Comparative trends in research performance of the Russian universities

A percentile rank score of group productivity: an evaluation of publication productivity for researchers from various fields

The difficulty in evaluating the research performance of groups is attributable to the following two factors: 1) difference of population size or discipline of group members and 2) skewed distribution of the research performance of individuals. This study attempts to overcome this difficulty, focusing on the research performance based on publication productivity. We employ the normalized index for the number of papers, in which publication efficiency was considered and disciplinary variation in the publication intensity was corrected by the disciplinary averages, to calculate a new percentile rank score. The score was developed on the basis of the principle that a person who is rare is valuable. The score was also tested with publication data for faculty members of 17 Japanese universities. The employment of the normalized index increased the score of universities with relatively few faculty members working in the disciplines of high productivity, resulting in more plausible university rankings. The rankings show a high correlation with those for a previously established percentile rank score, which was developed for citation analysis, and they are consistent with the judgment by evaluators of several universities under study. The advantage of the new score over the previous one is that it has no room for arbitrariness in determining the scheme of rank classification and the weights given to each rank class.

A Decade of CRISPR Gene Editing in China and Beyond: A Scientometric Landscape

Since its Nobel Prize-winning breakthrough in 2012, CRISPR-Cas-based gene-editing system has emerged as one of the most promising biotechnologies in decades. In this article, we present an objective and comprehensive evaluation of CRISPR-based gene-editing technologies, including base editing and prime editing, based on the bibliometric analysis of 22,902 published records. We also assessed the status of CRISPR gene-editing technologies in academia from 2010 to 2020 globally, with respect to countries, institutions, and researchers, and used text clustering methods to assess technical trends and research hotspots. Our results indicate, not surprisingly, that this is a thriving and prominent area of research. By comparing the relevance and growth of CRISPR gene-editing technologies in China with other countries by several metrics, we show that the Chinese scientific community attaches considerable importance to the field of plant genome engineering, with more scholars from agricultural sectors than other sectors.