All posts by VPInstitute

Current performance and future trends in health care sciences and services research

Research Examples, Research profiling, Research Type

Health care sciences and services research (HCSSR) has come to the fore in recent years and related research literature increased rapidly over the last few decades. The main purpose of this study is to describe the global progress and to determine the current trends on HCSSR by using a scientometrics approach to survey related literature in the Web of Science database from 1900 to 2012. The document types, languages, publication patterns, subject categories, journals, geographic and institutional distributions, top cited articles, and the distribution of keywords were thoroughly examined. The results show that HCSSR has increased rapidly over the past 20 years, most notably in the last decade. In total, there are currently 128,728 research articles in 156 journals listed in 39 WoS subject categories. The top 20 most productive countries, and institutions were analyzed in detail, and 11 frequently cited papers and research foci were identified based on citation analysis. HCSSR spans many disciplines and focuses mainly on public, environmental & occupational health and education educational research. Medical Care, Academic Medicine, Health Affairs and Journal of School Health are the core journals with both high quantity and quality. High-income countries make up the leading nations, especially G7 countries. Meanwhile, “emerging economies” are also increasingly engaging this field. American and Canadian institutions have made greater advances in productions, citations, and cooperation, with stronger and better development prospects overall. The hot topics include internet use and decision making in health care, palliative care and end of life research, health status and quality of life, quality of healthcare and patient’s satisfaction, medical education, and health communication. Also, most researchers tend to study health care sciences based on the topics of quality-of-life assessment, and their interest in quality-of-life measures has increased. Increasing attention has been paid to the developing countries, especially “emerging economies” like China. Although health research has made much progress, many questions still remain unanswered and there are few assessments of how well research systems carry out their essential functions. Hence, there is currently an urgent need for timely establishment of an effective health research system.

Author(s): Qiang Yao, Peng-Hui Lyu, Lian-Ping Yang, Lan Yao, Zhi-Yong Liu
Organization(s): Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Wuhan University
Source: Scientometrics
Year: 2014

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-014-1383-7

Analyzing patent topical information to identify technology pathways and potential opportunities

Future-oriented technology analysis, Research Examples, Research Type

As a basic knowledge resource, patents play an important role in identifying technology development trends and opportunities, especially for emerging technologies. However patent mining is restricted and even incomplete, because of the obscure descriptions provided in patent text. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to try out alternative methods with Derwent Innovation Index data. Our case study focuses on nano-enabled drug delivery (NEDD) which is a very active emerging biomedical technology, encompassing several distinct technology spaces. We explore different ways to enhance topical intelligence from patent compilations. We further analyze extracted topical terms to identify potential innovation pathways and technology opportunities in NEDD.

Author(s): Jing Ma and  Alan L. Porter
Organization(s): Beijing Institute of Technology and Georgia Institute of Technology
Source: Scientometrics
Year: 2014

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-014-1392-6

Feature report on China: a bibliometric analysis of China-related articles

Research Examples, Research profiling, Research Type

China’s rise in science has been widely acknowledged. Yet we know little empirically about academic research focusing on China. Utilizing a uniquely constructed large-scale dataset, this paper explores China-related publications through bibliometric analysis. Our data suggests that not only interest in China but also knowledge about China has developed rapidly over the years. Despite an increasingly diverse profile of participants, the substantial rise of research focusing on China is largely limited to affluent regions and some geographically proximate neighbors of China. The research discloses that overseas Chinese facilitate academic research focusing on China. The research foci of China-related studies have gradually shifted from social science to natural science and, in more recent years, to Chinese environmental issues, public health and economy.

Author(s): Weishu Liu, Li Tang, Mengdi Gu and Guangyuan Hu
Organization(s): Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Shanghai University of Finance and Economics
Source: Scientometrics
Year: 2014

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-014-1371-y

Interdisciplinarity among Academic Scientists: Individual and Organizational Factors

Interdisciplinarity, Research Examples, Research Type

Today when interdisciplinary research (IDR) is becoming increasingly important
in generating innovative research results and solving complex problems in academia,
discussions of IDR antecedents, processes and outcomes are becoming increasingly
important in research policy and sociology of science. This study addresses two primary
questions: 1) what individual and organizational factors affect academic scientists’
engagement in IDR, 2) what the effects of these factors are in difference disciplines.
Drawing on a wide variety of social science theories including studies of academic tenure
system, organizational climate theory, theories about women and gender in science and
scientific and technical human capital theory, it develops four hypotheses to investigate
the effects of tenure system, university climate for IDR, gender, and industry experience
on the degree to which individual scientists engage in IDR.

