This paper deploys bibliometric indices and semantic techniques for understanding to what extent research grants are likely to impact publications, research direction, and co-authorship rate of principal investigators. The novelty of this paper lies within the fact that it includes semantic analysis in the research funding evaluation process in order to effectively study short-term and long-term funding impact in terms of publication outputs. Our dataset consists of researchers that receive research grants from the National ICT Research and Development funding program of Pakistan. We show a number of interesting case studies to conclude that bibliometric-based quantitative assessment combined with semantics can lead to building better sustainable pathways to deploy evaluation frameworks for research funding effectively.
Multivariate linear regression models suggest a trade-off in allocations of national R&D investments. Government funding, and spending in the higher education sector, seem to encourage publications, whereas other components such as industrial funding, and spending in the business sector, encourage patenting. Our results help explain why the US trails the EU in publications, because of its focus on industrial funding - some 70% of its total R&D investment. Conversely, it also helps explain why the EU trails the US in patenting. Government funding is indicated as a negative incentive to high-qua…
In a university, research assessments are organized at different policy levels (faculties, research council) in different contexts (funding, council membership, personnel evaluations). Each evaluation requires its own focus and methodology. To conduct a coherent research policy however, data on which different assessments are based should be well coordinated. A common set of core indicators for any type of research assessment can provide a supportive and objectivating tool for evaluations at different institutional levels and at the same time promote coherent decision-making. The same indicato…
Stakeholders in the science system need to decide where to place their bets. Example questions include: Which areas of research should get more funding? Who should we hire? Which projects should we abandon and which new projects should we start? Making informed choices requires knowledge about these research options. Unfortunately, to date research portfolio options have not been defined in a consistent, transparent and relevant manner. Furthermore, we don't know how to define demand for these options. In this article, we address the issues of consistency, transparency, relevance and demand by…
The starting point of this paper is a desktop research assessment model that does not take properly into account the complexities of research assessment, but rather bases itself on a series of highly simplifying, questionable assumptions related to the availability, validity and evaluative significance of research performance indicators, and to funding policy criteria. The paper presents a critique of this model, and proposes alternative assessment approaches, based on an explicit evaluative framework, focusing on preconditions to performance or communication effectiveness rather than on perfo…
This paper contributes to the quest for an operational definition of 'research excellence' and proposes a translation of the excellence concept into a bibliometric indicator. Starting from a textual analysis of funding program calls aimed at individual researchers and from the challenges for an indicator at this level in particular, a new type of indicator is proposed. The Impact Vitality indicator [RONS & AMEZ, 2008] reflects the vitality of the impact of a researcher's publication output, based on the change in volume over time of the citing publications. The introduced metric is shown to po…
Allocation of research funding, as well as promotion and tenure decisions, are increasingly made using indicators and impact factors drawn from citations to published work. A debate among scientometricians about proper normalization of citation counts has resolved with the creation of an Integrated Impact Indicator (I3) that solves a number of problems found among previously used indicators. The I3 applies non-parametric statistics using percentiles, allowing highly-cited papers to be weighted more than less-cited ones. It further allows unbundling of venues (i.e., journals or databases) at th…
National research impact indicators derived from citation counts are used by governments to help assess their national research performance and to identify the effect of funding or policy changes. Citation counts lag research by several years, however, and so their information is somewhat out of date. Some of this lag can be avoided by using readership counts from the social reference sharing site Mendeley because these accumulate more quickly than citations. This article introduces a method to calculate national research impact indicators from Mendeley, using citation counts from older time p…
Despite concrete indicators and targets, monitoring the progress of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) remains a challenge, given the many different actors, initiatives, and institutions involved. OSDG, an open-source classification tool aims to help navigate the SDG related ambiguities through a simple and easy to use application. The tool allows to map and connect activities to the SDGs by identifying SDG -relevant content in any text. This paper presents OSDG 2.0, a new iteration of the partnership's work, which marks a significant improvement in the tool's methodology, as well as …
The paper presents a web prototype that visualises different characteristics of research projects in the heterogeneous domain of educational research. The concept of the application derives from the project "Monitoring Educational Research" (MoBi) that aims at identifying and implementing indicators that adequately describe structural properties and dynamics of the research field. The prototype enables users to visualise data regarding different indicators, e.g. "research activity", "funding", "qualification project", "disciplinary area". Since the application is based on Semantic MediaWikitec…
Higher education systems in competitive environments generally present top universities, that are able to attract top scientists, top students and public and private financing, with notable socio-economic benefits in their region. The same does not hold true for non-competitive systems. In this study we will measure the dispersion of research performance within and between universities in the Italian university system, typically non-competitive. We will also investigate the level of correlation that occurs between performance in research and its dispersion in universities. The findings may rep…
Bibliometric indicators are increasingly used in support of decisions for recruitment, career advancement, rewarding and selective funding for scientists. Given the importance of the applications, bibliometricians are obligated to carry out empirical testing of the robustness of the indicators, in simulations of real contexts. In this work we compare the results of national-scale research assessments at the individual level, based on three different indexes: the h-index, g-index and "fractional scientific strength", or FSS, an indicator previously proposed by the authors. For each index, we co…
