Rickard Danell

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.

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.

The top eight percent: Development of approved and rejected applicants for a prestigious grant in Sweden

In the final round of a call for applications for one of Swedens most prestigious research grants, 40 relatively young and potentially promising researchers remained. Half were eventually approved; the other half were rejected. The differences between them in terms scientific merit were investigated. No particular differences were found. How did these two groups differ in terms of scientific development a few years later, with respect to publications, international co-authorships, further funding and spin-offs? Results show that the approved group has been more successful in many ways. A discussion is held regarding the effects of providing young promising researchers with sufficient funding, and the cost of failing to do so. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Research collaboration at Nordic universities

Scientific collaboration has become a major issue in science policy. The need to survey and follow up such collaboration calls for statistical indicators sensitive enough to reveal the structure and change of collaborative networks. Bibliometric analysis of co-authored scientific articles is one promising approach. This study presents data generated from a comprehensive analysis of some 20,000 articles produced by 22 Nordic universities (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden) in 1993. The results show that scientific collaboration plays a key role for all universities, and that they collaborate with external institutions in just about the same extent. The inter-Nordic university network comprises about ten percent of all institutional collaborations. However, the amount of collaboration varies across fields, physics and medicine having a high degree of collaboration. The inter-Nordic network is of equal importance as the national network in physics and geosciences. Especially, when one looks at international collaboration outside the Nordic arena, the number of overlapping partners is quite low. This suggests that research specialization is the major force governing international contacts.

Career prospects for female university researchers have not improved

There are fewer female than male professors in the world (21–79 distribution in the country of examination). The unequal distribution of male and female professors has usually been taken to indicate that men and women have not had equal opportunities to achieve professorship. At the same time, the increase in the proportion of female professors has been taken as evidence that academia is becoming more gender equal. It is possible that both of these assumptions are flawed, and that the gender distribution among professors is the result of demographic inertia, i.e., affected by the previous distribution of men and women within the system, and how fast the distribution has changed.This study examines whether the chances, for men and women, of becoming a full professor changes over time, and whether gender differences may possibly depend on early career events. It concludes that women are significantly less likely than men to become professors and that this situation is not improving over time. In spite of policies that have tried to increase the proportion of female professors, the chances of a woman becoming a professor do not change over time. We also show that these gender differences in promotion rate can be attributed to early career events.

Publication activity in complementary and alternative medicine

In this article we analyse how research on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) break through into one established scientific arena, namely academic journals. With help from bibliometric methods we analyse publication of CAM articles, in the Medline database, during the period 1966–2007. We also analyse the general content of the articles and in what journals they get published. We conclude that the publication activity of CAM articles increases rapidly, especially in the late 1990s, and that the changing growth rate is not due to the general expansion of Medline. The character of CAM articles has changed towards more clinical oriented research, especially in subfields such as acupuncture and musculoskeletal manipulations. CAM articles are found both in core clinical journals and in specialized CAM journals. Even though a substantial part of the articles are published in CAM journals, we conclude that the increasing publication activity is not restricted to the expansion of these specialized journals.

Britannia and Her Business Schools

Business education constitutes a significant part of offerings at modern universities. It started to emerge on both sides of the Atlantic around 1900, despite considerable resistance from professor ...

THE FIRST MOVER AND THE CHALLENGER: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TWO JOURNALS IN ORGANIZATION RESEARCH

Many new journals are started in response to increasing specialization and limited space in existing journals. In this study two journals in organization research are studied,Administrative Science Quarterly as the first mover in the field andOrganization Studies as the challenger. It is shown that the new journal gradually differ from the old in terms of the national origin of its authors as well as the documents cited. It is concluded that the scientific journal market may not mirror the copy-cat behaviour found among newspapers or companies in other markets.

Development of scientific publications on acupunctur

During the last couple of decades, the use of acupuncture, in order to treat and relieve different kinds of symptoms and disorders, has increased dramatically in Western societies (e.g., Eisenberg et al., 1993; Harris & Rees 2000; Thomas et al. 2001; Vincent & Furnham, 1996). Together with some other integrative and complementary therapies1, such as osteopathy and chiropractic, acupuncture has evolved from being a rather unusual treatment to a relatively accepted one, and has been integrated in public health sectors. Today, it is often possible to get acupuncture from biomedical professionals, such as doctors and midwives, or visit trained acupuncturists as part of conventional health care, which is covered by general social security systems. Previous studies indicate a rapid increase in research of integrative and complementary medicine in general (Danell & Danell, 2009; Fu et al., 2011) and on acupuncture (Han & Ho, 2011). There are also indications of a growth in evidence-based research, in the form of clinical trials, in sub-fields such as acupuncture and musculoskeletal manipulations (Danell & Danell, 2009), and increased publications in mainstream biomedical journals (Barnes et al., 1996; Fontantarosa, 2001). There has also been notable institutional and financial support for research on integrative and complementary medicine through, for example, the establishment of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (a branch of the US National Institute of Health) and associations such as the International Society for Complementary Medicine Research. However, the establishment of integrative and complementary medicine in biomedical contexts is far from uncontroversial. In most Western countries there are both symbolic and institutional divisions between biomedicine on one hand, and alternative/complementary/integrative medicine on the other (e.g., Jutte, 2001). One crucial

Evaluating research organizations’ contribution to science is not the same task as evaluating the performance of their scientists

In their article “A farewell to the MNCS and like size-independent indicators” Abramo and D’Angelo argue that size-independent indicators are not suitable for assessing research performance; due to ...