Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userThe poor altmetric performance of publications authored by researchers in mainland China
341
0
0.0
(
0
)
Added by
Xianwen Wang
Publication date
2016
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
Chinas scientific output has risen precipitously over the past decade; it is now the worlds second-largest producer of scientific papers, behind only the United States. The quality of Chinas research is also on the rise (Van Noorden, 2016). The online visibility and impact of Chinas research are also important issues worth exploring. In this study, we investigate the altmetric performance of publications in the field of Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology and published by authors from Chinese affiliations. We find that papers published by those authors from Chinese affiliations have much lower visibility on the social web than articles from other countries, when there is no significant difference for the citations. Fewer of Chinas publications get tweeted, and those tweeted publications attract less social attention. A geographical analysis of tweeters shows that scholarly articles get most of their social attention from the authors home countries, a finding that is also confirmed by correlation and regression analysis. This situation, which is unfavorable for researchers from Chinese affiliations, is caused, in part, by the inaccessibility of mainstream social networking platforms in mainland China.
rate research
Read More
Interdisciplinary research is fundamental when it comes to tackling complex problems in our highly interlinked world, and is on the rise globally. Yet, it is unclear why--in an increasingly competitive academic environment--one should pursue an interdisciplinary career given its recent negative press. Several studies have indeed shown that interdisciplinary research often achieves lower impact compared to more specialized work, and is less likely to attract funding. We seek to reconcile such evidence by analyzing a dataset of 44,419 research grants awarded between 2006 and 2018 from the seven national research councils in the UK. We compared the research performance of researchers with an interdisciplinary funding track record with those who have a specialized profile. We found that the former dominates the network of academic collaborations, both in terms of centrality and knowledge brokerage; but such a competitive advantage does not immediately translate into impact. Indeed, by means of a matched pair experimental design, we found that researchers who transcend between disciplines on average achieve lower impacts in their publications than the subject specialists in the short run, but eventually outperform them in funding performance, both in terms of volume and value. Our results suggest that launching an interdisciplinary career may require more time and persistence to overcome extra challenges, but can pave the way for a more successful endeavour.
With the rapid evolution of cross-strait situation, Mainland China as a subject of social science study has evoked the voice of Rethinking China Study among intelligentsia recently. This essay tried to apply an automatic content analysis tool (CATAR) to the journal Mainland China Studies (1998-2015) in order to observe the research trends based on the clustering of text from the title and abstract of each paper in the journal. The results showed that the 473 articles published by the journal were clustered into seven salient topics. From the publication number of each topic over time (including volume of publications, percentage of publications), there are two major topics of this journal while other topics varied over time widely. The contribution of this study includes: 1. We could group each independent study into a meaningful topic, as a small scale experiment verified that this topic clustering is feasible. 2. This essay reveals the salient research topics and their trends for the Taiwan journal Mainland China Studies. 3. Various topical keywords were identified, providing easy access to the past study. 4. The yearly trends of the identified topics could be viewed as signature of future research directions.
A fair assignment of credit for multi-authored publications is a long-standing issue in scientometrics. In the calculation of the $h$-index, for instance, all co-authors receive equal credit for a given publication, independent of a given authors contribution to the work or of the total number of co-authors. Several attempts have been made to distribute the credit in a more appropriate manner. In a recent paper, Hirsch has suggested a new way of credit assignment that is fundamentally different from the previous ones: All credit for a multi-author paper goes to a single author, the called ``$alpha$-author, defined as the person with the highest current $h$-index not the highest $h$-index at the time of the papers publication) (J. E. Hirsch, Scientometrics 118, 673 (2019)). The collection of papers this author has received credit for as $alpha$-author is then used to calculate a new index, $h_{alpha}$, following the same recipe as for the usual $h$ index. The objective of this new assignment is not a fairer distribution of credit, but rather the determination of an altogether different property, the degree of a persons scientific leadership. We show that given the complex time dependence of $h$ for individual scientists, the approach of using the current $h$ value instead of the historic one is problematic, and we argue that it would be feasible to determine the $alpha$-author at the time of the papers publication instead. On the other hand, there are other practical considerations that make the calculation of the proposed $h_{alpha}$ very difficult. As an alternative, we explore other ways of crediting papers to a single author in order to test early career achievement or scientific leadership.
As the recent COVID-19 outbreak rapidly expands all over the world, various containment measures have been carried out to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. In Mainland China, the containment measures consist of three types, i.e., Wuhan travel ban, intra-city quarantine and isolation, and inter-city travel restriction. In order to carry out the measures, local economy and information acquisition play an important role. In this paper, we investigate the correlation of local economy and the information acquisition on the execution of containment measures to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic in Mainland China. First, we use a parsimonious model, i.e., SIR-X model, to estimate the parameters, which represent the execution of intra-city quarantine and isolation in major cities of Mainland China. In order to understand the execution of intra-city quarantine and isolation, we analyze the correlation between the representative parameters including local economy, mobility, and information acquisition. To this end, we collect the data of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the inflows from Wuhan and outflows, and the COVID-19 related search frequency from a widely-used Web mapping service, i.e., Baidu Maps, and Web search engine, i.e., Baidu Search Engine, in Mainland China. Based on the analysis, we confirm the strong correlation between the local economy and the execution of information acquisition in major cities of Mainland China. We further evidence that, although the cities with high GDP per capita attracts bigger inflows from Wuhan, people are more likely to conduct the quarantine measure and to reduce going out to other cities. Finally, the correlation analysis using search data shows that well-informed individuals are likely to carry out containment measures.
We perform a statistical analysis of scientific-publication data with a goal to provide quantitative analysis of scientific process. Such an investigation belongs to the newly established field of scientometrics: a branch of the general science of science that covers all quantitative methods to analyze science and research process. As a case study we consider download and citation statistics of the journal `Europhysics Letters (EPL), as Europes flagship letters journal of broad interest to the physics community. While citations are usually considered as an indicator of academic impact, downloads reflect rather the level of attractiveness or popularity of a publication. We discuss peculiarities of both processes and correlations between them.
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
