Co-authorship networks and research impact in large research facilities: benchmarking internal reports and bibliometric databases

Visualizing the Landscape of Home IoT Research: A Bibliometric Analysis Using VOSviewer

Currently, the internet of things (IoT) is being widely deployed in home automation systems. An analysis of bibliometrics is presented in this work that covers articles that were obtained from the Web of Science (WoS) databases and published between 1 January 2018, and 31 December 2022. With VOSviewer software, 3880 relevant research papers were analyzed for the study. Through VOSviewer, we analyzed how many articles were published about the home IoT in several databases and their relation to the topic area. In particular, it was pointed out that the chronological order of the research topics changed, and COVID-19 also attracted the attention of scholars in the IoT field, and it was emphasized in this topic that the impact of the epidemic was described. As a result of the clustering, this study was able to conclude the research statuses. In addition, this study examined and compared maps of yearly themes over 5 years. Taking into account the bibliometric nature of this review, the findings are valuable in terms of mapping processes and providing a reference point.

The structure and dynamics of instrument collaboration networks

Complex scientific questions often require collaboration between scientists to access scientific instruments (deS. Price, Res Policy 13:3–20, 1984; Shrum et al. 2007, Structures of scientific collaboration, The MIT Press, 2007), knowledge and social capital from scientists outside of their immediate networks (Burt, Am J Sociol 110:349–399, 2004; Collins, Tacit and explicit knowledge, University of Chicago Press, https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo8461024.html, 2012; Granovetter, Am J Sociol 78:1360–1380, 1973; Polanyi, Personal knowledge: towards a post-critical philosophy (Repr. (with corr.)). Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). Synchrotron radiation facilities are a unique case to explore this type of collaboration, as external scientists going to the facility to do their ordinary research work are common. These external users use complex scientific instrumentation that could require the additional accumulated knowledge of internal scientists and staff more familiar with the technical and social aspects of the instruments. These collaborations sometimes result in a co-authored publication with internal staff, employed in these facilities. However, this is not always the case. Data from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) shows that most often, external scientists do not include internal staff in the co-author fields of the subsequent publication from scientific work done in one (or more) instruments in these facilities. Instrument collaboration networks are constructed and analysed over the period 2000–2018 for the different scientific instruments within the facility. A strong relationship between the level of external collaboration and the structure of the networks is found and explored. The results provide further insight into factors that shape collaboration and knowledge transfer, also relevant to policy makers and facility managers seeking to promote these activities.

Labor productivity, labor impact, and co-authorship of research institutions: publications and citations per full-time equivalents

Indicators of productivity and impact of research institutions are based on counts of the institution members’ publications and the citations those publications attracted. How can scientometricians count publications and citations on the meso-level (here, institution level)? There are three variables: the institution’s scientific staff in the observed time frame, their publications in that time, and the publications’ citations. Considering co-authorship of the publications, one can count 1 for every author (whole counting) or 1/n for n co-authors (fractional counting). One can apply this procedure to publications as well as citations. New in this article is the consideration of complete lists of scientific staff members, which include the exact extent of employment, to calculate the labor input based on full-time equivalents (FTE) and also of complete lists of publications by those staff members. This approach enables a size-independent calculation of labor productivity (number of publications per FTE) and labor impact (number of citations per FTE) on the meso-level. Additionally, we experiment with the difference and the quotient between summarizing values from the micro-level (person level) and aggregating whole counting values directly on the meso-level as an indicator for the institution’s predominant internal or external co-authorship.

Domain expertise extraction for finding rising stars

The field of expertise extraction utilizes published research enabling communities to highlight and identify the skills of researchers within specific scientific domains. This can be useful for evaluating research performance, and in the case of rising stars, in identifying top scientific talent. Previous research has harvested a range of publication indicators in an effort to identify expertise and talent. These include content indicators, citation metrics, and also the position of a researcher within a full collaboration network of scientists. The existing mechanism of expertise extraction utilizes all papers attributed to a scientific author, thereby potentially neglecting their specific or specialized expertise. Here we show that a tensor decomposition technique when applied to the problem addresses a number of useful problems. This includes better identification of individual expertise, as well as an integrated appraisal of an author’s role in an extended scientific network. The technique will afford new analyses of knowledge production which consider specialisation and diversity as core elements for further analysis. More generally the tensor decomposition techniques presented in this paper can be applied to a range of scientometric problems where multi-modal data is encountered.

Generic instruments in a synchrotron radiation facility

This paper explores the concept and the levels of genericity of different instruments, or beamlines, at a synchrotron radiation facility. We use conceptual tools from the sociology of science, bibliometrics and data from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) publication database, enriched by data from Web of Science. The sample size is of 11,218 observations for the period 1996 to 2018. The combined dataset includes the beamline name, available from the ESRF library database, which makes the instrument level analysis possible. We operationalize instrument genericity as the disciplinary diversity in the corpus related to each instrument with a Herfindahl based index (Moschini et al., 2020; Schultz & Joutz, 2010), theoretically supported by the concept of generic instruments (Rosenberg, 1992; Joerges & Shinn, 2001). As a result, we gain a quantitative insight into the generic character of the instruments, as well as the way in which different scientific fields and the experimental use of instruments group and align.

Peer Review

https://publons.com/publon/10.1162/qss_a_00190