Social innovation research: An emerging area of innovation studies?

Large networks contain plentiful information about the organization of a system. The challenge is to extract useful information buried in the structure of myriad nodes and links. Therefore, powerful tools for simplifying and highlighting important structures in networks are essential for comprehending their organization. Such tools are called community-detection methods and they are designed to identify strongly intraconnected modules that often correspond to important functional units. Here we describe one such method, known as the map equation, and its accompanying algorithms for finding, evaluating, and visualizing the modular organization of networks. The map equation framework is very flexible and can identify two-level, multi-level, and overlapping organization in weighted, directed, and multiplex networks with its search algorithm Infomap. Because the map equation framework operates on the flow induced by the links of a network, it naturally captures flow of ideas and citation flow, and is therefore well-suited for analysis of bibliometric networks.

Measuring Scholarly Impact

Agencies that fund scientific research must choose: is it more effective to give large grants to a few elite researchers, or small grants to many researchers? Large grants would be more effective only if scientific impact increases as an accelerating function of grant size. Here, we examine the scientific impact of individual university-based researchers in three disciplines funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). We considered four indices of scientific impact: numbers of articles published, numbers of citations to those articles, the most cited article, and the number of highly cited articles, each measured over a four-year period. We related these to the amount of NSERC funding received. Impact is positively, but only weakly, related to funding. Researchers who received additional funds from a second federal granting council, the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, were not more productive than those who received only NSERC funding. Impact was generally a decelerating function of funding. Impact per dollar was therefore lower for large grant-holders. This is inconsistent with the hypothesis that larger grants lead to larger discoveries. Further, the impact of researchers who received increases in funding did not predictably increase. We conclude that scientific impact (as reflected by publications) is only weakly limited by funding. We suggest that funding strategies that target diversity, rather than “excellence”, are likely to prove to be more productive.

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Big Science vs. Little Science: How Scientific Impact Scales with Funding

There is increasing interest in assessing how sponsored research funding influences the development and trajectory of science and technology. Traditionally, linkages between research funding and subsequent results are hard to track, often requiring access to separate funding or performance reports released by researchers or sponsors. Tracing research sponsorship and output linkages is even more challenging when researchers receive multiple funding awards and collaborate with a variety of differentially-sponsored research colleagues. This article presents a novel bibliometric approach to undertaking funding acknowledgement analysis which links research outputs with their funding sources. Using this approach in the context of nanotechnology research, the article probes the funding patterns of leading countries and agencies including patterns of cross-border research sponsorship. We identify more than 91,500 nanotechnology articles published worldwide during a 12-month period in 2008---2009. About 67% of these publications include funding acknowledgements information. We compare articles reporting funding with those that do not (for reasons that may include reliance on internal core-funding rather than external awards as well as omissions in reporting). While we find some country and field differences, we judge that the level of reporting of funding sources is sufficiently high to provide a basis for analysis. The funding acknowledgement data is used to compare nanotechnology funding policies and programs in selected countries and to examine their impacts on scientific output. We also examine the internationalization of research funding through the interplay of various funding sources at national and organizational levels. We find that while most nanotechnology funding is nationally-oriented, internationalization and knowledge exchange does occur as researchers collaborate across borders. Our method offers a new approach not only in identifying the funding sources of publications but also in feasibly undertaking large-scale analyses across scientific fields, institutions and countries.

Funding acknowledgement analysis: an enhanced tool to investigate research sponsorship impacts: the case of nanotechnology

This review explores contributions by science policy studies and the sociology of science to our understanding of the impact of governance on research content. Contributions are subsumed under two perspectives, namely an “impact of”—perspective that searches for effects of specific governance arrangements and an “impact on”—perspective that asks what factors contribute to the construction of research content and includes governance among them. Our review shows that little is known so far about the impact of governance on knowledge content. A research agenda does not necessarily need to include additional empirical phenomena but must address the macro-micro-macro link inherent to the question in its full complexity, and systematically exploit comparative approaches in order to establish causality. This requires interdisciplinary collaboration between science policy studies, the sociology of science, and bibliometrics, which all can contribute to the necessary analytical toolbox.

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Governing Science: How Science Policy Shapes Research Content

As bibliometric indicators are objective, reliable, and cost-effective measures of peer-reviewed research outputs, they are expected to play an increasingly important role in research assessment/management. Recently, a bibliometric approach was developed and integrated within the evaluation framework of research funded by the National Cancer Institute of Canada (NCIC). This approach helped address the following questions that were difficult to answer objectively using alternative methods such as program documentation review and key informant interviews: (a) Has the NCIC peer-review process selected outstanding Canadian scientists in cancer research? (b) Have the NCIC grants contributed to increasing the scientific performance of supported researchers? (c) How do the NCIC-supported researchers compare to their neighbors supported by the U.S. National Cancer Institute? Using the NCIC evaluation as a case study, this article demonstrates the usefulness of bibliometrics to address key evaluation questions and discusses its integration, along complementary indicators (e.g., peer ratings), in a practice-driven research evaluation continuum.

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Michelle Picard-Aitken

Papers

Bibliometrics as a Performance Measurement Tool for Research Evaluation: The Case of Research Funded by the National Cancer Institute of Canada

Canada-U.S. Collaborations in Clean Energy Research: A Scientometric Analysis (2005-2009)