Ulf Sandström

Institutionalizing the triple helix: research funding and norms in the academic system

Abstract What are the institutional mechanisms that enable or hinder the development of new forms of knowledge production? This issue has been slightly neglected in the discussion of the “triple helix”. To redress this shortcoming, the authors suggest an institutionalist complement to the triple helix model. The article analyzes the institutional regulation of academic research, with a special emphasis on how norms in the academic system are constituted via research funding. It is argued that funding is a key mechanism of change in the norm system since its reward structure influences the performance and evaluation of research. The empirical analysis is based on the public financing of technical research in Sweden, with comparisons made with other countries. The structure of research funding has been reformed in all the countries studied. In addition to continuing recognition for scientific merit, the reforms have had the effect of emphasizing the commercial potential and the societal relevance of the research supported. The two dominant models of research funding, an intra-academic model and a top–down interventionist model, seem to be replaced partly with a catalytic one. However, there are counteracting tendencies. Some agencies still reproduce a model of reputational control and a collegial orientation among researchers. It is concluded, therefore, that the forces of change and continuity are engaged in a process of negotiation about the normative regulation of academic research.

Persistent nepotism in peer-review

In a replication of the high-profile contribution by Wennerås and Wold on grant peer-review, we investigate new applications processed by the medical research council in Sweden. Introducing a normalisation method for ranking applications that takes into account the differences between committees, we also use a normalisation of bibliometric measures by field. Finally, we perform a regression analysis with interaction effects. Our results indicate that female principal investigators (PIs) receive a bonus of 10% on scores, in relation to their male colleagues. However, male and female PIs having a reviewer affiliation collect an even higher bonus, approximately 15%. Nepotism seems to be a persistent problem in the Swedish grant peer review system.

Combining Curriculum Vitae and Bibliometric Analysis : Mobility, Gender and Research Performance

This paper demonstrates the benefits of combining curriculum vitae studies with advanced bibliometrics. Based on data from 326 CVs within one broad medical subject area we perform a cluster analysis of CV data. Data reduction produces four different groups of scientists: 1) mobile, 2) immobile, 3) excellent and 4) entrepreneurial. While it is clear that the most mobile and the least mobile researchers represent opposites also in citation performance we should acknowledge that for the large majority, with a low and medium mobility, there is no linear pattern of performance. The paper points at a double process where there are on the one hand selection processes at universities picking out ‘the winners’ and on the other hand self selection processes where researchers enhance their own performance by being mobile. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

The field factor : towards a metric for academic institutions

We present a new model for performance-related funding of universities in Sweden. The model is based on number of papers in international scientific journals, but relies on an estimation of field adjusted production per scientific/technological area. Author counts are based on potential authors using the Waring distribution for 34 areas of science (Schubert and Braun, 1992). We apply this model to the Swedish university system and illustrate with the reallocations that would follow from a complete implementation. Next, we test the accuracy of the method using publication data from six Swedish universities and four Norwegian universities. In conclusion we discuss advantages and drawbacks with the method. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Inertia and change in Scandinavian public-sector research systems: the case of biotechnology

This article reviews and analyses recent reforms of research funding in Denmark, Norway and Sweden where research councils traditionally have been the dominant funding mechanism. It analyses how the research council system is affected by changes in the political, economic and cognitive environments of public-sector research (PSR) and how the councils try to adapt to the changing conditions. Inspired by institutional theory the article starts with a discussion of path-dependency in PSR systems. A survey of the development of research councils in the Scandinavian countries traces the changing organisation and orientation of research councils in relation to political, economic and technological processes, and in particular how they have adapted to the emergence of a new research area, biotechnology, where the boundaries between science and technology, academic research and commercial application, are blurred. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Quantity and/or quality? The importance of publishing many papers

Do highly productive researchers have significantly higher probability to produce top cited papers? Or do high productive researchers mainly produce a sea of irrelevant papers—in other words do we find a diminishing marginal result from productivity? The answer on these questions is important, as it may help to answer the question of whether the increased competition and increased use of indicators for research evaluation and accountability focus has perverse effects or not. We use a Swedish author disambiguated dataset consisting of 48.000 researchers and their WoS-publications during the period of 2008–2011 with citations until 2014 to investigate the relation between productivity and production of highly cited papers. As the analysis shows, quantity does make a difference.

