ALBERT

Description: We introduce a novel set of metrics for triadic closure among individuals or groups to model how co-authorship networks become more integrated over time. We call this process of triadic, third-party mediated integration, research facilitation . We apply our research facilitation or RF-metrics to the development of the Pan-Asian SNP (PASNP) Consortium, the first inter-Asian genomics network. Our aim was to examine if the consortium catalyzed research facilitation or integration among the members and the wider region. The PASNP Consortium is an ideal case study of an emerging Asian Research Area because its members themselves asserted a regional Asian identity. To validate our model, we developed data mining software to extract and match full author and institutional information from the PDFs of scientific papers.

Description: In this study, the bibliometric study of cholinesterase inhibitors was used to find the trend of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) research and the order of drugs which was most tolerated or more effective in AD treatment. 4,982 articles and reviews from the Science Citation Index Expanded during 1993–2012 were analyzed. The main results were as follows: The publication of cholinesterase inhibitor research increased overall during 1993–2012. Chinese Academy of Science had most publications, University of California, San Diego and Hebrew University of Jerusalem won first place with the highest average citation per paper and the highest h-index respectively. Neurosciences, pharmacology and chemistry were “raising” subject categories in cholinesterase inhibitors research. With the comprehensive analysis of distribution and change of author keywords in two 10-year-time periods, it can be concluded as follows: (i) the order of drugs which was most tolerated or more effective in AD treatment might be donepezil, galantamine, rivastigmine, tacrine, memantine and huperzine A, and memantine attracted increasing interest recently and might be used more frequently now, especially for moderate to severe dementia. (ii) The pathogenesis of oxidative stress hypothesis attracted extensive attention. The interest to β-amyloid cascade hypothesis increased slightly but that of the cholinergic hypothesis decreased during the past decade. (iii) “Oxidative stress”, “β-amyloid”, “neuroprotection”, “memory” and “cognition” are the main orientations in the AD research in the future.

Description: Research fronts represent cutting edge studies in specific fields. One can better understand current and future development trends in the relevant field when updated with trends in research fronts. This study uses bibliographic coupling and sliding window to explore the organic light-emitting diodes (OLED) research fronts from 2000 to 2009, and identifies eighteen research fronts that match those predicted by subject experts related to OLED materials. Closer observation of the evolution shows that among the eighteen research fronts, there are four emerging fronts, two growing fronts, eleven stable fronts, and one shrinking front. Bibliographic coupling with sliding window is an effective tool to track the generation, growth, decline, and disappearance of research fronts. Therefore, this analytical method has great potential in discovering the evolution of research fronts.

Description: To explore the rules of knowledge transfer and application activities in knowledge space, defined at both temporal and spatial scales, the present study employs a unique dataset of Chinese patent licensing during the period of 2000–2012, with a total of 91,551 patents. Our results indicate that 70 % of patents were licensed out in the first 3 years. As time elapses, the annual average technology age decreases. There is a moderate difference among different types of licensors and patent types but not technology domains. With regards to the spatial dimension, 86 % of patents were licensed out within 1,000 km. The annual average geographical distance exhibits the same trend as technology age. Except for technology domains, a moderate difference among licensors and patent types is observed. Moreover, the interaction between geographical distance and technology age shows that as the technology age increases, this technology appears to be transferred and applied over greater distances.

Description: Based on the patent co-authorship data from State Intellectual Property Office of China, this paper examines the evolution of small world network and its impact on patent productivity in China. Compared with the western countries, the small-world phenomenon of the innovation network in China is becoming more obvious. Empirical result shows that the small world network may only have significant impact on patent productivity in those patent productive provinces, e.g., Beijing and Guangdong that filed larger number of patents. Although the collaborations in the network are more endurable in China than ones in western countries, it may be less efficient in transmitting knowledge because of large ratio of administration oriented state owned enterprises (SOEs). With larger ratio of SOEs, the small world network has longer path length and knowledge thus flows less efficiently in Beijing than in Guangdong. The policy implication of the findings lies in that the Chinese government should let the market rather than the administration determine the collaboration of technological innovation, in order to encourage innovation and establish an effective small world network for speeding up flow of knowledge among different type of firms during the innovative process.

Description: Although there is increasing interest in policy issues on university patents, studies hitherto have focused on certain limited factors or case studies. By using a two-mode network analysis, this study identifies idiosyncratic patterns and differences in technology–industry networks between the two groups of Korean university patents—commercialized and non-commercialized. We collected patent data including bibliographic information from Korean universities that have run a patent management advisor dispatch program since 2005. Then, network analysis and analysis of variance for the two groups were conducted to investigate the group differences. We found that the structure of the technology–industry network was significantly more direct and simpler for commercialized than for non-commercialized patents. Specifically, we found that both direct and indirect linkages between technology and related industry were more complex for the non-commercialized group than for the commercialized one: the direct linkage was stronger for the commercialized than for the non-commercialized group. Our study suggests an important aspect of technology commercialization from the perspective of the inherent characteristics of patents, which is at variance with the evolutionary approaches of previous studies.

Description: The counting of patents and citations is commonly used to evaluate technological innovation and its impact. However, in an age of increasing international collaboration, the counting of international collaboration patents has become a methodological issue. This study compared country rankings using four different counting methods (i.e. whole counting, straight counting, whole-normalized counting, complete-normalized counting) in patent, citation and citation-patent ratio (CP ratio) counts. It also observed inflation depending on the method used. The counting was based on the complete 1992–2011 patent and citation data issued by United States Patent and Trademark Office. The results show that counting methods have only minor effects on country rankings in patent count, citation count and CP ratio count. All four counting methods yield reliable country ranks in technology innovation capability and impact. While the influences of counting methods vary between patent count, citation count and CP ratio count, counting methods may exert slightly greater effects on CP ratio counts than on patent and citation counts. As for the inflation, the distributions of higher and lower inflation by the four counting methods are different in patent, citation and CP ratio counts.

