Misc items of possible interest to scientometricians

Wed Sep 21 13:36:16 EDT 2011

TITLE:          Climbing atop the Shoulders of Giants: The Impact of
                Institutions on Cumulative Research (Article, English)
AUTHOR:         Furman, JL; Stern, S
SOURCE:         AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW 101 (5). AUG 2011. p.1933-1963
                AMER ECONOMIC ASSOC, NASHVILLE

SEARCH TERM(S):  GARFIELD E  rauth; MERTON RK  rauth; PRICE DJD  rauth;
                 GARFIELD E         SCIENTOMETRICS          1:359   1979

KEYWORDS+:       RESEARCH-AND-DEVELOPMENT; INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY;
                TECHNOLOGICAL-CHANGE; PATENT CITATIONS; CELL-LINES;
                INNOVATION; KNOWLEDGE; SCIENCE; MODELS; GROWTH

ABSTRACT:       While cumulative knowledge production is central to
growth, little empirical research investigates how institutions shape whether existing knowledge can be exploited to create new knowledge. This paper assesses the impact of a specific institution, a biological resource center, whose objective is to certify and disseminate knowledge.
We disentangle the marginal impact of this institution on cumulative research from the impact of selection, in which the most important discoveries are endogenously linked to research-enhancing institutions.
Exploiting exogenous shifts of biomaterials across institutional settings and employing a difference-in-differences approach, we find that effective institutions amplify the cumulative impact of individual scientific discoveries. (JEL D02, D83, I23, O30)

AUTHOR ADDRESS: JL Furman, Boston Univ, Sch Management, 595 Commonwealth
                Ave 653A, Boston, MA 02215 USA

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TITLE:          Citation characteristics of German authors in "Der
                Chirurg" - Hegemony of the impact factor (Article, German)
AUTHOR:         Hasse, W; Fischer, RJ
SOURCE:         PFERDEHEILKUNDE 27 (4). JUL-AUG 2011. p.417-420
                HIPPIATRIKA VERLAG MBH, STUTTGART

SEARCH TERM(S):  GARFIELD E  rauth; CITATION  item_title;
                 CITATION*  item_title; IMPACT FACTOR*  item_title;
                 GARFIELD E         SCIENCE               122:108   1955;
                 PFERDEHEILKUNDE  source_abbrev_20

KEYWORDS:       Citations; self-citation; language; Impact factor;
                European citations databank
KEYWORDS+:       JOURNALS; MEDICINE

ABSTRACT:       Characteristics of citation and language in publications
of German authors from the journal "Der Chirurg" (vol 78, 2007) were analysed. Out of a total of 3,342 citations, 756 (22.62%) were from German authors with 248 (32.8) self-citations. The hegemony of the impact factor in science, research and education is critically discussed. The imbalance between the number of surgeons in the US and United Kingdom
(66,032) and surgeons in the German speaking countries in Europe (25,300) is compared with respect to the counting methods used to create the impact factor of a journal. The creation of an independent impact factor in Europe and the development of an EU-based citation data bank which allows unselected access to national language scientific literature are strongly needed.

AUTHOR ADDRESS: W Hasse, Arbeitskreis Deutsch Sprache Chirurg eV ADSiC,
                Friedrichshaller Str 7 B, D-14199 Berlin, Germany

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TITLE:          Kuhn and the Discovery of Paradigms (Article, English)
AUTHOR:         Wray, KB
SOURCE:         PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 41 (3). SEP 2011.
                p.380-397 SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, THOUSAND OAKS

SEARCH TERM(S):  MERTON RK  rauth

KEYWORDS:       paradigm; Kuhn; discovery; theory; exemplar; theory change

ABSTRACT:       I present a history of Kuhn's discovery of paradigms, one
that takes account of the complexity of the discovery process. Rather than emerging fully formed in Structure, the concept paradigm emerged through a series of phases. Early criticism of Structure revealed that the role of paradigms was unclear. It was only as Kuhn responded to criticism that he finally articulated a precise understanding of the concept paradigm. In a series of publications in the 1970s, he settled on a conception of a paradigm as a concrete exemplar that functions as a guide to future research.

