A spatial-institutional analysis of researchers with multiple affiliations.

Researchers holding multiple affiliations can play an important bridging role between organizations, fostering knowledge transfer and research collaboration. We propose a methodology to identify authors with multiple affiliations co-hosted by two organizations for a prolonged period of time, which distinguishes them from authors who change jobs or only hold short appointments. We apply this methodology to all authors and organizations residing in the Netherlands and find 626 organizations with at least one co-affiliated researcher. We perform a regression analysis of the inter-organizational network spanned by all co-affiliated researchers, and find strong negative effects of travel time. We also find that researchers who hold multiple affiliations, often cross the institutional boundaries between university, industry, government, healthcare and public research organizations. In particular, university-affiliated researchers tend to be most active in bridging to organizations in other institutional spheres. We end with some reflections for future studies and implications for science policy.

Exploring why global health needs are unmet by research efforts: the potential influences of geography, industry and publication incentives.

BACKGROUND: It has been well established that research is not addressing health needs in a balanced way - much more research is conducted on diseases with more burden in high-income countries than on those with more burden in lower-income countries. In this study, we explore whether these imbalances persist and inquire about the possible influence of three factors, namely geography, industry and publication incentives. METHODS: We use WHO data on the Global Burden of Disease as a proxy measure of health needs and bibliometric information as a proxy for research efforts. Scientific publications on diseases were collected from MEDLINE using MeSH terms to identify relevant publications. We used Web of Science to collect author affiliations and citation data. We developed a correspondence table between WHO ICD-10 and MeSH descriptors to compare global health needs and research efforts. This correspondence table is available as supplementary material. RESULTS: Research output is heavily concentrated in high-income countries and is mainly focused on their health needs, resulting in a relative lack of attention to diseases in lower income countries. A new finding is that diseases with a similar burden in high- and middle-income countries are also under-researched, both globally and in relation to disease burden in high- and middle-income countries. Global industrial R&D is found to be very similar to the focus of public research. Diseases more prevalent in high-income countries generate ten-fold more research attention than those in low-income countries. We find no discernible preference towards diseases of high-income countries versus those of low-income countries in the top 25% most prestigious journals. However, in middle-income countries, citation rates are substantially lower for diseases most prevalent in low- and middle-income countries. CONCLUSIONS: From a global perspective, the imbalance between research needs and research efforts persists as most of the research effort concentrates on diseases affecting high-income countries. Both pharmaceutical companies and the public sector also tend to focus on diseases with more burden in high-income countries. Our findings indicate that researchers in middle-income countries receive more citations when researching diseases more prevalent in high-income countries, and this may divert the attention of researchers in these countries from diseases more prevalent in their contexts.

University-industry R&D linkage metrics: validity and applicability in world university rankings.

In September 2015 Thomson Reuters published its Ranking of Innovative Universities (RIU). Covering 100 large research-intensive universities worldwide, Stanford University came in first, MIT was second and Harvard in third position. But how meaningful is this outcome? In this paper we will take a critical view from a methodological perspective. We focus our attention on the various types of metrics available, whether or not data redundancies are addressed, and if metrics should be assembled into a single composite overall score or not. We address these issues in some detail by emphasizing one metric in particular: university-industry co-authored publications (UICs). We compare the RIU with three variants of our own University-Industry R&D Linkage Index, which we derived from the bibliometric analysis of 750 research universities worldwide. Our findings highlight conceptual and methodological problems with UIC-based data, as well as computational weaknesses such university ranking systems. Avoiding choices between size-dependent or independent metrics, and between single-metrics and multi-metrics systems, we recommend an alternative 'scoreboard' approach: (1) without weighing systems of metrics and composite scores; (2) computational procedures and information sources are made more transparent; (3) size-dependent metrics are kept separate from size-independent metrics; (4) UIC metrics are selected according to the type of proximity relationship between universities and industry.

Does Interdisciplinary Research Lead to Higher Citation Impact? The Different Effect of Proximal and Distal Interdisciplinarity.

This article analyses the effect of degree of interdisciplinarity on the citation impact of individual publications for four different scientific fields. We operationalise interdisciplinarity as disciplinary diversity in the references of a publication, and rather than treating interdisciplinarity as a monodimensional property, we investigate the separate effect of different aspects of diversity on citation impact: i.e. variety, balance and disparity. We use a Tobit regression model to examine the effect of these properties of interdisciplinarity on citation impact, controlling for a range of variables associated with the characteristics of publications. We find that variety has a positive effect on impact, whereas balance and disparity have a negative effect. Our results further qualify the separate effect of these three aspects of diversity by pointing out that all three dimensions of interdisciplinarity display a curvilinear (inverted U-shape) relationship with citation impact. These findings can be interpreted in two different ways. On the one hand, they are consistent with the view that, while combining multiple fields has a positive effect in knowledge creation, successful research is better achieved through research efforts that draw on a relatively proximal range of fields, as distal interdisciplinary research might be too risky and more likely to fail. On the other hand, these results may be interpreted as suggesting that scientific audiences are reluctant to cite heterodox papers that mix highly disparate bodies of knowledge--thus giving less credit to publications that are too groundbreaking or challenging.

Número de autores y colaboración institucional en los artículos originales de investigación biomédica española. Evolución de los valores básicos de referencia en el período 1990-2009 / Number of authors and institutional collaboration in Spanish biomedical research papers. Evolution of the basic parameters in the period 1990-2009

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