January 2024, for the Higher Education Policy Institute, UK
Jonathan Adams, Chief Scientist at the Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate,
Jonathan Grant, David Smith and Martin Szomszor.
This report compares the UK’s policies intended to ‘level up’ the research and innovation capacity of regions with those in Germany after unification as well as in the US. The report concludes that investment has been too small and poorly linked to boosting research capacity.
The report also confirms there is exceptional regional economic imbalance in the UK. Yet despite disparities in the scale of UK regional research activity, the average academic research performance of the regions is similar. For example, the ‘golden triangle’ around London does not deliver research that is on average much more highly rated than that achieved in other regions.
Gali Halevi
Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate, United States
Evidence shows that women in academia are more likely to publish sole-authored papers than men and our findings add the additional insight that this occurs predominantly early in a woman’s career. There are several possible explanations. Earlier in their careers, women often seek tenure, and sole-authored publications are very important for promotion. Moreover, younger women may also have young children: family obligations can impede collaboration or travel. Women have been shown to have smaller networks than male counterparts, and this may reduce possible partnership opportunities. Further, collaboration can result in second or third authorship, which would reduce the impact of women’s contribution; women may be unwilling to receive less credit. Other reasons may be discrimination and bias, but these are less likely than the reasons suggested above.
Ann Beynon
Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate, United States
UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an increasingly important way to measure progress toward global challenges. We analyze SDG research based on Web of Science Core Collection data. The publication data in Web of Science is mapped to the UN SDGs, enabling a range of analyses. This presentation covers overall trends in SDG research, including breakdowns by publisher and open access status. We also explore how the research mapped to SDGs aligns with our traditional journal categories.
Ann Beynon, Gali Halevi
Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate, United States
The Open Science movement continues to grow across the globe with support from the European Commission (EC), the OECD (OECD) , the United States National Academies (National Academies of Sciences, 2018), amongst others. The Center for Open Science (COS), a non-profit organization, was founded in 2013 to “increase the openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research” (CoS). In 2015, CoS, with several universities, funders, and publishers, published the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines, eight standards scholarly journals can implement to further openness and transparency (Nosek et al., 2015). In 2020, CoS launched the TOP Factor to assess the degree to which journal policies are promoting transparency and reproducibility. The TOP Factor is based on the TOP Guidelines, e.g. transparency of data/code/materials/research design and pre-registration. The TOP Factor is calculated by summing the level of implementation of the 8 original standards plus 2 additional standards (CoS).
The Web of Science Core Collection is a global, multidisciplinary citation index widely used for scientometric analysis. The list of journals in Core Collection is available on the Web of Science Master Journal List (Clarivate). The Core Collection includes 21,879 active journals as of January 2022, covering sciences, social sciences, and arts & humanities. These journals pass a rigorous editorial selection process (Clarivate).
In 2020, Clarivate collaborated with the Center for Open Science to incorporate TOP Factors on the Master Journal List (Clarivate). As of February 2022, 1,232 of the Core Collection’s journals (5.6%) have a TOP Factor. Previous studies have analyzed TOP Factor for journals in specific disciplines, including sleep research and chronobiology (Spitschan et al., 2020), herpetology (Marshall & Strine, 2021), and sport science (Hansford et al.), (Hansford et al., 2022), (Hansford et al., 2021). Other studies have found a positive correlation between open data sharing, one aspect of open science, and citation impact (Piwowar et al., 2007), (Piwowar & Vision, 2013). This study explores the relationship between TOP Factor and journal impact measures across all research disciplines.
Ann Beynon
Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate, United States
The flow of ideas across geographies is essential for a healthy research ecosystem. Graduate students are vital to research universities, and these researchers often stay in their adopted country as postdocs and eventually faculty members. Established researchers move to universities in other countries or establish joint appointments across borders. Prior studies have shown the benefits of this cross-pollination to research and innovation outcomes (Halevi et al. 2015). Countries are in a fierce competition to attract and retain the best research talent. The COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical forces have altered the flow of researchers in recent years. In this study, we examine the mobility of Canadian researchers using Web of Science Core Collection publication data representing over 21,000 international journals. Author affiliations in three research fields- virology, finance, and environmental science- were analyzed to track researcher mobility across countries and over a ten-year period (2012-2021). We analyzed the rate of mobility for Canadian researchers versus other countries in these three fields, and examined the countries and institutions globally where the Canadian researchers migrated to. Mobility rates across sectors (academic, government, corporate, etc.) are also compared over the ten-year period. The data show there are field and country differences in mobility patterns which warrants further investigation. These data can help university leaders and government policy makers understand changes occurring in the Canadian research workforce and inform their funding and policy decisions to sustain and strengthen the national research system.
