National science systems have become embedded in global science and countries do everything they can to harness global knowledge to national economic needs. However, accessing and using the riches of global knowledge can occur only through scientists. Consequently, the research power of nations relies on the research power of individual scientists. Their capacity to collaborate internationally and to tap into the global networked science is key. The constantly evolving, bottom-up, autonomous, self-regulating, and self-focused nature of global science requires deeper understanding; and the best way to understand its dynamics is to understand what drives academic scientists in their work. The idea that science remains a state-driven rather than curiosity-driven is difficult to sustain. In empirical terms, we describe the globalization of science using selected publication, collaboration, and citation data from 2000-2020. The globalization of science implies two different processes in two different system types: the growth of science in the Western world is almost entirely attributable to internationally co-authored publications; its growth in the developing world, in contrast, is driven by both internationally co-authored and domestic publications. Global network science opens incredible opportunities to new arrivals - countries as well as institutions and research teams. The global system is embedded in the rules created by scientists themselves and maintained as a self-organizing system and nation-states have another major level to consider in their science policies: the global level. Globalization of science provides more agency, autonomy, collegiality, and self-regulation to scientists embedded in national science structures and involved in global networks.
The geopolitics of knowledge: tipping points, national fingerprints, and the unequal globalization of science
Gemass, CNRS（CNRS）；TETIS, University of Montpellier, AgroParisTech, Cirad, CNRS, INRAE（蒙彼利埃大学）；Centre des politiques de la Terre, Université Paris Cité（巴黎西岱大学）
As the increasing complexity of large-scale research requires the combined efforts of scientists with expertise in different fields, the advantages and costs of interdisciplinary scholarship have taken center stage in current debates on scientific production. Here we conduct a comparative assessment of the scientific success of specialized and interdisciplinary researchers in modern science. Drawing on comprehensive data sets on scientific production, we propose a two-pronged approach to interdisciplinarity. For each scientist, we distinguish between background interdisciplinarity, rooted in k…
The logic of abduction involves a collision between deduction and induction, where empirical surprises violate expectations and scientists innovate to resolve them. Here we reformulate abduction as a social process, occurring not only within individual scientists, but often through conversation between those who understand a particular scientific system and its anomalies (its insiders) and those exposed to alien and disruptive patterns, theories, and findings that could resolve them (its outsiders). These extended conversations between scientists, scholars, and disciplines with divergent backg…
Scientific knowledge and advances are a cornerstone of modern society. They improve our understanding of the world we live in and help us navigate global challenges including emerging infectious diseases, climate change and the biodiversity crisis. For any scientist, whether they work primarily in fundamental knowledge generation or in the applied sciences, it is important to understand how science fits into a decision-making framework. Decision science is a field that aims to pinpoint evidence-based management strategies. It provides a framework for scientists to directly impact decisions or …
Recently, Hirsch (2019a) proposed a new variant of the h index called the $h_α$ index. He formulated as follows: "we define the $h_α$ index of a scientist as the number of papers in the h-core of the scientist (i.e. the set of papers that contribute to the h-index of the scientist) where this scientist is the $α$-author" (p. 673). The $h_α$ index was criticized by Leydesdorff, Bornmann, and Opthof (2019). One of their most important points is that the index reinforces the Matthew effect in science. We address this point in the current study using a recently developed Stata command (h_index) an…
Complex networks have attracted a great deal of research interest in the last two decades since Watts & Strogatz, Barabási & Albert and Girvan & Newman published their highly-cited seminal papers on small-world networks, on scale-free networks and on the community structure of complex networks, respectively. These fundamental papers initiated a new era of research establishing an interdisciplinary field called network science. Due to the multidisciplinary nature of the field, a diverse but not divided network science community has emerged in the past 20 years. This paper honors the contributio…
Citizen Science is research undertaken by professional scientists and members of the public collaboratively. Despite numerous benefits of citizen science for both the advancement of science and the community of the citizen scientists, there is still no comprehensive knowledge of patterns of contributions, and the demography of contributors to citizen science projects. In this paper we provide a first overview of spatiotemporal and gender distribution of citizen science workforce by analyzing 54 million classifications contributed by more than 340 thousand citizen science volunteers from 198 co…
Scientific prizes are among the greatest recognition a scientist receives from their peers and arguably shape the direction of a field by conferring credibility to persons, ideas, and disciplines, providing financial rewards, and promoting rituals that reinforce scientific communities. The proliferation of prizes and links among prizes suggest that the prize network embodies information about scientists and ideas poised to grow in acclaim. Using comprehensive new data on prizes and prizewinners worldwide and across disciplines, we examine the growth dynamics and interlocking relationships foun…
Large-scale research endeavors can be hindered by logistical constraints limiting the amount of available data. For example, global ecological questions require a global dataset, and traditional sampling protocols are often too inefficient for a small research team to collect an adequate amount of data. Citizen science offers an alternative by crowdsourcing data collection. Despite growing popularity, the community has been slow to embrace it largely due to concerns about quality of data collected by citizen scientists. Using the citizen science project Floating Forests (http://floatingforests…
What happens when scientists are, at certain points in a field's development, playing a game? I present a framework for such an analysis that draws on the theory of games provided by the historian Johan Huizinga. Huizinga gives five conditions for a social practice to become a game: free engagement, disconnection, boundedness in time and arena, the order-creation of rules, and the presence of tension. Application of this theory to scientific practice predicts patterns of behavior that can be tested by quantitative analysis: the emergence of hard boundaries between disciplines, the closure of l…
Does it Matter Which Citation Tool is Used to Compare the h-index of a Group of Highly Cited Researchers?
由引文索引（Scopus，Google Scholar和Web of Science）检索的h指数用于衡量科学家的科学表现和研究影响力研究，基于科学家的出版物和引文数量。它也很容易获得，可用于科学家的业绩衡量和招聘决定。本研究的目的是调查这三个引文数据库，即Scopus，Google Scholar和Web of Science基于一组高被引研究人员（诺贝尔奖获得者科学家）的h指数的输出和结果之间的差异。本研究采立意抽样方法收集资料。结果表明，Scopus、Google scholar和Web of Science 3个数据库的h指数存在显著性差异，其中Google scholar h指数大于其他2个数据库的h指数。研究还表明，基于Google Scholar和Scopus的h指数之间存在显著的正相关关系。Scopus、Google Scholar和Web of Science的引文索引对科学家h指数的评价有一定的参考价值，但也存在一定的局限性。
We report the results of an exploratory study that examines the judgments of climate scientists, climate policy experts, astrophysicists, and non-experts (N = 3,367) about the factors that contribute to the creation and persistence of disagreement within climate science and astrophysics. We found that, as compared to educated non-experts, climate experts believe that there is less disagreement within climate science about climate change and that methodological factors and personal or institutional biases play less significant roles in generating existing disagreements than is commonly reported…
