We study the possible influences of the Russia-Ukraine War on Russia’s research productivity and international collaboration in science. For this purpose, we introduce and apply two recently... Show moreWe study the possible influences of the Russia-Ukraine War on Russia’s research productivity and international collaboration in science. For this purpose, we introduce and apply two recently developed indicators of relative intensity and balance in international collaboration. To see whether longitudinal trends have changed recently, we combine a long-term perspective based on annual updates since the year 2000 with a short-term perspective based on monthly updates since the beginning of 2022. The clearest change is that the productivity of Russian science, as measured within Web of Science, has dramatically decreased after several years of growth. There is also a clear decline in the degree of international collaboration in fields of research that heavily rely on large multinational infrastructures established through state agreements. In other fields, however, the degree of international collaboration is more stable. The general decline in Russian science seems to be more driven by internal factors than by loss of partnerships abroad. Show less
Recent years have seen a rise in awareness around “responsible metrics” and calls for research assessment reforms internationally. Yet within the field of quantitative science studies and in... Show moreRecent years have seen a rise in awareness around “responsible metrics” and calls for research assessment reforms internationally. Yet within the field of quantitative science studies and in research policy contexts, concerns about the limitations of evaluative bibliometrics are almost as old as the tools themselves. Given that many of the concerns articulated in recent reform movements go back decades, why has momentum for change grown only in the past ten years? In this paper, we draw on analytical insights from the sociology of social movements on collective action frames to chart the emergence, development, and expansion of “responsible metrics” as a professional reform movement. Through reviewing important texts that have shaped reform efforts, we argue that hitherto, three framings have underpinned the responsible metrics reform agenda: the metrics scepticism framing, the professional-expert framing, and the reflexivity framing. We suggest that while these three framings have co-existed within the responsible metrics movement to date, the “truce” negotiated between these framings may not last indefinitely, especially as the responsible metrics movement extends into wider research assessment reform movements. Show less
The European Union’s Green Deal and associated policies, aspiring to long-term environmental sustainability, now require economic activities to ‘do no significant harm’ to EU environmental... Show moreThe European Union’s Green Deal and associated policies, aspiring to long-term environmental sustainability, now require economic activities to ‘do no significant harm’ to EU environmental objectives. The way the European Commission is enacting the do no significant harm principle relies on quantitative tools that try to identify harm and adjudicate its significance. A reliance on established technical approaches to assessing such questions ignores the high levels of imprecision, ambiguity, and uncertainty—levels often in flux—characterizing the social contexts in which harms emerge. Indeed, harm, and its significance, are relational, not absolute. A better approach would thus be to acknowledge the relational nature of harm and develop broad capabilities to engage and ‘stay with’ the harm. We use the case of European research and innovation activities to expose the relational nature of harm, and explore an alternative and potentially more productive approach that departs from attempts to unilaterally or uniformly claim to know or adjudicate what is or is not significantly harmful. In closing, we outline three ways research and innovation policy-makers might experiment with reconfiguring scientific and technological systems and practices to better address the significant harms borne by people, other-than-human beings, and ecosystems. Show less
This report presents the results of the Steering Research and Innovation for Global Goals (STRINGS) project – a major global study into the alignment between science, technology and innovation (STI... Show moreThis report presents the results of the Steering Research and Innovation for Global Goals (STRINGS) project – a major global study into the alignment between science, technology and innovation (STI) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It highlights a glaring mismatch between STI and the SDGs; warns that, if this mismatch is not addressed, it will undermine progress on the SDGs; and makes recommendations about how to tackle this imbalance. To help understand and better address the challenges of investing in STI for the SDGs, while embracing the complex relationship between STI and the SDGs, we make use of multiple analytical tools to examine STI-SDG relations for different types of actors, across geographical settings and time horizons. By combining methods from a range of disciplines, we provide complementary mappings, characterizations and understandings of the complex relations between STI and the SDGs. We are then able to build on these mappings and characterizations to illustrate and explain misalignments between STI activities and the SDGs. By combining these analyses, we gained deep insights into the way that particular STI priorities emerge both locally and globally, and how STI can be steered to improve alignment with the SDGs. Our results can help policymakers, research funders, academics, international organizations (INGOs) and aid organizations to make informed decisions about investing in research and innovation that will address the SDGs and ultimately create a positive impact on society. Show less
