Category Archives: Research Type

Emerging Networking Methods: Analyzing Funding Patterns and Their Evolution in Two Medical Research Topics

Network analysis, Research Examples, Research Type

This chapter analyzes funding patterns and their evolution in two medical research topics: breast cancer and ovarian cancer, taking into account cross-agency and cross-national co-funding. A bibliometric analysis of 355,463 papers from PubMed (273,526 on breast cancer and 81,937 on ovarian cancer) brought out 91 funding agencies involved in breast cancer and 65 in ovarian cancer. Additionally, the study examined the evolution of Medical Subject Headings (MESH) funded by agencies. An analysis of patterns in funding, co-funding, MESH, and their evolution, was carried out using Social Network Analysis (SNA) methodology. The results show the importance of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in both breast and ovarian cancer. The NCI achieves its policy goals by co-funding its programs with both national and cross-national agencies. Moreover, the MESH that agencies co-funded in the two years studied coincided; however, it must be said that the number of agencies which participated in research funding also increased.

https://doi.org/10.1142/9781786344069_0014

Author(s): Blanca de-Miguel-Molina, Scott W. Cunningham, Fernando Palop
Organization(s): Universitat Politècnica de València, TU Delft
Source: Innovation Discovery: Network Analysis of Research and Invention Activity for Technology Management (Chpt 14)
Year: 2018

Bibliometrics and Social Network Analysis Supporting the Research Development of Emerging Areas: Case Studies from Thailand

Network analysis, Research Examples, Research Type

This chapter focuses on applying bibliometric analysis and text mining technique to generate technology intelligence from publication databases. The intelligence represents the research profile and landscape by highlighting active research areas and revealing professional communities along with their social networks. Professional communities are both hidden and promoted. In developing countries, such as Thailand in particular, the number of experts in science and technology is quite limited. The mobility of talent between academia, government, and industry is therefore essential for knowledge transfer and technology diffusion. The main challenge is how to identify the potential groups of experts leading to future research collaboration. In this chapter, the case analysis of two emerging research areas in Thailand are presented; Biomedical Engineering (BME) and Data Science. The findings are used as key inputs for the development of effective policies and incentives to promote the research activities as well as research collaboration among different groups of experts.

https://doi.org/10.1142/9781786344069_0010

Author(s): Nathasit Gerdsri, Alisa Kongthon
Organization(s): Mahidol University, National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC)
Source: Innovation Discovery: Network Analysis of Research and Invention Activity for Technology Management (Chpt 10)
Year: 2018

A landscape of bioinformatics patents – Garnering of IPR in the field of bioinformatics

Data Type, Patents, Research Examples, Research profiling

In the current information technology era, Bioinformatics is growing rapidly due to availability of vast database systems and the ever increasing amount of biological data. It is a flexible and creative means of storing, managing, and querying of complex biological datasets. With these rapid advancements in today’s technology-driven age, it is also imperative that protection in the form of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) is sought for such research and development activity. In addition, there is a need to formulate an aggressive strategy to protect one’s IP. In fact, various companies’, universities’, institutions’ and researchers’ are into the process to protect their core invention. This landscape will give an outline of the latest technological growth, geographical distribution, and top competitors playing an important role in this field.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0172219016300746

Author(s): Neha Mago, Nishad Deshpande, Rajkumar R.Hirwani
Organization(s): CSIR-Unit for Research and Development of Information Products (CSIR-URDIP)
Source: World Patent Information
Year: 2017

Bibliometrics and Networks: Case of a Multinational Perspective on How Eco-Innovation has Evolved in Academic Literature

Network analysis, Research Examples, Research Type

Recent studies in literature on eco-innovation have adopted a systematic approach, rather than taking advantage of what the iMetrics method — different types of information studies such as bibliometrics, scientometrics, and informetrics — can contribute to the understanding of how knowledge increases and develops in a particular field. This chapter contributes to filling this gap by completing what other studies have already revealed. Our contribution adds information about the evolution in research on eco-innovation and the distinct nature of the knowledge generated by most important countries in the field. In this chapter, through the examination of scientific papers indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus databases, an analysis of co-keywords was undertaken through the use of Social Network Analysis. These results indicated that: (a) eco-innovation was related to environment, management, and engineering; (b) evolution in the field moved toward a practitioner context, a factor which is shown in the changes of the most important keywords; and (c) mapping the science in this field is contextual, depicting the structural characteristics of different countries. These results may be of interest to researchers, practitioners, and policy makers. In particular, researchers can make interesting contacts and detect gaps for future research; practitioners can find institutions and researchers to work with; and policy makers can use the differences between knowledge patterns in the different countries for decision-making.

https://doi.org/10.1142/9781786344069_0009

Author(s): Blanca de-Miguel-Molina, María de-Miguel-Molina, María-del-Val Segarra-Oña, Ángel Peiró-Signes
Organization(s): Universitat Politècnica de València
Source: Innovation Discovery: Network Analysis of Research and Invention Activity for Technology Management (Chpt 9)
Year: 2018

A bibliometrical analysis of biological invasions under the global climate change.

