Public-private collaboration and scientific impact: An analysis based on Danish publication data for 1995–2013

In the past few decades, there has been increasing interest in public-private collaboration, which has motivated lengthy discussion of the implications of collaboration in general, and co-authorship in particular, for the scientific impact of research. However, despite this strong interest in the topic, there is little systematic knowledge on the relation between public-private collaboration and citation impact. This paper examines the citation impact of papers involving public-private collaboration in comparison with academic research papers. We examine the role of a variety of factors, such as international collaboration, the number of co-authors, academic disciplines, and whether the research is mainly basic or applied. We first examine citation impact for a comprehensive dataset covering all Web of Science journal articles with at least one Danish author in the period 1995–2013. Thereafter, we examine whether citation impact for individual researchers differs when collaborating with industry compared to work only involving academic researchers, by looking at a fixed group of researchers that have both engaged in public-private collaborations and university-only publications. For national collaboration papers, we find no significant difference in citation impact for public-only and public-private collaborations. For international collaboration, we observe much higher citation impact for papers involving public-private collaboration.     

Toward collaborator selection and determination of data ownership and publication authorship in research collaborations

This study examined factors that might affect researchers' willingness to collaborate with a specific researcher and the priorities given to those factors. In addition, it investigated how researchers determined the ownership of collaborative project data and how they determined the order of authorship on collaborative publications in condensed matter physics. In general, researchers rated their intrinsic motivations the highest, such as the quality of ideas a potential collaborator might have and their satisfaction with a past collaboration, followed by their extrinsic motivations, such as the complementary knowledge, skills, or resources the collaborator could provide. In addition, researchers who had a greater number of collaborative projects and researchers who had served as a project PI or co-PI valued the deep-level, personality-related characteristics of a collaborator higher than did those who had not. Younger researchers were more risk averse and more concerned with a collaborator's reputation and the possible cost of a collaboration decision. Additionally, younger researchers indicated more often than older researchers that they did not know whether their project teams followed any rules or norms or engaged in negotiation to determine the order of authorship on collaborative publications.     

学者研究主题演化的时空测度:速度、覆盖度和迂回度

[目的/意义]运用深度学习技术,提出结合时间和空间特征的测度(速度、覆盖度和迂回度)方法,用于量化学者研究主题演化,从而为基于内容的学者评价提供量化依据。[方法/过程]提出三维指标框架,其中速度反映作者改变研究主题快慢的平均程度,覆盖度反映作者研究内容所覆盖的主题广度,迂回度反映作者研究路径的曲折性。使用微软学术数据集中计算机科学的作者进行实证研究,并考察学者研究主题演化的三维测度和学者学术影响力和生产力的关系。[结果/结论] 实证研究结果显示,覆盖度与总被引量和总发文量的关系为单调递减,这一特征说明聚焦于特定研究主题较为深入的作者,其发文量和影响力都较大。作者研究主题演化的"速度"和"迂回度"与总被引量、总发文量都存在先增加后减少的倒U型关系。所提出的多维度指标框架不仅可在理论上丰富科学计量学对于学者研究主题转移演化及其机制的理解,而且结合深度学习模型提出了问题的解决思路。     

International Collaboration and Openness in Jordanian Research Output: A 10-year Publications Feedback

Previous reports stressed on the importance of international collaboration and open access (OA) publishing, as they increase the quality of the research and increase its benefits. In this study, we will assess Jordanian international research collaboration and OA publishing in the past 10 years. We performed a Scopus search for Jordanian publications in the years 2008–2017, where we extracted and calculated the total number of publications, publications in OA journals, publications with international collaborations. Moreover, we assessed the disciplines Jordanians usually publish in. During the 10-year interval, we found a total of 20,359 Jordan-affiliated publications indexed in Scopus. We found a dramatic increase in number of publications with international collaboration from 38% in 2008 reaching 53.3% in 2017, and an increase in OA publications from 7.3% of the total publications in 2008, reaching 18.7% of the total publications in 2017. Total number of Scopus indexed publications from Jordan has increased by 57.9% over the past 10 years. Although international collaboration and OA publications have dramatically increased in recent years, Jordanian researchers should focus more on international collaboration with developed countries and on self-archiving their publications.     

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.     

