Characteristics of international collaboration in sport sciences publications and its influence on citation impact

Factors influencing the research impact in cancer research: a collaboration and knowledge network analysis

BACKGROUND

Cancer is a major public health challenge globally. However, little is known about the evolution patterns of cancer research communities and the influencing factors of their research capacity and impact, which is affected not only by the social networks established through research collaboration but also by the knowledge networks in which the research projects are embedded.

METHODS

The focus of this study was narrowed to a specific topic - 'synthetic lethality' - in cancer research. This field has seen vibrant growth and multidisciplinary collaboration in the past decade. Multi-level collaboration and knowledge networks were established and analysed on the basis of bibliometric data from 'synthetic lethality'-related cancer research papers. Negative binomial regression analysis was further applied to explore how node attributes within these networks, along with other potential factors, affected paper citations, which are widely accepted as proxies for assessing research capacity and impact.

RESULTS

Our study revealed that the synthetic lethality-based cancer research field is characterized by a knowledge network with high integration, alongside a collaboration network exhibiting some clustering. We found significant correlations between certain factors and citation counts. Specifically, a leading status within the nation-level international collaboration network and industry involvement were both found to be significantly related to higher citations. In the individual-level collaboration networks, lead authors' degree centrality has an inverted U-shaped relationship with citations, while their structural holes exhibit a positive and significant effect. Within the knowledge network, however, only measures of structural holes have a positive and significant effect on the number of citations.

CONCLUSIONS

To enhance cancer research capacity and impact, non-leading countries should take measures to enhance their international collaboration status. For early career researchers, increasing the number of collaborators seems to be more effective. University-industry cooperation should also be encouraged, enhancing the integration of human resources, technology, funding, research platforms and medical resources. Insights gained through this study also provide recommendations to researchers or administrators in designing future research directions from a knowledge network perspective. Focusing on unique issues especially interdisciplinary fields will improve output and influence their research work.

Innovation in sport medicine and science: a global social network analysis of stakeholder collaboration in rugby union

Objectives

To investigate the network of stakeholders involved in rugby union research across the globe.

Methods

Using author affiliations listed on scientific publications, we identified the organisations that contributed to rugby union research from 1977 to 2022 and examine collaboration through coauthorship indicators. We determined the locations and sectors of identified organisations and constructed a collaboration network. Network metrics, including degree centrality and betweenness centrality, are computed to identify influential organisations and measure intersector collaboration.

Results

There is an increase in scientific knowledge creation and collaboration between organisations for rugby union research over time. Among the sectors, the university, professional sports team and sports governing body sectors exhibit the highest intersectoral and intrasectoral density. Predominantly, influential actors are located in England, Australia, France, New Zealand, Ireland and South Africa. Australian Catholic University, Leeds Beckett University, Stellenbosch University, Swansea University, University College London and the University of Cape Town emerge as influential actors between 2016 and 2022.

Conclusions

Our study underscores the ongoing growth of scientific knowledge generation in rugby union, primarily led by organisations in tier 1 rugby-playing nations within the university sector. Intersectoral collaboration with sports governing bodies plays a crucial role, acting as a broker between sectors. However, the overall collaboration landscape between and within sectors is low. These results highlight an opportunity for improved collaboration opportunities, as the organisations driving knowledge creation have been identified.

Identifying sports chiropractic global research priorities: an international Delphi study of sports chiropractors

Objectives

Developing a research agenda is one method to facilitate broad research planning and prioritise research within a discipline. Despite profession-specific agendas, none have specifically addressed the research needs of the specialty of sports chiropractic. This study determined consensus on research priorities to inform a global sports chiropractic research agenda.

Methods

A Delphi consensus methodology was used to integrate expert opinions. Clinicians, academics and leaders from the international sports chiropractic specialty were recruited using purposive sampling to participate in (1) a Delphi panel involving three voting rounds to determine consensus on research priorities and (2) a priority importance ranking of the items that reached consensus.

Results

We identified and contacted 141 participants, with response rates for rounds 1, 2 and 3, of 44%, 31% and 34%, respectively. From the original 149 research priorities, 66 reached consensus in round 1, 63 in round 2 and 45 items in round 3. Research priorities reaching consensus were collapsed by removing redundancies, and priority ranking identified 20 research priorities, 11 related to collaboration and 6 to research themes.

Conclusions

The top-ranked items for research priorities, research themes and collaborations included the effects of interventions on performance, recovery and return to play; clinical research in sport; and collaborations with researchers in chiropractic educational institutions, respectively.

Implications

The prioritisation of research items can be evaluated by key stakeholders (including athletes) and implemented to develop the first international research agenda for sports chiropractic.

