China doubles research output, leaving West in its wake

 

Research output in China has exploded in the past five years, far outpacing activity in the rest of the world, according to a new report by Thomson Reuters. China has already overtaken the EU and Japan and will leapfrog the US within the next decade, the report predicts.

The Global Research Report on China shows the Asian giant published twice as many research papers last year as in 2004. The growth over the past decade is even more dramatic.

Chinese scientists published 20,000 papers in 1998 but this figure jumped to 112,000 in 2008.

EurActiv.com – China doubles research output, leaving West in its wake | EU – European Information on Science & Research.

On Reuters:

China's Research Output More Than Doubled Since 2004, Thomson Reuters Study
Reveals
Nation Stands Second Only to United States

PHILADELPHIA and LONDON, Nov. 2 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- A study from Thomson
Reuters released today shows explosive growth in research output from China,
far outpacing research activity in the rest of the world.

At this pace, China will overtake the USA within the next decade.

The study, Global Research Report: China, informs policymakers about the
research and collaboration potential of China and its current place in world
science. The study is part of the Global Research Report series from Thomson
Reuters that illustrates the changing landscape and dynamics of global
research around the world.

"If China's research growth remains this rapid and substantial, European and
North American institutions will want to be part of it," said Jonathan Adams,
director of research evaluation at Thomson Reuters. "China no longer depends
on links to traditional G8 partners to help its knowledge development. When
Europe and the USA visit China they can only do so as equal partners."

The study draws on data found in Web of Science®, available on the Web of
Knowledge(SM) platform -- the world's largest citation environment of the
highest quality scholarly literature. Key findings include:
    --  China's output increased from just over 20,000 research papers in 1998
        to nearly 112,000 in 2008, The nation doubled its output since 2004
        alone. China surpassed Japan, the UK and Germany in 2006 and now
stands
        second only to the USA.
    --  China is heading to overtake the USA in output within the next decade.
    --  China's research is concentrated in the physical sciences and
        technology. Materials science, chemistry and physics predominate.
        Looking toward the future, rapid growth can be seen in agricultural
        sciences and life sciences fields such as immunology, microbiology,
and
        molecular biology and genetics.
    --  The USA stands out in terms of collaboration with China., US-based
        authors contributed to nearly 9 percent of papers from China-based
        institutions between 2004 and 2008.

    --  Regional collaboration expansion is notable, especially with Japan,
        South Korea, Singapore and Australia.

For more information, please visit
http://researchanalytics.thomsonreuters.com/grr/.

SOURCE  Thomson Reuters

Aim initiative for academic careers: Learning to Think like an Expert Management Researcher

Learning to Think like an Expert Management Researcher
AIM’s online learning resource is intended for postgraduate and research students, but it will also be useful for academics just starting out on a career in the management field. The website is designed to support researchers with developing your critical frame of mind. A constructively critical way of thinking is characteristic of expert researchers, who have gradually built-up their critical thinking capability as a product of their accumulating research experience. Acquiring this capability can be a slow process if it just occurs incidentally: a side-effect of being a student or an academic. But researchers can accelerate their learning as they go along by consciously developing their ability to think critically and to make informed decisions in their research.
Key aspects of studying management are to find things out and then to demonstrate what has been found and why it is significant. This kind of work follows the ‘logic of enquiry’, or detective-work. Finding things out involves asking well-informed questions and designing literature-based and empirical investigations to answer them. Demonstrating what has been found out typically includes writing an account that will convince other people (as with your assignments, dissertation, thesis, or academic articles for publication). Expert researchers have learned the habit of following the logic of enquiry by applying their critical frame of mind. This resource is intended to help you to develop your habit of thinking like an expert.
Researchers can do this here in two ways. First, they can visit the link at the top of this page – Introduction. - to learn more about the approach to detective-work reflected in other sections of the resource. The introduction offers both an ‘advance organizer’, or mental framework, and self-assessment exercises to support learning.
Second, researchers can go to the Key Topics link and choose one of these topics to study by clinking on its link. Each key topic contains a series of learning activities focused on common tasks that postgraduate and research students are expected to undertake. These activities include information for raising awareness and reflective exercises and ideas for integrating learning into academic work. Researchers can click on Additional Resources for some suggested further reading. Whether the researcher is a student interested in personal learning, or an academic who is interested in using the materials in teaching of postgraduate or research students, researchers may wish to visit the Using this Resource link for ideas and information on how to make effective use of the materials.