Description: This paper suggests a new method to search main path, as a knowledge trajectory, in the citation network. To enhance the performance and remedy the problems suggested by other researchers for main path analysis (Hummon and Doreian, Social Networks 11(1): 39–63, 1989 ), we applied two techniques, the aggregative approach and the stochastic approach . The first technique is used to offer improvement of link count methods, such as SPC, SPLC, SPNP, and NPPC, which have a potential problem of making a mistaken picture since they calculate link weights based on a individual topology of a citation link; the other technique, the second-order Markov chains, is used for path dependent search to improve the Hummon and Doreian’s priority first search method. The case study on graphene that tested the performance of our new method showed promising results, assuring us that our new method can be an improved alternative of main path analysis. Our method’s beneficial effects are summed up in eight aspects: (1) path dependent search, (2) basic research search rather than applied research, (3) path merge and split, (4) multiple main paths, (5) backward search for knowledge origin identification, (6) robustness for indiscriminately selected citations, (7) availability in an acyclic network, (8) completely automated search.

Description: The goal of this study was to identify common mistakes made in research study manuscripts submitted to journals of Education and the effects of these mistakes on rejection by the journal editors and referees. An online questionnaire was developed for this purpose with 43 items and five open-ended questions. Common mistakes were identified by administering the 43 questions, which were to be answered in two stages: first by using 5-point Likert scale responses, and then by responses arranged according to semantic differential scale (for the effects of the mistakes on rejections). The online questionnaire was sent to the editors and referees of Turkish journals of Education indexed in SSCI and ULAKBIM. Data were then collected from 232 participants and examined. The quantitative data obtained from the questionnaire items were analyzed, and the mean and standard deviation scores were presented in tables. The qualitative data gathered from the open-ended questions were analyzed descriptively. The results show that researchers mostly make mistakes in the discussion, conclusion, and suggestions part of the manuscripts. However, mistakes made in the methods part are the most significant causes of manuscript rejection.

Description: The triple helix (TH) of university–industry–government relations can be considered as one of the most popular innovation models in the last two decades. In this brief interview with Leydesdorff, we show how the TH can be used to improve knowledge-based innovation systems in some developing and transitional economies and provide some concrete examples of TH applications in the age of big data.

Description: The study aimed to analyse the global research output related to microRNA (miRNA), based on the fact that it has diverse expression patterns and might regulate various developmental and physiological processes. First miRNA was identified as small RNA in 1993 but its function as biological regulator was unknown till 2000. Since then the research in miRNAs has got momentum. To understand and visualize the research dynamics and the research structure of the field, the publications appeared in Science Citation Index expanded database for 2002–2012 under miRNA category using specific search string, were analysed. A sum of more than 14,000 documents found from Web of Science database for the same period. This study detected major productive countries, high productive-institutions, authors, research areas, journals and document types, along with their individual citation impacts. The inter-collaborative linkages of countries, organizations and authors were also analysed. The study has observed that number of publication increased from 8 in 2002 to 4,186 in 2012 with compound annual growth rate of 87 %. The compound annual growth rates of countries, institutions, number of journals, research areas, and authors are 36.60, 76.64, 64.80, 30.5, and 88.09 % respectively.

Description: A bibliometric analysis was conducted to evaluate the global scientific output of proteomics research in the Science Citation Index Expanded from 1995 to 2010. The document types, languages, journals, categories, countries, and institutions were analyzed to obtain publication patterns. Research focuses and trends were revealed by a word cluster method related to author keywords, title, abstract, and KeyWords Plus . Bradford’s Law and the correlation between keywords and institutions were identified to look deeper into the nature works. Proteomics and Journal of Proteome Research published the most articles in proteomics research. The researchers focused on the categories of biochemical research methods, and biochemistry and molecular biology. The USA and Harvard University were the most productive country and institution, respectively, while China was the fastest-growing country due to the support by Chinese government. The distribution of author keywords provided the important clues of hot issues. Results showed that mass spectrometry and two-dimensional gel electrophoresis had been the most frequently used research methods in the past 16 years; and cancer proteomics had a strong potential in the near future. Furthermore, biologists contributed significantly to proteomics research, and were more likely to co-operate with medical scientists.

Description: This paper investigates the technological innovation capabilities of the three Asian latecomers—namely Taiwan, China, and Korea—in the emergent solar photovoltaic industry. For this study, I deploy a new dataset of 75,540 solar photovoltaic patents taken out by Taiwan, China and Korea over the period of 31 years (1978–2008) and analyse the evolving technological innovation capabilities revealed in these patents using a set of four technology platforms that I constructed. This study demonstrates the patent portfolios of the three latecomers and explores what extent have the Taiwanese, Chinese, and Korean followers developed their technological innovation capabilities so as to surpass the US, German, and Japan and acquire the leading production positions; and how the variations of technological innovation capabilities among the major producers influence their business activities in the global solar photovoltaic industry. The results show the various strategies adopted by Taiwan, China, and Korea to develop their solar photovoltaic industries, reflect their different national innovation systems involved, and response to the current trends of technology development in the global solar photovoltaic industry.

