1,720,963 research outputs found
How do scholars collaborate with each other? : comparative study on Co-authorship Networks of Scholars Worldwide Using Big Data
Full text linkAre there any similarities and/or differences regarding how scholars collaborate with their colleagues in different universities worldwide? The aim of this research is to investigate the trends, differences, similarities and changes over time in the co-authorship networks of individual scholars. To do so, we have gathered big data from Google scholar profiles of 8377 scholars including information about all their papers and publications, their affiliation, keywords they have used to introduce their research interests on their profile. These scholars are selected from 19 universities and higher education institutions from higher ranked universities like Oxford and Harvard to be compared with lower ranked universities like the university of Milan and Tehran university in Iran that are spread worldwide.
The goal is to see how authors’ collaborations change over time throughout their scientific career: are there drastic changes in the recent years compared to the early years of their careers? To elicit the networks, the researcher used “scholar” and “igraph” packages in R to build a recursive crawling function to reach out to the authors' Google scholar profiles and publications as reference of collaborations. Each paper and the names of authors was seen as a single adjacency list to extract the relationships. These adjacency lists represent the tie between ego (first author of this paper) and alters (each of co-authors). If the relationship is reciprocated, it was added to the network as well. It means if one of the co-authors appeared to be the first author of another paper, the relationship changes from a one-way directed one to a two-way undirected one, showing the reciprocity of collaboration. If there was more than one collaboration between two or more authors, this was taken into account through multiple relationships. And lastly, if a paper is written by a single author, it was represented with a loop (tie to oneself). The year of publication of each paper was used and in an aggregate of papers in a year, the evolution of collaborations is compared through years in scientific career.
The focus of the study is the structure of egocentric networks. Data on composition of egocentric networks is not available, although that could be another interesting research question to see if there are compositional differences of scientific networks among scholars worldwide or not? One of the main ideas here is to see how scholars are building and developing their collaboration networks. Are there differences among higher ranked scholars and universities behaviors in terms of the change in their scientific career collaborations over time with lower ranked universities' scholars? Are there differences between earlier years of scientific career, with the subsequent or later years? Are there differences among scientific fields (extracted based on research interests keywords) in the co-authorship patterns, as an example between hard sciences and social sciences? Are there statistically significant relationships among the authors’ h-index and i10-index and their egocentric network properties? Are authors building distant relationships in shape of unique dyads and triads to work with multiple and more scholars to maximize their scientific proliferation or not? What about publishing in more unique journals and/or trying to publish in some particular journals repeatedly? Can we find any significant trends in the variation of number of journals papers are published in, between scholars in different universities?
The study is still a work-in-progress, so far the researcher has finished the data gathering process and this abstract mostly included the network extraction procedures, and the ideas and questions that the researcher is going to answer to them based on analysis of data. The prospects of getting interesting results and the trends of how scientific collaborations develop, change and grow or shrink over time, are promising. This enables us to see how scientific collaboration among universities worldwide evolve over time
Internationalizing Sociology in Italy, 1970s-2010s
No full textItalian sociologists work in a wide range of educational and research institutions located in different regions of Italy. Established hiring and promotion practices – developed through a complicated mix of top-down regulations, co-existing and conflictual “paradigmatic” schools and local “cliques” – have allowed sociologists to expand their academic influence and find positions in many institutions. For example, across Italy’s universities, the number of sociology faculty is similar to that of economists (around 1,000 full, associate and assistant professors). However, while this may show our community’s successful evolution it is unclear whether these practices have truly fueled excellent research, or have jeopardized it.
To develop some quantitative insight into Italian sociologists’ publications, we took the names of all 1,227 Italian sociologists (including post-docs enrolled in 2016) from the MIUR (Italian Ministry of University and Research) website, and then searched the Scopus data set, which includes international journals, conference proceedings, monographs and book chapters, as well as the most prestigious national journals, from the 1970s to 2010s.
We found that 63.8% of Italian sociologists have at least one publication indexed in Scopus. This means that one out of three sociologists in Italy does not have a single record in recognized international journals, conference proceedings, book series or Italy’s most prestigious journals.
A few Italian sociologists’ names appear frequently in the data set. For example, five individuals have published more than 35 indexed publications. On the other hand, about 20% (249 sociologists) have published only one article in their whole career. If we consider the impact of publications, we found that 52.4% (1,840 out of 3,515 publications) had no citations reflected in the data.
Interestingly, the data suggested a geographical divide. Sociologists working in Northern (45.5%) and Central (27.2%) universities published significantly more than those working in Southern universities, suggesting either self-selection bias or a negative context effect, perhaps reflecting uneven socio-economic development across geographical regions. However, only further analysis of university hiring process, which would require reconstructing hiring committees and candidates via the MIUR database, could reveal whether this bias is more due to self-selection and homophily than to context effects.
While observers of Italian academy may not be surprised at this finding, we found other interesting results when time series were included. We considered international co-authorships, which suggest sociologists are more active in the international community and so more exposed to international research standards. After counting the number of non-Italian co-authors as a proportion of the total number of co-authors for each single individual, and scaling data over time, we found that the rate of international collaborations has significantly increased in recent years, as did the number of publications. These trends are quite similar, with a growth of more than 50% of international collaborations over the past ten years (see figure).
Although further analysis would require looking systematically at causal factors, this trend is probably a positive result of ANVUR (the Italian national agency for the evaluation of the university and research system) national research assessment, which was established in 2010 and assessed sociology research published from 2004. Although it takes time for scientists to adapt their publication strategies, many sociologists who were not particularly familiar with international journals probably realized the importance of publishing in well-established outlets. Alternatively, sociologists who published internationally may have decided to invest even more in international publications to pay off an initial investment.
We do not want to suggest that institutional pressures have simple Darwinian effects, in which scientists simply adapt to increase their fitness. However, increased competition for funds at national and international levels and growing attention to university and department productivity could promote increased internationalization and the importance of publishing in prestigious international journals for the purposes of increasing their academic reputation. In a nutshell, we could say “Eppur si muove” – “And yet it moves”!
Direct all correspondence to Flaminio Squazzoni <[email protected]
Developing sustainable SCM evaluation model using fuzzy AHP in publishing industry
No full textIn the new econo mic context the long term success of any organization is built not only on profits and profitability but also on its contribution to the future of people and the future of the planet. Being supply chains a key cornerstone in any organization the consideration of sustainability at the supply chain level is recognized as an emerging area that needs to be studied in a systematic way. In this paper we proposed a fuzzy AHP approach for evaluating of SCM sustainability in publishing industry. For this work, we define a hierarchical framework regarding with Ageron et al model and criteria and sub criteria based on viewpoints of practical and academic experts. Results show that criteria relating with company and supplier selection factors are most important criteria
The conundrum of research productivity: a study on sociologists in Italy
No full textThis paper aims to understand the influence of institutional and organisational embeddedness on research productivity of Italian sociologists. We looked at all records published by Italian sociologists in Scopus from 1973 to 2016 and reconstructed their co-authorship patterns. We built an individual productivity index by considering the number and type of records, the impact factor of journals in which these records were published and each record’s citations. We found that sociologists who co-authored more frequently with international authors were more productive and that having a stable group of co-authors had a positive effect on the number of publications but not on citations. We found that organisational embeddedness has a positive effect on productivity at the group level (i.e., sociologists working in the same institute), less at the individual level. We did not found any effect of the scientific disciplinary sectors, which are extremely influential administratively and politically for promotion and career in Italy. With all caveats due to several limitations of our analysis, our findings suggest that internationalisation and certain context-specific organisational settings could promote scientist productivit
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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