In recent years scholars have built maps of science by connecting the academic fields that cite each other, are cited together, or that cite a similar literature. But since scholars cannot always publish in the fields they cite, or that cite them, these science maps are only rough proxies for the potential of a scholar, organization, or country, to enter a new academic field. Here we use a large dataset of scholarly publications disambiguated at the individual level to create a map of science-or research space-where links connect pairs of fields based on the probability that an individual has published in both of them. We find that the research space is a significantly more accurate predictor of the fields that individuals and organizations will enter in the future than citation based science maps. At the country level, however, the research space and citations based science maps are equally accurate. These findings show that data on career trajectories-the set of fields that individuals have previously published in-provide more accurate predictors of future research output for more focalized units-such as individuals or organizations-than citation based science maps.
International mobility in academia can enhance the human and social capital of researchers and consequently their scientific outcome. However, there is still a very limited understanding of the different mobility patterns among scholars with various socio-demographic characteristics. The aim of this study is twofold. First, we investigate to what extent individual factors associate with the mobility of researchers. Second, we explore the relationship between mobility and scientific activity and impact. For this purpose, we used a bibliometric approach to track the mobility of authors. To compa…
The use of Semantic Web Technologies supports research in the field of digital humanities. In this paper we focus on the creation of semantic independent online databases such as those of historical prosopography. These databases contain biographical information of historical persons. We focus on this information with an interest in German professorial career patterns from the 16th to the 18th century. In that respect, we describe the process of building an Early Modern Scholarly Career RDF Knowledge Graph from two existing prosopography online databases: the Catalogus Professorum Lipsiensium …
Assessing the influence of a scholar's work is an important task for funding organizations, academic departments, and researchers. Common methods, such as measures of citation counts, can ignore much of the nuance and multidimensionality of scholarly influence. We present an approach for generating dynamic visualizations of scholars' careers. This approach uses an animated node-link diagram showing the citation network accumulated around the researcher over the course of the career in concert with key indicators, highlighting influence both within and across fields. We developed our design in …
In recent years, assessing the performance of researchers has become a burden due to the extensive volume of the existing research output. As a result, evaluators often end up relying heavily on a selection of performance indicators like the h-index. However, over-reliance on such indicators may result in reinforcing dubious research practices, while overlooking important aspects of a researcher's career, such as their exact role in the production of particular research works or their contribution to other important types of academic or research activities (e.g., production of datasets, peer r…
Setbacks are an integral part of a scientific career, yet little is known about whether an early-career setback may augment or hamper an individual's future career impact. Here we examine junior scientists applying for U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 grants. By focusing on grant proposals that fell just below and just above the funding threshold, we compare "near-miss" with "near-win" individuals to examine longer-term career outcomes. Our analyses reveal that an early-career near miss has powerful, opposing effects. On one hand, it significantly increases attrition, with one near…
There is a growing need for ranking universities, departments, research groups, and individual scholars. Usually, the scientific community measures the scientific merits of the researchers by using a variety of indicators that take into account both the productivity of scholars and the impact of their publications. We propose the t-index, the new indicator to measure the scientific merits of the individual researchers. The proposed t-index takes into account the number of citations, number of coauthors on every published paper, and career duration. The t-index makes the possible comparison of …
We show that the greater the scientific wealth of a nation, the more likely that it will tend to concentrate this excellence in a few premier institutions. That is, great wealth implies great inequality of distribution. The scientific wealth is interpreted in terms of citation data harvested by Google Scholar Citations for profiled institutions from all countries in the world.