Description: In this research, through the complete investigation of 100 American national universities. A list of 3,776 Chinese-American faculties are collected. Analysis is made from five aspects, including regional statistics, institution statistics, gender statistics, position statistics, and discipline statistics. New York, California and Pennsylvania have the most Chinese-American scholars, when the top three universities are The Ohio State University-Columbus, Emory University, and Texas A&M University. The number of male faculties is much greater than female, when the ratio is roughly 7:3. For the position statistics, the ratio of Professor, Associate Professor and Assistant Professor is 2.7:3:4.3. Biology, Medicine and Computer Science are the top three disciplines with the most Chinese-American faculties.

Description: The present paper attempts to shed light on outstanding research performance using the example of citation distributions. In order to answer the question of how the analysis of outstanding performance, in general, and highly cited papers, in particular, could be integrated into standard techniques of evaluative scientometrics. Two general methods are proposed: One solution aims at quantifying the performance represented by the tail of citation distributions independently of the “mainstream”, the second one, a parameter-free solution, provides performance classes for any level. Advantages and shortcoming of both methods are discussed.

Description: This study deals primarily with the effect of certain European Framework Programmes on EU-27 member states’ publication output in nanotechnology, with a focus on their scientific collaboration over the last ten years. The study was conducted at three levels (category, journal and publication). The aim was to verify whether the newly launched category is sufficiently complete, as well as to identify the most prominent journals and compare the EU-27 member states’ output to world production. Snapshots of European networking are also provided for three key dates (2001, 2006 and 2011) to ascertain the positions of emerging and central countries and analyse their variations over time. The results confirm the speedy development in the field and the importance of the EU-27s world role. They corroborate the close correlation between funding and increased output and the intensification of collaboration among member states. Finally, the information contained in the “Funding Agency” field in the Web of Science database was also compiled, with a view to substantiating the validity of the estimated impact of EU-funding programmes on member states’ scientific output.

Description: The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) published by researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University has become a major source of information for university administrators, country officials, students and the public at large. Recent discoveries regarding its internal dynamics allow the inversion of published ARWU indicator scores to reconstruct raw scores for 500 world class universities. This paper explores raw scores in the ARWU and in other contests to contrast the dynamics of rank-driven and score-driven tables, and to explain why the ARWU ranking is a score-driven procedure. We show that the ARWU indicators constitute sub-scales of a single factor accounting for research performance, and provide an account of the system of gains and non-linearities used by ARWU. The paper discusses the non-linearities selected by ARWU, concluding that they are designed to represent the regressive character of indicators measuring research performance. We propose that the utility and usability of the ARWU could be greatly improved by replacing the unwanted dynamical effects of the annual re-scaling based on raw scores of the best performers.

Description: Many scientists were respected by people and science has made great development in the twentieth century. What role do scientists play in the process of scientific development? Does scientific development bring more researchers into scientists? This paper mainly analyzes the two interested questions and suggests that: (a) not all researchers’ output could be attributed to scientific knowledge, only the innovative output could promote science to develop. Scientists play a more significant role than the rest researchers in scientific development in average because scientists’ innovative consciousness is far higher than that of non-scientists. (b) Distinguishing scientists from researchers in accordance with the fixed basic contribution of innovative output in the process of scientific development. Researchers’ innovative work becomes easier with the accumulated scientific knowledge growing gradually in the initial stage of scientific development. Thus, scientific development could produce more and more scientists. On the contrary, researchers’ innovative work becomes more challenged with the accumulated scientific knowledge increasing gradually while science develops to a certain stage. As a result, scientific development would make researchers become scientist increasingly difficult.

Description: This paper proposes a new taxonomy for the internationalization patterns of innovation of the BRIC countries within the global innovation landscape during the period 1990–2009. Based on the BRICs’ patents granted by the USPTO, we find (1) the BRICs gradually increased their roles in the global innovation arena with various degrees of internationalization; (2) the domestic-dominant pattern has widely countered the foreign dominance of innovation, while the collaborative multi-dominant pattern has increased; (3) a divergence of the BRICs’ global innovation output growth emerged, while their internationalization pattern portfolios evolved towards greater similarity; and (4) China has differentiated itself by increasing its global innovation influence.

Description: There is a wealth of research on technological learning in developing countries, but few scholars have clearly addressed the issue of learning time in an empirical way. This paper aims to fill this void by presenting an empirical investigation of the time needed by Chinese firms to learn from the technologies that they have in-licensed. Furthermore, we analyzed in detail the antecedents leading to an acceleration or deceleration of the learning process among Chinese licensees. The results of an event history analysis indicate that recipient firms take on average 5.8  years to learn from their in-licensed technologies. The absorptive capacity and firm age of the licensees, the technology licensing scale, the age of the licensed technology, and the desorptive capability of the licensor firm all play a role in shortening the learning time.

Description: This paper proposes a framework to identify and evaluate companies from the technological perspective to support merger and acquisition (M&A) target selection decision-making. This employed a text mining-based patent map approach to identify companies which can fulfill a specific strategic purpose of M&A for enhancing technological capabilities. The patent map is the visualized technological landscape of a technology industry by using technological proximities among patents, so companies which closely related to the strategic purpose can be identified. To evaluate the technological aspects of the identified companies, we provide the patent indexes that evaluate both current and future technological capabilities and potential technology synergies between acquiring and acquired companies. Furthermore, because the proposed method evaluates potential targets from the overall corporate perspective and the specific strategic perspectives simultaneously, more robust and meaningful result can be obtained than when only one perspective is considered. Thus, the proposed framework can suggest the appropriate target companies that fulfill the strategic purpose of M&A for enhancing technological capabilities. For the verification of the framework, we provide an empirical study using patent data related to flexible display technology.