Author(s): Fang Xiao
Organization(s): Georgia State University
Source: Dissertation, Georgia State University
Year: 2014

http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/pmap_diss/50

Collaboration within Engineering Education Research’s Community of Practice

Citation analysis, Research Examples, Research Type

Engineering education research (EER) is a relatively young field of inquiry, established with the
intent to improve the academic experiences of young and emerging engineers. While many
researchers’ perceptions of how to improve engineering education stem from traditional
classroom experiences, a select group of researchers belong to EER-oriented departments, labs,
and research centers. These on-campus resources create a formal bridge between EER-expert
networks and offer researchers an opportunity to collaborate with other like-minded individuals.
However, researchers lacking access to similar EER resources may be unable to establish
connections to engineering education’s expert community of practice.

The purpose of this paper is to answer the question “How is collaboration within the EER
community of practice impacted by an individual’s access to EER resources?” Formal
collaborations were catalogued using co-authorship data from publications in the Journal of
Engineering Education between the years 2008 to 2012. Influential researchers, collaboration
trends, critical brokers, and other hidden structures were analyzed using social network analysis
methods. Results of this study found that researchers on campuses lacking formal EER resources
are unable to broker connections into EER’s expert community of practice. Consequently, these
researchers may be unable to adopt best practices from and exchange relevant information with
the greater community.

Author(s): Scottie-Beth Fleming
Organization(s): Georgia Institute of Technology
Source: 121st American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference and Exhibition
Year: 2014

Visualization of social network for scientific research evaluation

Citation analysis, Network analysis, Research Examples

In order to enrich the existing scientific research evaluation methods for scientific researchers, institutions, regions or journals that engaged in some technical field, subject or field, the paper reviews the shortcoming in current visualization used for scientific research evaluation. And then, the paper designs and realizes three applications of social network visualization, first improves the traditional co-author network marking signature order, then integrates correlative network with dynamic threshold, and at last constructs citation network to convey the quantity, quality and influence of the object being evaluated. For each model, we propose a virtual example without real meaning to show the interpretation of the network map.

Author(s): Yunsheng Du, Yuqin Liu, Pengjun Qiu, Xiaohan Shen
Organization(s): Beijing Institute of Technology
Source: Modeling and Computation in Engineering III (45 technical papers from the 3rd International Conference on Modeling and Computation in Engineering)
Year: 2014

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/modeling-and-computation-in-engineering-iii-lei-zhang/1119693251?ean=9781138026803

Digging for gold with a simple tool: Validating text mining in studying electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) communication

Data Type, novel source, Research Examples, Research Type, ST&I indicators, Strategic planning, Tech mining

Text-based electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) communication has increasingly become an important channel for consumers to exchange information about products and services. How to effectively utilize the enormous amount of text information poses a great challenge to marketing researchers and practitioners. This study takes an initial step to investigate the validities and usefulness of text mining, a promising approach in generating valuable information from eWOM communication. Bilateral data were collected from both eWOM senders and readers via two web-based surveys. Results provide initial evidence for the validity and utility of text mining and demonstrate that the linguistic indicators generated by text analysis are predictive of eWOM communicators’ attitudes toward a product or service. Text analysis indicators (e.g., Negations and Money) can explain additional variance in eWOM communicators’ attitudes above and beyond the star ratings and may become a promising supplement to the widely used star ratings as indicators of eWOM valence.

Author(s): Chuanyi Tang and Lin Guo
Organization(s): Old Dominion University and University of New Hampshire
Source: Marketing Letters
Year: 2013

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11002-013-9268-8

Development of carbon-based nanomaterials indicators using the analytical tools and data provided by the web of science database

Research Examples, Research profiling, Research Type,

The recent rise of nanotechnology and nanomaterial research is marked by the huge amount of publications indexed in electronic databases, which can be evaluated using bibliometric indicators in order to help researchers find hidden trends, gain novel insights and support new scientific developments. Although in-depth analyses require specialized software and advanced methodologies, some initial indicators can be developed using the analytical tools available in databases and provide useful information about a specific subject or research field. This paper aims to explore the Web of Science’s analytical tool for analyzing the scientific output regarding carbon-based nanomaterials. The results provide several key findings, including research trends and publications in carbon nanotubes, fullerene and graphene, as well as revealing the main global players and journals from 2001 to 2010. Despite the usefulness of the analytical tool, a number of limitations hindered the development of important indicators, such as those involving citation and collaboration.