AUTHOR ADDRESS: KB Wray, SUNY Coll Oswego, Dept Philosophy, 211 Campus Ctr,
                Oswego, NY 13126 USA

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TITLE:          The growth statistics of Zipfian ensembles: Beyond Heaps'
                law (Article, English)
AUTHOR:         Eliazar, I
SOURCE:         PHYSICA A-STATISTICAL MECHANICS AND ITS APPLICATIONS 390
                (20). OCT 1 2011. p.3189-3203 ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV,
                AMSTERDAM

SEARCH TERM(S):  ZIPF*  item_title; PHYSICA A  source_abbrev_20

KEYWORDS:       Zipfs law; Heaps law; Power laws; Rank distributions;
                Growth processes; Poisson processes; Heaps process; Heaps
                curve; Functional Central Limit Theorems (FCLTs)
KEYWORDS+:       DISTRIBUTIONS; TEXT

ABSTRACT:       We consider an evolving ensemble assembled from a set of
n different elements via a stochastic growth process in which independent and identically distributed copies of the elements arrive randomly in time, and their statistics are governed by Zipf's law. The associated "Heaps process" is the stochastic process tracking the fraction of different element copies present in the evolving ensemble at any given time point. For example, the evolving ensemble is a text assembled from a stream of words, and the Heaps process keeps count of the number of different words in the evolving text. A detailed asymptotic statistical analysis of the Heaps process, in the limit n -> infinity, is conducted.
This paper establishes a comprehensive "Heapsian analysis" of the growth statistics of Zipfian ensembles. The analysis presented far extends and generalizes Heaps' law, which asserts that the number of different words in a text of length I follows a power law in the variable I. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

AUTHOR ADDRESS: I Eliazar, Holon Inst Technol, Dept Technol Management, POB
                305, IL-58102 Holon, Israel

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TITLE:          Mining competitor relationships from online news: A
                network-based approach (Article, English)
AUTHOR:         Ma, ZM; Pant, G; Sheng, ORL
SOURCE:         ELECTRONIC COMMERCE RESEARCH AND APPLICATIONS 10 (4).
                JUL-AUG 2011. p.418-427 ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV, AMSTERDAM

SEARCH TERM(S):  SMALL H            J AM SOC INFORM SCI    24:265   1973

KEYWORDS:       Web mining; Classification in networked data; Competitor
                discovery; Business news
KEYWORDS+:       SOCIAL NETWORKS; EMBEDDEDNESS; CLASSIFIERS; CENTRALITY;
                INDUCTION; WEB

ABSTRACT:       Identifying competitors is important for businesses. We
present an approach that uses graph-theoretic measures and machine learning techniques to infer competitor relationships on the basis of structure of an intercompany network derived from company citations
(cooccurrence) in online news articles. We also estimate to what extent our approach complements the commercial company profile data sources, such as Hoover's and Mergent. (C) 2010 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.

AUTHOR ADDRESS: ZM Ma, Calif State Polytech Univ Pomona, Comp Informat Syst
                Dept, 3801 W Temple Ave, Pomona, CA 91768 USA

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TITLE:          Research evaluation: the example of three European
                countries (Article, French)
AUTHOR:         Louvel, S; Lange, S
SOURCE:         CONNAISSANCES RATIONNELLES ET ACTION PUBLIQUE (79).
                2011. p.11-28 PRESSES UNIV MIRAIL, TOULOUSE

SEARCH TERM(S):  MERTON RK  rauth

KEYWORDS:       academic research; evaluation; research policy;
                international comparison
KEYWORDS+:       MANAGEMENT; SCIENCE; UK

ABSTRACT:       Research evaluation is at the heart of considerable
controversy in Europe. This article compares the evaluation procedures in use in the UK (the Research Assessment Exercise introduced in 1986), in Italy (the Valutazione Triennale della Ricerca conducted between 2001 and
2003) and in Germany (the Excellenz Initiative launched by the Federal Government; the Ranking of institutions and disciplines by the German Science Council both started in 2004). It analyses these reforms with the help of two ideal-types defined from the knowledge base and the link between such knowledge and public action (Glaser, 2007; Whitley, 2007; Glaser, Lange et al., 2010). National evaluation systems can be predominantly qualified as intrusive evaluation systems or "competitive evaluation systems" with a strong or weak impact on research. However, various forms of hybridization reveal the tensions inherent to all research evaluation systems and the difficult decisions as to which kinds of knowledge which should be given priority.

AUTHOR ADDRESS: S Louvel, Univ Grenoble, CNRS, UMR 5194, PACTE, BP 48,
                F-38040 Grenoble 9, France

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