Description: This paper discusses a concept for inferring attributes of ‘frontier research’ in peer-reviewed research proposals under the popular scheme of the European Research Council (ERC). The concept serves two purposes: firstly to conceptualize, define and operationalize in scientometric terms attributes of frontier research; and secondly to build and compare outcomes of a statistical model with the review decision in order to obtain further insight and reflect upon the influence of frontier research in the peer-review process. To this end, indicators across scientific disciplines and in accord with the strategic definition of frontier research by the ERC are elaborated, exploiting textual proposal information and other scientometric data of grant applicants. Subsequently, a suitable model is formulated to measure ex-post the influence of attributes of frontier research on the decision probability of a proposal to be accepted. We present first empirical data as proof of concept for inferring frontier research in grant proposals. Ultimately the concept is aiming at advancing the methodology to deliver signals for monitoring the effectiveness of peer-review processes.

Description: This article describes an analysis of keywords which was aimed at revealing publication patterns in the field of renewable energy, including the temporal evolution of its different research lines over the last two decades. To this end, we first retrieved the records of the sample, then we processed the keywords to resolve their obvious problems of synonymy and to limit the study to those most used. The final results showed a clear increase in scientific production related to alternative energies, and a structure corresponding to five major clusters which, at a finer level of resolution, were decomposed into 22. We analyzed the structure of the clusters and their temporal evolution, paying particular attention to uncovering the bursty periods of the different lines of research.

Description: Here we show a novel technique for comparing subject categories, where the prestige of academic journals in each category is represented statistically by an impact-factor histogram. For each subject category we compute the probability of occurrence of scholarly journals with impact factor in different intervals. Here impact factor is measured with Thomson Reuters Impact Factor, Eigenfactor Score, and Immediacy Index. Assuming the probabilities associated with a pair of subject categories our objective is to measure the degree of dissimilarity between them. To do so, we use an axiomatic characterization for predicting dissimilarity between subject categories. The scientific subject categories of Web of Science in 2010 were used to test the proposed approach for benchmarking Cell Biology and Computer Science Information Systems with the rest as two case studies. The former is best-in-class benchmarking that involves studying the leading competitor category; the latter is strategic benchmarking that involves observing how other scientific subject categories compete.

Description: An increasing number of researchers have recently shown interest in the relationship between economic growth of a country and its research output, measured in scientometric indicators. The answer is not only of theoretical interest but it can also influence the specific policies aimed at the improvement of a country’s research performance. Our paper focuses on this relationship. We argue that research output is a manifestation of the improvement of human capital in the economy. We examine this relationship specifically in South Africa for the period 1980–2008. Using the autoregressive distributed lag method, we investigate the relationship between GDP and the comparative research performance of the country in relation to the rest of the world (the share of South African papers compared to the rest of the world). The relationship is confirmed for individual fields of science (biology and biochemistry, chemistry, material sciences, physics, psychiatry and psychology). The results of this study indicate that in South Africa for the period 1980–2008 the comparative performance of the research output can be considered as a factor affecting the economic growth of the country. Similarly, the results confirm the results of Vinkler ( 2008 ) and Lee et al. ( 2011 ). In contrast, economic growth did not influence the research output of the country for the same period. Policy implications are also discussed.

Description: In order to explore the rule of knowledge creation activities at both temporal and spatial scales, this paper makes statistical analysis of the time interval and spatial displacement of consecutive knowledge creation activities of high-yield, low-yield, and ASFP (all the scientists published at least four papers), respectively. The research shows that, for high-yield scientists, the time interval of knowledge creation activities obeys heavy-tailed distribution and embodies bursting features, with both long-time silence and intensive burst of creation activities. The time interval distribution of low-yield scientists is approximate to exponential distribution, and is often randomly and occasionally distributed. For ASFP, the spatial distribution of creation activities also embodies heavy-tailed features, where their activities are intensively confined to a certain knowledge field, and where long-distance exploration across the knowledge fields has also been made in knowledge creation activities.

Description: The central area indices and the central interval indices, as introduced in Dorta-González and Dorta-González (Scientometrics 88(3):729–745, 2011 ), are studied from a theoretical point of view. They are defined in order to yield higher impact values of “selective” authors (i.e., authors with concentrated number of citations over their publications). We show that this property is not valid for every citation distribution. However, if Zipf’s law is adopted for the citation distribution, we can show that the central area indices and the central interval indices have indeed higher values for more selective authors.

Description: We continue the investigation for more than 2,150 astrophysics papers published from July 2007 to June 2008 of various possible correlations among time from submission to acceptance; nationalities of lead authors; numbers of citations to the papers in three years after publication; subdisciplines; and numbers of authors. Paper I found that submissions from American authors were accepted faster than others but by only about 3.8 days out of a median of 105 days. Here we report the following additional relationships: (1) the correlation of citation rate with lag time is weak, the most cited papers having intermediate lag times, (2) citation rates are highest for papers with European and American authors and much smaller for papers from less-developed (etc.) countries, with other prosperous countries in between, (3) citation rates are much larger for currently hot topics (exoplanets, cosmology), than for less hot ones (binary stars, for instance), (4) papers with many authors (seven to more than 100) are more often cited than 1–2 author ones, but this is not linear, and author numbers are not much correlated with lag times, and (5) the lag time for hot topics is about the same as that for less hot topics, which surprised us. Of specific subfields, solar papers are, on average, accepted fastest, quite often within less than 2 months. We don’t know why.