Research quality and diversity of funding: A model for relating research money to output of research

We analyze the relation between funding and output using bibliometric methods with field normalized data. Our approach is to connect individual researcher data on funding from Swedish university databases to data on incoming grants using the specific personal ID-number. Data on funding include the person responsible for the grant. All types of research income are considered in the analysis yielding a project database with a high level of precision. Results show that productivity can be explained by background variables, but that quality of research is more or less un-related to background variables.

Biodiversity in Urban Governance and Planning: Examples from Swedish Cities

One of the key agreements adopted at the Rio Conference in 1992 was the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Both in practice and research biodiversity has been mainly addressed in a non-urban context, often discussed in relation to issues such as the depletion of rainforests and desertification. However, as more than half of the world population are urban dwellers, it is increasingly urgent to discuss the application of the concept of biodiversity within an urban context. Issues approached in this article are: What does it mean to talk about biodiversity in an urban context? Is biodiversity a meaningful goal for urban politics and planning? Is there empirical evidence of implementing biodiversity in urban politics and planning. After an introduction, the article is organized into four sections. In the second section the concept of biological diversity is defined with special reference to its application in an urban context. Biodiversity and its relationship to urban governance is the topic of the third section, followed by a section analysing examples of how this relationship is practised in selected Swedish cities. The final section highlights five major conclusions with regard to the application of biodiversity in an urban context: (1) that all cities studied have adopted overall ‘green’ policies, including biodiversity as one component; (2) that local coalitions in favour of implementing biodiversity have been established between employees at different offices, between employees and politicians, and between employees and NGOs; (3) that there are in all cases tangible signs of spatial patterns and structures that are favourable to biodiversity; (4) that urban biodiversity, for its successful implementation, needs to be related, and accommodated to other values given priority in current policymaking, such as recreation; (5) that mainstream biodiversity analysis should be complemented by an urban landscape approach. Finally, the article returns to the more general question of what biodiversity could and should mean in urban planning.

Perverse effects of output-based research funding? Butler’s Australian case revisited

More than ten years ago, Linda Butler (2003a) published a well-cited article claiming that the Australian science policy in the early 1990s made a mistake by introducing output based funding. According to Butler, the policy stimulated researchers to publish more but at the same time less good papers, resulting in lower total impact of Australian research compared to other countries. We redo and extend the analysis using longer time series, and show that Butlers’ main conclusions are not correct. We conclude in this paper (i) that the currently available data reject Butler’s claim that “journal publication productivity has increased significantly… but its impact has declined”, and (ii) that it is hard to find such evidence also with a reconstruction of her data. On the contrary, after implementing evaluation systems and performance based funding, Australia not only improved its share of research output but also increased research quality, implying that total impact was greatly increased. Our findings show that if output based research funding has an effect on research quality, it is positive and not negative. This finding has implications for the discussions about research evaluation and about assumed perverse effects of incentives, as in those debates the Australian case plays a major role.

Large-scale bibliometric review of diffusion research

Despite the fact that diffusion research has existed for more than a century, a quantitative review covering this subject in a broad and general context is still lacking. This article reviews diffusion research by providing an extensive bibliometric and clustering analysis. In total, we identified thirteen clusters comprising 6,811 publications over the period of 2002–2011, and thereby describe the characteristics of diffusion research in an extensive and general way based on quantitative bibliometric methods. The analysis reveals that diffusion research is highly interdisciplinary in character, involving several disciplines from ethnology to economics, with many overlapping research trails. The concluding section indicates that diffusion research seems to be data driven and relies heavily on solely empirical studies. Consequently, influential publications rely on empirical data that support and change theories in modest ways only. In this contribution, we propose a review method that produces a fairly good overview of the research area and which can be applied to any knowledge field to replace or complement the traditional literature review.