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Why Meta-regulation Matters for Public Health: the Case of the EU Better Regulation Agenda

Why Meta-regulation Matters for Public Health: the Case of the EU Better Regulation Agenda

Meta-regulation - the rules that govern how individual policies are developed and reviewed - has not received much attention in the study of health policy. Far from value-free and objective, they have however significant potential to shape policy outputs and, as such, health outcomes.

Big Science, Big Trouble? Understanding Conflict in and Around Big Science Projects and Networks

Big Science, Big Trouble? Understanding Conflict in and Around Big Science Projects and Networks

Many Big Science projects and networks experience conflict. Yet, so far, there is no theoretical model that explains which mechanisms connect conflict cause and outbreak in Big Science. 

Ten Reasons Why Research Collaborations Succeed - A Random Forest Approach

Ten Reasons Why Research Collaborations Succeed - A Random Forest Approach

Based on the state of research in the Science of Team Science, the question of which intra- and interpersonal factors are most significant for the success of a research team is investigated.

Return Migration of German-Affiliated Researchers: Analyzing Departure and Return by Gender, Cohort, and Discipline Using Scopus Bibliometric Data 1996-2020

Return Migration of German-Affiliated Researchers: Analyzing Departure and Return by Gender, Cohort, and Discipline Using Scopus Bibliometric Data 1996-2020

This analysis uncovers new dimensions of migration among scholars by investigating the return migration of published researchers, which is critical for the development of science policy.

Applying Quantified Indicators in Central Asian Science: Can Metrics Improve the Regional Research Performance? - Scientometrics

Applying Quantified Indicators in Central Asian Science: Can Metrics Improve the Regional Research Performance? - Scientometrics

 This study discusses the implications of research metrics as applied to the transition countries based on the framework of ten principles of the Leiden Manifesto. They can guide Central Asian policymakers in creating systems for a more objective evaluation of research performance based on globally recognized indicators. 

"Formal and Informal Networkedness Among German Academics": Exploring the Role of Conferences and Co-publications in Scientific Performance - Scientometrics

"Formal and Informal Networkedness Among German Academics": Exploring the Role of Conferences and Co-publications in Scientific Performance - Scientometrics

This paper develops a new indicator based on an academic's inferred co-presence at conferences. It finds that hierarchy and influence play a stronger role in determining a scientist's performance in the context of informal networks than they do when considering formal co-publication networks.

China's Research Evaluation Reform: What Are the Consequences for Global Science?

China's Research Evaluation Reform: What Are the Consequences for Global Science?

China created a research evaluation system based on publications indexed in the SCI and on the Journal Impact Factor, which helped China become the largest contributor to scientific literature and increase the position of its universities in global rankings.

Stress-Inducing and Anxiety-Ridden: A Practice-Based Approach to the Construction of Status-Bestowing Evaluations in Research Funding

Stress-Inducing and Anxiety-Ridden: A Practice-Based Approach to the Construction of Status-Bestowing Evaluations in Research Funding

More than resource allocations, evaluations of funding applications have become central instances for status bestowal in academia. Much attention in past literature has been devoted to grasping the status consequences of prominent funding evaluations. 

Coopetition Between Frenemies-interrelations and Effects of Seven Collaboration Problems in Research Clusters - Scientometrics

Coopetition Between Frenemies-interrelations and Effects of Seven Collaboration Problems in Research Clusters - Scientometrics

This article explores the effects and interrelationships of seven collaboration problems that arise in the context of the tension between cooperation and competition. 

Research Performance and Scholarly Communication Profile of Competitive Research Funding: the Case of Academy of Finland - Scientometrics

Research Performance and Scholarly Communication Profile of Competitive Research Funding: the Case of Academy of Finland - Scientometrics

The Academy of Finland (AKA), Finland's major public research funding agency, uses a Web of Science (WoS) based bibliometric indicator to assess the performance of research it has funded. CRIS-based publication data can support multidimensional assessments of research performance and scholarly communication profiles, potentially also in other countries and institutions. 

Scrutinizing the Collaboration Criterion in Research: How Do Policy Ambitions Play out in Proposals and Assessments?

Scrutinizing the Collaboration Criterion in Research: How Do Policy Ambitions Play out in Proposals and Assessments?

This study aimed to reveal how researchers describe the collaboration with partners outside the university in research proposals.

Citizen Science in Deliberative Systems: Participation, Epistemic Injustice, and Civic Empowerment

Citizen Science in Deliberative Systems: Participation, Epistemic Injustice, and Civic Empowerment

The paper brings together the literature on citizen science and on deliberative democracy and epistemic injustice. 

Managing Academic Performance by Optimal Resource Allocation - Scientometrics

Managing Academic Performance by Optimal Resource Allocation - Scientometrics

This paper develops and studies a complex data-driven framework for human resource management enabling (i) academic talent recognition, (ii) researcher performance measurement, and (iii) renewable resource allocation maximizing the total output of a research unit.