Description: The aging of scientific has generally been studied using synchronous approaches, i.e., based on references made by papers. This paper uses a diachronous model based on citations received by papers to study the changes in the life expectancy of three corpus of papers: papers from G6 and BRICS countries, papers published in Science, Nature, Physical Review and the Lancet and all papers divided into four broad fields: medical sciences, natural sciences and engineering, social sciences and arts and humanities. It shows that that: (i) life expectancy is extensively different from a corpus to another and may be either finite or infinite, meaning that the corpus would never be obsolete from a mathematical perspective; (ii) life expectancy for scientific literature has lengthened over the 1980–2000 period; (iii) life expectancy of developed countries’ (G6) literature is on average shorter than that of emerging countries (BRICS).

Description: In the last few decades, multi-authored articles have increased in different disciplines with increasing instances of authorship abuse although multi-authorship is not always due to undeserving authorship (McDonald et al. in Mayo Clin Proc 85(10):920–927, 2010 ). It may be necessitated by interdisciplinary research, the evolution of a discipline, or the intention of quality improvement. This article studies the relationship between the authorship and the quality of articles (publications in better impact factor journals or core journals) in the field of Oceanography. The result shows ~75 % increase in the number of authors per article from 1990 to 2009 in the discipline. The increase in authorship correlates not only with the percentage of articles in core journals but also with the mean impact factor (IF) of journals (where the articles were published). The ANOVA study shows that though multi-authorship has no influence on the preference to publish in core journals during the 1990s or 2000s, it does have a significant influence on the preference to publish in high IF journals in both the decades. So these findings establish that in the field of Oceanography, the increase in collaboration would have resulted in more publications in core journals (without any influence of authorship increase) and in better impact factor journals (due to the influence of authorship increase).

Description: Research and development of rice, a major crop, has been promoted on an interdisciplinary basis with the involvement of various research fields ranging from natural sciences to socioeconomics in Japan. This paper focuses on the structure of interdisciplinarity in Japanese rice research and technology development by analyzing the relationship among all relevant disciplines with the use of a compiled bibliography of Japanese rice research with 19,389 articles in 1,611 journals in the publishing years of 1990–2000. The relationship among the disciplines was characterized by the frequency distribution of articles among journals classified into 24 categories based on the law of scattering originally identified by Bradford (Engineering 13:785–786, 1934 ). The 24 journal categories ranked in decreasing order of productivity of articles were divided into 3 zones; the first nuclear zone with a smaller number of highly productive journal disciplines; the second zone with a large number of less productive disciplines; and the last zone with a larger number of the least productive disciplines, which characterized the structure of interdisciplinarity in Japanese rice research and technology development. Other aspects of the interdisciplinarity were further explored with reference to peripheral journals with a minimal number of papers on a certain subject, and the Groos droop phenomenon at the end of Bradford’s S-shape curve that is the region of the least productive journals with only one paper on a certain subject, by analyzing the frequency distribution of articles in journal categories.

Description: The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) is one of the world’s most secretive and reclusive states. In scientometrics, even the United Nations, which compiles data from every country of the world, has been able to do little beyond counting the few scientific papers made publicly available (UNESCO 2010 ). The world could benefit from knowing more about North Korean science, which is quite well developed—witness all the concern about their nuclear energy and rocket launches. Here an analysis is presented of the North Korean presence in the world’s scientific literature, and of the possibilities for collaboration which offers a mechanism for positive development for their citizens and also for their neighbours.

Description: The disambiguation of named entities is a challenge in many fields such as scientometrics, social networks, record linkage, citation analysis, semantic web…etc. The names ambiguities can arise from misspelling, typographical or OCR mistakes, abbreviations, omissions… Therefore, the search of names of persons or of organizations is difficult as soon as a single name might appear in many different forms. This paper proposes two approaches to disambiguate on the affiliations of authors of scientific papers in bibliographic databases: the first way considers that a training dataset is available, and uses a Naive Bayes model. The second way assumes that there is no learning resource, and uses a semi-supervised approach, mixing soft-clustering and Bayesian learning. The results are encouraging and the approach is already partially applied in a scientific survey department. However, our experiments also highlight that our approach has some limitations: it cannot process efficiently highly unbalanced data. Alternatives solutions are possible for future developments, particularly with the use of a recent clustering algorithm relying on feature maximization.

Description: Given the widespread use of many digitalized communication channels, knowledge production activities have rapidly become interrelated. As the term “network society” implies, knowledge-based innovation systems have been built mainly on the mediated social infrastructure, which has lead to the emergence of the N-Tuple Helix model. I wish to contribute to this special issue by offering an interview with Prof. Dr. Elias G. Carayannis and Dr. David F. J. Campbell, the two co-authors and co-creators of the Quadruple (Government, University, Industry and Civil Society) and Quintuple (Quadruple Innovation Helix plus Environment) Innovation Helix concepts that extend, expand and complement the Triple Innovation Helix rubric. This article starts with brief background information on N-Tuple Helices and concludes with some implications for developing and transitional economies.

Description: By considering Korea’s presidential election on December 19, 2012, this study examines how a presidential campaign can be measured using (negative) entropy indicators. We collected data from Google-indexed web documents, Twitter, and Facebook for four time periods. More specifically, we measured bilateral, trilateral, and quadruple relationships based on the number of web and social media mentions referring only to a candidate (this is, no mention of other candidates or the term “president”). The results indicate that Twitter tended to generate the highest entropy value across the three time periods but that President Geun-Hye Park outperformed the other candidates across all three periods on Google in terms of (negative) entropy indicators.