Milovan Kovač, Ross W. K. Potter
Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate
Analysing researchers’ mobility is an important step toward understanding global research patterns and what drives researchers to move institutions, countries or leave academia. Here, an analysis of researchers’ mobility during the years 2012 to 2021 was conducted through the lens of researchers’ academic age. Data from three subject categories (finance, oceanography, and virology), where researchers are expected to publish under different affiliation types, were used. Changes in affiliation types (academic, corporate, government, etc.) throughout researchers’ publishing careers were tracked. The results show that over 80% of authors did not change affiliation type over their career. However, of those authors that did exhibit changes, researchers were more likely to stop publishing completely with an affiliation type rather than adding a new type as their career progressed. At a country level, a comparison between authors initially affiliated with China and USA shows that, depending on the research field, authors initially affiliated with USA gradually stopped publishing under USA affiliations as their academic age increases. This effect was greater than that for initially Chinese affiliated authors in some subject fields.
Ross Potter, Milovan Kovac
Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate
Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI) allows comparisons between research in different fields and is considered a standard indicator for national and institutional comparisons. Fractional and Collaboration CNCI supplement the standard approach by considering the increasingly collaborative nature of scientific research. Here, these three CNCI variants are combined to analyse changes in these indicator values over the period 2009 to 2018 for nearly 200 institutions. Using Web of Science data, Chinese institutions are found to be extremely consistent in improvements across all three CNCI indicators with an almost 1:1 nature, while USA and Canadian institutions tend to show declines in values for all three indicator variants. Specific institutions, such as King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia, stand out as being regionally exceptional in their CNCI values. Analysis also demonstrates the increasingly collaborative nature of research, with the mean number of institutional partners for both domestic and international collaboration increasing over time. Chinese institutions’ unique improvement may be due to Chinese citation practices. Specific institutional improvements may be due to hiring policies. Further work is required to fully address how greater collaboration, as well as research portfolios, affect CNCI indicator values and, therefore, performance evaluation and understanding.
Ryan Beardsley, Gali Halevi
Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate
Caroline Wagner
The Ohio State University
In recent years special attention was given to identify gaps in scientific productivity and impact between women en men. These studies contributed to our understanding of how social, economic, inequity, and gaps in career opprtunities contributed to the increasing gaps in advancement, productivity and impact between men and women in science. In this study we focused on tracking the differences between men en women’s productivity and impact with the same academic age, single autorship in the same disciplines. We sought to demonstrate the dynamics of females and males’ publications and impact over time by analyzing number of publications and citations by academic age and by selected discipline. Our contribution is mainly the addition of two parameters: academic age and single authorship analysis.
Our finding show, that except for Nursing, which is already dominated by female authors, all the disciplines we studies showed that male authors receive more citations as single authors than females. This study demonstrates that gaps in impact exist even when single authorship and academic age are identical. This is concerning since these gaps seem to be inscribed from early career and as previous studies showed, continue through the scientific careers of females and males.
Ross Potter
Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate
International collaboration is now integral to academic research, with the Collaboration Category Normalised Citation Impact (Collab CNCI) indicator formulated to specifically account for this. Here, Collab CNCI is used independently, as well as in concert with other CNCI variants (the standard method and fractional counting), to derive and showcase important and otherwise hidden insights into three countries’ (Australia, China Mainland, Sri Lanka) research output. By deconstructing output into different collaboration types, as well as analysing data at both national and institutional levels, highly multilateral papers are shown to directly influence and in some cases (Sri Lanka) dominate a country’s CNCI performance. Such information is critical to be able to fully understand and responsibly compare research performance and consequently drive better informed policy and funding decisions.
Gali Halevi, Nemanja Milićević, Ryan Fry
Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate
Thed van Leeuwen
The Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University
Open access publishing has quite a significant cost associated with it. Article Processing Charges (APCs) are fees charged by publishers to authors for the publication of their articles in open access journals. These fees can present a new type of “paywall” to researchers and institutions who cannot afford to pay these amounts. Considering previous studies that showed barriers to publishing open access between countries as a result of high costs, in this study, we aimed to examine whether there are differences in open access publishing, expenditure and overall participation within universities in the United States. Our analysis shows that the majority of states published between 1,000 – 7,000 Gold Open Access publications and spent up to 6million dollars in the past 10 years. However, there are some noteworthy outliers’ states that publish a high number Gold Open Access papers but pay significantly less than other states that publish a lower number of Gold Open Access papers and pay significantly more.
