Olle Persson

Studying research collaboration using co-authorships

Scientific collaboration has become a major issue in science policy. The tremendous growth of collaboration among nations and research institutions witnessed during the last twenty years is a function of the internal dynamics of science as well as science policy initiatives. The need to survey and follow up the collaboration issue calls for statistical indicators sensitive enough to reveal the structure and change of collaborative networks. In this context, bibliometric analysis of co-authored scientific articles is one promising approach. This paper discusses the relationship between collaboration and co-authorship, the nature of bibliometric data, and exemplifies how they can be refined and used to analyse various aspects of collaboration.

Inflationary bibliometric values: the role of scientific collaboration and the need for relative indicators in evaluative studies

Several research studies and reports on national and European science and technology indicators have recently presented figures reflecting intensifying scientific collaboration and increasing citation impact in practically all science areas and at all levels of aggregation. The main objective of this paper is twofold, namely first to analyse if the number or weight of actors in scientific communication has increased, if patterns of documented scientific communication and collaboration have changed in the last two decades and if these tendencies have inflationary features. The second question is concerned with the role of scientific collaboration in this context. In particular, the question will be answered to what extent co-authorship and publication activity, on one hand, and co-authorship and citation impact, on the other hand, do interact. The answers found to these questions have strong implication for the application of bibliometric indicators in research evaluation, moreover, the construction of indicators applied to trend analyses and studies based on medium-term or long-term observations have to be reconsidered to guarantee the validity of conclusions drawn from bibliometric results.

The measurement of international scientific collaboration

A growing science policy interest in international scientific collaboration has brought about a multitude of studies which attempt to measure the extent of international scientific collaboration between countries and to explore intercountry collaborative networks. This paper attempts to clarify the methodology that is being used or can be used for this purpose and discusses the adequacy of the methods. The paper concludes that, in an analysis of collaborative links, it is essential to use both absolute and relative measures. The latter normalize differences in country size. Each yields a different type of information. Absolute measures yield an answer to questions such as which countries are central in the international network of science, whether collaborative links reveal a centre — periphery relationship, and which countries are the most important collaborative partners of another country. Relative measures provide answers to questions of the intensity of collaborative links.

The intellectual base and research fronts of JASIS 1986–1990

A citation analysis was applied to articles published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science. The document set consisted of 209 genuine articles from the 1986–1990 SSCI® CD‐ROM. To find the intellectual base of these articles a cocitation analysis was made. A map of the most cocited authors shows considerable resemblance to a map of information science produced by other methods. Citation‐based bibliographic coupling was applied to the same set of documents in order to define research fronts, i.e., clusters of articles using similar parts of the intellectual base. It is also shown that the research front map has a close correspondence with the man of the intellectual base.

Nanotechnology-interdisciplinarity, patterns of collaboration and differences in application

Nanotechnology is a novel technological field said to be one of the key technologies in the 21st century revoltionizing information technology, materials and medicine. Bibliometric quantification is a way to show the emergence of a new technology.Braun et al.1 could establish an exponential growth pattern of publications in nano-science and technology starting in the early 1990s. Using their study as basis we intend to further characterize nanotechnology using bibliometric as well as patent data. We can show that the share of boundary-spanning publications is exceptionally high in the field of nanotechnology. Our co-authorship analysis indicates that countries follow different patterns of collaboration. Some countries tend to have bilateral relations while others collaborate with a much larger array of nations. Patent data in combination with bibliometric reveals differences in the application of science. In our conclusion we raise a number of questions requiring an analysis using also other types of data. Still, a closer investigation and disaggregation of bibliometric data may come up with additional findings.

Entrepreneurial Studies: The Dynamic Research Front of a Developing Social Science

Entrepreneurship research has been built upon a historical foundation grounded in economic change. To understand the development of the field, it is useful to understand the motivations and interests of key scholars and to trace the linkages between these scholars and other authors, from the transient to the contributor. This has been done through a bibliometric analysis of research articles cited between 1982 and 2004. Entrepreneurship has developed from a subdiscipline of management studies reliant on alien terms and cognitive methods toward a separate field with increasing complexities of its own. While not fully mature, entrepreneurship shows all the signs of a maturing field from its increasingly internal orientation and the establishment of key areas of research through to an enhanced, discipline–specific, theoretical approach with a professional language of its own.

Are highly cited papers more international

Several bibliometric studies have shown that international or multicountry papers are generally more cited than domestic or single country papers. Does this also hold for the most cited papers? In this study, the citation impact of domestic versus international papers is analyzed by comparing the share of international papers among the hundred most cited papers in four research specialities, from three universities, four cities and two countries. It is concluded that international papers are not well represented among high impact papers in research specialities, but dominate highly cited papers from small countries, and from cities and institutions within them. The share of international papers among highly cited papers is considerably higher during 2001–2008 compared to earlier years for institutions, cities and countries, but somewhat less for two of the research fields and slightly higher for the other two. Above all, domestic papers from the USA comprise about half of the highly cited papers in the research specialities.

socio-bibliometric mapping of intra-departmental networks

The mapping of author networks at academic departments is the focus of this study. Papers from two departments at two different universities, but within the same field of research, were analyzed in terms of co-authorship, direct and indirect citations among the authors. Considerable overlap was found between the co-authorship and the citation based networks. The paper also introduces the idea of socio-bibliometric maps that can be used to make social interpretations of bibliometric networks. The nodes of the networks were labeled by sex and seniority and supervisor-student links were also indicated. When reading the maps and tabulating the links it could be concluded that the two departmental networks were structured differently by sex and seniority.

Regional R&D activities and interactions in the Swedish Triple Helix

The Swedish innovation system is analysed in terms of the interaction between academia, government and the private sector. For each of 21 Swedish regions we analyse the distribution of research activities, doctoral employment, and publication output, as well as the flow of doctoral graduates and the distribution of co-authorship links across regions and sectors. The three main urban regions have about 75 percent of all R&D activities and outputs. They also have a more balanced supply of academic, governmental and private research activities than the smaller regions, and the interactions among sectors within these regions are more intense. The inter-regional flow of PhDs is also to the advantage of the big regions. So far, decentralization of the academic sector does not seem to have had as similar decentralizing effect on private R&D. Unless this imbalance changes, smaller regions will continue to be net exporters of skill and knowledge to the big regions.

Locating the network of interacting authors in scientific specialties

This paper seeks to describe the social circles, networks, or invisible colleges etc that make a scientific speciality in terms of (mathematically precise) sets generated by documents citation and accessible through theSocial Science Citation Index\TM. The document and author sets that encompass a scientific speciality are the basis for some interdependent citation matrices. We illustrate our method of construction of these sets and matrices through an application to the literature on \ldinvisible colleges\rd.