Description: Interdisciplinarity is as trendy as it is difficult to define. Instead of trying to capture a multidimensional object with a single indicator, we propose six indicators, combining three different operationalizations of a discipline, two levels (article or laboratory) of integration of these disciplines and two measures of interdisciplinary diversity. This leads to a more meaningful characterization of the interdisciplinarity of laboratories’ publication practices. Thanks to a statistical analysis of these indicators on 600 CNRS laboratories, we suggest that, besides an average value of interdisciplinarity, different laboratories can be mainly distinguished by the “distance” between the disciplines in which they publish and by the scale at which interdisciplinary integration is achieved (article or laboratory).

Description: Research collaboration is the way forward in order to improve quality and impact of its research findings. International research collaboration has resulted in international co-authorship in scientific communications and publications. This study highlights the collaborating research and authorship trend in clinical medicine in Malaysia from 2001 to 2010. Malaysian-based author affiliation in the Web of Science (Science Citation Index Expanded) and clinical medicine journals ( n  = 999) and articles ( n  = 3951) as of 30th Oct 2011 were downloaded. Types of document analyzed were articles and reviews, and impact factors (IF) in the 2010 Journal Citation Report Science Edition were taken to access the quality of the articles. The number of publications in clinical medicine increased from 4.5 % ( n  = 178) in 2001 to 23.9 % ( n  = 944) in 2010. The top three contributors in the subject categories are Pharmacology and Pharmacy (13.9 %), General and Internal Medicine (13.6 %) and Tropical Medicine (7.3 %). By journal tier system: Tier 1 (18.7 %, n  = 738), Tier 2 (22.5 %, n  = 888), Tier 3 (29.6 %, n  = 1170), Tier 4 (27.2 %, n  = 1074), and journals without IF (2.1 %, n  = 81). University of Malaya was the most productive. Local collaborators accounted for 60.3 % and international collaborations 39.7 %. Articles with international collaborations appeared in journals with higher journal IFs than those without international collaboration. They were also cited more significantly than articles without international collaborations. Citations, impact factor and journal tiers were significantly associated with international collaboration in Malaysia’s clinical medicine publications. Malaysia has achieved a significant number of ISI publications in clinical medicine participation in international collaboration.

Description: This study introduces nation diffusion breadth and nation diffusion intensity by adapting the notions of field diffusion breadth and field diffusion intensity as defined by Liu and Rousseau, and a variation on the total cited influence indicator introduced by Hu et al. Knowledge diffusion across countries in the field of management is then analyzed as a case study. Main countries in the field of management studies are considered as centers in their own ego-centered citation networks. The three indicators mentioned above are then calculated for these ego-centered citation networks. They measure the scientific impact each of these countries has on other nations. A general picture of the knowledge diffusion process is given by the three indicators at the country level over four periods 1992–1996, 1997–2001, 2002–2006, and 2007–2011. The validity of the proposed indicators is verified by the calculated results.

Description: In an era of energy crisis, biomass-based bioenergy research has attracted the attention of R&D managers and policy makers around the world. This study explores the structural and dynamic patterns of biomass-based bioenergy research. We measure the profile of biomass research on both macro scales (nations) and meso level (institutions) in an international context. We find that biomass publications are intensively distributed in developed regions and some emerging economies. The U.S. leads in this emerging field as evidenced by research quantity, impact, and international collaboration links. China is developing rapidly in this domain in terms of publication volume and collaborative links but suffers from low research visibility. The study also finds strong interactions are taking place both within macro-disciplines and between macro-disciplines. Research limitations are presented.

Description: Journal impact factors (JIF) are computed by Thomson Reuters to three decimal places. Some authors have cast doubt on the validity of the third decimal place in JIFs. In this paper I present a new approach to evaluate the significance of decimal places in JIFs. To do so, two modified JIFs were computed by adding or removing one citation to the number used by Thomson Reuters to compute the JIF for journals listed in the 2008 Journal Citation Report. The rationale is that one citation is the minimum amount of impact that can be observed and analyzed. Next, the modified JIFs were compared with the original JIF to identify the decimal place that changed as consequence of adding or removing one citation. The results suggest that for about two-third of journals, the number of places used by Thomson Reuters to compute JIFs can be considered appropriate for the most part.

Description: Scientifically liberated and developed countries produce huge amounts of cutting-edge publications in peer-reviewed impact-creating journals. These publications may become basis for various policies/other blueprints. There is no reported study regarding the publication trends of Periodontists from India. The aim of this study was to assess the trends of Indian Periodontist’s publications in Pubmed database till 1st March, 2012 by taking quantitative bibliometric approach. Studies were identified by running select search phrases on Pubmed search engine. Search inputs included, ‘dental’, ‘oral’, ‘periodontal’, ‘gingiva’, ‘gingival’, ‘periodontology’, ‘periodontics’, ‘periodontia’, ‘periodontitis’, ‘gingivitis’, and ‘dental implant’. A parallel search with above phrases along with ‘India’ also done to assess India-specific publications. All publications with or without available abstracts were analyzed for selected parameters. Analysis was performed to determine name of the journal, number of authors, year of publication, type of institute, statewide distribution, type of study etc. The approximate contribution of Indian Dental/Periodontal literature to Pubmed database is 1.45 % till 1st March 2012. The number of articles published by Indian Periodontists is 764 across 107 journals and starting from 1960. The number of original articles published were 510 (66.75 %) as opposed to 127 (16.62 %) each for review articles and case reports/case series. The average contribution of an Indian Periodontist to Pubmed database is 0.53 articles. The contribution of Indian Periodontists to world literature through Pubmed database is not voluminous but, the publications are multiplying every passing year almost in an exponential way. There is also an increasing trend towards original articles to be published.