Ross Potter
Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate
Funding is imperative for academic research and can be provided by, among others, governments and private companies. Here, using a dataset of ~245,000 research articles sourced from the Web of Science and Incites Benchmarking & Analytics over the period 2016 to 2021 inclusive, funding for Nordic-authored research is analysed. The dominant funding source (~80% of all articles) is from countries within the European Union (EU). However, on a continent level, only funding from Asia, specifically China, increases in terms of percentage share over the period (14% to 19%). Within the EU, the main funding source (30% of all articles) is the European Commission, as well as countries’ own research councils or academies (particularly Sweden, Norway and Finland). Outside the EU, funding from US government health bodies (e.g., National Institute of Health – NIH) is prominent but has decreased (12% to 9.5%). Funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has also declined (10.5% to 7.5%) over the period, possibly a consequence of Brexit. Notably, the impact of Nordic research declines over the period – all top 10 funders (by publication count) saw their Category Normalised Citation Impact (CNCI) stagnate or decrease, particularly UKRI and NIH whose values halved from above 6 to around 3. Using Citation Topics to define research areas, forty percent of funded research covers Clinical and Life Sciences. This is the most funded area for all 10 largest funders, bar the National Natural Science Foundation of China and National Science Foundation where Physics is the most funded area.
Ross Potter, Milovan Kovac
Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate
Using publication data between 2012 and 2021, this work examines the institutional and geographic mobility of researchers initially affiliated with a Nordic institution in 2012. Data are retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) and contain information for more than 70,000 researchers. More than four fifths (84%) of these authors have multiple institutional affiliations, while more than half (56%) added a new institution to their initial affiliation list. Roughly 37% of Nordic authors have more than one affiliated country, while 29% added new a country affiliation after 2012. Furthermore, researchers from all Nordic countries tend to gradually leave their initial affiliated country as their career progresses. Iceland has the greatest drain of researchers. It is the only Nordic country where less than 70% of its authors remained affiliated with an Icelandic institution in 2021. USA, UK and Germany are in the top tier of foreign affiliated countries of Nordic researchers. At the same time, many Nordic researchers are affiliated with other Nordic countries. Sweden stands out as an important mobility destination for authors from other Nordic countries. Sweden is in the top three mobility destinations for all other Nordic countries except for Denmark. In terms of institution affiliation types (i.e., academic, government, corporate), there were no significant shifts of authors from one affiliation type to another when comparing distributions in 2012 and 2021.
Ross Potter
Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate
An analysis of Web of Science Core Collection data used to explore research trends in global ocean science. Examples from this recently published bibliometric analysis will illustrate publishing trends for the world’s five ocean basins, focusing on national and institutional-level activity and collaboration trends. We also covered recent additions to Web to Science: Preprint Citation Index and ProQuest Dissertations and These Citation Index.
Ann Beynon
Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate
Laurel Crawford
Johns Hopkins University
Shawn Hendrikx
Western University
Academic research libraries have been building their open access strategies for decades in response to government-led OA policies balanced with their institutional principles and values. As these mandates take shape, such as the Canadian Tri-Agency OA Policy and the OSTP Public Access Memo (2022 Nelson Memo) in the US, librarians are seeking ways to help support OA publishing and compliance at their organization. At the same time, they also endeavor to build a values-inclusive framework that considers both quantitative results and the institution’s principles. In this session, librarians from Johns Hopkins University and Western University will discuss how they use bibliometric data to support a balanced decision-making approach when it comes to publishing-support solutions, e.g., publisher partnerships or transformative agreements.
Through analyses in Web of Science™ and InCites Benchmarking & Analytics™, libraries can quickly understand the current OA publishing trends among their researchers–one piece of the OA initiative puzzle. Attendees of this session will learn techniques for compiling reports that help librarians uncover which researchers and departments are particularly engaged with OA already or what the university’s gold OA output looks like by publisher portfolio. With trusted Clarivate™ tools available at many institutions, librarians can start tackling some of their biggest questions related to OA, and non-OA publishing alike, at their organization.
