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Scrutinizing the Collaboration Criterion in Research: How Do Policy Ambitions Play out in Proposals and Assessments?

Scrutinizing the Collaboration Criterion in Research: How Do Policy Ambitions Play out in Proposals and Assessments?

This study aimed to reveal how researchers describe the collaboration with partners outside the university in research proposals.

Citizen Science in Deliberative Systems: Participation, Epistemic Injustice, and Civic Empowerment

Citizen Science in Deliberative Systems: Participation, Epistemic Injustice, and Civic Empowerment

The paper brings together the literature on citizen science and on deliberative democracy and epistemic injustice. 

Managing Academic Performance by Optimal Resource Allocation - Scientometrics

Managing Academic Performance by Optimal Resource Allocation - Scientometrics

This paper develops and studies a complex data-driven framework for human resource management enabling (i) academic talent recognition, (ii) researcher performance measurement, and (iii) renewable resource allocation maximizing the total output of a research unit.

Making the Most of World Talent for Science? The Nobel Prize and Fields Medal Experience - Scientometrics

Making the Most of World Talent for Science? The Nobel Prize and Fields Medal Experience - Scientometrics

This study found that the average age of scientists at the time of the breakthrough was higher for researchers from less developed countries. Moreover, individual opportunities in the world were extremely unequal by country of birth, gender significantly conditioned any participation in research, and the probability of becoming a top researcher more than doubled for individuals with parents belonging to the most favoured occupational categories. 

The Explanatory Power of Citations: a New Approach to Unpacking Impact in Science - Scientometrics

The Explanatory Power of Citations: a New Approach to Unpacking Impact in Science - Scientometrics

This article proposes a text clustering approach to derive contextual aspects of individual citations and the relationship between cited and citing work in an automated and scalable fashion. The method reveals a focal publication's absorption and use within the scientific community. It can also facilitate impact assessments at all levels. 

How Human Capital, Universities of Excellence, Third Party Funding, Mobility and Gender Explain Productivity in German Political Science - Scientometrics

How Human Capital, Universities of Excellence, Third Party Funding, Mobility and Gender Explain Productivity in German Political Science - Scientometrics

Apart from generally showing why political scientists publish more or less, this article specifically identifies accumulative advantage as the principal reason why women increasingly fall behind men over the course of their careers.

The State of Social Science Research on COVID-19

The State of Social Science Research on COVID-19

This is the first scientometric study of the performance of social science research on COVID-19. It provides insight into the landscape, the research fields, and international collaboration in this domain. The results are useful for finding potential collaborators and for identifying the frontier and gaps in social science research on COVID-19 to shape future studies.

Reply to the Comment by Heyard Et Al. Titled "Imaginary Carrot or Effective Fertiliser? A Rejoinder on Funding and Productivity" - Scientometrics

Reply to the Comment by Heyard Et Al. Titled "Imaginary Carrot or Effective Fertiliser? A Rejoinder on Funding and Productivity" - Scientometrics

Mapping the Impact of Papers on Various Status Groups in Excellencemapping.net: a New Release of the Excellence Mapping Tool

Mapping the Impact of Papers on Various Status Groups in Excellencemapping.net: a New Release of the Excellence Mapping Tool

In over five years, Bornmann, Stefaner, de Moya Anegon, and Mutz (2014b) and Bornmann, Stefaner, de Moya Anegón, and Mutz (2014c, 2015) have published several releases of the www.excellencemapping.net tool revealing (clusters of) excellent institutions worldwide based on citation data. With the new release, a completely revised tool has been published. It is not only based on citation data (bibliometrics), but also Mendeley data (altmetrics). Thus, the institutional impact measurement of the tool has been expanded by focusing on additional status groups besides researchers such as students and librarians. Furthermore, the visualization of the data has been completely updated by improving the operability for the user and including new features such as institutional profile pages. In this paper, we describe the datasets for the current excellencemapping.net tool and the indicators applied. Furthermore, the underlying statistics for the tool and the use of the web application are explained.

Publication Outperformance Among Global South Researchers: An Analysis of Individual-Level and Publication-Level Predictors of Positive Deviance

Publication Outperformance Among Global South Researchers: An Analysis of Individual-Level and Publication-Level Predictors of Positive Deviance

Research and development are central to economic growth, and a key challenge for countries of the global South is that their research performance lags behind that of the global North. Yet, among Southern researchers, a few significantly outperform their peers and can be styled research "positive deviants" (PDs). This paper asks: who are those PDs, what are their characteristics and how are they able to overcome some of the challenges facing researchers in the global South? 

Citation Patterns Between Impact-Factor and Questionable Journals

Citation Patterns Between Impact-Factor and Questionable Journals

One of the most fundamental issues in academia today is understanding the differences between legitimate and questionable publishing. This study's findings show that neither the impact factor of citing journals nor the size of cited journals is a good predictor of the number of citations to the questionable journals.

Imaginary Carrot or Effective Fertiliser? A Rejoinder on Funding and Productivity

Imaginary Carrot or Effective Fertiliser? A Rejoinder on Funding and Productivity

The question of whether and to what extent research funding enables researchers to be more productive is a crucial one. In their recent work, Mariethoz et al. (Scientometrics, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03.855-1 ) claim that there is no significant relationship between project-based research funding and bibliometric productivity measures and conclude that this is the result of inappropriate allocation mechanisms. In this rejoinder, we argue that such claims are not supported by the data and analyses reported in the article.