Standing on the shoulders of giants?—Faculty hiring in information schools

The past three decades have witnessed the tremendous growth of the number of information schools (a.k.a., iSchools) and the size of their faculty bodies. However, there is little empirical evidence in faculty hiring patterns within the community. Analyzing hand-curated data of 81 junior and 485 senior faculty members from 27 iSchools in the United States and a total of 41?981 journal and conference proceeding publications, we investigate the effects of collaboration experience on placement quality, controlling for other well studied factors including gender, scholarly performance, and prestige of degree-granting programs. In particular, we find that strong ties in collaboration, as measured by PhD advisors’ academic achievements, have little correlation with placement quality fixing other factors. On the other hand, weak ties, manifested by coauthors excluding advisors, are found to be beneficial. Providing a better understanding of hiring practice in iSchools, the results highlight the importance of “standing on the shoulders of giants” for junior information science researchers wishing to find high-quality faculty job. Finally, our findings lay the foundation for future investigations, where stakeholders and administrators can assess the effectiveness of existing hiring strategies, which in turn provide managerial and policy implications for iSchools to adapt to the fast growing landscape of information science.     

Co-Authorship and Scientific Publications: A Case Study at Shahed University

The purpose of this research is to study co-authorship and scientific publications of faculty members at Shahed University, located in Iran, during the period of 2000 to 2008. Scientometrics methods were used to evaluate scientific publications. The rate of co-authorship is high (91.27%) in comparison with single authorship (8.73%). Moreover, there is a great number of scientific collaborations among Shahed University faculty members but international collaboration is low. The article provides insight into co-authorship at Shahed University and provides useful information for researchers who are seeking to learn about the collaboration in scientific works by Iranian researchers at the national and international levels.     

Book editors in the social sciences and humanities: an analysis of publication and collaboration patterns of established researchers in Flanders

Book editors in the social sciences and humanities play an important role in their fields but little is known about their typical publication and collaboration patterns. To partially fill this gap, we compare Flemish editors and other researchers, in terms of career stage, productivity, publication types, publications with domestic and international collaboration as well as the number of (international or all) unique co‐authors, co‐editors and associated book chapter authors. The results show that editors are mostly established researchers, especially in the social sciences, produce more book chapters and monographs than do other researchers, and are more productive. Nevertheless, editors collaborate less than do other researchers, both in terms of publications and in number of co‐authors. Including book chapter authors in the editors' collaboration networks makes those networks substantially larger, demonstrating that editors do not mainly call upon authors from their existing collaboration network when choosing book chapter authors in the edited books. Finally, editors seem to co‐author with their book chapter authors slightly more often after the publication of the edited book than before.     

The value and credits of n-authors publications

Collaboration among researchers is becoming increasingly common, which raises a large number of scientometrics questions for which there is not a clear and generally accepted answer. For instance, what value should be given to a two-author or three-author publication with respect to a single-author publication? This paper uses axiomatic analysis and proposes a practical method to compute the expected value of an n-authors publication that takes into consideration the added value induced by collaboration in contexts in which there is no prior or ex-ante information about the publication's potential merits or scientific impact. The only information required is the number of authors. We compared the obtained theoretical values with the empirical values based on a large dataset from the Web of Science database. We found that the theoretical values are very close to the empirical values for some disciplines, but not for all. This observation provides support in favor of the method proposed in this paper. We expect that our findings can help researchers and decision-makers to choose more effective and fair counting methods that take into account the benefits of collaboration.     

A new interpretation of scientific collaboration patterns from the perspective of symbiosis: An investigation for long-term collaboration in publications

Based on complementarity in terms of factors such as skill and knowledge, researchers might build long-term partnerships with one another during their scientific careers. It has been shown that such relationships have a significant positive impact on researchers’ scientific performance. However, the preferential connection mechanism in collaboration networks actually suggests the unequal positions of participants in the process of scientific collaboration. This study argues that this phenomenon is very similar to the symbiosis function in the natural world. Hence, this work provides a novel interpretation of scientific collaboration patterns from the perspective of symbiosis. In more detail, long-term collaboration relationships are investigated based on the scope of an academician dataset with multiple fields and an economic dataset. With the aid of a quantitative metric for symbiosis degree, six meta-patterns of the short-term evolution of symbiosis degree are proposed. Furthermore, by exploring the evolution of meta-patterns, four scientific collaboration patterns are summarized according to the common characteristics as follows: leading growth, continuous leadership, chasing each other, and standing on equal footing. Extensive experimental results on an academician dataset with multiple fields show that the collaboration network evolution of four collaboration patterns is consistent with our summarized characteristics based on symbiosis. This indicates that our symbiosis-based framework can be used to effectively interpret the developmental and evolutionary trajectories of scientific collaboration.     