Research Examples, Research profiling, Research Type

Biological invasions seriously threat the global biodiversity and ecosystem health, causing great losses to global environment and economy. However, rapid climate change could significantly affect the diffusion and invasion of alien species. To explore the development situation of biological invasions under climate change could be helpful for better understanding the status and hot spots in this field, and also the benefitial for understanding the invasion mechanism and making effective management measures. In our study, we studied the Web of Science (WOS) database for publications pertaining to the biological invasions under climate change between the years 1990-2016, we then used the Thomson Data Analyzer (TDA) to operate the systematic analysis. We found that there were total 1 736 published papers in recent 27 years. The number of publications increased annually, while it rapidly increased since 2009. This research area related to several subjects such as environmental science and ecology, biodiversity protection, botany, etc. Prof. Chown SL form Monash University had the largest amounts of publications. USA had the maximum total papers, highly cited and high impact factor papers. California University published the most papers among international research institutes, while the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) ranked the 10th. Biological Invasions was the academic journal which had the largest publications. Recent studies focused primarily on topics related to species distribution models, biodiversity, global warming and risk assessment. China totally published 52 articles, Chinese Academy of Science had the largest amounts of papers, while Institute of Zoology, Wuhan Botanical Garden, Institute of Botany ranking Top 3 among the branch organizations of CAS. In the future, China should give more attentions on the high level research papers and international cooperation of biological invasions under climate change. In addition, we need to focus on prediction and risk assessment of alien species, relationships between biological invasions and biodiversity, system evolution of invaders, relationships among multiple trophic levels of invaded ecosystem, marine biological invasion, influence of invasion on human health, etc under a rapid global climate change.

https://www.cabdirect.org/cabdirect/abstract/20173346345

Author: Wu Hao
Organization: National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Source: GUANGXI ZHIWU
Year: 2017

Open Teaching: a New Way on E-learning? (full-text)

Research Examples, Research profiling, Research Type

Open Teaching is currently considered an ambiguous and polysemic concept but has nevertheless become a growing global trend in ICT-based education. To identify key issues on the subject, this article presents a study on Open teaching that combines meta-synthesis and content analysis of research published over the last twenty years in major peer-reviewed databases. Six main analytical categories emerge from data, conforming six groups of findings. Those findings show that Open Teaching has been associated with various concepts over the years and that there is no consensus on its meaning in the academic community. The current understanding of Open Teaching, that it is merely related to distance education, thwarts important practical and conceptual possibilities by prioritizing access as its main feature and ignoring important “openness” attributes, such as adaptation, sharing, remixing or collaboration. Moreover, the findings note that the most common means to implement Open Teaching as an ICT-based practice are derived from the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) and via Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) which represents not only a major challenge for active educational practitioners but a new way of conceiving and implementing e-learning in higher education.

Full text at https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1157965.pdf

Author(s): Andres Chiappe, Linda L. Lee
Organizaton(s): Universidad de la Sabana, Universidad de Córdoba
Source: The Electronic Journal of e-Learning
Year: 2017

Scientific evolutionary pathways: Identifying and visualizing relationships for scientific topics

Future-oriented technology analysis, Research Examples, Research Type

Whereas traditional science maps emphasize citation statistics and static relationships, this paper presents a term-based method to identify and visualize the evolutionary pathways of scientific topics in a series of time slices. First, we create a data preprocessing model for accurate term cleaning, consolidating, and clustering. Then we construct a simulated data streaming function and introduce a learning process to train a relationship identification function to adapt to changing environments in real time, where relationships of topic evolution, fusion, death, and novelty are identified. The main result of the method is a map of scientific evolutionary pathways. The visual routines provide a way to indicate the interactions among scientific subjects and a version in a series of time slices helps further illustrate such evolutionary pathways in detail. The detailed outline offers sufficient statistical information to delve into scientific topics and routines and then helps address meaningful insights with the assistance of expert knowledge. This empirical study focuses on scientific proposals granted by the United States National Science Foundation, and demonstrates the feasibility and reliability. Our method could be widely applied to a range of science, technology, and innovation policy research, and offer insight into the evolutionary pathways of scientific activities.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.23814/full