International scientific mobility is acknowledged to be a key mechanism for the diffusion of knowledge, particularly tacit or 'sticky' knowledge that cannot be transferred without geographical proximity and personal contact, for the incorporation of young researchers into elite transnational scientific networks, and for accessing additional resources or infrastructures that are essential to the research process but located in other places. The inadequacy and lack of appropriate data to assess the phenomenon of researcher mobility has been repeatedly pointed out by scholars and policy makers. T…
Scholar Ranking 2023 is the second edition of U.S. Computer Science (CS) departments ranking based on faculty citation measures. Using Google Scholar, we gathered data about publication citations for 5,574 tenure-track faculty from 185 U.S. universities. For each faculty, we extracted their t10 index, defined as the number of citations received by their 10th highest cited paper. For each department, we calculated four quality metrics: median t10 (m10), the geometric mean of t10 (g10), and the number of well-cited faculty with t10 above 40% (c40) and 60% (c60) of the national average. We fitted…
How common is self-citation in scholarly publication, and does the practice vary by gender? Using novel methods and a data set of 1.5 million research papers in the scholarly database JSTOR published between 1779 and 2011, the authors find that nearly 10 percent of references are self-citations by a paper's authors. The findings also show that between 1779 and 2011, men cited their own papers 56 percent more than did women. In the last two decades of data, men self-cited 70 percent more than women. Women are also more than 10 percentage points more likely than men to not cite their own previou…
A Double Bind: Gendered Funding, Research Topics, and Academic Performance in the Social Sciences
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Edinburgh Futures Institute, University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡未来研究所）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University（武汉大学人民医院）；University of Münster（明斯特大学）；University of York（约克大学）；Polytechnic University of Milan（米兰理工大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；University of Reading（雷丁大学）；City University of Macau（澳门城市大学）
Consensus and fragmentation in academic publication preferences
University of Colorado Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）；Copenhagen Center for Social Data Science, University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学社会数据科学中心）；Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校环境科学研究合作研究所）；Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, Stanford University（斯坦福大学道尔可持续发展学院）；Department of Statistics & Data Science, Yale University（耶鲁大学统计与数据科学系）；BioFrontiers Institute, University of Colorado Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校生物前沿研究所）；Santa Fe Institute（圣塔菲研究所）
The impact factor (IF) of scientific journals has acquired a major role in the evaluations of the output of scholars, departments and whole institutions. Typically papers appearing in journals with large values of the IF receive a high weight in such evaluations. However, at the end of the day one is interested in assessing the impact of individuals, rather than papers. Here we introduce Author Impact Factor (AIF), which is the extension of the IF to authors. The AIF of an author A in year $t$ is the average number of citations given by papers published in year $t$ to papers published by A in …
Numerous national research assessment policies set the goal of promoting "excellence" and incentivise scholars to publish their research in the most prestigious journals or with the most prestigious book publishers. We investigate the practicalities of the assessment of book outputs based on the prestige of book publishers (Denmark, Finland, Flanders, Lithuania, Norway). Additionally, we test whether such judgments are transparent and yield consistent results. We show inconsistencies in the levelling of publishers, such as the same publisher being ranked as prestigious and not-so-prestigious i…
Should children follow their parents' research paths? Intergenerational research continuity and divergence in academic families
School of Information, Journalism and Communication, University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学信息、新闻与传播学院）；School of Information Resource Management, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学信息资源管理学院）；Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University（莱顿大学科学与技术研究中心）
This article maps Library and Information Science (LIS) research in Indian universities. As the two prominent citation databases, Web of Science and Scopus have very limited coverage of Indian LIS journals, the publications generated by the library and science departments of about 114 selected Indian universities and the two national institutions of importance in LIS research were extracted from Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA). The relevant publication records were analyzed using scientometrics and Social Network Analysis (SNA) tools. The study traces the growth of …
National culture is among those societal factors which could influence research and innovation activities. In this study, we investigated the associations of two national culture models with citation impact of nations (measured by the proportion of papers belonging to the 10% and 1% most cited papers in the corresponding fields, PPtop 10% and PPtop 1%). Bivariate statistical analyses showed that of six Hofstede's national culture dimensions (HNCD), uncertainty avoidance and power distance had a statistically significant negative associa-tion, while individualism and indulgence had a statistica…
The purpose of this study is to ascertain the suitability of GS's url-based method as a valid approximation of universities' academic output measures, taking into account three aspects (retroactive growth, correlation, and coverage). To do this, a set of 100 Turkish universities were selected as a case study. The productivity in Web of Science (WoS), Scopus and GS (2000 to 2013) were captured in two different measurement iterations (2014 and 2018). In addition, a total of 18,174 documents published by a subset of 14 research-focused universities were retrieved from WoS, verifying their presenc…
We investigate the question of how long top scientists retain their stardom. We observe the research performance of all Italian professors in the sciences over three consecutive four-year periods, between 2001 and 2012. The top scientists of the first period are identified on the basis of research productivity, and their performance is then tracked through time. The analyses demonstrate that more than a third of the nation's top scientists maintain this status over the three consecutive periods, with higher shares occurring in the life sciences and lower ones in engineering. Compared to males,…
Beyond Journals: Rethinking Research Evaluation in Hungarian Computer Science
Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯技术与经济大学）；University of Szeged（塞格德大学）；HUN-REN Institute for Computer Science and Control（匈牙利科学院计算机与控制研究所）