Author(s): D.H. Milanez, M.T. Schiavi, R.M. do Amaral, L.I.L de Faria and  J.A.R. Gregolin
Organization(s):Federal University of São Carlos – UFSCAR
Source: Materials Research
Year: 2013

http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S1516-14392013005000130&script=sci_arttext&tlng=en

Scientometric trends and knowledge maps of global health systems research

Research Examples, Research profiling, Research Type, ST&I policy

In the last few decades, health systems research (HSR) has garnered much attention with a rapid  increase in the related literature. This study aims to review and evaluate the global progress in HSR and assess the current quantitative trends.

Based on data from the Web of Science database, scientometric methods and knowledge visualization techniques were applied to evaluate global scientific production and develop trends of HSR from 1900 to 2012.

HSR has increased rapidly over the past 20 years. Currently, there are 28,787 research articles published in 3,674 journals that are listed in 140 Web of Science subject categories. The research in this field has mainly focused on public, environmental and occupational health (6,178, 21.46%), health care sciences and services (5,840, 20.29%), and general and internal medicine (3,783, 13.14%). The top 10 journals had published 2,969 (10.31%) articles and received 5,229 local citations and 40,271 global citations. The top 20 authors together contributed 628 papers, which accounted for a 2.18% share in the cumulative worldwide publications. The most productive author was McKee, from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, with 48 articles. In addition, USA and American institutions ranked  the first in health system research productivity, with high citation times, followed by the UK and Canada.

HSR is an interdisciplinary area. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries  showed they are the leading nations in HSR. Meanwhile, American and Canadian institutions and the World Health Organization play a dominant role in the production, collaboration, and citation of high quality articles. Moreover, health policy and analysis research, health systems and sub-systems research, healthcare and services research, health, epidemiology and economics of communicable and non-communicable diseases, primary care research, health economics and health costs, and pharmacy of hospital have been identified as the mainstream topics in HSR fields. These findings will provide evidence of the current status and trends in HSR all over the world, as well as clues to the  impact of this popular topic; thus, helping scientific researchers and policy makers understand the panorama of HSR and predict the dynamic directions of research.

Author(s): Qiang Yao, Kai Chen, Lan Yao, Peng-hui Lyu, Tian-an Yang, Fei Luo, Shan-quan Chen, Lu-yang He and Zhi-yong Liu
Organization(s): Huazhong University of Science and Technology
Source: Health Research Policy and Systems
Year: 2014

http://www.health-policy-systems.com/content/pdf/1478-4505-12-26.pdf

Integrating bibliometrics and roadmapping methods: A case of dye-sensitized solar cell technology-based industry in China

Future-oriented technology analysis, Research Type

Emerging industries are attracting increasing attention as they engage in innovation activities that transgress the boundaries of science and technology. Policy makers and industrial communities use roadmapping methods to predict future industrial growth, but the existing bibliometric/workshop methods have limitations when analyzing the full-lifecycle industrial emergence, including the transitions between science, technology, application, and the mass market. This paper, therefore, proposes a framework that integrates bibliometrics and a technology roadmapping (TRM) workshop approach to strategize and plan the future development of the new, technology-based industry. The dye-sensitized solar cell technology-based industry in China is selected as a case study. In this case, the bibliometrics method is applied to analyze the existing position of science and technology, and TRM workshops are used to strategize the future development from technology to application and marketing. Key events and impact on the development of the new, technology-based industry have been identified. This paper will contribute to the roadmapping and foresight methodology, and will be of interest to solar photovoltaic industry researchers.

Highlights

  • We develop a framework for roadmapping the emerging technology-based industry.
  • A roadmap of the dye-sensitized solar cell technology-based industry is developed.
  • We find that research on dye-sensitized solar cells has been very active.
  • We find that China is one of the leaders in dye-sensitized solar cell area.

Author(s): Xin Li, Yuan Zhou,  Lan Xue and Lucheng Huang
Organization(s): School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University and Beijing University of Technology
Source: Technological Forecasting and Social Change
Year: 2014

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162514001644