especially developed countries in Europe and North America, with only a few exceptions (e.g., Pakistan).     

Exploring the influence of coauthorship with top scientists on researchers’ affiliation,research topic,productivity, and impact

Research studies have found that coauthorship with top scientists positively correlates with researchers’ career advancement. However, the influence of different proximities and types of coauthorship with top scientists on their performance has rarely been discussed. We identified the winners of four awards as top authors. We also evaluated the effect on the researchers’ affiliation change, research topic, productivity, and impact before and after three top-ordinary scientist coauthorship types (strong, moderate, and weak), examining the effect after top-top and ordinary-ordinary scientist coauthorships. Additionally, a coauthorship closeness indicator was proposed, considering the team size and author role to measure the collaboration relationship between coauthors. The results reveal that the top scientist in strong coauthorship obtained the highest affiliation change rate. For the top-ordinary coauthorship, the affiliation change rate for top scientists is higher than for ordinary scientists. For other aspects (the coauthor number, research topic, productivity, and impact), the rate after strong and moderate coauthorships increases compared to weak top-ordinary coauthorship type for top and ordinary scientists. Therefore, top scientists obtain a partner with skills, and ordinary scientists obtain more guidance. Strong and moderate coauthorships are win-win relationships for top-ordinary coauthorship types.