What is societal impact of research and how can it be assessed? a literature survey
01 Feb 2013-Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd)-Vol. 64, Iss: 2, pp 217-233
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present existing research on and practices employed in the assessment of societal impact in the form of a literature survey, and the objective is for this review to serve as a basis for the development of robust and reliable methods for societal impact measurement.
Abstract: Since the 1990s, the scope of research evaluations becomes broader as the societal products outputs, societal use societal references, and societal benefits changes in society of research come into scope. Society can reap the benefits of successful research studies only if the results are converted into marketable and consumable products e.g., medicaments, diagnostic tools, machines, and devices or services. A series of different names have been introduced which refer to the societal impact of research: third stream activities, societal benefits, societal quality, usefulness, public values, knowledge transfer, and societal relevance. What most of these names are concerned with is the assessment of social, cultural, environmental, and economic returns impact and effects from results research output or products research outcome of publicly funded research. This review intends to present existing research on and practices employed in the assessment of societal impact in the form of a literature survey. The objective is for this review to serve as a basis for the development of robust and reliable methods of societal impact measurement.
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TL;DR: Comparisons between citations and metric values for articles published at different times, even within the same year, can remove or reverse this association and so publishers and scientometricians should consider the effect of time when using altmetrics to rank articles.
Abstract: Altmetric measurements derived from the social web are increasingly advocated and used as early indicators of article impact and usefulness. Nevertheless, there is a lack of systematic scientific evidence that altmetrics are valid proxies of either impact or utility although a few case studies have reported medium correlations between specific altmetrics and citation rates for individual journals or fields. To fill this gap, this study compares 11 altmetrics with Web of Science citations for 76 to 208,739 PubMed articles with at least one altmetric mention in each case and up to 1,891 journals per metric. It also introduces a simple sign test to overcome biases caused by different citation and usage windows. Statistically significant associations were found between higher metric scores and higher citations for articles with positive altmetric scores in all cases with sufficient evidence (Twitter, Facebook wall posts, research highlights, blogs, mainstream media and forums) except perhaps for Google+ posts. Evidence was insufficient for LinkedIn, Pinterest, question and answer sites, and Reddit, and no conclusions should be drawn about articles with zero altmetric scores or the strength of any correlation between altmetrics and citations. Nevertheless, comparisons between citations and metric values for articles published at different times, even within the same year, can remove or reverse this association and so publishers and scientometricians should consider the effect of time when using altmetrics to rank articles. Finally, the coverage of all the altmetrics except for Twitter seems to be low and so it is not clear if they are prevalent enough to be useful in practice.
828 citations
01 Nov 2015
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the growth of science and identified three essential growth phases in the development of science, which each led to growth rates tripling in comparison with the previous phase: from less than 1% up to the middle of the 18th century, to 2 to 3% to the period between the two world wars, and 8 to 9% to 2010.
Abstract: Many studies (in information science) have looked at the growth of science. In this study, we reexamine the question of the growth of science. To do this we (a) use current data up to publication year 2012 and (b) analyze the data across all disciplines and also separately for the natural sciences and for the medical and health sciences. Furthermore, the data were analyzed with an advanced statistical technique—segmented regression analysis—which can identify specific segments with similar growth rates in the history of science. The study is based on two different sets of bibliometric data: (a) the number of publications held as source items in the Web of Science (WoS, Thomson Reuters) per publication year and (b) the number of cited references in the publications of the source items per cited reference year. We looked at the rate at which science has grown since the mid-1600s. In our analysis of cited references we identified three essential growth phases in the development of science, which each led to growth rates tripling in comparison with the previous phase: from less than 1% up to the middle of the 18th century, to 2 to 3% up to the period between the two world wars, and 8 to 9% to 2010.
805 citations
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TL;DR: The Science of Science (SciSci) as discussed by the authors provides a quantitative understanding of the interactions among scientific agents across diverse geographic and temporal scales, providing insights into the conditions underlying creativity and the genesis of scientific discovery, with the ultimate goal of developing tools and policies that have the potential to accelerate science.
