Science and technology studies: Exploring the knowledge base

Science and Technology Studies (STS) is one of a number of new research fields to emerge over the last four or five decades. This paper attempts to identify its core academic contributions from the perspective of the authors of chapters in authoritative ‘handbooks’ and the references they cite. Besides identifying the most prominent publications, institutions and authors, we examine whether the core contributions can be broken down into identifiable clusters. The study also analyses the impact of these contributions by exploring the research fields, journals, and geographical location of the researchers that have cited the STS core contributions in their own work. Together, these analyses reveal a number of phases in the development of STS with periods of convergence and divergence of the field, including the gradual separation of quantitative studies of science and technology from the main body of STS. The paper ends with some conclusions about the evolution of STS, such as the role of ‘institution builders’ in developing new research fields and the structures required to hold them together.     

中国国际科技合著论文的学科分布差异

 本文研究了十年间（1996-2005）SCIE论文中国国际科技合著论文的学科分布差异。通过对论文数量和引文影响的相对水平进行比较,发现在基础研究、工程技术和生物医学三个主要学科大类之间存在明显的差异：基础研究学科论文和引文数量都比较多;工程技术学科论文数多而引文数量相对较少;医学生物学则是论文数量较少而引文数量相对较多。同时,本文还将h指数的概念引入到学科比较中,以学科作为论文产出的主体进行比较分析。同样可以发现三大类学科的差异：基础研究学科h指数普遍较高,工程技术类普遍较低,而医学生物学处于二者之间的地位。     

Exploring the emerging knowledge base of ‘the knowledge society’

Science, technology and innovation have grown in importance over the last 50 years as we have moved towards a more knowledge-intensive society (the ‘knowledge society’). A number of new research fields have emerged in an effort to understand these developments and to offer advice to decision-makers in government, industry and elsewhere. This special issue focuses on studies of three relatively distinct though thematically related research fields (innovation studies, entrepreneurship studies, and science and technology studies). The first three articles use a particular methodology based on analysis of the references cited in the chapters to authoritative ‘handbooks’ to identify the core contributions in the three fields. A fourth article examines the relationship between the core literatures in three fields and how this has evolved over time. Other articles look at the evolution of innovation studies as reflected in highly cited papers, at the development of entrepreneurship as seen by a key ‘insider’, and at the creation of new centres in these fields and the difficulties they face. The last article in this special issue shows how interdisciplinary centres in innovation studies suffer from research assessment systems that are intrinsically biased against interdisciplinary research. This introduction presents a synthesis of the articles in this special issue, discusses similarities and differences between the three fields and their development over time, and considers challenges for policy and governance arising from the research presented here.     

The geography of scientific citations

Science’s main norms prescribe scientists to use citations as acknowledgements of cognitive content irrespective of geographical location. Previous studies, however, suggested that there is a considerable geographical bias in scientific citations. We argue that this geographical bias does not, in itself, falsify the notion that citations reflect acknowledgement of cognitive content, because cognitively related knowledge may be geographically concentrated as well. We analyse the role of organizational, regional and national co-location on citation likelihood for 5.5 million article pairs, and find that the geographical bias in citations is weak once cognitive relatedness is accounted for. Furthermore, we find that the effect of co-location on citation likelihood is strongest at the organizational level, weaker at the regional level, and weakest at the national level. In addition, we show that geographical co-location particularly increases the citation likelihood between two papers when knowledge relatedness between articles is low, suggesting that interdisciplinary research benefits most from co-location. Finally, we find that, when knowledge relatedness is high, the effect of geographical co-location on citation likelihood is non-existent. We discuss the implications regarding policies aimed to discourage strategic citations and to foster interdisciplinary research.     

