What price politics? Scientists and political controversy

There is a long tradition within scientific communities that encourages governments, patrons and citizens to enlist scientific expertise in the service of the public good. However, since the 17th century, scientists who have engaged in public political controversy have often been judged harshly by scientific colleagues, as well as by political adversaries. Some prominent scientists were politically active in Germany, France and England during the 1920s and 1930s; controversial stands were taken by the British physicist P.M.S. Blackett and the American chemist Linus C. Pauling against their countries' nuclear weapons policy following the Second World War.     

Who games metrics and rankings? Institutional niches and journal impact factor inflation

Ratings and rankings are omnipresent and influential in contemporary society. Individuals and organizations strategically respond to incentives set by rating systems. We use academic publishing as a case study to examine organizational variation in responses to influential metrics. The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is a prominent metric linked to the value of academic journals, as well as career prospects of researchers. Since scholars, institutions, and publishers alike all have strong interests in affiliating with high JIF journals, strategic behaviors to ‘game’ the JIF metric are prevalent. Strategic self-citation is a common tactic employed to inflate JIF values. Based on empirical analyses of academic journals indexed in the Web of Science, we examine institutional characteristics conducive to strategic self-citation for JIF inflation. Journals disseminated by for-profit publishers, with lower JIFs, published in academically peripheral countries and with more recent founding dates were more likely to exhibit JIF-inflating self-citation patterns. Findings reveal the importance of status and institutional logics in influencing metrics gaming behaviors, as well as how metrics can affect work outcomes in different types of institutions. While quantitative rating systems affect many who are being evaluated, certain types of people and organizations are more prone to being influenced by rating systems than others.     

Explanation and trust: what to tell the user in security and AI?

There is a common problem in artificial intelligence (AI) and information security. In AI, an expert system needs to be able to justify and explain a decision to the user. In information security, experts need to be able to explain to the public why a system is secure. In both cases, an important goal of explanation is to acquire or maintain the users’ trust. In this paper, I investigate the relation between explanation and trust in the context of computing science. This analysis draws on literature study and concept analysis, using elements from system theory as well as actor-network theory. I apply the conceptual framework to both AI and information security, and show the benefit of the framework for both fields by means of examples. The main focus is on expert systems (AI) and electronic voting systems (security). Finally, I discuss consequences of the analysis for ethics in terms of (un)informed consent and dissent, and the associated division of responsibilities.     

Academics engaging in knowledge transfer and co-creation: Push causation and pull effectuation?

Although academics are increasingly engaging with businesses, some fundamental aspects of this phenomenon (i.e., their motivations, decision-making approaches, and the interplay between the two) remain understudied. We therefore conducted a qualitative inductive study comprising 68 interviews with academics who had engaged in two forms of activities—knowledge transfer and co-creation. Whereas the entrepreneurship literature offers a resource-based argument, we made an original contribution to the literature by introducing an engagement-based argument in order to offer a more accurate prediction of the motivations and decision-making approaches of academics engaged in knowledge transfer and co-creation activities. We found that when the resource- and engagement-based arguments offer different predictions of the interplay between the motivations and decision-making approaches adopted, the cognitive proximity between academics and business researchers, which reflects whether the partners are from the same/different disciplines, resolves the puzzle. We captured these situational contingencies by developing six propositions that indicate how the engagement- and resource-based arguments jointly offer a more comprehensive explanation of the interplay. We discuss the implications of our findings with regard to how universities could offer customized training, rewards, and support structures based on the four types of interplay between the motivation and decision-making approaches.     

History of mathematics and history of science reunited?

For some years now, the history of modern mathematics and the history of modern science have developed independently. A step toward a reunification that would benefit both disciplines could come about through a revived appreciation of mathematical practice. Detailed studies of what mathematicians actually do, whether local or broadly based, have often led in recent work to examinations of the social, cultural, and national contexts, and more can be done. Another recent approach toward a historical understanding of the abstractness of modern mathematics has been to see it as a species of modernism, and this thesis will be tested by the raft of works on the history of modern applied mathematics currently under way.     

Who commercialises research at Swedish universities and why?

European universities have been increasingly pressured since the late 1990s to make a more visible contribution to economic development. This policy interest has produced an increasing focus on knowledge transfer generally, and more specifically on measures to promote a research culture which values patenting and firm formation. This paper presents results from an interview study of academic faculty views on knowledge transfer and commercialisation at five public universities in Sweden. Our results show that, despite the retention of inventor ownership at Swedish universities, there is a high degree of knowledge transfer of all kinds. The overriding driver of entrepreneurial behaviour among faculty appears to be the low level of direct funding for research in universities. We find that attitudes to firm formation vary from positive to ambivalent, and that faculty from the humanities and social sciences engage in a higher level of entrepreneurial and policy adaptive behaviour than they report. We conclude that faculty at Swedish universities perceive the role of public servant and entrepreneurial academic as conflicting. This perceived conflict may be one reason for reluctance to report instances of commercialisation of research.     