Internally Incentivized Interdisciplinarity: Organizational Restructuring of Research and Emerging Tensions

Internally Incentivized Interdisciplinarity: Organizational Restructuring of Research and Emerging Tensions

Interdisciplinarity is widely considered necessary to solving many contemporary problems, and new funding structures and instruments have been created to encourage interdisciplinary research at universities. This article looks at a small technical university specializing in green technology which implemented a strategy aimed at promoting and developing interdisciplinary collaboration.

Do Researchers Know What the H-index Is? And How Do They Estimate Its Importance? - Scientometrics

Do Researchers Know What the H-index Is? And How Do They Estimate Its Importance? - Scientometrics

In this article, we pursue two goals, namely the collection of empirical data about researchers' personal estimations of the importance of the h-index for themselves as well as for their academic disciplines, and on the researchers' concrete knowledge on the h-index and the way of its calculation.

Introducing a Novelty Indicator for Scientific Research: Validating the Knowledge-Based Combinatorial Approach

Introducing a Novelty Indicator for Scientific Research: Validating the Knowledge-Based Combinatorial Approach

In this study, a novelty indicator to quantify the degree of citation similarity between a focal paper and a pre-existing same-domain paper from various fields in the natural sciences is applied by proposing a new way of identifying papers that fall into the same domain of focal papers using bibliometric data only. 

Gender Disparity in Research Productivity Across Departments in the Faculty of Medicine: a Bibliometric Analysis

Gender Disparity in Research Productivity Across Departments in the Faculty of Medicine: a Bibliometric Analysis

Women's contributions to the medical field have increased substantially over the past 4 decades but women remain underrepresented. Since research productivity is an important criterion for promotion, it was essential to assess the gender differences within the faculty of medicine and across departments. We conducted a bibliometric analysis using the Scopus database between 2009 and 2018 at the American University of Beirut (N = 324, 93 women, 231 men). Women comprised 29% of the faculty. The rank of Professor was held by 34% of men and 18% of women (p < 0.0001). Mean number of publications was 30.12 for males compared to 20.77 for females (p = 0.007). Men were more often last authors (p < 0.0001) and corresponding authors (p < 0.01). In the MD subcategory (N = 282), the gender difference in number of publications, H-index, and total citations was not significant. Women MDs were underrepresented as last authors (p < 0.0001). Among PhD faculty (N = 42), males had greater H-Indices (p = 0.02) and were more often last and corresponding authors. After adjusting for the year of appointment: the gender differences in corresponding and last authorship lost statistical significance among MDs but not among PhDs where it became more pronounced. In conclusion, women in the faculty of medicine were underrepresented in most departments, senior ranks and senior research authorships; H-indices generally did not differ, which was partially explained by the later year of appointment among females. In a developing country, greater family responsibilities especially early in their careers, may put women at a disadvantage in research productivity.

The Matthew Effect Impacts Science and Academic Publishing by Preferentially Amplifying Citations, Metrics and Status

The Matthew Effect Impacts Science and Academic Publishing by Preferentially Amplifying Citations, Metrics and Status

The Matthew Effect, which breeds success from success, may rely on standing on the shoulders of others, citation bias, or the efforts of a collaborative network. Prestige is driven by resource, which in turn feeds prestige, amplifying advantage and rewards, and ultimately skewing recognition.

Open Access Uptake in Germany 2010-2018: Adoption in a Diverse Research Landscape

Open Access Uptake in Germany 2010-2018: Adoption in a Diverse Research Landscape

This study investigates the development of open access (OA) to journal articles from authors affiliated with German universities and non-university research institutions in the period 2010-2018 and can serve as a baseline to assess the impact recent transformative agreements with major publishers will likely have on scholarly communication.

Assessment of Gender Divide in Scientific Communities

Assessment of Gender Divide in Scientific Communities

Increasing evidence of women's under-representation in some scientific disciplines is prompting researchers to reassess common narratives that women's under-representation is due to limited skills and/or social centrality.

Investigating the Association Between Publication Performance and the Work Environment of University Research Academics

Investigating the Association Between Publication Performance and the Work Environment of University Research Academics

This review highlights where academics’ performance needs support and how the work environment can be improved to bolster publication productivity.

The Imaginary Carrot: No Correlation Between Raising Funds and Research Productivity in Geosciences

The Imaginary Carrot: No Correlation Between Raising Funds and Research Productivity in Geosciences

The ability of researchers to raise funding is central to academic achievement. However, whether success in obtaining research funds correlates with the productivity, quality or impact of a researcher is debated. The study analyses 10 years of grant funding by the Swiss National Science Foundation in Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Quantitative Quality: a Study on How Performance-based Measures May Change the Publication Patterns of Danish Researchers

Quantitative Quality: a Study on How Performance-based Measures May Change the Publication Patterns of Danish Researchers

Nations the world over are increasingly turning to quantitative performance-based metrics to evaluate the quality of research outputs, as these metrics are abundant and provide an easy measure of ranking research. In 2010, the Danish Ministry of Science and Higher Education followed this trend and began portioning out a percentage of the available research funding according to how many research outputs each Danish university produces. Not all research outputs are eligible: only those published in a curated list of academic journals and publishers, the so-called BFI list, are included. The BFI list is ranked, which may create incentives for academic authors to target certain publication outlets or publication types over others. In this study we examine the potential effect these relatively new research evaluation methods have had on the publication patterns of researchers in Denmark. The study finds that publication behaviors in the Natural Sciences & Technology, Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) have changed, while the Health Sciences appear unaffected. Researchers in Natural Sciences & Technology appear to focus on high impact journals that reap more BFI points. While researchers in SSH have also increased their focus on the impact of the publication outlet, they also appear to have altered their preferred publication types, publishing more journal articles in the Social Sciences and more anthologies in the Humanities.