SRELS Journal of Information Management, Oct 16, 2013
Performance Evaluation of Academic and Research Institutions is important from the point of sever... more Performance Evaluation of Academic and Research Institutions is important from the point of several groups such as funding agencies, students, employers, etc. For some years now, rankings have been produced by different agencies around the world. Scientometric methods using research publication and citation data feature in almost all rankings of research excellence. In this article we try to summarize the criteria used by some of these agencies. In particular we note the presence of only a few Indian institutes in these rankings. The need for initiating a systematic ranking of Indian institutes at regular intervals is stressed.
China has a long and proud history of world leadership in science and technology, but in the past... more China has a long and proud history of world leadership in science and technology, but in the past two centuries it has experienced a period of instability that has challenged that leadership. However, since its political consolidation in the middle part of the 20th Century and its subsequent economic reforms, China's rise in science has been meteoric. This rise was first detected by the scientometric community through its indicators, but it has now become obvious. Indeed in 2017 the question, ''Will China come to lead world science?'' was becoming to some, ''Does China already lead world science?'' This paper tries to make the case that the answer is ''yes'' (or at least ''soon'')-but the answer depends on which metrics one considers. China already leads many countries in some measures of GDP, scientific paper production, researchers, plus high technology manufacturing and exports. China also recently passed the European Union in R&D investment. Even in some of those indicators where China has not yet taken the lead, reasonable forecasts predict that it soon will. However, there are some indicators where China is still far behind. For example while rising, it still lags the U.S. and EU in citations in Western publications, and will take years to catch up. Here, these quantitative measures are supplemented by qualitative ones from WTEC assessments and by survey results of scientists and the public, which present a more nuanced conclusion. While Chinese leadership may be difficult for Westerners to accept, it can be viewed as China merely regaining its historical position of leadership in science and technology.
2017 International Conference On Smart Technologies For Smart Nation (SmartTechCon)
The threat of incendiary and often, catstrophical terrorist attacks is a major challenge for the ... more The threat of incendiary and often, catstrophical terrorist attacks is a major challenge for the urban administrators. The urban landscape is changing at a fast pace with the emphasis moving toward “smart cities”. Terrorists, for obvious reasons, prefer attacking cities compared to rural areas. Smart cities are expected to absorb larger populations of inhabitants in smaller area implying the damage inflicted by these attacks would be maximum unless some preventive mechanisms exist in the smart city ecosystem. There exist very few methodologies for attack forecasting due to lack of real-time data (confidentiality and reluctance of law enforement in sharing data). In this paper, we propose a way to predict future attacks, weapons used and likely targets using a class of powerful machine learning algorithms known as ensemble learning. The features used to train the model are location, attack type, weapon type and target type.
Don R. Swanson (Oct. 10, 1924 – Nov. 18, 2012) was an American information scientist, known for h... more Don R. Swanson (Oct. 10, 1924 – Nov. 18, 2012) was an American information scientist, known for his work in literature-based discovery in the biomedical sciences. Swanson received his B.S. degree in Physics at Caltech, in 1945, followed by an M.A, and then a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1952. He worked as a physicist at various laboratories until 1963, when he was made a professor and served as dean of the Graduate School of Library Science at the University of Chicago until 1972 and again from 1977–79 and 1987–89. In 2000, he was awarded the ASIST Award of Merit, the highest honor of the society, for his “lifetime achievements in research and scholarship.” (Wikipedia). He developed a system called Arrowsmith to obtain meaningful links between MEDLINE articles in the area called ‘Literature-based Discovery.’ The simple basis of Swanson’s idea of what he called ‘undiscovered public knowledge’ was as follows. He saw that science and the s...