Link here for all the information: http://www.aimexpertresearcher.org/

8 perspectives on measuring research

In a recent essay Douglas Comer lists 8 different ways to measure research. What is measured depends on the perspective and role of the evaluator. Here are the 8 ways and the point of view using this perspective on research:

Journal Paper Approach (preferred by journal publishers)
Measure: N, the total number of papers published.

Rate Of Publication Approach (preferred by young researchers)
Measure: N/T, the ratio of total papers published to the time in which they were published.

Weighted Publication Approach (preferred by accreditation agencies)
Measure: W, the sum of the weights assigned to published papers.

Millions Of Monkeys Approach (preferred by government granting agencies)
Measure: G, the total amount of taxpayer money distributed for research.

Direct Funding Approach (preferred by department heads)
Measure: D, the total dollars of grant funds acquired by a researcher.

Indirect Funding Approach (preferred by university administrators)
Measure: O, the total overhead dollars generated.

Bottom Line Approach (preferred by industrial research labs)
Measure: P, the profit generated by patents or products that result from the research.

Assessment Of Impact Approach (preferred by the handful of researchers who actually achieve something)
Measure: I/R, Ratio of the impact of the work to the amount of resources used to generate it.

All perspectives have pro’s and con’s, and I advice to read the essay for these details. The important thing is to keep in mind for research managers is to be aware of the the position of the person who measures research. There is nothing wrong in any perspective, as long it is clear that every perspective only looks at a partial reality aspect of research.

Visualizations of science

It is always nice to visit galleries of visualizations of science. It helps to get grip on things and they reveal structures and genetics of scientific fields.

Here is a nice gallery of maps, enjoy these little works of art at the scimaps website : http://scimaps.org/maps/browse/

KNAW published new SEP protocol 2009-2015

This week The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) published the new Standard Evaluation Report (SEP) which is applied to all fields of research in the Netherlands. The  new feature is that it looks at Doctoral training too. This means that research and doctoral training are seen as integrated, which is a good development.

SEP protocol

Another new Citation Impact tool on Scopus data: Scimago

Declan Butler, Free journal-ranking tool enters citation market, Nature News, January 2, 2008. Excerpt:

A new [OA] Internet database lets users generate on-the-fly citation statistics of published research papers for free. The tool also calculates papers’ impact factors using a new algorithm similar to PageRank, the algorithm Google uses to rank web pages. The open-access database is collaborating with Elsevier, the giant Amsterdam-based science publisher, and its underlying data come from Scopus, a subscription abstracts database created by Elsevier in 2004.

The SCImago Journal & Country Rank database was launched in December by SCImago,

Thomson is also under fire from researchers who want greater transparency over how citation metrics are calculated and the data sets used. In a hard-hitting editorial published in Journal of Cell Biology in December, Mike Rossner, head of Rockefeller University Press, and colleagues say their analyses of databases supplied by Thomson yielded different values for metrics from those published by the company (M. Rossner et al . J. Cell Biol. 179, 1091–1092 ; 2007). Thomson, they claim, was unable to supply data to support its published impact factors. “Just as scientists would not accept the findings in a scientific paper without seeing the primary data,” states the editorial, “so should they not rely on Thomson Scientific’s impact factor, which is based on hidden data.”

It also includes a new metric: the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR).

The familiar impact factor created by industry leader Thomson Scientific, based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is calculated as the average number of citations by the papers that each journal contains. The SJR also analyses the citation links between journals in a series of iterative cycles, in the same way as the Google PageRank algorithm. This means not all citations are considered equal; those coming from journals with higher SJRs are given more weight. The main difference between SJR and Google’s PageRank is that SJR uses a citation window of three years. See Table 1

I tested some testing on the marketing research subfield of business and management (see screenshot). I ranked the list according to total cites over the last 3 years.

SJR versus JCR:

Let’s take the highest ranked journal form Scimago: Journal of Marketing (sjr 0,107) and compare it with the JCR citation trend. JOM has the higest impactfactor i the ISI subjectcategory Business for 2006. So in general this would mean that the best journals come up equally. But it remains a situation of comparing apples and oranges because the subject categories differ between Scopus and ISI. So the relative position of a journal is different in the two measure systems.