Making the Most of World Talent for Science? The Nobel Prize and Fields Medal Experience - Scientometrics

Making the Most of World Talent for Science? The Nobel Prize and Fields Medal Experience - Scientometrics

This study found that the average age of scientists at the time of the breakthrough was higher for researchers from less developed countries. Moreover, individual opportunities in the world were extremely unequal by country of birth, gender significantly conditioned any participation in research, and the probability of becoming a top researcher more than doubled for individuals with parents belonging to the most favoured occupational categories. 

The Explanatory Power of Citations: a New Approach to Unpacking Impact in Science - Scientometrics

The Explanatory Power of Citations: a New Approach to Unpacking Impact in Science - Scientometrics

This article proposes a text clustering approach to derive contextual aspects of individual citations and the relationship between cited and citing work in an automated and scalable fashion. The method reveals a focal publication's absorption and use within the scientific community. It can also facilitate impact assessments at all levels. 

How Human Capital, Universities of Excellence, Third Party Funding, Mobility and Gender Explain Productivity in German Political Science - Scientometrics

How Human Capital, Universities of Excellence, Third Party Funding, Mobility and Gender Explain Productivity in German Political Science - Scientometrics

Apart from generally showing why political scientists publish more or less, this article specifically identifies accumulative advantage as the principal reason why women increasingly fall behind men over the course of their careers.

The State of Social Science Research on COVID-19

The State of Social Science Research on COVID-19

This is the first scientometric study of the performance of social science research on COVID-19. It provides insight into the landscape, the research fields, and international collaboration in this domain. The results are useful for finding potential collaborators and for identifying the frontier and gaps in social science research on COVID-19 to shape future studies.

Reply to the Comment by Heyard Et Al. Titled "Imaginary Carrot or Effective Fertiliser? A Rejoinder on Funding and Productivity" - Scientometrics

Reply to the Comment by Heyard Et Al. Titled "Imaginary Carrot or Effective Fertiliser? A Rejoinder on Funding and Productivity" - Scientometrics

Mapping the Impact of Papers on Various Status Groups in Excellencemapping.net: a New Release of the Excellence Mapping Tool

Mapping the Impact of Papers on Various Status Groups in Excellencemapping.net: a New Release of the Excellence Mapping Tool

In over five years, Bornmann, Stefaner, de Moya Anegon, and Mutz (2014b) and Bornmann, Stefaner, de Moya Anegón, and Mutz (2014c, 2015) have published several releases of the www.excellencemapping.net tool revealing (clusters of) excellent institutions worldwide based on citation data. With the new release, a completely revised tool has been published. It is not only based on citation data (bibliometrics), but also Mendeley data (altmetrics). Thus, the institutional impact measurement of the tool has been expanded by focusing on additional status groups besides researchers such as students and librarians. Furthermore, the visualization of the data has been completely updated by improving the operability for the user and including new features such as institutional profile pages. In this paper, we describe the datasets for the current excellencemapping.net tool and the indicators applied. Furthermore, the underlying statistics for the tool and the use of the web application are explained.

Publication Outperformance Among Global South Researchers: An Analysis of Individual-Level and Publication-Level Predictors of Positive Deviance

Publication Outperformance Among Global South Researchers: An Analysis of Individual-Level and Publication-Level Predictors of Positive Deviance

Research and development are central to economic growth, and a key challenge for countries of the global South is that their research performance lags behind that of the global North. Yet, among Southern researchers, a few significantly outperform their peers and can be styled research "positive deviants" (PDs). This paper asks: who are those PDs, what are their characteristics and how are they able to overcome some of the challenges facing researchers in the global South? 

Citation Patterns Between Impact-Factor and Questionable Journals

Citation Patterns Between Impact-Factor and Questionable Journals

One of the most fundamental issues in academia today is understanding the differences between legitimate and questionable publishing. This study's findings show that neither the impact factor of citing journals nor the size of cited journals is a good predictor of the number of citations to the questionable journals.

Imaginary Carrot or Effective Fertiliser? A Rejoinder on Funding and Productivity

Imaginary Carrot or Effective Fertiliser? A Rejoinder on Funding and Productivity

The question of whether and to what extent research funding enables researchers to be more productive is a crucial one. In their recent work, Mariethoz et al. (Scientometrics, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03.855-1 ) claim that there is no significant relationship between project-based research funding and bibliometric productivity measures and conclude that this is the result of inappropriate allocation mechanisms. In this rejoinder, we argue that such claims are not supported by the data and analyses reported in the article.

Internally Incentivized Interdisciplinarity: Organizational Restructuring of Research and Emerging Tensions

Internally Incentivized Interdisciplinarity: Organizational Restructuring of Research and Emerging Tensions

Interdisciplinarity is widely considered necessary to solving many contemporary problems, and new funding structures and instruments have been created to encourage interdisciplinary research at universities. This article looks at a small technical university specializing in green technology which implemented a strategy aimed at promoting and developing interdisciplinary collaboration.

Do Researchers Know What the H-index Is? And How Do They Estimate Its Importance? - Scientometrics

Do Researchers Know What the H-index Is? And How Do They Estimate Its Importance? - Scientometrics

In this article, we pursue two goals, namely the collection of empirical data about researchers' personal estimations of the importance of the h-index for themselves as well as for their academic disciplines, and on the researchers' concrete knowledge on the h-index and the way of its calculation.