The structure of disciplines can be mapped using citation and co-citation analysis, viz. author, ... more The structure of disciplines can be mapped using citation and co-citation analysis, viz. author, journal and document co-citation. Citation provides an underlying cognitive link between papers, journals, and authors that goes towards defining the interconnectedness of areas of research in these maps. In a less structured context, cooccurrence of names of terrorist organizations in reports of terrorist violence in India has been used to draw a map of terrorist groups and linkages. Words in editorials of Science and Nature have been analyzed for content analysis. In this paper we have looked at a new measure of connectedness between research areas, namely, the migration of authors between subfields. Migration may be considered as an embodied knowledge flow that bridges some part of the cognitive gap between fields. Our hypothesis is that the rate of author migration will reflect cognitive similarity or affinity between disciplines. This is graphically shown to be reasonable above cert...
In an earlier study on measuring national efficiencies in the production of scientific papers and... more In an earlier study on measuring national efficiencies in the production of scientific papers and patents of several developed and developing countries (Basu, 2013; 2014a), we found that Italy has the highest efficiency in the production of papers. While this has not gone unnoticed in the literature (Daraio and Moed, 2011) they have taken it as an ‘overcompensation effect’ and an indication of decline. By examining the work of several authors, we find instances where the information put forward, when taken together, support our findings – that Italy has a high efficiency in scientific publication but only an average efficiency in patenting. We note that Italy’s profile along a host of parameters is quite distinct with respect to the OECD average (DeJaeger, 2012). Using a typology of countries based on their publication and patenting efficiencies (Basu, 2014b) we infer that Italy is not one of the countries that have shifted national priorities from publications to patents, like USA,...
Power laws are a characteristic distribution that are ubiquitous, in that they are found almost e... more Power laws are a characteristic distribution that are ubiquitous, in that they are found almost everywhere, in both natural as well as in man-made systems. They tend to emerge in large, connected and self-organizing systems, for example, scholarly publications. Citations to scientific papers have been found to follow a power law, i.e., the number of papers having a certain level of citation x are proportional to x raised to some negative power. The distributional character of altmetrics has not been studied yet as altmetrics are among the newest indicators related to scholarly publications. Here we select a data sample from the altmetrics aggregator this http URL containing records from the platforms Facebook, Twitter, News, Blogs, etc., and the composite variable Alt-score for the period 2016. The individual and the composite data series of 'mentions' on the various platforms are fit to a power law distribution, and the parameters and goodness of fit determined using least ...
This article presents a computational analysis of the research performance of 16 relatively older... more This article presents a computational analysis of the research performance of 16 relatively older Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) in India. The research publication data indexed in Web of Science for all the 16 IITs is used for the analysis. The data is computationally analysed to identify productivity, productivity per capita, rate of growth of research output, authorship and collaboration pattern, citation impact and discipline-wise research strengths of the different IITs. The research performances of the IITs have been compared with those of two top ranking engineering and technology institutions of the world (MIT-USA and NTU-Singapore) and most cited papers from these IITs have also been identified. The analytical results are expected to provide a informative, up-to-date and useful account of research performance assessment of the IITs.
A set of candidate genes for schizophrenia are selected and the chromosomal region around them (+... more A set of candidate genes for schizophrenia are selected and the chromosomal region around them (+/-3mb) is explored. The genes/ORF's in the vicinity of the candidate genes are searched for their properties using Gene Ontology. The data is processed and projected on a 2-dimensional map using Multi Dimensional Scaling (MDS). We find cholinergic receptors which are strongly associated with schizophrenia, and several other associated properties, including olfactory receptors, nicotinic receptors, etc. Which may need to be investigated for co-occurrence with schizophrenia.
Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2018
Alternative metrics or altmetrics are article level metrics that have been used to quantify the a... more Alternative metrics or altmetrics are article level metrics that have been used to quantify the attention given to scholarly papers in online fora or social media. In some way it was sought to replace journal level metrics such as the Impact Factor and also to see if early altmetric scores could predict highly cited papers. Early studies, done soon after altmetrics was suggested in 2013, were somewhat premature as the use of social media was not widely prevalent, and their results may no longer be relevant at the present time when use levels have risen significantly. In the past year, 2016, Altmetric.com has tracked over 17 million mentions of 2.7 million different research outputs. Of these, the top 100 most-discussed journal articles of 2016 were presented with details of journals in which the research was published, affiliations of authors, fields, countries, etc. 1 ..Our attempt is to obtain a bibliometric profile of these papers with high altmetric scores, to see the underlying patterns and characteristics that motivate high public attention. In parallel we have analyzed top 100 highly cited papers from the same year. Our objective in this empirical study is to examine the similarities and distinguishing features of scientific attention as measured by citations and public attention in online fora.
Bibliometric analysis of ASOC publications (2004-2016) with Web of Science (WoS) data. Main i... more Bibliometric analysis of ASOC publications (2004-2016) with Web of Science (WoS) data. Main influencing aspects that govern the ASOC publications are highlighted. The distribution of citations over the years, citing sources and an aerial view of the citation structure is also given. ASOC authorship is analyzed, the author co-citation network is also given. Country-wise temporal and quantitative analysis of the ASOC publications are given.
The diaspora of a less developed country, who reside outside their country of origin, can contrib... more The diaspora of a less developed country, who reside outside their country of origin, can contribute to the parent country through financial or knowledge transfers, connections, or on return of talented persons. The knowledgebase of the diasporas is therefore of interest to the parent country. Scientific publications of the Indian diaspora are an indicator of the existing knowledge base of Indians overseas. Samples drawn from Web of Science (1986-2010), using a selected list of unique Indian names, are analyzed with the objective of comparing and identifying distinguishing features of the diaspora. While both Indian and diaspora samples have increased over time, publication output from Indians overseas has increased more rapidly. English was by far the most frequently used language. A major difference was found in the type of publication with many more proceedings papers and meeting abstracts by the diaspora, showing increasing importance of rapid publication of novel results. Number of articles was about the same in both samples, but a more detailed look at the top 100 journals qualifies the nature of the journal space used, which again shows major differences. Articles in Nature and Science confirm the differences in the high impact range. We end with a discussion of limitations which includes effects of changing database coverage with time.
Highly educated Indians in science, medicine and engineering have migrated to other countries ove... more Highly educated Indians in science, medicine and engineering have migrated to other countries over several years. Many, currently engaged in research in their adopted countries, could constitute a potential knowledge resource for India that has not been adequately mapped. The country of origin of diaspora authors can be correctly identified through characteristic ethnic names, unique to the country of origin. The large number of ethnic names poses a challenge for complete retrieval, and omissions are inevitable. Using 50 commonly occurring Indian names, we have retrieved a large sample of 23723 Indian diaspora documents indexed in SCI-E for 2007. Names not unique to India were dropped. These 50 names successfully retrieved 53.6% of the SCI-E output from India in 2007. Analyzing by document type, research area, and country/institution of location/collaboration we get a bibliometric overview of current publications by overseas Indians, and compare with broad characteristics of Indian ...
Migration and Diasporas: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2019
Every year large numbers of highly educated students, engineers, doctors, management professional... more Every year large numbers of highly educated students, engineers, doctors, management professionals and others migrate from India to other countries to pursue higher education or for employment. In the present study we use scientometric methods to chart the contribution of migrant Indian scientists to global scientific research in the last decade, through their publications (journal articles) listed in the Science Citation Index. We estimate that the number of papers contributed annually by the diaspora is of the same order as that by Indian scientists. However, there are major differences in the quality of journals where the papers by these two groups are published, the diaspora publishing in more reputed journals. There are also significant differences in the research areas addressed, Indian scientists publishing more basic research and the diaspora publishing more in applied and technologically advanced areas. We also chart the participation of migrant Indian scientists in highly visible research by examining papers by Nobel prize winning scientists. Policy changes that can lead to increasing benefits for India from the large presence of diaspora scientists are discussed.
