Search

This study investigates gender disparities in the Spanish workforce's distribution in international and industry collaborative publications, highlighting common issues and potential differences. The work provides detailed information not only by gender but also by research field, research career, author position, and number of co-authors. The findings show a lower presence of women in both types of collaboration, even in 'Biomedical & Health Sciences', although there are more women in the total number of publications of this field. Women are under-represented in relevant authorship positions (first, last or corresponding author), possibly due to their concentration in the early career stages. A greater number of co-authors is associated with a decreased likelihood of holding relevant authorship positions, with some exceptions for women in international collaboration. This article aims to encourage responsible metrics by suggesting changes in evaluation policies to avoid indirect biases affecting gender and career progression.

In the evolving landscape of scientific research, ORCID identifiers are essential for maintaining academic integrity and enhancing research visibility. This study proposes a methodological framework for identifying and analyzing the presence and characteristics of researchers in a specific country in ORCID, using complementary data from OpenAlex to improve results. Our objectives were to develop a reliable method to identify ORCID records of researchers in Spain, study the frequency of profile updates, and investigate the most frequently filled metadata sections and common profile characteristics across disciplines. We identified 190,455 ORCID records of Spanish researchers and found high engagement with some metadata, particularly in the 'Employment' (73%) and 'Publications' (83%) sections. Additionally, 73% of records were actively maintained. The most common metadata combination included 'Works', 'Employment', and 'Education and Qualifications'. However, we noted significant variability and incomplete records across disciplines. The study highlights the need for more complete and frequently updated profiles, improved institutional integration, and strategic efforts to enhance ORCID adoption. These improvements could enhance the reliability of ORCID for tracking researcher mobility and academic trajectories.

This study aims to identify and compare the national scope of research at the country level, dealing with two groups of countries: Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and a group of countries at the forefront in developing mainstream science (WORLD). We wish to explore whether similar or different patterns arise between the two groups at the global and disciplinary level, becoming apparent in their proportion of research related to local perspectives or topics. It is found that Latin America and the Caribbean countries present a greater proportion of local production. The trend to publish national-oriented research is related to disciplinary fields. Even though English is the dominant language of publication, the lingua franca is more likely to appear in the national scope of research, especially for Latin America and the Caribbean countries but also in the rest of non-Anglophone countries. Some implications and limitations for further studies are described.

This study aims to provide an overview of the distribution of the Spanish scientific workforce focusing on differences in authorship position by gender, academic age, number of authors, and research field. The results show some degree of parity in younger age cohorts and areas such as biomedicine, but little participation of females in the oldest age cohort and areas such as mathematics. In addition, the presence of women undergoes significant changes in certain areas and decreases in oldest age cohorts. This circumstance leads to a very low probability of finding women or junior researchers in relevant authorship positions. Policymakers should be aware that there are inequalities in the scientific workforce that need to be considered when addressing/proposing scientific evaluation criteria.

Quantitative science studies have been used to facilitate the systematic analysis of the modern digital tide of literature over the last few decades. This chapter reviews two applications related to science mapping of scholarly communication. Science mapping includes visualizations to analyze potential relationships between people, organizations, concepts. Here, we review two methods: a) co-authorship: to unveil the scientific connections of actors in the field; b) and coword analysis: to reveal the main themes and topics and their cognitive structure. This study also presents an exploratory case of study for the knowledge circulation literature. Based on a sample of 3,900+ documents published between 1996 and 2021, we found a global average annual growth of the literature of ~17%, particularly since 2009. We then segmented the science mapping analysis into two periods: 1996-2008 and 2009-2021, to track changes over time. Coauthorship analysis showed a growing institutional collaboration between periods, first led by USA-Asia pacific institutions, then led by the United Kingdom and Canada. On the other hand, the co-word analysis showed consistency between periods of the conceptual communities concerning Knowledge management via Information Technology (IT) and Miscellaneous in the history of medicine and research/methodologies. Relevant conceptual communities in the first period were displaced by communities such as E-learning and education economics; Research methods in public policy; and Sustainability sciences and environmental policy. Beginners, seasoned scholars, and other actors could use our findings to identify key institutions and topics in the knowledge circulation research landscape.

Mapping and depicting the structure, dynamics and national specialisation profiles of scientific fields at the country level affords a better understanding of national developments and changes in a given field, particularly when these changes may serve as an aid in decision-making with regard to research management. This article looks at the cognitive structure of a field over time to characterise its development across countries and to appraise the competitiveness of countries in terms of research specialisation. Based on a dataset extracted from the Scopus database, we conducted a co-word analysis and studied the degree of specialisation based on publications and on keywords, in the Nanoscience and Nanotechnology field (NST). The results reveal that NST research tends to focus on nano applications and devices. According to the keyword activity index, the countries studied centre their specialisation on electronic, biotechnology and biomedical research, certain countries showing a more competitive edge in the global realm of output. Accordingly, implications that could contribute to decision-making regarding the economy and research policies are described.