Abstract: BACKGROUND The increasing availability of digital data on scholarly inputs and outputs—from research funding, productivity, and collaboration to paper citations and scientist mobility—offers unprecedented opportunities to explore the structure and evolution of science. The science of science (SciSci) offers a quantitative understanding of the interactions among scientific agents across diverse geographic and temporal scales: It provides insights into the conditions underlying creativity and the genesis of scientific discovery, with the ultimate goal of developing tools and policies that have the potential to accelerate science. In the past decade, SciSci has benefited from an influx of natural, computational, and social scientists who together have developed big data–based capabilities for empirical analysis and generative modeling that capture the unfolding of science, its institutions, and its workforce. The value proposition of SciSci is that with a deeper understanding of the factors that drive successful science, we can more effectively address environmental, societal, and technological problems. ADVANCES Science can be described as a complex, self-organizing, and evolving network of scholars, projects, papers, and ideas. This representation has unveiled patterns characterizing the emergence of new scientific fields through the study of collaboration networks and the path of impactful discoveries through the study of citation networks. Microscopic models have traced the dynamics of citation accumulation, allowing us to predict the future impact of individual papers. SciSci has revealed choices and trade-offs that scientists face as they advance both their own careers and the scientific horizon. For example, measurements indicate that scholars are risk-averse, preferring to study topics related to their current expertise, which constrains the potential of future discoveries. Those willing to break this pattern engage in riskier careers but become more likely to make major breakthroughs. Overall, the highest-impact science is grounded in conventional combinations of prior work but features unusual combinations. Last, as the locus of research is shifting into teams, SciSci is increasingly focused on the impact of team research, finding that small teams tend to disrupt science and technology with new ideas drawing on older and less prevalent ones. In contrast, large teams tend to develop recent, popular ideas, obtaining high, but often short-lived, impact. OUTLOOK SciSci offers a deep quantitative understanding of the relational structure between scientists, institutions, and ideas because it facilitates the identification of fundamental mechanisms responsible for scientific discovery. These interdisciplinary data-driven efforts complement contributions from related fields such as scientometrics and the economics and sociology of science. Although SciSci seeks long-standing universal laws and mechanisms that apply across various fields of science, a fundamental challenge going forward is accounting for undeniable differences in culture, habits, and preferences between different fields and countries. This variation makes some cross-domain insights difficult to appreciate and associated science policies difficult to implement. The differences among the questions, data, and skills specific to each discipline suggest that further insights can be gained from domain-specific SciSci studies, which model and identify opportunities adapted to the needs of individual research fields.
630 citations
Posted Content•
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors re-examine the question of the growth of science and analyse it across all disciplines and also separately for the natural sciences and for the medical and health sciences.
Abstract: Many studies in information science have looked at the growth of science. In this study, we re-examine the question of the growth of science. To do this we (i) use current data up to publication year 2012 and (ii) analyse it across all disciplines and also separately for the natural sciences and for the medical and health sciences. Furthermore, the data are analysed with an advanced statistical technique - segmented regression analysis - which can identify specific segments with similar growth rates in the history of science. The study is based on two different sets of bibliometric data: (1) The number of publications held as source items in the Web of Science (WoS, Thomson Reuters) per publication year and (2) the number of cited references in the publications of the source items per cited reference year. We have looked at the rate at which science has grown since the mid-1600s. In our analysis of cited references we identified three growth phases in the development of science, which each led to growth rates tripling in comparison with the previous phase: from less than 1% up to the middle of the 18th century, to 2 to 3% up to the period between the two world wars and 8 to 9% to 2012.
617 citations
01 Aug 2020
TL;DR: SciSci has revealed choices and trade-offs that scientists face as they advance both their own careers and the scientific horizon, and offers a deep quantitative understanding of the relational structure between scientists, institutions, and ideas, which facilitates the identification of fundamental mechanisms responsible for scientific discovery.
Abstract: The rapid development of digital libraries and the proliferation of scholarly big data have created an unprecedented opportunity to explore scientific production and reward at scale. Fueled by the data exploration and computational advances in digital libraries, the science of science is an emerging multidisciplinary field that aims to quantify patterns for scientific relationships and dependencies, and how scientific progress emerges from the scholarly big data. In this tutorial, we will provide an overview of the science of science, including major topics on scientific careers, scientific collaborations and scientific ideas. We will also discuss its historical context, the state-of-art models and exciting discoveries, and promising future directions for participants interested in mining scholarly big data.
579 citations
References
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TL;DR: The authors argued that the ways in which knowledge is produced are undergoing fundamental changes at the end of the twentieth century and that these changes mark a distinct shift into a new mode of knowledge production which is replacing or reforming established institutions, disciplines, practices and policies.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors reviewed the literature on the economic benefits of publicly funded basic research and classified these into six main categories, reviewing the evidence on the nature and extent of each type.
1,295 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors estimate the extent to which technological innovations in various industries have been based on recent academic research, and the time lags between the investment in academic research projects and the industrial utilization of their findings.
1,276 citations
TL;DR: A detailed and systematic examination of the contribution of public science to industrial technology would be useful evidence in arguing the case for governmental support of science as mentioned in this paper, by tracing the rapidly growing citation linkage between U.S. patents and scientific research papers.
1,222 citations