Description: Hirsch’s h -index cannot be used to compare academics that work in different disciplines or are at different career stages. Therefore, a metric that corrects for these differences would provide information that the h -index and its many current refinements cannot deliver. This article introduces such a metric, namely the hI,annual (or hIa for short). The hIa-index represents the average annual increase in the individual h -index. Using a sample of 146 academics working in five major disciplines and representing a wide variety of career lengths, we demonstrate that this metric attenuates h -index differences attributable to disciplinary background and career length. It is also easy to calculate with readily available data from all major bibliometric databases, such as Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge, Scopus and Google Scholar. Finally, as the metric represents the average number of single-author-equivalent “impactful” articles that an academic has published per year, it also allows an intuitive interpretation. Although just like any other metric, the hIa-index should never be used as the sole criterion to evaluate academics, we argue that it provides a more reliable comparison between academics than currently available metrics.

Description: This study examines long-term trends and shifting behavior in the collaboration network of mathematics literature, using a subset of data from Mathematical Reviews spanning 1985–2009. Rather than modeling the network cumulatively, this study traces the evolution of the “here and now” using fixed-duration sliding windows. The analysis uses a suite of common network diagnostics, including the distributions of degrees, distances, and clustering, to track network structure. Several random models that call these diagnostics as parameters help tease them apart as factors from the values of others. Some behaviors are consistent over the entire interval, but most diagnostics indicate that the network’s structural evolution is dominated by occasional dramatic shifts in otherwise steady trends. These behaviors are not distributed evenly across the network; stark differences in evolution can be observed between two major subnetworks, loosely thought of as “pure” and “applied”, which approximately partition the aggregate. The paper characterizes two major events along the mathematics network trajectory and discusses possible explanatory factors.

Description: Several publication metrics are used for the evaluation of academic productivity. h index and g index are relatively new statistics for this purpose. Our aim is to evaluate academic psychiatrists’ h and g indices at different academic ranks in the United States. 30 psychiatry programs from the American Medical Association’s FREIDA online database were included to the study. From each academic rank, the total number of papers ( P total ), the single authored papers ( P single ) and the h and g indexes of faculty members were calculated by using one way ANOVA for multiple comparisons as primary analysis test. The metric medians as follows; P total  = 34.5, P single  = 13, g index = 19.5 and h index = 9. h index significantly differed between academic ranks except chairperson-professor. The other indices failed to distinguish junior academic ranks (associated professor-assistant professor) in addition to chairperson-professor. The strongest correlation was between h index and g indexes. Of the indices evaluated, the h -index is best tracked with academic ranking in psychiatry programs studied.

Description: In a previews paper we introduced the quantitative method named reference publication year spectroscopy (RPYS). With this method one can determine the historical roots of research fields and quantify their impact on current research. RPYS is based on the analysis of the frequency with which references are cited in the publications of a specific research field in terms of the publication years of these cited references. In this study, we illustrate that RPYS can also be used to reveal the origin of scientific legends. We selected “Darwin finches” as an example for illustration. Charles Darwin, the originator of evolutionary theory, was given credit for finches he did not see and for observations and insights about the finches he never made. We have shown that a book published in 1947 is the most-highly cited early reference cited within the relevant literature. This book had already been revealed as the origin of the term “Darwin finches” by Sulloway through careful historical analysis.

Description: Internationalization of universities has become a worldwide phenomenon as global economic integration continues to make its way forcefully into the higher education. The objective of the study is to develop a model for internationalization of universities with the transformation of some promising macroeconomic variables i.e., educational reforms and economic growth in the seven largest regions of the world [namely, East Asia and Pacific (sample 25 countries); Europe and Central Asia (40 countries); Latin America and Caribbean (27 countries); Middle East and North Africa (17 countries); North America (22 countries); South Asia (7 countries) and Sub-Saharan Africa (21 countries)]. The data has been analyzed by panel fixed effect regression from the period of 1990–2011. In addition to transform inputs into output, the study employed eleven indicators of education and five indicators for growth, where the resulting vector is internationalization. The results show the dynamic linkages between educational indicators and economic factors in the selected regions of the World. In East Asia and Pacific region, tertiary and higher education expenditures per student increase the economic factors. Higher education is a powerful driver of long-term growth in Europe and Central Asia. Governments of the state should have to focus on higher education enrolment, as it does not have any significant contribution to increase GDP; gross capital formation and FDI in Latin America and Caribbean region. Higher education enrolment in MENA region significantly increases growth factors on the cost of increase gross national expenditures. Investment in general education and other generic human capital is of the utmost importance in creating an enabling environment for FDI in North America. It is imperative for South Asia to encourage the skill levels and education opportunities for females, in order to maximize the effects of FDI on the female human capital stock and therefore economic growth. Tertiary school enrolment and tertiary expenditures per student identified the importance of tertiary education in Sub-Saharan Africa. The results conclude that educational indicators improve the economic gains, which ultimately reap out the benefit of internationalization.

Description: This paper examines the strength of association between the outcomes of National Research Foundation (NRF) peer review based rating mechanisms, and a range of objective measures of performance of researchers. The analysis is conducted on 1932 scholars that have received an NRF rating or an NRF research chair. We find that on average scholars with higher NRF ratings record higher performance against research output and impact metrics. However, we also record anomalies in the probabilities of different NRF ratings when assessed against bibliometric performance measures, and record a disproportionately large incidence of scholars with high peer-review based ratings with low levels of recorded research output and impact. Moreover, we find strong cross-disciplinary differences in terms of the impact that objective levels of performance have on the probability of achieving different NRF ratings. Finally, we report evidence that NRF peer review is less likely to reward multi-authored research output than single-authored output. Claims of a lack of bias in NRF peer review are thus difficult to sustain.