Intelligent Educational Evaluation of Research Performance between Digital Library and Open Government Data

This study evaluates institutional research performance in benchmark technological universities in Taiwan through intelligent research databases (SciVal) in digital libraries with Ministry of Education open data to explore the performance of research indicators and the research trend of topic clusters to ascertain accountability for decision makers. The research performance of eight benchmark technological universities in Taiwan is compared in this study. In addition, the trends in research topics in the top 10% of journals are explored. Descriptive statistics, correlation, ANOVA, and the Boston Consulting Group matrix were used in this study. Research personnel, publications, productivity, total citations, number of international collaborations, and academic research income in 2018 significantly positively correlated with each other. From 719 records of research topics, topic clusters and school types are the significant factors in research outputs. Biosensors, electrodes, and voltammetry are the leading topic clusters in the research trend. The topic cluster of decision-making, fuzzy sets, and models has the best growth rate in the SciVal results. This analysis provides useful insights to policymakers to improve institutional administration and research resource allocation.

Collaboration and citation impact: Trends in health sciences research at the University of Cape Town

Against a background of substantial growth in publication output in health sciences at the University of Cape Town (UCT) over the past two decades, we examined the relationship between collaboration with domestic and foreign institutions and resulting citations of co-published work. We report on trends in authorship and citation impact for health sciences research at UCT across three 3-year periods: 1999–2001, 2006–2008 and 2013–2015. We examined numbers of collaborative publications with domestic and foreign co-authors; the status of collaboration with other African countries; the location of the ‘drivers’ of the research (with ‘drivers’ indicated by first or last authorship); and expected and observed citation counts – used as an indicator of impact – over time. We found that the relative citation rate of the set of UCT health sciences publications has increased; the set of 1999–2001 publications was less frequently cited than expected for the journals in which the publications appear, while the 2006–2008 and 2013–2015 sets were cited more frequently than expected. Relative citation rates were greater for papers for which UCT shared international co-authorship than for papers with UCT-only or domestic co-authorship. Our findings confirm reports in the literature of higher citation of internationally co-authored publications. We additionally found that the publications with the highest relative citation rates were driven by authors from foreign institutions.

Evaluating the impact of citations of articles based on knowledge flow patterns hidden in the citations

The effective evaluation of the impact of a scholarly article is a significant endeavor; for this reason, it has garnered attention. From the perspective of knowledge flow, this paper extracted various knowledge flow patterns concealed in articles citation counts to describe the citation impact of the articles. First, the intensity characteristic of knowledge flow was investigated to distinguish the different citation vitality of articles. Second, the knowledge diffusion capacity was examined to differentiate the size of the scope of articles’ influences on the academic environment. Finally, the knowledge transfer capacity was discussed to investigate the support degree of articles on the follow-up research. Experimental results show that articles got more citations recently have a higher knowledge flow intensity. The articles have various impacts on the academic environment and have different supporting effects on the follow-up research, representing the differences in their knowledge diffusion and knowledge transfer capabilities. Compared with the single quantitative index of citation frequency, these knowledge flow patterns can carefully explore the citation value of articles. By integrating the three knowledge flow patterns to examine the total citation impact of articles, we found that the articles exhibit distinct value of citation impact even if they were published in the same field, in the same year, and with similar citation frequencies.

Internationality of Spanish scholarly journals indexed in Web of Science and Scopus

Se analiza la internacionalidad de las revistas españolas indizadas en WoS y Scopus, en base a cuatro elementos principales identificados en la revisión bibliográfica: artículos en inglés, artículos de autores extranjeros, colaboraciones internacionales, y miembros extranjeros de los equipos editoriales. Se constata que el área temática y el tipo de acceso son determinantes en cuanto al grado de internacionalidad de las revistas, así como, en menor medida, el tipo de editorial. El Factor de Impacto (FI), buque insignia del impacto bibliométrico, no guarda correlación con ningún elemento de internacionalidad, mientras que los valores de SJR y SNIP correlacionan moderadamente con los porcentajes de las colaboraciones internacionales. La participación de autores extranjeros está relacionada con la presencia del inglés, revelando la orientación de las revistas españolas indizadas hacia los países del “núcleo” científico. La presencia de miembros extranjeros en los comités va acompañada de la de autores extranjeros, aunque no se pueda demostrar una relación causa-efecto. Se concluye con aportaciones sobre posibles líneas de investigación futuras.

Are Mendeley reader counts high enough for research evaluations when articles are published?

Purpose

Mendeley reader counts have been proposed as early indicators for the impact of academic publications. The purpose of this paper is to assess whether there are enough Mendeley readers for research evaluation purposes during the month when an article is first published.

Design/methodology/approach

Average Mendeley reader counts were compared to the average Scopus citation counts for 104,520 articles from ten disciplines during the second half of 2016.

Findings

Articles attracted, on average, between 0.1 and 0.8 Mendeley readers per article in the month in which they first appeared in Scopus. This is about ten times more than the average Scopus citation count.

Research limitations/implications

Other disciplines may use Mendeley more or less than the ten investigated here. The results are dependent on Scopus’s indexing practices, and Mendeley reader counts can be manipulated and have national and seniority biases.

Practical implications

Mendeley reader counts during the month of publication are more powerful than Scopus citations for comparing the average impacts of groups of documents but are not high enough to differentiate between the impacts of typical individual articles.

Originality/value

This is the first multi-disciplinary and systematic analysis of Mendeley reader counts from the publication month of an article.

Research Collaboration in Saudi Arabia 1980–2014: Bibliometric Patterns and National Policy to Foster Research Quantity and Quality

Using bibliometric indicators from InCites