The effects of offshore production on onshore innovation: Evidence from Japanese multinationals

This paper examines a largely unexplored channel of the effects of offshore production on onshore (domestic) innovation performance. We combine a comprehensive dataset mapping the global operations of Japanese multinational firms with patent statistics to measure innovation. The study finds that increased offshore production have little effects on onshore innovation performance once properly correcting a simultaneity bias. Furthermore, we find some weak evidence of increased offshore production downgrades the quality of innovation, measured by citations. Consistent with other studies, we find that an increase in overseas R&D is the main driver of innovation creation for multinational firms.     

基于SSCI的2000-2010年我国大陆信息科学和图书馆学论文的计量分析

通过对十年来(2000-2010)SSCI收录的信息科学和图书馆学的66种期刊中的中国大陆学者发表的455篇论文进行计量分析,包括各年文献量、期刊、著者、机构、研究主题和引文等,以期从一个侧面来反映我国大陆学者在信息科学和图书馆学研究方面的科研生产量、核心期刊、核心人员、核心机构、主要的研究领域和国际影响力等信息,便于人们通过定量数据了解我国大陆信息科学和图书馆学研究的现状和实力。     

How status of research papers affects the way they are read and cited

Although citations are widely used to measure the influence of scientific works, research shows that many citations serve rhetorical functions and reflect little-to-no influence on the citing authors. If highly cited papers disproportionately attract rhetorical citations then their citation counts may reflect rhetorical usefulness more than influence. Alternatively, researchers may perceive highly cited papers to be of higher quality and invest more effort into reading them, leading to disproportionately substantive citations. We test these arguments using data on 17,154 randomly sampled citations collected via surveys from 9,380 corresponding authors in 15 fields. We find that most citations (54%) had little-to-no influence on the citing authors. However, citations to the most highly cited papers were 2–3 times more likely to denote substantial influence. Experimental and correlational data show a key mechanism: displaying low citation counts lowers perceptions of a paper's quality, and papers with poor perceived quality are read more superficially. The results suggest that higher citation counts lead to more meaningful engagement from readers and, consequently, the most highly cited papers influence the research frontier much more than their raw citation counts imply.     

新信息环境下数学文献老化趋势及影响因素新探

借助Web of Science引文数据库,随机选取了SCIE收录的40种数学期刊,对期刊中的文献以及其参考文献和被引记录进行统计分析,考察了数学文献在1960-2009年50年间的老化趋势,并重点分析了网络环境的变化对文献老化的影响。通过对共时法和历时法文献半衰期的计算和分析得出,在互联网环境下文献的绝对老化并未发生,而文献的相对老化速度持续减缓。在发文量、即年指标等基础上,提出了即年影响力和长尾效应等新的信息环境影响因素,并用灰色关联分析的方法定量分析出篇均引文量和长尾效应是影响文献老化速度的最重要因素。     

Faculty participation in licensing: Implications for research

We exploit a unique database on research and invention disclosure of faculty at 11 major US universities over a period of 17 years to explore the extent to which faculty involvement in license activity has affected their research profiles. We relate faculty disclosures to their industry and government-sponsored research, publications, and citations. Recent disclosure by faculty has a positive effect on industry and government funding, but, if they disclose multiple times, the effect on government funding can be negative. Recent and repeated disclosures increase the faculty member's publication count as well as the importance of these publications in terms of citations. We also examine life-cycle effects and find that the ability to attract funding and the rate of publication increase as the faculty member ages but at a decreasing rate. We also find that post-tenure, both types of funding decrease.     

Applicant and examiner citations in U.S. patents: An overview and analysis

Prior art patent citations have become a popular measure of patent quality and knowledge flow between firms. Interpreting these measurements is complicated, in some cases, because prior art citations are added by patent examiners as well as by patent applicants. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) adopted new reporting procedures in 2001, making it possible to measure examiner and applicant citations separately for the first time. We analyzed prior art citations listed in all U.S. patents granted in 2001-2003, and found that examiners played a significant role in identifying prior art, adding 63% of citations on the average patent, and all citations on 40% of patents granted. An analysis of variance found that firm-specific variables explain most of the variation in examiner-citation shares. Using multivariate regression, we found that foreign applicants to the USPTO had the highest proportion of citations added by examiners. High-volume patent applicants had a greater proportion of examiner citations, and a substantial number of firms won patents without listing a single applicant citation. In terms of technology, we found higher examiner shares among patents in electronics, communications, and computer-related fields. Taken together, our findings suggest that firm-level patenting practices, particularly among high-volume applicants, have a strong influence on citation data and merit additional research.     