Description: Co-citation analysis is a form of content analysis that can be applied in the context of scholarly publications with the purpose of identifying prominent articles, authors and journals being referenced to by the citing authors. It identifies co-cited references that occur in the reference list of two or more citing articles, with the resultant co-citation network providing insights into the constituents of a knowledge domain (e.g., significant authors and papers). The contribution of the paper is twofold; (a) the demonstration of the added value of using co-citation analysis, and for this purpose the underlying dataset that is chosen is the peer-reviewed publication of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International ( SCS )— SIMULATION ; (b) the year 2012 being the 60th anniversary of the SCS, the authors hope that this paper will lead to further acknowledgement and appreciation of the Society in charting the growth of Modeling and Simulation (M&S) as a discipline.

Description: In today’s competitive business environment, the timely identification of potential technology opportunities is becoming increasingly important for the strategic management of technology and innovation. Existing studies in the field of technology opportunity discovery (TOD) focus exclusively on patent textual information. In this article, we introduce a new method that tackles TOD via technology convergence, using both patent textual data and patent citation networks. We identify technology groups with high convergence potential by measuring connectivity between clusters of patents. From such technology groups we select pairs of core patents based on their technological relatedness, on their past involvement in convergence, and on the impact of their new potential convergence. We finally carry out TOD by extracting representative keywords from the text of the selected patent pairs and organizing them into the basic description of a new invention, which the potential convergence of the patent pair might produce. We illustrate our proposed method using a data set of U.S. patents in the field of digital information and security.

Description: Web of Science ( wos ) and scopus have often been compared with regard to user interface, countries, institutions, author sets, etc., but rarely employing a more systematic assessment of major research fields and national production. The aim of this study was to appraise the differences among major research fields in scopus and wos based on a standardized classification of fields and assessed for the case of an entire country (Slovenia). We analyzed all documents and citations received by authors who were actively engaged in research in Slovenia between 1996 and 2011 (50,000 unique documents by 10,000 researchers). Documents were tracked and linked to scopus and wos using complex algorithms in the Slovenian cobiss bibliographic system and sicris research system where the subject areas or research fields of all documents are harmonized by the Frascati/ oecd classification, thus offsetting some major differences between wos and scopus in database-specific subject schemes as well as limitations of deriving data directly from databases. scopus leads over wos in indexed documents as well as citations in all research fields. This is especially evident in social sciences, humanities, and engineering & technology. The least citations per document were received in humanities and most citations in medical and natural sciences, which exhibit similar counts. Engineering & technology reveals only half the citations per document compared to the previous two fields. Agriculture is found in the middle. The established differences between databases and research fields provide the Slovenian research funding agency with additional criteria for a more balanced evaluation of research.

Description: We investigated the development of astronomy and astrophysics research productivity in Turkey in terms of publication output and their impacts as reflected in the science citation index for the period 1980–2010. Our study involves 838 refereed publications, including 801 articles, 16 letters, 15 reviews, and six research notes. The number of papers were prominently increased after 2000 and the average number of papers per researcher is calculated as 0.89. Total number of received citations for 838 papers is 6938, while number of citations per papers is approximately 8.3 in 30 years. Publication performance of Turkish astronomers and astrophysicists was compared with those of seven countries that have similar gross domestic expenditures on research and development, and members of organization for economic co-operation and development. Our study reveals that the output of astronomy and astrophysics research in Turkey has gradually increased over the years.

Description: This article identifies scientific fields in Brazil that have been generating new knowledge, their evolution, tendencies and the relationship between scientific production and the National Postgraduate Program (Programa Nacional de Pós-Graduação—PNPG). It works with review articles and assesses: (a) articles published as reviews by international databases; (b) the growth of Brazilian participation in that context; (c) institutional participation; (d) the predominant fields of knowledge; (e) the most productive authors, and (f) periodicals that published the greatest number of review articles by Brazilian authors. The 5,348 review articles published between 2000 and 2009 were made available in 1,309 scientific publications, and the fields that published the most reviews were Pharmacology, Chemistry, Neurosciences, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Psychiatry, Neurology, Endocrinology and Internal Medicine. The reviews were produced by 27,096 authors under the auspices of 20 institutions which, together, answer for 95 % of the Brazilian production, and are public, excepting for the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUC-RS). In the international scenario, we find that 31 countries are responsible for 90.11 % of the total scientific production and 94.08 % of the review articles. To establish a comparison between Brazil and its closest competitors, these countries can be classified arbitrarily in three groups: (1) countries with a large number of review articles (〉3100), an average number of citations above 18, and an h-index greater than 95; (2) countries with a significant production of articles (between 2,000 and 3,000), average number of citations between 12 and 17, and an h-index below 95. Brazil is in the third group, (3) formed by countries with a lower level of production and the two qualitative indicators at opposite poles: the average of citations on a par with the first group (〉18) and h-indexes like those of the second group (〈95).

Description: Based on the network comprised of 111,444 keywords of library and information science that are extracted from Scopus, and taken into consideration the major properties of average distance and clustering coefficients, the present authors, with the knowledge of complex network and by means of calculation, reveal the small-world effect of the keywords network. On the basis of the keywords network, the betweenness centrality is used to carry out a preliminary study on how to detect the research hotspots of a discipline. This method is also compared with that of detecting research hotspots by word frequency.