Evaluative processes struggle with the notion of diversity of a scientific workforce. Despite overwhelming evidence on the need for diverse teams in terms of division of labor, ethnic mix or gender among others, bibliometric methods have traditionally been focused on the development of impact and productivity indicators. In this paper we attempt at reviewing recent advances in the development of novel informetric approaches and methods to study diversity in science. Specifically, we focus on those related to the scientific workforce. We first review the changes with regard to data sources which have made possible such approaches. Then we revise the different proposals made by organizing these approaches into three groups: 1) informetric methods related to individuals’ characteristics (e..g, gender, age, mobility); 2) methods related to individuals’ context (e.g., career trajectory, social engagement); and 3) approaches related to team dynamics (e.g., author position, contribution statements). We then conclude by identifying the main gaps in the literature and pointing towards potential areas to explore.

Authorship is associated with scientific capital and prestige, and corresponding authorship is used in evaluation as a proxy for scientific status. However, there are no empirical analyses on the validity of the corresponding authorship metadata in bibliometric databases. This paper aims at looking at differences on the corresponding authorship metadata in Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus, to investigate how the relationship between author position and corresponding authors varies by discipline and country and analyzing changes in the position of corresponding authors over time. We find that both, WoS and Scopus, have accuracy issues when it comes to assigning corresponding authorship. Although the number of documents with a reprint author has increased over time in both databases, however, WoS indexed more of those papers than Scopus, and there are significant differences between the two databases in terms of who the corresponding author is. Although metadata is not complete in WoS, corresponding authors are normally first authors with a declining trend over time, favoring middle and last authors, especially in Medical, Natural & Engineering fields. These results reinforce the importance of considering how databases operationalize and index concepts like corresponding authors, being this particularly important when are used in research assessment.

This paper focuses on systematic errors and propose how these can be measured and reported when informing and offering bibliometric data for policy purposes. We analysed differences in the calculation of impact indicators, when different 23 different classification schemes derived from Clarivate’s InCites suite are used, specifically on five indicators: the Category Normalized Citation Indicator, the total number of citations, the H-index, the 1% of most cited articles, and the 10% of most cited articles. Findings show that citation counts are quite stable, with a difference of 13%. However, proportional indicators, such as top 1% and top 10% most cited articles, tend to vary more between universities, although on average they are lower than in the previous case. The results of this study can be used in estimating the error level in the research assessment of countries, institutions, and individuals.

This study aims at identifying and comparing the national scope of research at the country level of two groups of countries: LAC and World. We want to explore whether similar or different patterns arise between the two groups at the global and disciplinary level in their proportion of research related to local perspectives or topics. Findings show that LAC countries present a greater proportion of local production than the rest of the countries. The trend to publish national-oriented research is related to disciplinary fields and it is not only coarsened into national but in extra regional journals. Even English is the dominant language of publication, the lingua franca is more likely to appear in the national scope of research, especially for LAC countries but also in the rest of non-Anglophone countries. Some implications in research evaluation for further research are described.

Agricultural Sciences have become one of Brazil’s most efficient and sustainable research areas, where most publications benefit from scientific collaboration. The present study analyzes the influence of the designation as the corresponding author to researchers linked to Brazilian institutions on the impact of co-authored articles in the category Agronomy from the Web of Science for five-year periods from 2005 to 2019. We have observed a noticeable growth in the number of documents in collaboration between the five-year periods. However, international partnership in the area still needs to be improved, although it is higher in non-academic institutions. The study verified that the documents published by Brazilian authors with international colleagues present a higher normalized citation impact in all types of institutions and five-year periods than documents with national collaboration. The total number of articles, their normalized citation impact, and the percentage of documents as the corresponding author of academic institutions presented less variation than non-academic institutions. For Brazilian academic institutions, assuming the role of the corresponding author of co-authored articles in Agronomy has little influence on citation impact. As for non-academic institutions, we found an association between the corresponding authorship position within the scope of international collaboration and the higher impact of their scientific production. We point out some potential implications and briefly describe the limitations and future research.

This study aims to identify and compare the national scope of research at the country level, dealing with two groups of countries: LAC and WORLD. We wish to explore whether similar or different patterns arise between the two groups at the global and disciplinary level, becoming apparent in their proportion of research related to local perspectives or topics. It is found that LAC countries present a greater proportion of local production. The trend to publish national-oriented research is related to disciplinary fields. Even though English is the dominant language of publication, the lingua franca is more likely to appear in the national scope of research, especially for LAC countries but also in the rest of non-Anglophone countries. Some implications for research evaluation in the future are described.

This is a homage to Loet Leydesdorff, teacher and scientific reference. Through the combination of overlay maps, a visualization technique proposed by himself and Ismael Ràfols, in combination with the CAMEOs (Characterizations Automatically Made and Edited Online) proposed by Howard White, we project his scientific trajectory in five different scenarios, which turn out to be complementary. For each of the scenarios or CAMEOs, we show how he acts and interacts from the point of view of scientific research, providing the reader with online access to an interactive VOSviewer tool, so that he can check the information presented here, and even go deeper into the analysis, in fact, we encourage him to do so. To sum up, we can say that Loet was quite a character, a lone wolf who enjoyed working with the best of the best of his main research topics: scientific communication, innovation systems, bibliometrics, and science mapping; becoming in turn the referent of these lines of research