Scientific collaboration

Developments in network technologies, scholarly communication, and national policy are challenging academic libraries to find new ways to engage with research communities in the economic downturn. Librarians are responding with service innovations in areas such as bibliometrics and research data management. Previous surveys have investigated research data support within North America and other research services globally with small samples. An online multiple-choice questionnaire was used to survey bibliometric and data support activities of 140 libraries in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, including current and planned services, target audiences, service constraints, and staff training needs. A majority of respondents offered or planned bibliometrics training, citation reports, and impact calculations but with significant differences between countries. Current levels of engagement in data management were lower than for bibliometrics, but a majority anticipated future involvement, especially in technology assistance, data deposit, and policy development. Initiatives were aimed at multiple constituencies, with university administrators being important clients and partners for bibliometric services. Gaps in knowledge, skills, and confidence were significant constraints, with near-universal support for including bibliometrics and particularly data management in professional education and continuing development programs. The study also found that librarians need a multilayered understanding of the research environment.

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Bibliometrics and Research Data Management Services: Emerging Trends in Library Support for Research

The average age at which U.S. researchers receive their first grant from NIH has increased from 34.3 in 1970, to 41.7 in 2004. These data raise the crucial question of the effects of aging on the scientific productivity and impact of researchers. Drawing on a sizeable sample of 6,388 university professors in Quebec who have published at least one paper between 2000 and 2007, our results identify two turning points in the professors' careers. A first turning point is visible at age 40 years, where researchers start to rely on older literature and where their productivity increases at a slower pace—after having increased sharply since the beginning of their career. A second turning point can be seen around age 50, when researchers are the most productive whereas their average scientific impact is at its lowest. Our results also show that older professors publish fewer first-authored papers and move closer to the end of the list of co-authors. Although average scientific impact per paper decreases linearly until about age 50, the average number of papers in highly cited journals and among highly cited papers rises continuously until retirement. Our results show clearly that productivity and impact are not a simple and declining function of age and that we must take into account the collaborative aspects of scientific research. Science is a collective endeavor and, as our data shows, researchers of all ages play a significant role in its dynamic.

The Effects of Aging on Researchers' Publication and Citation Patterns

To what extent do sociologists collaborate? Has this changed over time? What factors contribute to research collaboration among sociologists? To answer these questions, we examine trends in collaboration over a 70 year period and empirically test a variety of explanations for the increase in collaboration that we find. We analyze data collected from a stratified random sample of articles in two leading sociology journals between 1935 and 2005 (n = 1274). Most of our analyses are descriptive and display trends over time. However, we pool the data across all years and estimate logistic regression models to assess the relative contribution of various factors. We find that the importance of geographical location has been waning since the 1950s, although the growth in cross-place collaborations stagnated between 1980 and 2005. We find that quantitative research is more likely to be collaborative, as are projects requiring data collection, though this may change because the collaboration rate among secondary data users is increasing at a faster rate. We find no significant gender differences in rates of collaboration, although male sole-authorship remains the most common form of publication. We also find the institutional prestige of coauthors is typically higher than that of sole-authors. Our results elucidate the extent of collaboration in sociology and reveal how several factors have contributed to this major shift in work organization.

Collaborative Research in Sociology: Trends and Contributing Factors

Citation indictors are increasingly used in some subject areas to support peer review in the evaluation of researchers and departments. Nevertheless, traditional journal-based citation indexes may be inadequate for the citation impact assessment of book-based disciplines. This article examines whether online citations from Google Books and Google Scholar can provide alternative sources of citation evidence. To investigate this, we compared the citation counts to 1,000 books submitted to the 2008 U.K. Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) from Google Books and Google Scholar with Scopus citations across seven book-based disciplines (archaeology; law; politics and international studies; philosophy; sociology; history; and communication, cultural, and media studies). Google Books and Google Scholar citations to books were 1.4 and 3.2 times more common than were Scopus citations, and their medians were more than twice and three times as high as were Scopus median citations, respectively. This large number of citations is evidence that in book-oriented disciplines in the social sciences, arts, and humanities, online book citations may be sufficiently numerous to support peer review for research evaluation, at least in the United Kingdom. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Assessing the citation impact of books: The role of Google Books, Google Scholar, and Scopus