The Publication Success of 102 Nations in Scopus and the Performance of Their Scopus-Indexed Journals

Over the years, the number of journals indexed in Scopus has increased, although it varies significantly between countries. The increasing proportion of international journals of a country provides new venues for papers from that country to be seen by other researchers worldwide. In this work, we evaluate the relationship of a country’s scientific performance or publication success with both its journals’ quantity and quality. The specific objective of the study is to identify the relationship between the country’s publication success and the quantity and quality of those country’s journals indexed in Scopus during 2005–2014. The publication success of 102 individual countries, measured by their scientific productivity, impact and collaboration indicators, the quantity of country’s Scopus-indexed journals in 2014 (a total of 22,581 journals) as well as the quantity of its journals were investigated. Scopus-indexed journals are predominantly from Western Europe (48.9%) and North America (27.7%), with the United States and the United Kingdom dominate with a total 51%. The contribution from the peripheral countries is comparatively small, however there are a good number of contributions from the South-East Asian countries. Estonia is the fastest growing country in terms of having indexed journals in Scopus, following by Iran and Malaysia. Among the studied indices, it was found that publication success (total publications and total citations) of 102 countries are strongly correlated with quantity (number of indexed journals and number of documents published in indexed journals) and quality (citations per paper, SJR, h-index, CiteScore and SNIP) indicators of country’s journals. We can conclude that the scientific productivity of a country depend critically on the number of journals indexed from that country in citation databases. The study provides a context with which the relative success of publications can be assessed, yielding new insights into the scientific impact of individual countries and the performance of journals that they published.     

Do researchers collaborate in a similar way to publish and to develop projects?

The aim of this paper is to establish the similarities and differences between the way of collaboration and the production of researchers when dealing with publications or with the development of projects and whether the collaboration patterns change across disciplines.We have studied the networks of researchers formed through the collaborations in papers or in projects in a research institution (the University of Zaragoza) and we have analyzed a series of individual and global magnitudes. As a general result, we have observed that the laws governing the individual productivity are similar for the cases of publications and projects but, however, the behavior is different when analyzing more complex magnitudes such as the collaborations or other structural variables. We consider also the subnetworks defined by the researchers of the different disciplines and characterize their topologies and compare the corresponding collaboration patterns.Because of the general approach, we expect most of the conclusions to be applicable to other universities or research centers.     

Harmonic coauthor credit: A parsimonious quantification of the byline hierarchy

In this paper the accuracy of five current approaches to quantifying the byline hierarchy of a scientific paper is assessed by measuring the ability of each to explain the variation in a composite empirical dataset. Harmonic credit explained 97% of the variation by including information about the number of coauthors and their position in the byline. In contrast, fractional credit, which ignored the byline hierarchy by allocating equal credit to all coauthors, explained less than 40% of the variation in the empirical dataset. The nearly 60% discrepancy in explanatory power between fractional and harmonic credit was accounted for by equalizing bias associated with the omission of relevant information about differential coauthor contribution. Including an additional parameter to describe a continuum of intermediate formulas between fractional and harmonic provided a negligible or negative gain in predictive accuracy. By comparison, two parametric models from the bibliometric literature both had an explanatory capacity of approximately 80%. In conclusion, the results indicate that the harmonic formula provides a parsimonious solution to the problem of quantifying the byline hierarchy. Harmonic credit allocation also accommodates specific indications of departures from the basic byline hierarchy, such as footnoted information stating that some or all coauthors have contributed equally or indicating the presence of a senior author.     

A regression analysis of researchers’ social network metrics on their citation performance in a college of engineering

Previous research shows that researchers’ social network metrics obtained from a collaborative output network (e.g., joint publications or co-authorship network) impact their performance determined by g-index. We use a richer dataset to show that a scholar's performance should be considered with respect to position in multiple networks. Previous research using only the network of researchers’ joint publications shows that a researcher's distinct connections to other researchers, a researcher's number of repeated collaborative outputs, and a researchers’ redundant connections to a group of researchers who are themselves well-connected has a positive impact on the researchers’ performance, while a researcher's tendency to connect with other researchers who are themselves well-connected (i.e., eigenvector centrality) had a negative impact on the researchers’ performance. Our findings are similar except that we find that eigenvector centrality has a positive impact on the performance of scholars. Moreover, our results demonstrate that a researcher's tendency toward dense local neighborhoods and the researchers’ demographic attributes such as gender should also be considered when investigating the impact of the social network metrics on the performance of researchers.     