Knowledge management and ERP: Complementary or contradictory?

This research aims at deepening the understanding of the effects of information systems on supply chain operations, and to find the level and direction of the relationship between Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Knowledge Management (KM) in the context of operational and financial performance. Essentially, this study emphasizes the explanation of the complementary relationship between ERP and KM. Therefore, the mediating effect of KM is also analyzed. Using a survey method, 163 responses are collected from Turkish manufacturing companies which operate in a variety of industries. A structural equation modelling (SEM) is used to test both the reliability and validity of measurement and the structural path model. The results show that ERP has no significantly positive effect on operational performance, but it is a precedent of KM. Moreover, results also show that KM affects operational performance positively and it has a mediating effect for the relationship between ERP and operational performance. Lastly, the path analysis shows that operational performance is positively associated with financial performance.     

Shall We Talk? Conversing With Humans and Robots

While social robots are the creation of human beings, it is not obvious what kinds of conversation people desire to have with computer-based devices. Progressive improvements in speech recognition, natural language parsing, and physical embodiment are making it technologically possible for social robots to engage with humans in essentially the full range of conversational modes that we do with one another. However, when we examine the variety of possible (human) linguistic functions, we discover reasons people may not wish for total verisimilitude when interacting linguistically with robots. Informational and empathetic functions are likely to be more welcomed than those involving social control or critique.     

Do tax incentives and direct funding enhance innovation input and output in high-tech firms?

Tax incentives and direct funding are two different public support instruments used to facilitate the formation and growth of firms. Limited empirical evidence has compared the effectiveness of two different policies and their interactions for firms. In this paper, we investigate the main and interaction effects of these interventions on high-tech firms. Since large and small firms innovate in different ways, we compare the use of both incentives by Iranian high-tech SMEs and large firms through a factorial design technique. This paper presents significant differences both across instruments and across firm size. Results show that for SMEs, tax exemption has a significant effect on R&D investment, and funding has a significant effect on R&D investment, R&D employees, and new products. However, there aren't any interaction effects between instruments. For large firms, funding is an effective instrument for R&D investment. Also, there is an interaction effect between tax incentives and direct funding on new products. These findings indicate that funding is a more effective instrument than tax exemption, especially for SMEs, but suggest some changes in supporting policies of high-tech firms in Iran.     

M&A and R&D: Asymmetric Effects on acquirers and targets?

We evaluate the impact of M&A activity on the growth of R&D spending and R&D intensity of 265 acquiring firms and 133 merger targets between 1990 and 2009. We use different matching techniques to construct separate control groups for acquirers and targets and use appropriate difference-in-difference estimation methods to single out the causal effect of mergers on R&D growth and intensity. We find that target firms substantially decrease their R&D efforts after a merger, while the R&D intensity of acquirers drops due to a sharp increase in sales.     

Popular and/or prestigious? Measures of scholarly esteem

Citation analysis does not generally take the quality of citations into account: all citations are weighted equally irrespective of source. However, a scholar may be highly cited but not highly regarded: popularity and prestige are not identical measures of esteem. In this study we define popularity as the number of times an author is cited and prestige as the number of times an author is cited by highly cited papers. Information retrieval (IR) is the test field. We compare the 40 leading researchers in terms of their popularity and prestige over time. Some authors are ranked high on prestige but not on popularity, while others are ranked high on popularity but not on prestige. We also relate measures of popularity and prestige to date of Ph.D. award, number of key publications, organizational affiliation, receipt of prizes/honors, and gender.     

Is there an association of allergy and cardiovascular disease?

Cardiovascular diseases and allergic diseases occur commonly in developed countries. They lead to serious health complications and significantly impair the quality of life. Both types of diseases are characterized by excessive inflammatory processes. Recent studies suggest a link between allergy and an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, resulting from overactivity of the immune system in allergic diseases and increased synthesis of proinflammatory mediators, which has been well documented in the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis. The aim of this article is to present current data on the role of proinflammatory factors in the pathogenesis of cardiovascular diseases and allergies and on potential relationship between these disorders.     

Which health and biomedical topics generate the most Facebook interest and the strongest citation relationships?

Although more than a million academic papers have been posted on Facebook, there is little detailed research about which fields or cross-field issues are involved and whether there are field or public interest relationships between Facebook mentions and future citations. In response, we identified health and biomedical scientific papers mentioned on Facebook and assigned subjects to them using the MeSH and Science Metrix journal classification schema. Multistage adaptive LASSO and unpenalized least-squares regressions were used to model Facebook mentions by fields and MeSH terms. The fields Science and Technology, General and Internal Medicine, Complementary and Alternative Medicine, and Sport Sciences produced higher Facebook mention counts than average. However, no MeSH cross-field issue differences were found in the rate of attracting Facebook mentions. The relationship between Facebook mentions and citations varies between both fields and MeSH cross-field issues. General and Internal Medicine, Cardiovascular System and Hematology and Developmental Biology have strongest correlations between Facebook mentions and citations, probably due to high citation rates and high Facebook visibility in these areas.