The skewness of computer science

Computer science is a relatively young discipline combining science, engineering, and mathematics. The main flavors of computer science research involve the theoretical development of conceptual models for the different aspects of computing and the more applicative building of software artifacts and assessment of their properties. In the computer science publication culture, conferences are an important vehicle to quickly move ideas, and journals often publish deeper versions of papers already presented at conferences. These peculiarities of the discipline make computer science an original research field within the sciences, and, therefore, the assessment of classical bibliometric laws is particularly important for this field. In this paper, we study the skewness of the distribution of citations to papers published in computer science publication venues (journals and conferences). We find that the skewness in the distribution of mean citedness of different venues combines with the asymmetry in citedness of articles in each venue, resulting in a highly asymmetric citation distribution with a power law tail. Furthermore, the skewness of conference publications is more pronounced than the asymmetry of journal papers. Finally, the impact of journal papers, as measured with bibliometric indicators, largely dominates that of proceeding papers.     

基于趋势分析的学科研究主题优先级战略坐标

对学科领域研究主题优先级进行战略分析,能够帮助科研人员及科研管理决策部门快速了解学科领域的研究态势、发现科学前沿,对提高科研产出起到积极的支持和促进作用。本文以图书情报学研究主题为例,采用主题提取与趋势分析相结合的方法,在提取学科主题基础上,从发文趋势和引文趋势两个维度,绘制含“研究贫乏区、热点区、冷点区、过热区”的我国图书情报学领域研究主题战略坐标。研究表明：本文提出的趋势战略坐标能够有效展示学科领域不同研究主题的发展阶段,全面、细致地呈现不同研究主题的发展等级。     

Innovation: Exploring the knowledge base

New types of knowledge, and new ways of organising the production of it, may emerge as knowledge producers respond to the challenges posed by a changing society. This paper focuses on the core knowledge of one such emerging field, namely, innovation studies. To explore the knowledge base of the field, a database of references in scholarly surveys of various aspects of innovation, published in “handbooks”, is assembled and a new methodology for analysing the knowledge base of a field with the help of such data is developed. The paper identifies the core contributions to the literature in this area, the most central scholars and important research environments, and analyses - with the help of citations in scholarly journals - how the core literature is used by researchers in different scientific disciplines and cross-disciplinary fields. Based on this information a cluster analysis is used to draw inferences about the structure of the knowledge base on innovation. Finally, the changing character of the field over time is analysed, and possible challenges for its continuing development are discussed.     

Research addressing emerging technological ideas has greater scientific impact

This study empirically examines the association between the extent of emerging technological ideas in a scientific publication and its future scientific impact measured by number of citations. We analyze metadata of scientific publications in three scientific domains: Nano-Enabled Drug Delivery, Synthetic Biology, and Autonomous Vehicles. By employing a bibliometric indicator for identifying and quantifying emerging technological ideas – as derived terms from the titles and abstracts – we measure the extent to which the publication contains emerging technological ideas in each domain. Then, we statistically estimate the size and statistical significance of the relationship between the publication-level technological emergence score and the normalized number of citations accruing to the publication.Our analysis shows that the degree to which a paper contains technologically emerging ideas is positively and strongly associated with its future citation impact in each of the three domains. An additional analysis demonstrates that this relationship holds for citations from other publications, both in the same field as, and in different fields from, the scientific domain of the focal publication. A series of tests for validation further support our argument that the greater the extent to which scientific knowledge (a paper) contains emerging ideas, the bigger its scientific impact. Implications for academic researchers, research policymakers, and firms are discussed.     

