Building bridges across fields, universities, and countries: Successfully funding communication research through interdisciplinary collaboration

Even though there are few directorates explicitly dedicated to communication research at places like the National Science Foundation, there are significant opportunities for funding of interdisciplinary research on "communication problems." This article informally shares some principles, rules of thumb, and ideas about funding communication technology research projects, though it applies to other areas as well. The article draws on the experience of the communication technology research experience at the international, cross-university, and interdisciplinary network of Media Interface and Network Design (M.I.N.D.) Labs.     

Visualization of ranking data: Geographical signatures in international collaboration,leadership and research impact

In this work we address the comprehensive Scimago Institutions Ranking 2012, proposing a data visualization of the listed bibliometric indicators for the 509 Higher Education Institutions among the 600 largest research institutions ranked according to their outputs. We focus on research impact, internationalization and leadership indicators, which became important benchmarks in a worldwide discussion about research quality and impact policies for universities. Our data visualization reveals a qualitative difference between the behavior of Northern American and Western European Higher Education Institutions concerning International collaboration levels. Chinese universities show still a systematic low international collaboration levels which are positively linked to the low research impact. The data suggests that research impact can be related directly to internationalization only to rather low values for both indicators. Above world average, other determinants may become relevant in fostering further impact. The leadership indicator provides further insights to the collaborative environment of universities in different geographical regions, as well as the optimized collaboration portfolio for enhancing research impact.     

Research universities on the ResearchGate social networking site: An examination of institutional differences,research activity level,and social networks formed

As one of the largest active academic social networking sites, ResearchGate (RG) has been utilized by scholars to share publications, seek collaborators, communicate work in progress, and build scholarly reputation. This study collects data from RG users from 61 U.S. research universities at different research activity levels, as categorized by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, to examine the impact of institutional differences on RG reputational metrics. The results confirm that RG is a research-oriented academic social networking site that closely and realistically mirrors the research activity level of institutions. With an increase in the research activity level of a university, its affiliated RG users tend to have higher RG scores, more publications and citations, and more profile views and followers, while the average number of reads of their publications and followees tend to be lower and fluctuant. In addition, RG users primarily follow others from institutions of a higher research activity level, forming virtual social networks centered around esteemed institutions. The study suggests academic social networks can serve as indicators in evaluation of research activities among research institutions, and such sites can be helpful and credible for acquiring resources, keeping informed about research, and promoting academic influence.