Increasingly code and algorithms are techniques also applied in textual scholarship, giving rise to new interactions between software engineers and textual scholars. This book argues that much of... Show moreIncreasingly code and algorithms are techniques also applied in textual scholarship, giving rise to new interactions between software engineers and textual scholars. This book argues that much of that process and its effects on textual scholarship are still poorly understood and go unchecked by otherwise normal processes of quality control in scholarship such as peer review. The text provides case studies in which some of these interactions become more apparent, as well as the academic challenges and problems that they introduce. The book demonstrates that the space between code creation and conventional scholarship is one that offers many affordances to textual scholarship that until now remain unexplored. The author argues that it is an intellectual obligation of programmers and textual scholars to examine the properties of digital text and how its existence changes and challenges textual scholarship. Show less
Taking Big Data research as a case study, this article intends to investigate the cognitive relatedness of research topics across the global science landscape to a focal topic. Several levels of... Show moreTaking Big Data research as a case study, this article intends to investigate the cognitive relatedness of research topics across the global science landscape to a focal topic. Several levels of cognitive relatedness are established depending on the citation distance between the citing publications and a core set of publications. The concept of citation generation is adopted for identifying and classifying other publications with different levels of relatedness to the core set. The micro publication-level classification system of Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) is applied for determining clusters of publication sets at the topic level. The overall cognitive relatedness of micro clusters to Big Data core publications are measured based on the mean citation generation of all the publications in corresponding clusters. In addition to the given clusters, this study also explores the 'topics' relatedness from a semantic point of view, by extracting high-frequency title terms of publications in each generation. Results show that data analysis methods and technologies are the topics with the strongest cognitive relatedness to Big Data research, while topics on physics and astronomy studies present the weakest relatedness. This approach allows assessment of relatedness between research topics by considering the citations distribution across multiple citation generations, and can provide useful insights to study and characterise topics with fuzzy boundaries or are difficult to delineate, thus representing a novel toolset relevant in the context of studying interdisciplinary research. Show less
Various stakeholders in science have put research integrity high on their agenda. Among them, research funders are prominently placed to foster research integrity by requiring that the... Show moreVarious stakeholders in science have put research integrity high on their agenda. Among them, research funders are prominently placed to foster research integrity by requiring that the organizations and individual researchers they support make an explicit commitment to research integrity. Moreover, funders need to adopt appropriate research integrity practices themselves. To facilitate this, we recommend that funders develop and implement a Research Integrity Promotion Plan (RIPP). This Consensus View offers a range of examples of how funders are already promoting research integrity, distills 6 core topics that funders should cover in a RIPP, and provides guidelines on how to develop and implement a RIPP. We believe that the 6 core topics we put forward will guide funders towards strengthening research integrity policy in their organization and guide the researchers and research organizations they fund. Show less
Leading citation databases have made concerted efforts to reflect academic conference contributions in the form of proceedings papers in their databases. We studied global trends and a regional... Show moreLeading citation databases have made concerted efforts to reflect academic conference contributions in the form of proceedings papers in their databases. We studied global trends and a regional case study to determine the relative representation of conference proceedings in the global scholarly literature using the Web of Science, Scopus, and Dimensions. We designed our case study of ten Southeast Asian countries to uncover conspicuous publishing patterns obscured by global average figures. As a result, we discovered that Indonesia alone has made a recent and remarkable shift towards conference proceedings publishing. This trend was not the result of expanding database coverage but may be linked to a rapid increase in conferences locally hosted in Indonesia.The conclusion suggests that conference proceedings are increasingly indexed by major databases, and that scholars might have found advantage in publishing conference papers that were quicker and easier to publish than journal articles or book chapters. Our study is relevant to policy makers in the area of research evaluation because it highlights potential changes in academic publishing behaviour by those being assessed. Show less