Author(s): Yi Zhang, Guangquan Zhang, Donghua Zhu, Jie Lu
Organization(s): University of Technology Sydney, Beijing Institute of Technology
Source: Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
Year: 2017

Tracking the emergence of synthetic biology (full-text)

Research Examples, Research Type, ST&I indicators,

Synthetic biology is an emerging domain that combines biological and engineering concepts and which has seen rapid growth in research, innovation, and policy interest in recent years. This paper contributes to efforts to delineate this emerging domain by presenting a newly constructed bibliometric definition of synthetic biology. Our approach is dimensioned from a core set of papers in synthetic biology, using procedures to obtain benchmark synthetic biology publication records, extract keywords from these benchmark records, and refine the keywords, supplemented with articles published in dedicated synthetic biology journals. We compare our search strategy with other recent bibliometric approaches to define synthetic biology, using a common source of publication data for the period from 2000 to 2015. The paper details the rapid growth and international spread of research in synthetic biology in recent years, demonstrates that diverse research disciplines are contributing to the multidisciplinary development of synthetic biology research, and visualizes this by profiling synthetic biology research on the map of science. We further show the roles of a relatively concentrated set of research sponsors in funding the growth and trajectories of synthetic biology. In addition to discussing these analyses, the paper notes limitations and suggests lines for further work.

Full-text available at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-017-2452-5

Author(s): Philip Shapira, Seokbeom Kwon, Jan Youtie
Organization(s): University of Manchester, Georgia Institute of Technology
Source: Scientometrics
Year: 2017

An indicator of technical emergence

Research Examples, Research Type, ST&I indicators

Developing useful intelligence on scientific and technological emergence challenges those who would manage R&D portfolios, assess research programs, or manage innovation. Recently, the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity Foresight and Understanding from Scientific Exposition Program has explored means to detect emergence via text analyses. We have been involved in positing conceptual bases for emergence, framing candidate indicators, and devising implementations. We now present a software script to generate a family of Emergence Indicators for a topic of interest. This paper offers some background, then discusses the development of this script through iterative rounds of testing, and then offers example findings. Results point to promising and actionable intelligence for R&D decision-makers.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-018-2654-5?wt_mc=Internal.Event.1.SEM.ArticleAuthorOnlineFirst

Author(s): Stephen F. Carley, Nils C. Newman, Alan L. Porter, Jon G. Garner
Organizations(s): Search Technology
Source: Scientometrics
Year: 2018

Visualization of Disciplinary Profiles: Enhanced Science Overlay Maps

Research Examples, Research Type, Science mapping

Purpose
The purpose of this study is to modernize previous work on science overlay maps by updating the underlying citation matrix, generating new clusters of scientific disciplines, enhancing visualizations, and providing more accessible means for analysts to generate their own maps.

Design/methodology/approach
We use the combined set of 2015 Journal Citation Reports for the Science Citation Index (n of journals = 8,778) and the Social Sciences Citation Index (n = 3,212) for a total of 11,365 journals. The set of Web of Science Categories in the Science Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index increased from 224 in 2010 to 227 in 2015. Using dedicated software, a matrix of 227 × 227 cells is generated on the basis of whole-number citation counting. We normalize this matrix using the cosine function. We first develop the citing-side, cosine-normalized map using 2015 data and VOSviewer visualization with default parameter values. A routine for making overlays on the basis of the map (“wc15.exe”) is available at http://www.leydesdorff.net/wc15/index.htm.

Findings
Findings appear in the form of visuals throughout the manuscript. In Figures 1–9 we provide basemaps of science and science overlay maps for a number of companies, universities, and technologies.

Research limitations
As Web of Science Categories change and/or are updated so is the need to update the routine we provide. Also, to apply the routine we provide users need access to the Web of Science.

Practical implications
Visualization of science overlay maps is now more accurate and true to the 2015 Journal Citation Reports than was the case with the previous version of the routine advanced in our paper.

Originality/value
The routine we advance allows users to visualize science overlay maps in VOSviewer using data from more recent Journal Citation Reports.

https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/jdis.2017.2.issue-3/jdis-2017-0015/jdis-2017-0015.xml

Author(s): Stephen Carley, Alan L. Porter, Ismael Rafols, Loet Leydesdorff
Organization(s): Georgia Institute of Technology , Universitat Politècnica de València, University of Amsterdam
Source: Journal of Data and Information Science
Year: 2017