Can Google Scholar and Mendeley help to assess the scholarly impacts of dissertations?

Dissertations can be the single most important scholarly outputs of junior researchers. Whilst sets of journal articles are often evaluated with the help of citation counts from the Web of Science or Scopus, these do not index dissertations and so their impact is hard to assess. In response, this article introduces a new multistage method to extract Google Scholar citation counts for large collections of dissertations from repositories indexed by Google. The method was used to extract Google Scholar citation counts for 77,884 American doctoral dissertations from 2013 to 2017 via ProQuest, with a precision of over 95%. Some ProQuest dissertations that were dual indexed with other repositories could not be retrieved with ProQuest-specific searches but could be found with Google Scholar searches of the other repositories. The Google Scholar citation counts were then compared with Mendeley reader counts, a known source of scholarly-like impact data. A fifth of the dissertations had at least one citation recorded in Google Scholar and slightly fewer had at least one Mendeley reader. Based on numerical comparisons, the Mendeley reader counts seem to be more useful for impact assessment purposes for dissertations that are less than two years old, whilst Google Scholar citations are more useful for older dissertations, especially in social sciences, arts and humanities. Google Scholar citation counts may reflect a more scholarly type of impact than that of Mendeley reader counts because dissertations attract a substantial minority of their citations from other dissertations. In summary, the new method now makes it possible for research funders, institutions and others to systematically evaluate the impact of dissertations, although additional Google Scholar queries for other online repositories are needed to ensure comprehensive coverage.     

Gender and research publishing in India: Uniformly high inequality?

Women’s access to academic careers has been historically limited by discrimination and cultural constraints. Comprehensive information about gender inequality within disciplines is needed to understand the problem and target remedial action. India is the fifth largest research producer but has a low international index of gender inequality and so is an important case. This study assesses gender inequalities in Indian journal article publishing in 2017 for 186 research fields. It also seeks overall gender differences in interests across academia by comparing the terms used in 27,710 articles with an Indian male or female first author. The data show that there are at least 1.5 male first authors per female first author in each of 26 broad fields and 2.8 male first authors per female first author overall. Compared to the USA, India has a much lower share of female first authors but smaller variations in gender differences between broad fields. Dentistry, Economics and Maths are all more female in India, but Veterinary is much less female than in the USA. There is a tendency for males to research thing-oriented topics and for females to research helping people and some life science topics. More initiatives to promote gender equality in science are needed to address the overall imbalance, but care should be taken to avoid creating the larger between-field gender differences found in the USA.     

The effectiveness of university knowledge spillovers: Performance differences between university spinoffs and corporate spinoffs

While much prior research has focused upon how the Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) and other contextual characteristics shape the level of university spinoffs (USO), there is little research on entrepreneurial potential among individual academics, and to the best of our knowledge, no comparative studies with other types of spinoffs exist to date. In this paper we focus on an important but neglected aspect of knowledge transfer from academic research involving the indirect flow to entrepreneurship by individuals with a university education background who become involved in new venture creation by means of corporate spinoffs (CSO) after gaining industrial experience, rather than leaving university employment to found a new venture as an academic spinoff. We argue that the commercial knowledge gained by industry experience is potentially more valuable for entrepreneurial performance compared to the academic knowledge gained by additional research experience at a university. This leads us to posit that the average performance of CSOs will be higher than comparable USOs, but the gains from founder‘s prior experiences will be relatively higher among USOs whose founders lack the corporate context. We investigate these propositions in a comparative study tracking the complete population of USOs and CSOs among the Swedish knowledge-intensive sectors between 1994 and 2002.