Evaluation systems have been long criticized for abusing and misusing bibliometric indicators. This has created a culture by which academics are constantly exposing their daily work to the standards they are expected to perform. In this study, we investigate whether researchers’ own values and expectations are in line with the expectations of the evaluation system. We conduct a multiple case study of five departments in two Dutch universities to examine how they balance between their own valuation regimes and the evaluation schemes. For this, we combine curriculum analysis with a series of semi-structured interviews. We propose a model to study the diversity of academic activities and apply it to the multiple case study to understand how such diversity is shaped by discipline and career stage. We conclude that the observed misalignment is not only resulting from an abuse of metrics but also by a lack of tools to evaluate performance in a contextualized and adaptable way.@en

This study explores the societal embeddedness of the websites of research projects. It combines two aims: characterizing research projects based on their weblink relationships, and discovering external societal actors that relate to the projects via weblinks. The study was based on a set of 121 EU-funded research projects and their websites. Domains referring to the websites of the research projects were collected and used in visualizations of co-link relationships. These analyses revealed clusters of topical similarity among the research projects as well as among referring entities. Furthermore, a first step into unveiling potentially relevant stakeholders around research projects was made. Weblink analysis is discussed as an insightful tool for monitoring the internal and external linkages of research projects, representing a relevant application of webometric methods.@en

This paper presents a novel methodological framework by which the effects of globalization on international collaboration can be studied and understood. Using the cosine similarity of the disciplinary and partner profiles of countries by collaboration types it is possible to analyse the effects of globalization and the costs and benefits of an increasing global networked research system.@en

Numerous research efforts have centered on identifying the most influential players in networked social systems. This problem is immensely crucial in the research of complex networks. Most existing techniques either model social dynamics on static networks only and ignore the underlying time-serial nature or model the social interactions as temporal edges without considering the influential relationship between them. In this paper, we propose a novel perspective of modeling social interaction data as the graph on event sequence, as well as the Soft K-Shell algorithm that analyzes not only the network’s local and global structural aspects, but also the underlying spreading dynamics. The extensive experiments validated the efficiency and feasibility of our method in various social networks from real world data. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first of its kind.@en

This study investigates the scientific mobility and international collaboration networks in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region between 2008 and 2017. By using affiliation metadata available in scientific publications, we analyze international scientific mobility flows and collaboration linkages. Three complementary approaches allow us to obtain a detailed characterization of scientific mobility. First, we uncover the main destinations and origins of mobile scholars for each country. Results reveal geographical, cultural and historical proximities. Cooperation programs also contribute to explain some of the observed flows. Second, we use the academic age. The average academic age of migrant scholars in MENA was about 12.4 years. The academic age group 6–10 years is the most common for both emigrant and immigrant scholars. Immigrants are relatively younger than emigrants, except for Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, and Turkey. Scholars who migrated to Gulf Cooperation Council countries, Jordan, and Morocco were on average younger than emigrants by 1.5 years from the same countries. Third, we analyze gender differences. We observe a clear gender gap: Male scholars represent the largest group of migrants in MENA. We conclude by discussing the policy relevance of the scientific mobility and collaboration aspects.@en

The implementation of policies promoting the adoption of an open science (OS) culture must be accompanied by indicators that allow monitoring the uptake of such policies and their potential effects on research publishing and sharing practices. This study presents indicators of open access (OA) at the institutional level for universities worldwide. By combining data from Web of Science, Unpaywall and the Leiden Ranking disambiguation of institutions, we track OA coverage of universities’ output for 963 institutions. This paper presents the methodological challenges, conceptual discrepancies and limitations and discusses further steps needed to move forward the discussion on fostering OA and OS practices and policies.@en

Research careers are typically envisioned as a single path in which a scientist starts as a member of a team working under the guidance of one or more experienced scientists and, if they are successful, ends with the individual leading their own research group and training future generations of scientists. Here we study the author contribution statements of published research papers in order to explore possible biases and disparities in career trajectories in science. We used Bayesian networks to train a prediction model based on a dataset of 70,694 publications from PLoS journals, which included 347,136 distinct authors and their associated contribution statements. This model was used to predict the contributions of 222,925 authors in 6,236,239 publications, and to apply a robust archetypal analysis to profile scientists across four career stages: junior, early-career, mid-career and late-career. All three of the archetypes we found-leader, specialized, and supporting-were encountered for early-career and mid-career researchers. Junior researchers displayed only two archetypes (specialized, and supporting), as did late-career researchers (leader and supporting). Scientists assigned to the leader and specialized archetypes tended to have longer careers than those assigned to the supporting archetype. We also observed consistent gender bias at all stages: the majority of male scientists belonged to the leader archetype, while the larger proportion of women belonged to the specialized archetype, especially for early-career and mid-career researchers.@en

The age of researchers is a critical factor necessary to study the bibliometric characteristics of the scholars that produce new knowledge. In bibliometric studies, the age of scientific authors is generally missing; however, the year of the first publication is frequently considered as a proxy of the age of researchers. In this article, we investigate what are the most important bibibliometric factors that can be used to predict the age of researchers (birth and PhD age). Using a dataset of 3574 researchers from Québec for whom their Web of Science publications, year of birth and year of their PhD are known, our analysis falls under the linear regression setting and focuses on investigating the predictive power of various regression models rather than data fitting, considering also a breakdown by fields. The year of first publication proves to be the best linear predictor for the age of researchers. When using simple linear regression models, predicting birth and PhD years result in an error of about 3.7 years and 3.9 years, respectively. Including other bibliometric data marginally improves the predictive power of the regression models. A validation analysis for the field breakdown shows that the average length of the prediction intervals vary from 2.5 years for Basic Medical Sciences (for birth years) up to almost 10 years for Education (for PhD years). The average models perform significantly better than the models using individual observations. Nonetheless, the high variability of data and the uncertainty inherited by the models advice to caution when using linear regression models for predicting the age of researchers.@en

With the advent of altmetrics, digital traces that go beyond the scientific impact can be tracked. Twitter stands as the most appealing platform for their inspection since it gathers academic and non-academic users that discuss a wide-ranging number of topics. This research aims at developing and proposing a fine-grained classification of social media users based on mapping techniques and clustering methods and compare them with other tentative classifications proposed elsewhere. To do so, online activity of over 1.3 million Twitter users is examined, considering both their overall activity on Twitter as well as their interaction with scientific publications.@en

This paper presents a first attempt to analyse Open Access integration at the institutional level. For this, we combine information from Unpaywall and the Leiden Ranking to offer basic OA indicators for universities. We calculate the overall number of Open Access publications for 930 universities worldwide. OA indicators are also disaggregated by green, gold and hybrid Open Access. We then explore differences between and within countries and offer a general ranking of universities based on the proportion of their output which is openly accessible.@en