Predicting future influence of papers,researchers, and venues in a dynamic academic network

Performance evaluation and prediction of academic achievements is an essential task for scientists, research organizations, research funding bodies, and government agencies alike. Recently, heterogeneous networks have been used to evaluate or predict performance of multi-entities including papers, researchers, and venues with some success. However, only a minimum of effort has been made to predict the future influence of papers, researchers and venues. In this paper, we propose a new framework WMR-Rank for this purpose. Based on the dynamic and heterogeneous network of multiple entities, we extract seven types of relations among them. The framework supports useful features including the refined granularity of relevant entities such as authors and venues, time awareness for published papers and their citations, differentiating the contribution of multiple coauthors to the same paper, amongst others. By leveraging all seven types of relations and fusing the rich information in a mutually reinforcing style, we are able to predict future influence of papers, authors and venues more precisely. Using the ACL dataset, our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach considerably outperforms state-of-the art competitors.     

Research impact and scholars’ geographical diversity

In recent years there has been a sharp increase in collaborations among scholars and there are studies on the effects of scientific collaboration on scholars’ performance. This study examines the hypothesis that geographically diverse scientific collaboration is associated with research impact. Here, the approach is differentiated from other studies by: (a) focusing on publications rather than researchers or institutes; (b) considering the geographical diversity of authors of each publication; (c) considering the average number of citations a publication receives per year (time-based normalization of citations) as a surrogate for its impact; and (d) not focusing on a specific country (developed or developing) or region. Analysis of the collected bibliometric data shows that a publication impact is significantly and positively associated with all related geographical collaboration indicators. But publication impact has a stronger association with the numbers of external collaborations at department and institution levels (inter-departmental and inter-institutional collaborations) compared to internal collaborations. Conversely, national collaboration correlates better with impact than international collaboration.     

An international comparison of journal publishing and citing behaviours

The relationship between researchers’ publishing and citing behaviours has received little examination despite its potential importance in scholarly communication, particularly at an international level. To remedy this we studied documents and their references indexed in Thomson Reuters's Web of Science (WoS) in the period 2000–2009 to compare journal publishing behaviours against journal citing behaviours across the world. The results reveal that most publications in, and citations to, all five quality based strata of journals examined come from scientifically and economically advanced countries. Nevertheless, in proportion to their total number of citations given to WoS journals, it seems that less developed countries cite high-quality journals at the same rate as developed countries and so the poorer publishing of less developed countries does not seem to be due to a lack of access to top journals. Moreover, examining the publishing and citing trends of countries revealed a decreasing rate of high-income and Scientifically Advanced Countries (SACs) publications in, and citations to, all quality ranges of journals in comparison to the increasing rate of publications and citations of other groups. Finally, research cooperation between developed and less developed countries seems to positively influence the publishing behaviour of the latter as their publications co-authored with developed countries were published more often in top journals.     

On the relation between the degree of internationalization of cited and citing publications: A field level analysis,including and excluding self-citations

The growing complexity of scientific challenges demands increasingly intense research collaboration, both domestic and international. The resulting trend affects not only the modes of producing new knowledge, but also the way it is disseminated within scientific communities. This paper analyses the relationship between the “degree of internationalization” of a country’s scientific production and that of the relevant citing publications. The empirical analysis is based on 2010-2012 Italian publications. Findings show: i) the probability of being cited increases with the degree of internationalization of the research team; ii) totally domestic research teams tend to cite to a greater extent totally domestic publications; iii) vice versa, publications resulting from international collaborations tend to be more cited by totally foreign publications rather than by publications including domestic authors. These results emerge both at overall and at discipline level. Findings might inform research policies geared towards internationalization.     

我国数字图书馆研究十年：领域作者、机构和地区影响力分析

文章借助CSSCI的统计数据分析了我国数字图书馆领域2000—2009年间的发展情况,分析指标主要有：数字图书馆论文作者、机构、地区、合作作者等。得到结论：我国数字图书馆的研究在近十年来发展迅速,在论文发表形式上以合著为主。文章从不同学者的发文量和被引情况,以及不同类型机构、机构发文量、不同地区发文量等几个方面具体分析了这些特征对加深数字图书馆领域学术影响发挥了重大作用。