The peer review system has been traditionally challenged due to its many limitations especially for allocating funding. Bibliometric indicators may well present themselves as a complement. Objective: We analyze the relationship between peers' ratings and bibliometric indicators for Spanish researchers in the 2007 National R&D Plan for 23 research fields. We analyze peers' ratings for 2333 applications. We also gathered principal investigators' research output and impact and studied the differences between accepted and rejected applications. We used the Web of Science database and focused on th…
In Hungary, the highest and most prestigious scientific qualification is considered to be the Doctor of Science (DSc) title being awarded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The academic performance indicators of the DSc title are of high importance in the evaluation of individuals' research performance not only when a researcher applies for obtaining a DSc title, but also during promotions and appointments at universities, and in the case of the evaluation of applications for scientific titles and degrees, and the assessment of applications for funding. In the Section of Earth Sciences enco…
The 2030 Agenda of the United Nations (UN) revolves around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A critical step towards that objective is identifying whether scientific production aligns with the SDGs' achievement. To assess this, funders and research managers need to manually estimate the impact of their funding agenda on the SDGs, focusing on accuracy, scalability, and objectiveness. With this objective in mind, in this work, we develop ASDG, an easy-to-use artificial-intelligence (AI)-based model for automatically identifying the potential impact of scientific papers on the UN SDGs. As…
Most Performance-based Research Funding Systems (PRFS) draw on peer review and bibliometric indicators, two different methodologies which are sometimes combined. A common argument against the use of indicators in such research evaluation exercises is their low correlation at the article level with peer review judgments. In this study, we analyse 191,000 papers from 154 higher education institutes which were peer reviewed in a national research evaluation exercise. We combine these data with 6.95 million citations to the original papers. We show that when citation-based indicators are applied a…
This paper presents an analysis of the Overton policy document database, describing the makeup of materials indexed and the nature in which they cite academic literature. We report on various aspects of the data, including growth, geographic spread, language representation, the range of policy source types included, and the availability of citation links in documents. Longitudinal analysis over established journal category schemes is used to reveal the scale and disciplinary focus of citations and determine the feasibility of developing field-normalized citation indicators. We examine how well…
Like it or not, attempts to evaluate and monitor the quality of academic research have become increasingly prevalent worldwide. Performance reviews range from at the level of individuals, through research groups and departments, to entire universities. Many of these are informed by, or functions of, simple scientometric indicators and the results of such exercises impact onto careers, funding and prestige. However, there is sometimes a failure to appreciate that scientometrics are, at best, very blunt instruments and their incorrect usage can be misleading. Rather than accepting the rise and f…
Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；Joint Research Centre, European Commission（欧盟委员会联合研究中心）
The lack of diversity of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) field is nowadays a concern, and several initiatives such as funding schemes and mentoring programs have been designed to overcome it. However, there is no indication on how these initiatives actually impact AI diversity in the short and long term. This work studies the concept of diversity in this particular context and proposes a small set of diversity indicators (i.e. indexes) of AI scientific events. These indicators are designed to quantify the diversity of the AI field and monitor its evolution. We consider diversity in terms of g…
Leveraging Artificial Intelligence Technology for Mapping Research to Sustainable Development Goals: A Case Study
Swinburne University of Technology（斯威本科技大学）；University of Canberra（堪培拉大学）；University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Griffith University（格里菲斯大学）
Combining new insights from both bibliometric and text mining analyses, with prior relevant research conversations on circular economy (CE) and industrial ecology (IE), this paper aims to clarify the recent development trends and relations between these concepts, including their representations and applications. On this basis, discussions are made and recommendations provided on how CE and IE approaches, tools, and indicators can complement each other to enable and catalyze a more circular and sustainable development, by supporting sustainable policy-making and monitoring sound CE strategies i…
A crucial goal of funding research and development has always been to advance economic development. On this basis, a consider-able body of research undertaken with the purpose of determining what exactly constitutes economic impact and how to accurately measure that impact has been published. Numerous indicators have been used to measure economic impact, although no single indicator has been widely adapted. Based on patent data collected from Altmetric we predict patent citations through various social media features using several classification models. Patents citing a research paper implies …
How to quantify the impact of a researcher's or an institution's body of work is a matter of increasing importance to scientists, funding agencies, and hiring committees. The use of bibliometric indicators, such as the h-index or the Journal Impact Factor, have become widespread despite their known limitations. We argue that most existing bibliometric indicators are inconsistent, biased, and, worst of all, susceptible to manipulation. Here, we pursue a principled approach to the development of an indicator to quantify the scientific impact of both individual researchers and research institutio…
Finding measures for research impact, be it for individuals, institutions, instruments or projects, has gained a lot of popularity. More papers than ever are being written on new impact measures, and problems with existing measures are being pointed out on a regular basis. Funding agencies require impact statistics in their reports, job candidates incorporate them in their resumes, and publication metrics have even been used in at least one recent court case. To support this need for research impact indicators, the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) has developed a service which provides …
This paper proposes a three-year average of social attention as a more reliable measure of social impact for journals, since the social attention of research can vary widely among scientific articles, even within the same journal. The proposed measure is used to evaluate a journal's contribution to social attention in comparison to other bibliometric indicators. The study uses Dimensions as a data source and examines research articles from 76 disciplinary library and information science journals through multiple linear regression analysis. The study identifies socially influential journals who…
