Measuring the contributions of Chinese scholars to the research field of systems biology from 2005 to 2013

A Novel Metric for Assessing National Strength in Scientific Research: Understanding China's Research Output in Quantum Technology through Collaboration

Purpose

The 5th Plenary Session of the 19th Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee clearly states that developing science and technology through self-reliance and self-strengthening provides the strategic underpinning for China's development. Based on this background, this paper explores a metric model for assessing national scientific research strength through collaboration on research papers.

Design/methodology/approach

We propose a novel metric model for assessing national scientific research strength, which sets two indicators, national scientific self-reliance (SR) and national academic contribution (CT), to reflect “self-reliance” and “self-strengthening” respectively. Taking the research papers in quantum technology as an example, this study analyzes the scientific research strength of various countries around the world, especially China in quantum technology.

Findings

The results show that the research of quantum technology in China has always been relatively independent with fewer international collaboration papers and located in a more marginal position in cooperation networks. China's academic contribution (CT) to global quantum technology research is increasing and has been greater than that of the United States in 2020. Combining the two indicators, CT and SR, China's research strength in the quantum field closely follows the United States, and the United States is the most powerful with high research autonomy.

Research limitations

This paper only reflects China's scientific research strength in quantum technology from collaboration on research papers and doesn’t consider the segmentation of quantum technology and the industrial upstream and downstream aspects, which need further study.

Practical implications

The model is helpful to better understand the national scientific research strength in a certain field from “self-reliance” and “self-strengthening”.

Originality/value

We propose a novel metric model to measure the national scientific research strength from the perspective of “self-reliance” and “self-strengthening”, which provides a solid basis for the assessment of the strength level of scientific research in countries/regions and institutions.

Factors Influencing Cities’ Publishing Efficiency

Purpose

Recently, a vast number of scientific publications have been produced in cities in emerging countries. It has long been observed that the publication output of Beijing has exceeded that of any other city in the world, including such leading centres of science as Boston, New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo. Researchers have suggested that, instead of focusing on cities’ total publication output, the quality of the output in terms of the number of highly cited papers should be examined. However, in the period from 2014 to 2016, Beijing produced as many highly cited papers as Boston, London, or New York. In this paper, another method is proposed to measure cities’ publishing performance by focusing on cities’ publishing efficiency (i.e., the ratio of highly cited articles to all articles produced in that city).

Design/methodology/approach

First, 554 cities are ranked based on their publishing efficiency, then some general factors influencing cities’ publishing efficiency are revealed. The general factors examined in this paper are as follows: the linguistic environment of cities, cities’ economic development level, the location of excellent organisations, cities’ international collaboration patterns, and their scientific field profile. Furthermore, the paper examines the fundamental differences between the general factors influencing the publishing efficiency of the top 100 most efficient cities and the bottom 100 least efficient cities.

Findings

Based on the research results, the conclusion can be drawn that a city’s publishing efficiency will be high if meets the following general conditions: it is in a country in the Anglosphere–Core; it is in a high-income country; it is home to top-ranked universities and/or world-renowned research institutions; researchers affiliated with that city most intensely collaborate with researchers affiliated with cities in the United States, Germany, England, France, Canada, Australia, and Italy; and the most productive scientific disciplines of highly cited articles are published in high-impact multidisciplinary journals, disciplines in health sciences (especially general internal medicine and oncology), and disciplines in natural sciences (especially physics, astronomy, and astrophysics).

Research limitations

It is always problematic to demarcate the boundaries of cities (e.g., New York City vs. Greater New York), and regarding this issue there is no consensus among researchers. The Web of Science presents the name of cities in the addresses reported by the authors of publications. In this paper cities correspond to the spatial units between the country/state level and the institution level as indicated in the Web of Science. Furthermore, it is necessary to highlight that the Web of Science is biased towards English-language journals and journals published in the field of biomedicine. These facts may influence the outcome of the research.

Practical implications

Publishing efficiency, as an indicator, shows how successful a city is at the production of science. Naturally, cities have limited opportunities to compete for components of the science establishment (e.g., universities, hospitals). However, cities can compete to attract innovation-oriented companies, high tech firms, and R&D facilities of multinational companies by for example establishing science parks. The positive effect of this process on the city’s performance in science can be observed in the example of Beijing, which publishing efficiency has been increased rapidly.

Originality/value

Previous scientometric studies have examined cities’ publication output in terms of the number of papers, or the number of highly cited papers, which are largely size dependent indicators; however this paper attempts to present a more quality-based approach.