Ross Potter, Milovan Kovac
Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate
Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI) allows comparisons between research in different fields and is considered a standard indicator for national and institutional comparisons. Fractional and Collaboration CNCI supplement the standard approach by considering the increasingly collaborative nature of scientific research. Here, these three CNCI variants are combined to analyse changes in these indicator values over the period 2009 to 2018 for nearly 200 institutions. Using Web of Science data, Chinese institutions are found to be extremely consistent in improvements across all three CNCI indicators with an almost 1:1 nature, while USA and Canadian institutions tend to show declines in values for all three indicator variants. Specific institutions, such as King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia, stand out as being regionally exceptional in their CNCI values. Analysis also demonstrates the increasingly collaborative nature of research, with the mean number of institutional partners for both domestic and international collaboration increasing over time. Chinese institutions’ unique improvement may be due to Chinese citation practices. Specific institutional improvements may be due to hiring policies. Further work is required to fully address how greater collaboration, as well as research portfolios, affect CNCI indicator values and, therefore, performance evaluation and understanding.
Ryan Beardsley*, Caroline Wagner**, Gali Halevi*
* Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate
** The Ohio State University
In recent years special attention was given to identify gaps in scientific productivity and impact between women and men. These studies contributed to our understanding of how social, economic, inequity, and gaps in career opportunities contributed to the increasing gaps in advancement, productivity and impact between men and women in science. In this study we focused on tracking the differences between men and women’s productivity and impact with the same academic age, single authorship in the same disciplines. We sought to demonstrate the dynamics of females and males’ publications and impact over time by analyzing number of publications and citations by academic age and by selected discipline. Our contribution is mainly the addition of two parameters: academic age and single authorship analysis. Our finding show, that except for Nursing, which is already dominated by female authors, all the disciplines we studies showed that male authors receive more citations as single authors than females. This study demonstrates that gaps in impact exist even when single authorship and same academic age are identical. This is concerning since these gaps seem to be inscribed from early career and as previous studied showed, continue through the scientific careers of females and males
Ross Potter
Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate, United States
International collaboration is now integral to academic research, with the Collaboration Category Normalised Citation Impact (Collab CNCI) indicator formulated to specifically account for this. Here, Collab CNCI is used independently, as well as in concert with other CNCI variants (the standard method and fractional counting), to derive and showcase important and otherwise hidden insights into three countries’ (Australia, China Mainland, Sri Lanka) research output. By deconstructing output into different collaboration types, as well as analysing data at both national and institutional levels, highly multilateral papers are shown to directly influence and in some cases (Sri Lanka) dominate a country’s CNCI performance. Such information is critical to be able to fully understand and responsibly compare research performance and consequently drive better informed policy and funding decisions.
Gali Halevi* , Thed van Leeuwen** Nemanja Milićević, *** Ryan Fry****
*Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate, United States
**The Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, NL
Open access publishing has quite a significant cost associated with it. Article Processing Charges (APCs) are fees charged by publishers to authors for the publication of their articles in open access journals. These fees can present a new type of “paywall” to researchers and institutions who cannot afford to pay these amounts. Considering previous studies that showed barriers to publishing open access between countries as a result of high costs, in this study, we aimed to examine whether there are differences in open access publishing, expenditure and overall participation within universities in the United States. Our analysis shows that the majority of states published between 1,000 – 7,000 Gold Open Access publications and spent up to 6million dollars in the past 10 years. However, there are some noteworthy outliers’ states that publish a high number Gold Open Access papers but pay significantly less than other states that publish a lower number of Gold Open Access papers and pay significantly more.
Ross Potter, Milovan Kovac
Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate
Using publication data between 2012 and 2021, this work examines the institutional and geographic mobility of researchers initially affiliated with a Nordic institution in 2012. Data are retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) and contain information for more than 70,000 researchers. More than four fifths (84%) of these authors have multiple institutional affiliations, while more than half (56%) added a new institution to their initial affiliation list. Roughly 37% of Nordic authors have more than one affiliated country, while 29% added new a country affiliation after 2012. Furthermore, researchers from all Nordic countries tend to gradually leave their initial affiliated country as their career progresses. Iceland has the greatest drain of researchers. It is the only Nordic country where less than 70% of its authors remained affiliated with an Icelandic institution in 2021. USA, UK and Germany are in the top tier of foreign affiliated countries of Nordic researchers. At the same time, many Nordic researchers are affiliated with other Nordic countries. Sweden stands out as an important mobility destination for authors from other Nordic countries. Sweden is in the top three mobility destinations for all other Nordic countries except for Denmark. In terms of institution affiliation types (i.e., academic, government, corporate), there were no significant shifts of authors from one affiliation type to another when comparing distributions in 2012 and 2021.