Effects of seniority, gender and geography on the bibliometric output and collaboration networks of European Research Council (ERC) grant recipients

Path of excellence: A co-authorship network analysis of European Research Council grant winners in social sciences

The international scientific community puts an ever-growing emphasis on research excellence and performance evaluation. So does the European Union with its flagship research excellence grant scheme organised by the European Research Council. This paper aims to provide an in-depth analysis of one of the ERC's thematic panels within the social sciences, namely the SH2 "Political Science" panel. The analysis is based on empirical, statistical methods, and network analysis tools to gain insights about the grant winners' publication patterns and their coauthor networks. The results draw up an academic career track of the grantees based on quantitative publication patterns and performance. Besides, a change in authorship can be observed, which is proven by the formation of new groups and intensifying intra-group collaboration patterns in the case of all three grant types. However, the ERC grant serves different functions for the winners of three different categories: for the Starting Grant winners, it offers the possibility to kick off and establish their research group, for the Consolidator Grant winners, it opens up new opportunities to extend their co-authorship network, and for the Advanced Grant winners, it offers the chance to start a new collaboration.

A machine learning approach to quantify gender bias in collaboration practices of mathematicians

Collaboration practices have been shown to be crucial determinants of scientific careers. We examine the effect of gender on coauthorship-based collaboration in mathematics, a discipline in which women continue to be underrepresented, especially in higher academic positions. We focus on two key aspects of scientific collaboration-the number of different coauthors and the number of single authorships. A higher number of coauthors has a positive effect on, e.g., the number of citations and productivity, while single authorships, for example, serve as evidence of scientific maturity and help to send a clear signal of one's proficiency to the community. Using machine learning-based methods, we show that collaboration networks of female mathematicians are slightly larger than those of their male colleagues when potential confounders such as seniority or total number of publications are controlled, while they author significantly fewer papers on their own. This confirms previous descriptive explorations and provides more precise models for the role of gender in collaboration in mathematics.

The unintended consequences of the pandemic on non-pandemic research activities

Research about the Covid-19 pandemic has taken center stage in shaping the work of many scholars, inter alia highlighting the importance of research in addressing the grand challenges humanity faces. However, the pandemic has also ushered in increased administrative, teaching and out of work commitments for many researchers, leading to concerns that academics will become less willing to invest time in obtaining resources to undertake non-Covid-related projects. Using a large-scale survey of business, economics and management researchers, coupled with their publication histories and additional institutional data, we examine how far individuals experienced the focus on the pandemic as ‘crowding out’ interest in, and undermining their confidence in applying for grants for work not focused on the pandemic. We found 40% of the sample agree that the pandemic has impaired their confidence in applying for non-pandemic-related grants and ‘crowded out’ other projects. Researchers with current and prior grants, particularly those with the most experience of holding grants, scholars whose work ‘impacted’ beyond academia, and early career researchers, disproportionately considered themselves to be most affected. We also found that researchers’ perceptions differed based on institutional characteristics. We discuss the implications of these findings for grant providers and national research agencies as well as for individual academic researchers and the institutions in which they work.

Ethics issues identified by applicants and ethics experts in Horizon 2020 grant proposals

Background: We assessed the ethics review of proposals selected for funding under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) and the European Research Council (ERC) in Horizon 2020, EU’s framework programme for research and innovation, 2014-2020.

Methods: We analysed anonymized datasets for 3,054 MSCA individual fellowships (IF), 417 MSCA Innovative Training Networks (ITN), and 1,465 ERC main-listed proposals with ethics conditional clearance, over four years (2016 to 2019). The datasets included the information on ethics issues identified by applicants in their proposal and ethics issues and requirements identified by ethics experts during the ethics review.

Results: 42% of proposals received ethical clearance. For proposals with conditional ethics clearance (n=3546), most of the identified ethics issues by both applicants and ethics experts were in the ethics categories related to humans; protection of personal data; environment, health and safety; and non-EU countries. Ethics experts identified twice as many ethics issues compared to applicants across funding schemes, years, and from high- and low-research performing countries. ERC grants had the highest number of ethics requirements per proposal (median (Md)=8, interquartile range (IQR=4-14), compared to ITN (Md=6, IQR=3-13) and IF grants (Md=3, IQR=2-6). The majority of requirements had to be fulfilled after grant agreement: 99.4% for IF, 99.5% for ITN, and 26.0% for ERC. For 9% of the proposals, the requirements included the appointment of an independent ethics advisor and 1% of the proposals had to appoint an ethics advisory board.

Conclusions: Many applicants for highly competitive H2020 funding schemes lack awareness of ethics issues raised by their proposed research. There is a need for better training of researchers at all career stages about ethics issues in research, more support to researchers from research organizations to follow the funding agencies requirements, as well as further development and harmonization of the ethics appraisal process during grant assessment.

Mapping career patterns in research: A sequence analysis of career histories of ERC applicants

Despite the need to map research careers, the empirical evidence on career patterns of researchers is limited. We also do not know whether career patterns of researchers can be considered conventional in terms of steady progress or international mobility, nor do we know if career patterns differ between men and women in research as is commonly assumed. We use sequence analysis to identify career patterns of researchers across positions and institutions, based on full career histories of applicants to the European Research Council frontier research grant schemes. We distinguish five career patterns for early and established men and women researchers. With multinomial logit analyses, we estimate the relative likelihood of researchers with certain characteristics in each pattern. We find grantees among all patterns, and limited evidence of gender differences. Our findings on career patterns in research inform further studies and policy making on career development, research funding, and gender equality.

Scopus as a curated, high-quality bibliometric data source for academic research in quantitative science studies

Scopus is among the largest curated abstract and citation databases, with a wide global and regional coverage of scientific journals, conference proceedings, and books, while ensuring only the highest quality data are indexed through rigorous content selection and re-evaluation by an independent Content Selection and Advisory Board. Additionally, extensive quality assurance processes continuously monitor and improve all data elements in Scopus. Besides enriched metadata records of scientific articles, Scopus offers comprehensive author and institution profiles, obtained from advanced profiling algorithms and manual curation, ensuring high precision and recall. The trustworthiness of Scopus has led to its use as bibliometric data source for large-scale analyses in research assessments, research landscape studies, science policy evaluations, and university rankings. Scopus data have been offered for free for selected studies by the academic research community, such as through application programming interfaces, which have led to many publications employing Scopus data to investigate topics such as researcher mobility, network visualizations, and spatial bibliometrics. In June 2019, the International Center for the Study of Research was launched, with an advisory board consisting of bibliometricians, aiming to work with the scientometric research community and offering a virtual laboratory where researchers will be able to utilize Scopus data.