Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Science mapping within the science policy and research management context has had a promising start during the seventies, but it lasted until the early nineties before useful technology was developed to make it really work. Recently domain visualization seems to have become a mature research area. Therefore, the actual potential of visualization for this particular purpose can be explored in more detail. In this chapter a short history is outlined and the current possibilities and requirements of contributing to a sound evaluation tool in the near future are listed. By using a case study the potential of bibliometric maps is illustrated within a policy context. It shows how these maps may be used to visualize the research focus of actors within one field and to compare them. The main issue raised in this chapter is the requirement of reference points in order to make useful comparisons.

Co-authorship is one of the most tangible and well documented forms of scientific collaboration. Almost every aspect of scientific collaboration networks can be reliably tracked by analysing co-authorship networks by bibliometric methods. In the present study, scientific collaboration is considered both at individual and national levels, with special focus given to multinational collaborations. Both literature data and original results witnessed a dramatic quantitative and structural change in the last decades of the 20th century. The changes, to great extent, can be attributed to the universal tendencies of globalisation and the political restructuring of Europe. The standards and, particularly, the visibility of scientific research, as a rule, benefit from the ever increasing level of collaboration, but the profits do not come automatically. This fact underlines the necessity of a regular quantitative monitoring of inputs and outcomes, i.e., bibliometric surveys.

Over the last decade, researchers studying innovation have increasingly used measures based on patent citations to estimate the values of new technologies, which are typically unobserved. In this study we examine the relationship between patent citation counts and private economic value in a dataset in which the latter is observed. Specifically, we use data about patenting and licensing by two major U.S. research universities to examine whether patent citations predict if university technologies are licensed, and the amount of revenue they earn if licensed. Our preliminary results suggest that citations are significantly related to the probability that a patent is licensed, but not to revenues conditional upon licensing.

The availability of sex-disaggregated data in the fields of research, technology and development is extremely important for supporting the growing political commitment to promote and monitor women participation in the different fields of S&T. During the late 1990s the European Commission identified as a priority the availability of this data. Even if scientific publications and patents are widely accepted indicators of scientific and technological performances, until now it has been impossible to measure bibliometric and patent output by gender in a large set of data. Starting from a feasibility study carried out for the European Commission on the whole set of patents published in 1998 by the European Patent Office and on 30,000 authors of items published in 1995 on scientific journals of international relevance, the paper demonstrates that it is possible to obtain robust gender indicators on S&T output.

With the emergence of the knowledge based society, great emphasis is put on the development of qualitative and quantitative policy tools for analysing the science and innovation system. In this chapter an overview is given of the available R&D input data at (supra) national and regional level. With the Frascati Manual the OECD provides a methodological framework for setting up national surveys to collect these data. This methodology is used to produce standardised measurements of human and financial resources devoted to R&D by OECD member countries. EUROSTAT adapted and extended this methodology to produce for the EU countries R&D input data at regional level. To measure the performance of national and regional R&D systems, input and output data have to be combined. The methodologies for collecting input and output data have, however, been developed largely independently from each other. The resulting limitations on their use in performance indicators are discussed, and suggestions are formulated for a more integrated approach to construct input and output data.

The contribution defines webometrics within the framework of informetric studies, bibliometrics, and scientometrics as belonging to library and information science, and associated with cybermetrics as a generic sub-field. It outlines a consistent and detailed link typology and terminology and makes explicit the distinction between the web node levels when using the proposed terminological structures. Secondly, the contribution presents the meaning, methodology and problematic issues of the central webometric analysis types, i.e., Web engine and crawler coverage, quality and sampling issues. It discusses briefly Web Impact Factor and other link analyses. The contribution finally looks into log studies of human Web interaction.

This paper covers the differences between two separate bibliometric approaches, labelled ‘descriptive’ versus ‘evaluative’, or top down versus bottom up. The most important difference between these two approaches is found in the level of validity of the underlying research output. Whilst the publications in a top down approach, having a descriptive character, are collected by following general characteristics of these publications (such as country names, or fields), the consequence is that findings from such studies have a ‘meaning’ that is limited with respect to actual research assessment. On the other hand, in a bottom up approach the publications are collected from individual oeuvres of scientists, including a process of verification by the researchers involved. This procedure contributes significantly to the validity of the publication material, and consequently research assessment procedures can be based on the results of this type of bibliometric analyses. A strong focus in the paper will be on the actual application of bibliometric analysis within research assessment procedures, in particular within the UK and the Netherlands.

Many countries are placing a greater emphasis on public accountability for government research funding and are starting to use quantitative performance indicators for the distribution of funds. In Australian universities the use of quantitative formulas to allocate the research component of university block grants to institutions has been in place for a decade, and thus the system provides fertile ground for using bibliometrics to examine the effects of such policies on academic output. An analysis of Australian data from the Institute for Scientific Information’s major citation indexes clearly demonstrates the academic response to the linking of funds, at least in part, to productivity measures undifferentiated by any measure of quality — publication numbers jumped dramatically, with the highest percentage increase in the lower impact journals. The trends were apparent across all fields of research in the university sector, but were not present in other sectors active in research (such as hospitals or government research agencies). The trends were not, however, uniform across all institutions.

Powerful engines tend to support internationalisation: self-organisation of scientific communities regardless of national borders; international and supranational top down programmes; side effects of economic globalisation; all these trends being boosted latterly by the ICT/Internet revolution. However, internationalisation meets several obstacles: resistance of the national structure in most aspects of innovation systems; proximity effects anchored in infra-structural factors; inertia of personal and institutional networks. Internationalisation of competition and cooperation does not necessarily imply fewer discrepancies in national performances. Bibliometric studies of scientific journals profiles, collaborative and other scientific networks, spatial distribution of scientific activity, tend to validate a real but slow process of the fading of borders. In the last decade advances appear more in globalisation of scientific communication and increase of aggregate collaboration figures than in the geographic distribution of knowledge sources, the reshaping of co-operation networks and the modification of interdisciplinary balances in connection with new growth regimes of science.

A review of interdisciplinarity in science is presented from the point of view of quantitative studies of science. The main objectives pursued and methodologies used in publications on cross-disciplinary research are pointed out, as well as the most relevant results obtained. The study of cross-disciplinary collaboration between authors, co-classification analysis, interdisciplinary nature of publication journals and cross-disciplinary references and/or citations are the most useful approaches to the topic. Results about a global analysis of scientific areas and disciplines based on ISI multi-assignation indicators are presented.