Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Citations to biomedical research papers from different types of document — clinical guidelines, textbooks, government policy documents, international or national regulations and newspaper articles — can provide new indicators of the utility of such research. However, most such citing documents will be national in character, and in order to provide an international perspective it will be necessary to combine several databases constructed to the same protocols and linked through the Web.

This chapter reviews bibliometric studies of the social sciences and humanities. SSCI bibliometrics will work reasonably well in economics and psychology, whose literatures share many characteristics with science, and less well in sociology, characterised by a typical social science literature. The premise of the chapter is that quantitative evaluation of research output faces severe methodological difficulties in fields whose literature differs in nature from scientific literature. Bibliometric evaluations are based on international journal literature indexed in the SSCI, but social scientists also publish books, write for national journals and for the non-scholarly press. These literatures form distinct, yet partially overlapping worlds, each serving a different purpose. For example, national journals communicate with a local scholarly community, and the non-scholarly press represents research in interaction with contexts of application. Each literature is more trans-disciplinary than its scientific counterpart, which itself poses methodological challenges. The nature and role of each of the literatures will be explored here, and the chapter will argue that by ignoring the three other literatures of social science bibliometric evaluation produces a distorted picture of social science fields.

Chinese scientists and decision makers are, like their counterparts elsewhere in the world, highly interested in analysing the quality of their country’s academic and technological achievements. Twenty five years ago research activities Chinese scientists understood the world’s scientific research largely through journals consulted in libraries. in China were mainly conducted within the nation’s borders. Chinese scientists understood the world’s scientific research largely through journals consulted in libraries. They themselves published few papers in international journals. Meanwhile, the number of Chinese publications, as covered by SCI, has increased spectacularly: it rose from about 8,000 in the year 1990 to nearly 40,000 in the year 2002. What is the explanation for this extraordinary growth? The fundamentals of this accomplishment are to be found in the country’s major socio-economic development and the stimulating role of the government’s S&T policy. Although the number of Chinese publications covered by the has rapidly increased, most Chinese research results are still published in domestic journals. This means that it makes little sense to use the Web of Knowledge as the only source for information retrieval, or for research evaluation purposes in China. For this reason it had already been decided in 1989 to develop local, i.e., Chinese, citation databases. This was the origin of the (CSCD) and the (CSTPC). In 1998 a (CSSCI) was developed as well. Local databases of derived indicators, similar to the Journal Citation Reports, soon followed. The structure of these databases is described here. This contribution focuses on two parallel developments: one using ISI’s databases, aimed at gauging China’s international position; and one used for internal purposes, where the locally developed databases play an important role. Examples of comparisons and rankings based on local databases are given, and it is shown how these are different from rankings based on ISI’s databases. Chinese scientists and decision makers soon recognized that simple quantitative evaluations focussing on numbers stimulate the growth of publications, but have little effect on the quality of research. Hence new approaches and regulations for research evaluation are nowadays being introduced.

Publication and citation counts have become essential indicators for science policy in many countries. However, the overall national performance needs to be decomposed if it is to inform the development of appropriate and targeted policies. This can be accomplished by breaking down performance in terms of research institution, research groups and/or individual authors, as well as by applying different performance measures. In this chapter we show how the Swedish trend in activity and impact within neuroscience changes as we decompose trends according to actors and apply different measurements.

We use US Patent Statistics to depict national patterns of technology accumulation in Japan and EU countries. Two properties of country profiles are confirmed, namely, over time with a country and across countries. The main novelty introduced here is the combined analysis of overall technological advantage, performance in fast growing areas and impact. The results show that in many areas of technology in which EU countries have an overall relative advantage, their performance in the subfields of highest technological opportunity is weak. On the other hand, Japan seems to have a consistent level of performance both in aggregate and in fast growing areas.

This paper examines the relationship between indicators of technology quality and stock market performance. The purpose of this analysis is to demonstrate how quantitative R&D and technology indicators may be useful tools in the analysis of the stock market. Currently many stock market analysts do not include quantitative technology indicators in their evaluation of companies. The analysis presented in this paper shows how such indicators may be a useful addition to traditional methods of company valuation. The paper describes CHI’s technology value model, and presents the results of this model in terms of stock market returns. The results are divided into three sections, according to how often the model is updated. A comparison is made between portfolios updated on an annual, monthly, and weekly basis. The last of these portfolios is based on an actual investment made by CHI using part of its pension fund. The results of the analysis show that updating the model more often than annually improves its performance. This may be owed to the ability to adjust for price changes in stocks during each year.

This chapter deals with the use of patent data to monitor science and technology (S&T) portfolios. S&T portfolios have become central tools for examining and for monitoring the vitality of institutions, innovative clusters, and regions in the innovation game that underpins their respective economic growth and development. Those portfolios have to be monitored not only at the intra-organisational level, but also at the inter-organizational level, as well as at other appropriate levels of analysis for designated systems of innovation (e.g., specific technology clusters). To this end, the development of appropriate, easy to use and transparent, benchmark indicators to assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of S&T portfolios is important. In this chapter the construction of a particular type of benchmark indicator, based on relative specialization indices, is reported and its usefulness is assessed by its application to the European Patent Database.

This chapter introduces text mining of patents in support of technology management. Technological innovation models point to empirical measures that relate to prospects for successful commercialisation. We present an 8-step process for analysing entire patent sets on a given topic to generate such ‘innovation indicators.’l We illustrate for the case of fuel cells.

The economic literature on technical change has increasingly relied upon patent citation data to measure inter-personal knowledge flows. Many doubts exist about whether patent citations really reflect the designated inventors’ knowledge of both their technical fields, and of the other inventors and experts therein: citations, in fact, come mainly from the patent examiners, and possibly the patent applicant’s lawyers, rather than from inventors themselves. Unfortunately, most of the papers dedicated to discussing these interpretation issues deal with USPTO data, whose citation rules are quite exceptional if compared to those of other patent offices. In addition some confusion exists between the two issues of (whether citing inventors actually knew of the cited patents) and of a knowledge flow (whether some information on the contents of the cited patents has however reached the, possibly unaware, citing inventor). Questionnaires addressed to inventors are severely affected by this confusion, and can hardly dispel the existing doubts. We then propose to apply social network analysis to derive maps of social relationships between inventors, and measures of social proximity between cited and citing patents. Logit regressions demonstrate that the probability of observing a citation is positively influenced by such proximity. In order to perform such regressions, however, a specific sampling scheme has to used, which we also illustrate and discuss.

This paper presents three new patent-based indicators of internationalisation of knowledge generation. They measure the extent of international cooperation in research and the international location of research facilities associated with multinational firms — i.e., cross-border ownership. These indicators are based on triadic patent data (patent families applied in the US, Europe and Japan), and on the patents granted by the USPTO. They witness both an increasing trend towards the internationalisation of knowledge generation and large cross-country differences in the extent of internationalisation. The degree of technological internationalisation is higher for small countries and for countries with a low R&D intensity. Two countries are more likely to collaborate if they are close to each other, if they have a similar technological specialization and if they share a common language.