SRELS Journal of Information Management, Oct 16, 2013
Performance Evaluation of Academic and Research Institutions is important from the point of sever... more Performance Evaluation of Academic and Research Institutions is important from the point of several groups such as funding agencies, students, employers, etc. For some years now, rankings have been produced by different agencies around the world. Scientometric methods using research publication and citation data feature in almost all rankings of research excellence. In this article we try to summarize the criteria used by some of these agencies. In particular we note the presence of only a few Indian institutes in these rankings. The need for initiating a systematic ranking of Indian institutes at regular intervals is stressed.
China has a long and proud history of world leadership in science and technology, but in the past... more China has a long and proud history of world leadership in science and technology, but in the past two centuries it has experienced a period of instability that has challenged that leadership. However, since its political consolidation in the middle part of the 20th Century and its subsequent economic reforms, China's rise in science has been meteoric. This rise was first detected by the scientometric community through its indicators, but it has now become obvious. Indeed in 2017 the question, ''Will China come to lead world science?'' was becoming to some, ''Does China already lead world science?'' This paper tries to make the case that the answer is ''yes'' (or at least ''soon'')-but the answer depends on which metrics one considers. China already leads many countries in some measures of GDP, scientific paper production, researchers, plus high technology manufacturing and exports. China also recently passed the European Union in R&D investment. Even in some of those indicators where China has not yet taken the lead, reasonable forecasts predict that it soon will. However, there are some indicators where China is still far behind. For example while rising, it still lags the U.S. and EU in citations in Western publications, and will take years to catch up. Here, these quantitative measures are supplemented by qualitative ones from WTEC assessments and by survey results of scientists and the public, which present a more nuanced conclusion. While Chinese leadership may be difficult for Westerners to accept, it can be viewed as China merely regaining its historical position of leadership in science and technology.
2017 International Conference On Smart Technologies For Smart Nation (SmartTechCon)
The threat of incendiary and often, catstrophical terrorist attacks is a major challenge for the ... more The threat of incendiary and often, catstrophical terrorist attacks is a major challenge for the urban administrators. The urban landscape is changing at a fast pace with the emphasis moving toward “smart cities”. Terrorists, for obvious reasons, prefer attacking cities compared to rural areas. Smart cities are expected to absorb larger populations of inhabitants in smaller area implying the damage inflicted by these attacks would be maximum unless some preventive mechanisms exist in the smart city ecosystem. There exist very few methodologies for attack forecasting due to lack of real-time data (confidentiality and reluctance of law enforement in sharing data). In this paper, we propose a way to predict future attacks, weapons used and likely targets using a class of powerful machine learning algorithms known as ensemble learning. The features used to train the model are location, attack type, weapon type and target type.
Don R. Swanson (Oct. 10, 1924 – Nov. 18, 2012) was an American information scientist, known for h... more Don R. Swanson (Oct. 10, 1924 – Nov. 18, 2012) was an American information scientist, known for his work in literature-based discovery in the biomedical sciences. Swanson received his B.S. degree in Physics at Caltech, in 1945, followed by an M.A, and then a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1952. He worked as a physicist at various laboratories until 1963, when he was made a professor and served as dean of the Graduate School of Library Science at the University of Chicago until 1972 and again from 1977–79 and 1987–89. In 2000, he was awarded the ASIST Award of Merit, the highest honor of the society, for his “lifetime achievements in research and scholarship.” (Wikipedia). He developed a system called Arrowsmith to obtain meaningful links between MEDLINE articles in the area called ‘Literature-based Discovery.’ The simple basis of Swanson’s idea of what he called ‘undiscovered public knowledge’ was as follows. He saw that science and the s...
