Jens Peter Andersen

Price revisited: on the growth of dissertations in eight research fields

This paper studies the production of dissertations in eight research fields in the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. In using doctoral dissertations it builds on De Solla Prices seminal study which used PhD dissertations as one of several indicators of scientific growth (Price, Little science, big science, 1963). Data from the ProQuest: Dissertations and Theses database covering the years 1950–2007 are used to depict historical trends, and the Gompertz function was used for analysing the data. A decline in the growth of dissertations can be seen in all fields in the mid-eighties and several fields show only a modest growth during the entire period. The growth profiles of specific disciplines could not be explained by traditional dichotomies such as pure/applied or soft/hard, but rather it seems that the age of the discipline appears to be an important factor. Thus, it is obvious that the growth of dissertations must be explained using several factors emerging both inside and outside academia. Consequently, we propose that the output of dissertations can be used as an indicator of growth, especially in fields like the humanities, where journal or article counts are less applicable.

Global Myeloma Research Clusters, Output, and Citations: A Bibliometric Mapping and Clustering Analysis

Background International collaborative research is a mechanism for improving the development of disease-specific therapies and for improving health at the population level. However, limited data are available to assess the trends in research output related to orphan diseases. Methods and Findings We used bibliometric mapping and clustering methods to illustrate the level of fragmentation in myeloma research and the development of collaborative efforts. Publication data from Thomson Reuters Web of Science were retrieved for 2005–2009 and followed until 2013. We created a database of multiple myeloma publications, and we analysed impact and co-authorship density to identify scientific collaborations, developments, and international key players over time. The global annual publication volume for studies on multiple myeloma increased from 1,144 in 2005 to 1,628 in 2009, which represents a 43% increase. This increase is high compared to the 24% and 14% increases observed for lymphoma and leukaemia. The major proportion (>90% of publications) was from the US and EU over the study period. The output and impact in terms of citations, identified several successful groups with a large number of intra-cluster collaborations in the US and EU. The US-based myeloma clusters clearly stand out as the most productive and highly cited, and the European Myeloma Network members exhibited a doubling of collaborative publications from 2005 to 2009, still increasing up to 2013. Conclusion and Perspective Multiple myeloma research output has increased substantially in the past decade. The fragmented European myeloma research activities based on national or regional groups are progressing, but they require a broad range of targeted research investments to improve multiple myeloma health care.

One and a half million medical papers reveal a link between author gender and attention to gender and sex analysis

Gender and sex analysis is increasingly recognized as a key factor in creating better medical research and health care1–7. Using a sample of more than 1.5 million medical research papers, our study examined the potential link between women’s participation in medical science and attention to gender-related and sex-related factors in disease-specific research. Adjusting for variations across countries, disease topics and medical research areas, we compared the participation of women authors in studies that do and do not involve gender and sex analysis. Overall, our results show a robust positive correlation between women’s authorship and the likelihood of a study including gender and sex analysis. These findings corroborate discussions of how women’s participation in medical science links to research outcomes, and show the mutual benefits of promoting both the scientific advancement of women and the integration of gender and sex analysis into medical research.Nielsen and colleagues’ analysis of a large database of medical research papers shows a correlation between women’s authorship and the likelihood of a study including gender and sex analysis.

An empirical and theoretical critique of the Euclidean index

The recently proposed Euclidean index offers a novel approach to measure the citation impact of academic authors, in particular as an alternative to the h-index. We test if the index provides new, robust information, not covered by existing bibliometric indicators, discuss the measurement scale and the degree of distinction between analytical units the index offers. We find that the Euclidean index does not outperform existing indicators on these topics and that the main application of the index would be solely for ranking, which is not seen as a recommended practice.

Google Scholar and Web of Science: Examining gender differences in citation coverage across five scientific disciplines

Abstract Many studies demonstrate differences in the coverage of citing publications in Google Scholar (GS) and Web of Science (WoS). Here, we examine to what extent citation data from the two databases reflect the scholarly impact of women and men differently. Our conjecture is that WoS carries an indirect gender bias in its selection criteria for citation sources that GS avoids due to criteria that are more inclusive. Using a sample of 1250 U.S. researchers in Sociology, Political Science, Economics, Cardiology and Chemistry, we examine gender differences in the average citation coverage of the two databases. We also calculate database-specific h-indices for all authors in the sample. In repeated simulations of hiring scenarios, we use these indices to examine whether womens appointment rates increase if hiring decisions rely on data from GS in lieu of WoS. We find no systematic gender differences in the citation coverage of the two databases. Further, our results indicate marginal to non-existing effects of database selection on womens success-rates in the simulations. In line with the existing literature, we find the citation coverage in WoS to be largest in Cardiology and Chemistry and smallest in Political Science and Sociology. The concordance between author-based h-indices measured by GS and WoS is largest for Chemistry followed by Cardiology, Political Science, Sociology and Economics.

Mapping international impact of Danish neuroscience from 2004 to 2015 using tailored scientometric methodology

This study was undertaken to assess the standing of Danish neuroscience and how this broad research field has evolved in Denmark in recent years as compared to a number of world-leading neuroscience countries. This article outlines the hitherto most comprehensive study of international research performance in the neurosciences using an elaborate search methodology to identify relevant research articles and robust advanced scientometric indicators to quantify performance. Despite the considerable interest in neuroscience research, only a few scholarly studies have examined aspects of research performance, and no study has carried out this comprehensively across carefully identified research specialties or comparatively at the level of countries (e.g., Sengupta, 1989; Schwechheimer & Winterhager, 2001; Gl€anzel et al., 2003; Sorensen & Weedon, 2011; Shahabuddin, 2013; Ohlendorf et al., 2015; Buchan et al., 2016; Leitner et al., 2016). Two recent commercial reports, though, have examined neuroscience research performance, one for a specific research initiative in the UK (Gunashekar et al., 2015), and the other, globally for selected countries (Elsevier, 2014); albeit, the latter study lacks a proper methodological outline, and it is overly reliant on Elsevier’s standard analytical tools. Commissioned by the Lundbeck Foundation (www.lundbeckfonde n.com), this study aimed at examining the international standing of Danish neuroscience research and how this field has developed over the past decade (2004–2015) compared to USA, Canada, the Netherlands, UK, Germany, Switzerland and Sweden. These countries were selected for comparison because they were the highest ranked of all countries in a previous unpublished performance analysis based on the Web of Science (WoS) neuroscience subject category. Contrary to previous analyses of neuroscience, and traditional scientometric performance analyses in general, this study was based on a specially constructed publication set which is assumed to broadly cover neuroscience and related research areas (i.e. here neuroscience encompassed basic and clinical research including neurology and psychiatry). The publication set was constructed by querying the PubMed database for neuroscience topics using a combination of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), title and abstract words, and core journals. Subsequently identified publications from PubMed were matched with corresponding records in the WoS citation database, enabling advanced scientometric analyses. This approach has several advantages over traditional analyses; most importantly, we identified relevant articles according to their subject indexing at the individual publication level. Traditional performance analyses rely on arbitrary journal subject categories for delimiting the topic of interest, which often leads to the inclusion of irrelevant as well as exclusion of relevant papers published in multidisciplinary journals some of them with high impact.