A New Era in Citation and Bibliometric Analyses: Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar

Lokman I. Meho and Kiduk Yang
School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, 2007

Abstract:

Academic institutions, federal agencies, publishers, editors, authors, and librarians increasingly rely on citation analysis for making hiring, promotion, tenure, funding, and/or reviewer and journal evaluation and selection decisions. The Institute for Scientific Information’s (ISI) citation databases have been used for decades as a starting point and often as the only tools for locating citations and/or conducting citation analyses. ISI databases (or Web of Science), however, may no longer be adequate as the only or even the main sources of citations because new databases and tools that allow citation searching are now available. Whether these new databases and tools complement or represent alternatives to Web of Science (WoS) is important to explore. Using a group of 15 library and information science faculty members as a case study, this paper examines the effects of using Scopus and Google Scholar (GS) on the citation counts and rankings of scholars as measured by WoS. The paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of WoS, Scopus, and GS, their overlap and uniqueness, quality and language of the citations, and the implications of the findings for citation analysis. The project involved citation searching for approximately 1,100 scholarly works published by the study group and over 200 works by a test group (an additional 10 faculty members). Overall, more than 10,000 citing and purportedly citing documents were examined. WoS data took about 100 hours of collecting and processing time, Scopus consumed 200 hours, and GS a grueling 3,000 hours.

Conclusions by the authors:

The study found that the addition of Scopus citations to those of WoS could significantly alter the ranking of scholars. The study also found that GS stands out in its coverage of conference proceedings as well as international, non-English language journals, among others. GS also indexes a wide variety of document types, some of which may be of significant value to researchers. The use of Scopus and GS, in addition to WoS, reveals a more comprehensive and accurate picture of the extent of the scholarly relationship between LIS and other fields, as evidenced by the unique titles that cite LIS literature (e.g., titles from Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Education, and Engineering, to name only a few). Significantly, this study has demonstrated that:

1. Although WoS remains an indispensable citation database, it should not be used alone for locating citations to an author or title, and, by extension, journals, departments, and countries; Scopus should be used concurrently.
2. Although Scopus provides more comprehensive citation coverage of LIS and LIS-related literature than WoS for the period 1996-2005, the two databases complement rather than replace each other.
3. While both Scopus and GS help identify a considerable number of citations not found in WoS, only Scopus significantly alters the ranking of scholars as measured by WoS.
   Although GS unique citations are not of the same quality as those found in WoS or Scopus, they could be very useful in showing evidence of broader international impact than could possibly be done through the two proprietary databases.
4. GS value for citation searching purposes is severely diminished by its inherent problems. GS data are not limited to refereed, high quality journals and conference proceedings. GS is also very cumbersome to use and needs significant improvement in the way it displays search results and the downloading capabilities it offers for it to become a useful tool for large-scale citation analyses.
5. Given the low overlap or high uniqueness between the three tools, they may all be necessary to develop more accurate maps or visualizations of scholarly networks and impact both within and between disciplines (Börner, Chen, & Boyack, 2003; Börner, Sanyal, & Vespignani, 2006; Small, 1999; White & McCain, 1997).
6. Each database or tool requires specific search strategy(ies) in order to collect citation data, some more accurately and quickly (i.e., WoS and Scopus) than others (i.e., GS).

(Accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology)

The Rise and Rise of Citation Analysis

Meho, Lokman I. (2007) The Rise and Rise of Citation Analysis.

Full text available as:PDF -.

Abstract:

With the vast majority of scientific papers now available online, this paper (accepted for publication in Physics World) describes how the Web is allowing physicists and information providers to measure more accurately the impact of these papers and their authors. Provides a historical background of citation analysis, impact factor, new citation data sources (e.g., Google Scholar, Scopus, NASA’s Astrophysics Data System Abstract Service, MathSciNet, ScienceDirect, SciFinder Scholar, Scitation/SPIN, and SPIRES-HEP), as well as h-index, g-index, and a-index.

The author shows his awareness with the new dimensions of publishing:

Scientists now need to make it their job to disseminate their work on as many platforms and in as many different ways as possible, such as publishing in open access and high-impact journals, and posting their work in institutional repositories, personal homepages and e-print servers, if they want their peers to be aware of, use and ultimately cite their work. Publishing a journal article is now only the first step in disseminating or communicating one’s work; the Web provides a multitude of methods and tools to publicize its scholarly worth.

Cortege according to Peter van Straaten

There is a nice repository with cartoons by Peter van Straaten.

Some of these are related to university topics, like this one: the cortege (1997, 25 januari). I see very unhappy professors with logo’s of companies who pay for these chairs.

Very sharp and still a ‘hot topic’ today.

Leiden Professors and their fascination; a good example for others

Leiden University has created a wonderful website about the work and fascination of it’s immense intellectual capital over the centuries. All profs in one place. Well done!

This is what I call a valuable nurturing of your intellectual heritage.