Bibliometric measures for evaluating research units in the book-oriented humanities and social sciences are underdeveloped relative to those available for journal-oriented science and technology. We therefore present a new measure designed for book-oriented fields: the “libcitation count.” This is a count of the libraries holding a given book, as reported in a national or international union catalog. As librarians decide what to acquire for the audiences they serve, they jointly constitute an instrument for gauging the cultural impact of books. Their decisions are informed by knowledge not only of audiences but also of the book world (e.g., the reputations of authors and the prestige of publishers). From libcitation counts, measures can be derived for comparing research units. Here, we imagine a match-up between the departments of history, philosophy, and political science at the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney in Australia. We chose the 12 books from each department that had the highest libcitation counts in the Libraries Australia union catalog during 2000 to 2006. We present each book's raw libcitation count, its rank within its Library of Congress (LC) class, and its LC-class normalized libcitation score. The latter is patterned on the item-oriented field normalized citation score used in evaluative bibliometrics. Summary statistics based on these measures allow the departments to be compared for cultural impact. Our work has implications for programs such as Excellence in Research for Australia and the Research Assessment Exercise in the United Kingdom. It also has implications for data mining in OCLC's WorldCat. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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Libcitations: A measure for comparative assessment of book publications in the humanities and social sciences

Background: In 2000, the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Ophthalmology (ANZJO) changed title to Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology. At this time, a review of Australia's contributions to the literature over the previous 21 years appears timely. Bibliometric indicators are used extensively to assess research performance as they offer views of a field that might not otherwise be apparent. The aim of this study was to explore publication output data to construct a picture of ophthalmology that may be of benefit to researchers and ophthalmologists.



Methods: Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index databases were used to collate data on ophthal­mology research literature from 1980 to 2000. Subsequent analysis particularly focused on Australia's contribution to this literature, including publication frequency vis-a-vis the world, collaboration, and the journals in which Australian researchers frequently publish. These data were also compared with other countries of similar scientific stature or language.



Results: Since 1980, Australia has ranked in the top 10 nations contributing to world ophthalmology research. Its contribution was close to world average in the 1980s, but increasing numbers of researchers and papers show Australia exceeding the world average during the 1990s. Most ophthalmology research collaboration by Australians is within Australia. Although fewer in number, collaborative papers with overseas researchers include 28 other countries. Data on the journals in which Australians publish show that Australian researchers continue to exhibit a preference for publication in their own regional journals.



Conclusions: This paper, one of a series on the literature of the vision sciences, provides some initial benchmarks on Australia's standing and contribution to the field of ophthalmology research.

Research contributions in ophthalmology: Australia's productivity.

This paper is the continued study on age structure of scientific collaboration in Chinese computer science. Based on an extended database a new method is used to analyze the nature and preference of collaboration. Observed values of two- three- and four-dimensional collaboration were compared respectively with their expected values. Investigation covered co-authors" combination patterns, name permutations in their papers, especially the age of the first author.

Collaborative patterns and age structures in Chinese publications

This study covers a ten-year period, 1990-1999, of the publishing careers of nine authors who appear in the top-20 most productive authors in the field of ophthalmology. In this paper we discuss findings from a study of the publishing careers of elite researchers in the field of ophthalmology. The paper highlights the extent and nature of the journals in which these elite researchers publish their work. Data derived from the study include indications of multidisciplinary involvement or 'work-space' interests, publication characteristics, and collaborative engagement with others. We provide insights into the workings of author productivity, characteristics of papers such as numbers per paper of pages, references, and authors, and initial findings about their collaboration patterns. These findings, showing (ir)regularities or patterns in publishing careers, may be of interest to researchers and practitioners because they provide a view that might not otherwise be apparent to the field or to authors themselves.

Elite Researchers in Ophthalmology: Aspects of Publishing Strategies, Collaboration and Multi-Disciplinarity

The paper provides data from a first exploration of the literature of Vision Science as seen bibliometrically through the ISI's three citation indexes, SCI, SSCI, & AHCI The main focus of analysis is on the major fields of Ophthalmology and Optics (SC=OPTICS and SC=OPHTHALMOLOGY) with a focus on Australia's contribution to those literatures Australia's publication frequency vis-a-vis the world, its collaboration with authors from other nations, and the journals in which Australians most frequently publish are shown Comparison of productivity is made for countries of similar scientific stature, or of language and Commonwealth status

Mari Davis

Papers

Libcitations: A measure for comparative assessment of book publications in the humanities and social sciences

Research contributions in ophthalmology: Australia's productivity.

Collaborative patterns and age structures in Chinese publications

Elite Researchers in Ophthalmology: Aspects of Publishing Strategies, Collaboration and Multi-Disciplinarity

Ophthalmology and optics: An informetric study of Australia's contribution to fields in the Vision Science domain, 1991–95