Félix de Moya Anegón

The evolution of research activity in Spain: The impact of the National Commission for the Evaluation of Research Activity (CNEAI)

This article outlines the evolution of international scientific production in Spain over the last 25 years, a period characterised by steady growth in research production. The following stages in this process are identified in accordance with some of the factors that predominated at different times. From 1974 to 1982 production increased due to causes endogenous to the scientific system itself, as scientists brought their work into line with the patterns which characterised research in other industrialised countries. From 1982 to 1991 the prioritisation of R&D by government administrative bodies represented a constant stimulus, implemented through a set of legal measures, investments and the creation of posts for new researchers. From 1989 to the present the creation of the Comision Nacional de Evaluacion de la Actividad Investigadora (National Commission for the Evaluation of Research Activity, CNEAI) and the research incentive system have provided a further stimulus, which has led to the maintenance of, and an increase in, the rate of research production in spite of the net decrease in the monetary value of research grants awarded during the last period analysed. Other special characteristics of Spanish research, such as its dependence on the public sector and its essentially academic nature, are discussed.

The new Excellence Indicator in the World Report of the SCImago Institutions Rankings 2011

The new excellence indicator in the World Report of the SCImago Institutions Rankings (SIR) makes it possible to test differences in the ranking in terms of statistical significance. For example, at the 17th position of these rankings, UCLA has an output of 37,994 papers with an excellence indicator of 28.9. Stanford University follows at the 19th position with 37,885 papers and 29.1 excellence, and z = - 0.607. The difference between these two institution thus is not statistically significant. We provide a calculator at this http URL in which one can fill out this test for any two institutions and also for each institution on whether its score is significantly above or below expectation (assuming that 10% of the papers are for stochastic reasons in the top-10% set).

Document organization using Kohonen's algorithm

The classification of documents from a bibliographic database is a task that is linked to processes of information retrieval based on partial matching. A method is described of vectorizing reference documents from LISA which permits their topological organization using Kohonens algorithm. As an example a map is generated of 202 documents from LISA, and an analysis is made of the possibilities of this type of neural network with respect to the development of information retrieval systems based on graphical browsing.

Do Scientific Advancements Lean on the Shoulders of Giants? A Bibliometric Investigation of the Ortega Hypothesis

Background In contrast to Newtons well-known aphorism that he had been able “to see further only by standing on the shoulders of giants,” one attributes to the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset the hypothesis saying that top-level research cannot be successful without a mass of medium researchers on which the top rests comparable to an iceberg. Methodology/Principal Findings The Ortega hypothesis predicts that highly-cited papers and medium-cited (or lowly-cited) papers would equally refer to papers with a medium impact. The Newton hypothesis would be supported if the top-level research more frequently cites previously highly-cited work than that medium-level research cites highly-cited work. Our analysis is based on (i) all articles and proceedings papers which were published in 2003 in the life sciences, health sciences, physical sciences, and social sciences, and (ii) all articles and proceeding papers which were cited within these publications. The results show that highly-cited work in all scientific fields more frequently cites previously highly-cited papers than that medium-cited work cites highly-cited work. Conclusions/Significance We demonstrate that papers contributing to the scientific progress in a field lean to a larger extent on previously important contributions than papers contributing little. These findings support the Newton hypothesis and call into question the Ortega hypothesis (given our usage of citation counts as a proxy for impact).

A test of genetic algorithms in relevance feedback

There have been recent applications of genetic algorithms to information retrieval, mostly with respect to relevance feedback. Nevertheless, they are yet to be evaluated in a way that allows them to be compared with each other and with other relevance feedback techniques. We here implement the different genetic algorithms that have been applied in the literature together with some of our own variations, and evaluate them using the residual collection method described by Salton in 1990 for the evaluation of relevance feedback techniques. We compare the results with those of the Ide dec-hi method, which is one of the traditional methods that yields the best results.

