Preprints have gained prominence in the dissemination of scientific findings. This development has been reinforced by the COVID-19 pandemic, which continues to require the rapid dissemination of... Show morePreprints have gained prominence in the dissemination of scientific findings. This development has been reinforced by the COVID-19 pandemic, which continues to require the rapid dissemination of new scientific information. However, since preprints usually have not undergone peer review, they lack the rigour of other scientific publications such as journal articles. This presents a challenge for the news media tasked with keeping the public informed about the latest scientific developments in the context of great uncertainty during a global pandemic. This research note investigates the reporting of scientific information from preprints in 80 news articles identified in news articles related to COVID-19 published in four South African online media outlets. Our results show that despite the publication of guidelines for reporting on preprints in the media, there is still a way to go regarding the judicious use of scientific information from preprints by the news media. Show less
Reyes Elizondo, A.E.; Calero-Medina, C.; Visser, M.S. 2022
This paper presents a method for classifying the varying degrees of interdependency between academic hospitals and universities in the context of the Leiden Ranking. A key question for ranking... Show moreThis paper presents a method for classifying the varying degrees of interdependency between academic hospitals and universities in the context of the Leiden Ranking. A key question for ranking universities is whether or not to allocate the publication output of affiliated hospitals to universities.Hospital nomenclatures vary worldwide to denote some form of collaboration with a university: academic hospitals, teaching hospitals, university hospitals, and academic medical centres do not correspond to universally standard definitions. Thus, rather than seeking a normative definition of academic hospitals, we are proposing a workflow that aligns the university-hospital relationship with one of three general models: full integration of the hospital and the medical faculty into a single organization; health science centres in which hospitals and medical faculty remain separate entities albeit within the same governance structure; and structures in which universities and hospitals are separate entities which collaborate with one another. This classification system provides a standard by which we can allocate publications which note affiliations with academic hospitals.Our three-step workflow effectively translates the three above-mentioned models into two types of instrumental relationships for the assignation of publications: “associate” and “component”. When a hospital and a medical faculty are fully integrated or when a hospital is part of a health science centre, the relationship is classified as component. When a hospital follows the model of collaboration and support, the relationship is classified as associate. The compilation of data following these standards allows for a more uniform comparison between worldwide educational and research systems. Show less
Kaltenbrunner, W.; Rijcke, S. de; Müller, R.; Burner-Fritsch, I. 2022
We propose institutional mobility indicators based on researchers' mobility flows in 22 major fields of science across 1,130 Leiden Ranking institutions from 64 countries. We base our indicators on... Show moreWe propose institutional mobility indicators based on researchers' mobility flows in 22 major fields of science across 1,130 Leiden Ranking institutions from 64 countries. We base our indicators on data from the Dimensions database and Global Research Identifier Database. We use researchers' first and last affiliations to estimate the extent authors have moved across institutions as well as countries. For each institution, we quantify the shares of researchers with the same affiliation (insiders), those who came from another institution within the country (domestic outsiders), and those coming from a different country (foreign outsiders). Institutions in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe have the highest share of insiders, whereas institutions in Northern America and Western and Northern Europe have a higher share of foreign outsiders. Foreign outsiders are most common in small and wealthy countries. No disciplinary differences are observed, as captured by the field classification scheme of Dimensions. Show less
The data re-collection for tweets from data snapshots is a common methodological step in Twitter-based research. Understanding better the volatility of tweets over time is important for validating... Show moreThe data re-collection for tweets from data snapshots is a common methodological step in Twitter-based research. Understanding better the volatility of tweets over time is important for validating the reliability of metrics based on Twitter data. We tracked a set of 37,918 original scholarly tweets mentioning COVID-19-related research daily for 56 days and captured the reasons for the changes in their availability over time. Results show that the proportion of unavailable tweets increased from 1.6 to 2.6% in the time window observed. Of the 1,323 tweets that became unavailable at some point in the period observed, 30.5% became available again afterwards. “Revived” tweets resulted mainly from the unprotecting, reactivating, or unsuspending of users' accounts. Our findings highlight the importance of noting this dynamic nature of Twitter data in altmetric research and testify to the challenges that this poses for the retrieval, processing, and interpretation of Twitter data about scientific papers. Show less
Bernstein, M.J.; Nielsen, M.W.; Alno, E.; Brasil Varandas Pinto, A.; Birkving, A.L.; Chan, T.T.; ... ; Mejlgaard, N. 2022
Dmitry Kochetkov is PhD candidate at CWTS. In this post, he gives an update on Priority-2030, a new excellence initiative in the Russian higher education sector. He also makes some reflections on... Show moreDmitry Kochetkov is PhD candidate at CWTS. In this post, he gives an update on Priority-2030, a new excellence initiative in the Russian higher education sector. He also makes some reflections on the role of this experience in the global context of higher education reform. Show less
Mugabushaka, A.M.; Eck, N.J. van; Waltman, L. 2022
To analyze the outcomes of the funding they provide, it is essential for funding agencies to be able to trace the publications resulting from their funding. We study the open availability of... Show moreTo analyze the outcomes of the funding they provide, it is essential for funding agencies to be able to trace the publications resulting from their funding. We study the open availability of funding data in Crossref, focusing on funding data for publications that report research related to COVID-19. We also present a comparison with the funding data available in two proprietary bibliometric databases: Scopus and Web of Science. Our analysis reveals limited coverage of funding data in Crossref. It also shows problems related to the quality of funding data, especially in Scopus. We offer recommendations for improving the open availability of funding data in Crossref. Show less
