Comparative study on intelligent education research among countries based on bibliographic coupling analysis

Purpose

The continuous development of information technology leads to intelligent education research. In the context of internationalisation, the study aims to understand the relevant research status worldwide, research similarities and differences that need to be discovered, and research frontiers that need to be explored.

Design/methodology/approach

Web of Science (WoS) core collection was used as the data source, descriptive statistical analysis, geographic data visualisation and coupling analysis are used to reveal coupling relationships, present a cooperative situation and discover research frontiers.

Findings

Intelligent education research has been widely carried out in countries around the world, and there is extensive scientific research cooperation. According to coupling analysis results, the coupling strength of bibliographic between countries has been continuously improved, while the coupling strength of keywords has remained balanced, and there is standardisation and diversity of research.

Research limitations/implications

The weakness of the research lies in the limitations of the data sources. Important research achievements on a certain topic in many non-English speaking countries are usually published in native journals. In the future research direction, more coupling analysis objects can be carried out, such as focussing on authors and institutions.

Practical implications

Through the coupling analysis of country bibliographic and keywords, it reveals the consistency and divergence of intelligent education research between different countries at different time spans.

Originality/value

Design and implement country bibliographic coupling (CBC) and country keyword coupling (CKC) strength indicators to calculate the strength of coupling between countries.

Productivity and interdisciplinary impacts of Organized Research Units

Organized Research Units (ORUs) are nondepartmental units utilized by U.S. research universities to support interdisciplinary research initiatives, among other goals. This study examined the impacts of ORUs at one large public research university, the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), using a large corpus of journal article metadata and abstracts for both faculty affiliated with UCD ORUs and a comparison set of other faculty. Using regression analysis, I find that ORUs appeared to increase the number of coauthors of affiliated faculty, but did not appear to directly affect publication or citation counts. Next, I frame interdisciplinarity in terms of a notion of discursive space, and use a topic model approach to situate researchers within this discursive space. The evidence generally indicates that ORUs promoted multidisciplinarity rather than interdisciplinarity. In the conclusion, drawing on work in philosophy of science on inter- and multidisciplinarity, I argue that multidisciplinarity is not necessarily inferior to interdisciplinarity.

Exploring the influence of the nursing and medical professions on policy and politics

BACKGROUND

The Nursing Now global campaign is aimed at raising the profile of nursing and its influence on policy and politics. Calls for the profession to have an increased role in policymaking are not new, but recent developments offer significant opportunities to advance this message.

AIM

To compare and contrast the published scholarly evidence, indexed in Web of Science (WoS), relating to how medicine and nursing influence policy and politics.

METHOD

A bibliometric analysis of scholarship was undertaken to determine how medicine and nursing influence policy and politics. Indexed articles in Web of Science were compared to examine the evolution of scholarly contributions by both professions.

RESULTS

Since 1990, nursing and medicine have been consistent contributors to scholarship on policy and politics. At the same time, there has been an exponential growth in scholarly output, but nursing is now starting to fall behind. Nursing has focused on the necessary knowledge and skills, whereas medicine has focused on acting on specific issues.

CONCLUSION

There are multiple opportunities for nursing scholars to accelerate their indexed output to inform evidence-based advocacy, and influence policy and politics. These endeavours will increase their potential to inform future healthcare.

Introducing and testing an advanced quantitative methodological approach for the evaluation of research centers: a case study on sustainability science

With the growing complexity of societal and scientific problems, research centers have emerged to facilitate the conduct of research beyond disciplinary and institutional boundaries. While they have become firmly established in the global university landscape, research centers raise some critical questions for research evaluation. Existing evaluation approaches designed to assess universities, departments, projects, or individual researchers fail to capture some of the core characteristics of research centers and their participants, including the diversity of the involved researchers, at what point in time they join and leave the research center, or the intensity of their participation. In addressing these aspects, this article introduces an advanced approach for the ex post evaluation of research centers. It builds on a quasi-experimental within-group design, bibliometric analyses, and multilevel statistics to assess average and individual causal effects of research center affiliation on participants along three dimensions of research performance. The evaluation approach is tested with archival data from a center in the field of sustainability science. Against a widely held belief, we find that participation in research centers entails no disadvantages for researchers as far as their research performance is concerned. However, individual trajectories varied strongly.

Assessment of Environmental Health Research Centers in Iran due to knowledge production and utilization

BACKGROUND

Knowledge production in environmental health promotion is one of the most important goals at the national level and establishing environmental health research centers (EHRCs) is one of the main strategies that will lead to achieving this goal. In this study, we are going to present the results of knowledge production and research performance evaluation of EHRCs in Iran.

METHODS

In this cross sectional study, a specific check list has been used to assess Knowledge production and utilization through annual evaluations undertaken by research centers in Iran. This article has the results of the 4-year evaluation (2011-2014).

RESULTS

The total number of EHRCs under the supervision of universities of medical sciences (UMS) is 34. The number of faculty members at these centers is 291 and the total approved projects by research council of UMS during 2011-2014, were 538. The number of published article increased from 282 in 2011 to 709 in 2014. During this period, the number of citations to EHRCs' articles was 4488 in Scopus database. The number of EHRCs' articles which have been referred in text books were 39. The proportion of published articles per academic member in environmental health has been 1.8 per year.

CONCLUSION

Based on research performance evaluation, knowledge production and research is desirable in EHRCs, but research utilization to health environmental promotion is still inadequate and should be assessed by qualitative evaluation.

Citations in introduction and literature review sections should not count for quality

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to suggest that citations made in the introduction and literature review sections of academic writings should not count in the analysis of citations to measure the quality of research papers.

Design/methodology/approach

– Elucidatory expositions are made on the purposes of the introduction and literature review sections.

Findings

– The nature of citations to knowledge to establish these purposes is identified and used to suggest that citations made in these sections should not count in citation analysis that are used to determine quality of publications. Introduction sections are written to identify the importance and justification for the subject of study, while literature reviews are written to identify gaps, opposing views, strengths and weaknesses in the status quo knowledge.

Originality/value

– This paper will provide insight and awareness to new methodologies to cull and curate appropriate citation count in the computation of quality of publications.