Comparing bibliometric country-by-country rankings derived from the Web of Science and Scopus: the effect of poorly cited journals in oncology

This article addresses the robustness of country-by-country rankings according to the number of published articles and their average citation impact in the field oncology. It compares rankings based on bibliometric indicators derived from the Web of Science (WoS) with those calculated from Scopus. It is found that the oncological journals in Scopus not covered by WoS tend to be nationally oriented journals, i.e. they mainly serve a national research community, and play as of yet a more peripheral role in the international journal communication system. In expanding the set of WoS journals with Scopus journals not indexed for WoS, the countries that profit most in terms of percentage of published documents tend to show a decline in their average citation rate. This paradoxical finding is further explained by mathematical—statistical considerations, and interpreted as a short term effect. The paper discusses its implications for the construction of bibliometric indicators.

Ranking and mapping of universities and research-focused institutions worldwide based on highly-cited papers: : A visualisation of results from multi-level models

Purpose – The web application presented in this paper allows for an analysis to reveal centres of excellence in different fields worldwide using publication and citation data. Only specific aspects of institutional performance are taken into account and other aspects such as teaching performance or societal impact of research are not considered. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues. Design/methodology/approach – Based on data gathered from Scopus, field-specific excellence can be identified in institutions where highly-cited papers have been frequently published. Findings – The web application (www.excellencemapping.net) combines both a list of institutions ordered by different indicator values and a map with circles visualising indicator values for geocoded institutions. Originality/value – Compared to the mapping and ranking approaches introduced hitherto, our underlying statistics (multi-level models) are analytically oriented by allowing the estimation of values for the number of excel...

Visualization of scientific co-authorship in Spanish universities: from regionalization to internationalization

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to visualize the inter‐university and international collaboration networks generated by Spanish universities based on the co‐authorship of scientific articles.Design/methodology/approach – The approach takes the form of formulation based on a bibliometric analysis of Spanish university production from 2000 to 2004 as contained in Web of Science databases, applying social network visualization techniques. The co‐authorship data used were extracted with the total counting method from a database containing 100,710 papers.Findings – Spanish inter‐university collaboration patterns appear to be influenced by both geographic proximity and administrative and political affiliation. Inter‐regional co‐authorship encompasses regional sub‐networks whose spatial scope conforms rather closely with Spanish geopolitical divisions. Papers involving international collaboration are written primarily with European Union and North and Latin American researchers. Greater visibility is atta...

Do universities or research institutions with a specific subject profile have an advantage or a disadvantage in institutional rankings

Using data compiled for the SCImago Institutions Ranking, we look at whether the subject area type an institution (university or research-focused institution) belongs to (in terms of the fields researched) has an influence on its ranking position. We used latent class analysis to categorize institutions based on their publications in certain subject areas. Even though this categorization does not relate directly to scientific performance, our results show that it exercises an important influence on the outcome of a performance measurement: Certain subject area types of institutions have an advantage in the ranking positions when compared with others. This advantage manifests itself not only when performance is measured with an indicator that is not field-normalized but also for indicators that are field-normalized.

What is the effect of country-specific characteristics on the research performance of scientific institutions? Using multi-level statistical models to rank and map universities and research-focused institutions worldwide

Bornmann, Stefaner, de Moya Anegon, and Mutz (2014) have introduced a web application (www.excellencemapping.net) which is linked to both academic ranking lists published hitherto (e.g. the Academic Ranking of World Universities) as well as spatial visualization approaches. The web application visualizes institutional performance within specific subject areas as ranking lists and on custom tile-based maps. The new, substantially enhanced version of the web application and the generalized linear mixed model for binomial data on which it is based are described in this paper. Scopus data are used which have been collected for the SCImago Institutions Ranking. Only those universities and research-focused institutions are considered that have published at least 500 articles, reviews and conference papers in the period 2006–2010 in a certain Scopus subject area. In the enhanced version, the effect of single covariates (such as the per capita GDP of a country in which an institution is located) on two performance metrics (best paper rate and best journal rate) is examined and visualized. A covariate-adjusted ranking and mapping of the institutions is produced in which the single covariates are held constant. The results on the performance of institutions can then be interpreted as if the institutions all had the same value (reference point) for the covariate in question. For example, those institutions can be identified worldwide showing a very good performance despite a bad financial situation in the corresponding country.