Relevance. One of the main goals of state university support programs in Russia is to increase the number of scientific publications. In 2021, Project 5-100 was replaced by the program PRIORITY... Show moreRelevance. One of the main goals of state university support programs in Russia is to increase the number of scientific publications. In 2021, Project 5-100 was replaced by the program PRIORITY 2030 (Strategic Academic Leadership Program). The new program increased the significance of the factors affecting the number of publications in universities and the issue of the optimal allocation of funding among research groups.Research objective. This study examines the factors that affect the productivity of research groups at the university. Unlike the majority of other studies on this topic, this study analyzes scientific productivity at the level of research groups.Data and methods. The study was possible due to the availability of data for 79 research groups at the Ural Federal University for the period from 2014 to 2020. The total number of articles and the number of articles in journals with an impact factor of more than two were used as indicators of research groups’ performance. To determine the factors influencing these indicators, we used econometric models for panel data. We used two separate samples: for social sciences and humanities and for other sciences.Results. We identified the following factors affecting the performance of research groups: the number of participants, the age of the research group, the supervisor’s scientific age, and the amount of funding (the possibility of obtaining more funds or being denied funds). The most interesting result is the following: the supervisor's scientific age and increased funding have a negative impact on the group’s performance. The article provides possible explanations for these results.Conclusion. Since the purpose of creating and funding research groups is primarily to increase their productivity, the results may be in favor of younger supervisors. University managers may also be interested in the ambiguous impact of increased funding: we suppose that research groups are more motivated not by the actual funding but by the prospective amount they may get. Show less
Cloete, N.; Van Schalkwyk, F.; Winnink, j.; Tijssen R.J.W. 2022
In the post-industrial economy, the efficiency of scientific knowledge generation becomes crucial. Researchers began to interpret knowledge as a factor of economic growth in the second half of the... Show moreIn the post-industrial economy, the efficiency of scientific knowledge generation becomes crucial. Researchers began to interpret knowledge as a factor of economic growth in the second half of the 20th century; since then, within the theory of economics and management, various approaches have been developed to study the impact of knowledge on economic growth and performance. With time, the focus of knowledge-based theories shifted from corporate management to macrosystems and economic policy. The article describes the main stages in the development of socio-economic concepts of knowledge and analyzes the theoretical and methodological aspects of each approach. The authors have also formulated the critical problems in the analysis of the economic category of knowledge at the present stage and suggested ways of overcoming them. The article may be of interest both to researchers and practitioners in the sphere of corporate strategies and economic policy. Show less
Kaltenbrunner, W.; Birch, K.; Amuchastegui, M. 2021
Disagreement is essential to scientific progress but the extent of disagreement in science, its evolution over time, and the fields in which it happens remain poorly understood. Here we report the... Show moreDisagreement is essential to scientific progress but the extent of disagreement in science, its evolution over time, and the fields in which it happens remain poorly understood. Here we report the development of an approach based on cue phrases that can identify instances of disagreement in scientific articles. These instances are sentences in an article that cite other articles. Applying this approach to a collection of more than four million English-language articles published between 2000 and 2015 period, we determine the level of disagreement in five broad fields within the scientific literature (biomedical and health sciences; life and earth sciences; mathematics and computer science; physical sciences and engineering; and social sciences and humanities) and 817 meso-level fields. Overall, the level of disagreement is highest in the social sciences and humanities, and lowest in mathematics and computer science. However, there is considerable heterogeneity across the meso-level fields, revealing the importance of local disciplinary cultures and the epistemic characteristics of disagreement. Analysis at the level of individual articles reveals notable episodes of disagreement in science, and illustrates how methodological artifacts can confound analyses of scientific texts. Show less
The increasing popularity of Twitter in both scholarly communication and public engagement with science has triggered widespread Twitter interactions around scientific information, thus giving rise... Show moreThe increasing popularity of Twitter in both scholarly communication and public engagement with science has triggered widespread Twitter interactions around scientific information, thus giving rise to the emergence of scholarly Twitter metrics which aim to measure and characterize Twitter interactions related to scholarly objects. For the sake of more advanced scholarly Twitter metrics, the overarching aim of this PhD dissertation is to characterize diverse forms of Twitter interactions around scientific papers to understand in greater-depth the Twitter reception of scientific information and improve scholarly Twitter metrics. To this end, this dissertation starts with large-scale analyses of how many and how fast scientific papers are mentioned on Twitter in comparison with other types of social media metric data sources, to unravel the broadness and speed of Twitter presence of scientific papers. Then, focusing on scholarly tweets of scientific papers per se, this dissertation investigates the characteristics of diverse user interaction behaviors around scholarly tweets, shedding light on their potential value in developing more advanced indicators for measuring deeper levels of Twitter reception of scientific information. Finally, based on the main findings, this dissertation further discusses the possibility to approach a more fine-grained indicator system of scholarly Twitter metrics. Show less
This study investigates the scientific mobility and international collaboration networks in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region between 2008 and 2017. By using affiliation metadata... Show moreThis study investigates the scientific mobility and international collaboration networks in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region between 2008 and 2017. By using affiliation metadata available in scientific publications, we analyze international scientific mobility flows and collaboration linkages. Three complementary approaches allow us to obtain a detailed characterization of scientific mobility. First, we uncover the main destinations and origins of mobile scholars for each country. Results reveal geographical, cultural and historical proximities. Cooperation programs also contribute to explain some of the observed flows. Second, we use the academic age. The average academic age of migrant scholars in MENA was about 12.4 years. The academic age group 6-10 years is the most common for both emigrant and immigrant scholars. Immigrants are relatively younger than emigrants, except for Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, and Turkey. Scholars who migrated to Gulf Cooperation Council countries, Jordan, and Morocco were on average younger than emigrants by 1.5 years from the same countries. Third, we analyze gender differences. We observe a clear gender gap: Male scholars represent the largest group of migrants in MENA. We conclude by discussing the policy relevance of the scientific mobility and collaboration aspects. Show less