Christopher Freeman: social science entrepreneur

This paper focuses on Christopher Freeman's contributions to the field of innovation studies. First, we consider his role as the creator of various organisational and intellectual frameworks crucial for the field's development, including the main research activities he initiated. Next, we examine the publications by Freeman that these activities led to. A database of surveys of the innovation literature, assembled from articles in handbooks covering this area, is used to identify the most influential of his writings for this field. In addition, citations to these works in scholarly journals are analysed in order to examine the nature and extent of his influence on other scholars. The final section sums up the evidence regarding Freeman's influence on the field's development. A list of Freeman's scholarly works is included as Appendix B.     

University licensing and the flow of scientific knowledge

As university involvement in technology transfer and entrepreneurship has increased, concerns over the patenting and licensing of scientific discoveries have grown. This paper examines the effect that the licensing of academic patents has on journal citations to academic publications covering the same scientific research. We analyze data on invention disclosures, patents, and licenses from the University of California, a leading U.S. academic patenter and licensor, between 1997 and 2007. We also develop a novel “inventor-based” maximum-likelihood matching technique to automate and generalize Murray's (2002) “patent-paper pairs” methodology. We use this methodology to identify the scientific publications associated with University of California patents and licenses.Based on a “difference-in-differences” analysis, we find that within our sample of patented academic discoveries, citations to licensed patent-linked publications are higher in the three years after the license, although this difference is not statistically significant. We then disaggregate our sample into (a) patented discoveries that are likely to be used as “research tools” by other researchers (based on the presence of material transfer agreements (MTAs) that cover them) and (b) patented discoveries not covered by MTAs. Citations to publications linked to licensed patents in the latter subset (not covered by MTAs) are higher for publications linked to licensed patents, and this difference is statistically significant. In contrast, licensing of patented discoveries that are also research tools is associated with a reduction in citations to papers linked to these research advances, raising the possibility that licensing may restrict the flow of inputs to “follow-on” scientific research.     

中小企业技术来源的选择——基于浙江省中小企业的实证研究

提出一个技术来源选择的基本架构,描述技术来源选择、技术能力及技术类别间的相互影响关系。通过对浙江省148家中小企业的实证研究,表明技术能力和技术类别是影响技术来源选择的关键因素;企业内部自主研发要求企业具有相对较高水平的技术能力,而外部购买和联合研发则没有此要求;外部购买与技术类别密切相关而与企业的技术能力水平关系不大。     

No inventor is an island: Social connectedness and the geography of knowledge flows in the US

Do informal social ties connecting inventors across distant places promote knowledge flows between them? To measure informal ties, we use a new and direct index of social connectedness of regions based on aggregate Facebook friendships. We use a well-established identification strategy that relies on matching inventor citations with citations from examiners. Moreover, we isolate the specific effect of informal connections, above and beyond formal professional ties (co-inventor networks) and geographic proximity. We identify a significant and robust effect of informal ties on patent citations. Further, we find that the effect of geographic proximity on knowledge flows is entirely explained by informal social ties and professional networks. We also show that the effect of informal social ties on knowledge flows is greater for new entrepreneurs or ‘garage inventors’, for older or ‘forgotten’ patents, and for flows across distant technology fields. It has also become increasingly important over the last two decades.     

西藏高校藏学研究成果回顾与展望

本文对西藏三所本科院校主要藏学研究成果进行了概括性评述,展现了目前西藏高校藏学 研究的强劲实力与良好的发展势态。     

北极主题研究文献引文分析

利用WoS数据库对全球北极主题研究文献进行收集,对收集到的文献按被引频次进行统计分析,具体分析北极研究文献的总体被引情况、低被引频次文献情况,得到北极研究文献的半衰期。从文献出版年、研究领域、国家和机构角度重点分析了北极研究高被引文献的文献分布情况和被引情况,对中国北极主题研究文献做了具体分析。以归纳总结目前北极研究的重点、热点和薄弱环节。