The structure of disciplines can be mapped using citation and co-citation analysis, viz. author, ... more The structure of disciplines can be mapped using citation and co-citation analysis, viz. author, journal and document co-citation. Citation provides an underlying cognitive link between papers, journals, and authors that goes towards defining the interconnectedness of areas of research in these maps. In a less structured context, cooccurrence of names of terrorist organizations in reports of terrorist violence in India has been used to draw a map of terrorist groups and linkages. Words in editorials of Science and Nature have been analyzed for content analysis. In this paper we have looked at a new measure of connectedness between research areas, namely, the migration of authors between subfields. Migration may be considered as an embodied knowledge flow that bridges some part of the cognitive gap between fields. Our hypothesis is that the rate of author migration will reflect cognitive similarity or affinity between disciplines. This is graphically shown to be reasonable above cert...
In an earlier study on measuring national efficiencies in the production of scientific papers and... more In an earlier study on measuring national efficiencies in the production of scientific papers and patents of several developed and developing countries (Basu, 2013; 2014a), we found that Italy has the highest efficiency in the production of papers. While this has not gone unnoticed in the literature (Daraio and Moed, 2011) they have taken it as an ‘overcompensation effect’ and an indication of decline. By examining the work of several authors, we find instances where the information put forward, when taken together, support our findings – that Italy has a high efficiency in scientific publication but only an average efficiency in patenting. We note that Italy’s profile along a host of parameters is quite distinct with respect to the OECD average (DeJaeger, 2012). Using a typology of countries based on their publication and patenting efficiencies (Basu, 2014b) we infer that Italy is not one of the countries that have shifted national priorities from publications to patents, like USA,...
Power laws are a characteristic distribution that are ubiquitous, in that they are found almost e... more Power laws are a characteristic distribution that are ubiquitous, in that they are found almost everywhere, in both natural as well as in man-made systems. They tend to emerge in large, connected and self-organizing systems, for example, scholarly publications. Citations to scientific papers have been found to follow a power law, i.e., the number of papers having a certain level of citation x are proportional to x raised to some negative power. The distributional character of altmetrics has not been studied yet as altmetrics are among the newest indicators related to scholarly publications. Here we select a data sample from the altmetrics aggregator this http URL containing records from the platforms Facebook, Twitter, News, Blogs, etc., and the composite variable Alt-score for the period 2016. The individual and the composite data series of 'mentions' on the various platforms are fit to a power law distribution, and the parameters and goodness of fit determined using least ...
This article presents a computational analysis of the research performance of 16 relatively older... more This article presents a computational analysis of the research performance of 16 relatively older Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) in India. The research publication data indexed in Web of Science for all the 16 IITs is used for the analysis. The data is computationally analysed to identify productivity, productivity per capita, rate of growth of research output, authorship and collaboration pattern, citation impact and discipline-wise research strengths of the different IITs. The research performances of the IITs have been compared with those of two top ranking engineering and technology institutions of the world (MIT-USA and NTU-Singapore) and most cited papers from these IITs have also been identified. The analytical results are expected to provide a informative, up-to-date and useful account of research performance assessment of the IITs.
A set of candidate genes for schizophrenia are selected and the chromosomal region around them (+... more A set of candidate genes for schizophrenia are selected and the chromosomal region around them (+/-3mb) is explored. The genes/ORF's in the vicinity of the candidate genes are searched for their properties using Gene Ontology. The data is processed and projected on a 2-dimensional map using Multi Dimensional Scaling (MDS). We find cholinergic receptors which are strongly associated with schizophrenia, and several other associated properties, including olfactory receptors, nicotinic receptors, etc. Which may need to be investigated for co-occurrence with schizophrenia.
Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2018
Alternative metrics or altmetrics are article level metrics that have been used to quantify the a... more Alternative metrics or altmetrics are article level metrics that have been used to quantify the attention given to scholarly papers in online fora or social media. In some way it was sought to replace journal level metrics such as the Impact Factor and also to see if early altmetric scores could predict highly cited papers. Early studies, done soon after altmetrics was suggested in 2013, were somewhat premature as the use of social media was not widely prevalent, and their results may no longer be relevant at the present time when use levels have risen significantly. In the past year, 2016, Altmetric.com has tracked over 17 million mentions of 2.7 million different research outputs. Of these, the top 100 most-discussed journal articles of 2016 were presented with details of journals in which the research was published, affiliations of authors, fields, countries, etc. 1 ..Our attempt is to obtain a bibliometric profile of these papers with high altmetric scores, to see the underlying patterns and characteristics that motivate high public attention. In parallel we have analyzed top 100 highly cited papers from the same year. Our objective in this empirical study is to examine the similarities and distinguishing features of scientific attention as measured by citations and public attention in online fora.
Bibliometric analysis of ASOC publications (2004-2016) with Web of Science (WoS) data. Main i... more Bibliometric analysis of ASOC publications (2004-2016) with Web of Science (WoS) data. Main influencing aspects that govern the ASOC publications are highlighted. The distribution of citations over the years, citing sources and an aerial view of the citation structure is also given. ASOC authorship is analyzed, the author co-citation network is also given. Country-wise temporal and quantitative analysis of the ASOC publications are given.
The diaspora of a less developed country, who reside outside their country of origin, can contrib... more The diaspora of a less developed country, who reside outside their country of origin, can contribute to the parent country through financial or knowledge transfers, connections, or on return of talented persons. The knowledgebase of the diasporas is therefore of interest to the parent country. Scientific publications of the Indian diaspora are an indicator of the existing knowledge base of Indians overseas. Samples drawn from Web of Science (1986-2010), using a selected list of unique Indian names, are analyzed with the objective of comparing and identifying distinguishing features of the diaspora. While both Indian and diaspora samples have increased over time, publication output from Indians overseas has increased more rapidly. English was by far the most frequently used language. A major difference was found in the type of publication with many more proceedings papers and meeting abstracts by the diaspora, showing increasing importance of rapid publication of novel results. Number of articles was about the same in both samples, but a more detailed look at the top 100 journals qualifies the nature of the journal space used, which again shows major differences. Articles in Nature and Science confirm the differences in the high impact range. We end with a discussion of limitations which includes effects of changing database coverage with time.
Highly educated Indians in science, medicine and engineering have migrated to other countries ove... more Highly educated Indians in science, medicine and engineering have migrated to other countries over several years. Many, currently engaged in research in their adopted countries, could constitute a potential knowledge resource for India that has not been adequately mapped. The country of origin of diaspora authors can be correctly identified through characteristic ethnic names, unique to the country of origin. The large number of ethnic names poses a challenge for complete retrieval, and omissions are inevitable. Using 50 commonly occurring Indian names, we have retrieved a large sample of 23723 Indian diaspora documents indexed in SCI-E for 2007. Names not unique to India were dropped. These 50 names successfully retrieved 53.6% of the SCI-E output from India in 2007. Analyzing by document type, research area, and country/institution of location/collaboration we get a bibliometric overview of current publications by overseas Indians, and compare with broad characteristics of Indian ...
Migration and Diasporas: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2019
Every year large numbers of highly educated students, engineers, doctors, management professional... more Every year large numbers of highly educated students, engineers, doctors, management professionals and others migrate from India to other countries to pursue higher education or for employment. In the present study we use scientometric methods to chart the contribution of migrant Indian scientists to global scientific research in the last decade, through their publications (journal articles) listed in the Science Citation Index. We estimate that the number of papers contributed annually by the diaspora is of the same order as that by Indian scientists. However, there are major differences in the quality of journals where the papers by these two groups are published, the diaspora publishing in more reputed journals. There are also significant differences in the research areas addressed, Indian scientists publishing more basic research and the diaspora publishing more in applied and technologically advanced areas. We also chart the participation of migrant Indian scientists in highly visible research by examining papers by Nobel prize winning scientists. Policy changes that can lead to increasing benefits for India from the large presence of diaspora scientists are discussed.
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