Are finance, management, and marketing autonomous fields of scientific research? An analysis based on journal citations

Although there is considerable consensus that Finance, Management and Marketing are ‘science’, some debate remains with regard to whether these three areas comprise autonomous, organized and settled scientific fields of research. In this paper we aim to explore this issue by analyzing the occurrence of citations in the top-ranked journals in the areas of Finance, Management, and Marketing. We put forward a modified version of the model of science as a network, proposed by Klamer and Van Dalen (J Econ Methodol 9(2):289–315, 2002), and conclude that Finance is a ‘Relatively autonomous, organized and settled field of research’, whereas Management and (to a larger extent) Marketing are relatively non-autonomous and hybrid fields of research’. Complementary analysis based on sub-discipline rankings using the recursive methodology of Liebowitz and Palmer (J Econ Lit 22:77–88, 1984) confirms the results. In conclusions we briefly discuss the pertinence of Whitley’s (The intellectual and social organization of the sciences, 1984) theory for explaining cultural differences across these sub-disciplines based on its dimensions of scholarly practices, ‘mutual dependency’ and ‘task uncertainty’.     

Are firms withdrawing from basic research? An analysis of firm-level publication behaviour in Germany

Scientometrics - Previous research has expressed concerns about firms engaging less in basic research. We contribute to this debate by studying trends in the scientific publishing activities of...     

Are suicides by jumping off bridges preventable? An analysis of 50 cases from Sweden

This is a community-based sequential case series of 50 individuals who committed suicide by jumping from bridges in two regions of Sweden. Of the 50 subjects, 32 were men and 18 women, with a median age of 35 years. At least 40 had psychiatric problems. The frequency of suicide was highest during the summer months and during the weekends. A total of 27 bridges were used, with a total length of just under 9 km. Three bridges accounted for almost half of all suicides. Limiting the availability of one method of committing suicide is reported to reduce the overall suicide rate; why suicide and injury suicide preventive measures might be considered. Since this study demonstrates that few bridges attract suicide candidates, this injury mechanism needs to be acknowledged by the road system owners and included in the safety work.     

Do negative citations reduce the impact of cited papers?

Scientometrics - Citation is an important process of scientific activities, reflecting the inheritance and development of knowledge. However, citations representing different sentiment polarities...     

Identification of important citations by exploiting research articles’ metadata and cue-terms from content

Citations play a pivotal role in indicating various aspects of scientific literature. Quantitative citation analysis approaches have been used over the decades to measure the impact factor of journals, to rank researchers or institutions, to discover evolving research topics etc. Researchers doubted the pure quantitative citation analysis approaches and argued that all citations are not equally important; citation reasons must be considered while counting. In the recent past, researchers have focused on identifying important citation reasons by classifying them into important and non-important classes rather than individually classifying each reason. Most of contemporary citation classification techniques either rely on full content of articles, or they are dominated by content based features. However, most of the time content is not freely available as various journal publishers do not provide open access to articles. This paper presents a binary citation classification scheme, which is dominated by metadata based parameters. The study demonstrates the significance of metadata and content based parameters in varying scenarios. The experiments are performed on two annotated data sets, which are evaluated by employing SVM, KLR, Random Forest machine learning classifiers. The results are compared with the contemporary study that has performed similar classification employing rich list of content-based features. The results of comparisons revealed that the proposed model has attained improved value of precision (i.e., 0.68) just by relying on freely available metadata. We claim that the proposed approach can serve as the best alternative in the scenarios wherein content in unavailable.

     

Do cover papers get better citations and usage counts? An analysis of 42 journals in cell biology

Scientometrics - Research on the impact of and attention given to journal covers is a crucial research topic in academia. This study investigated whether a paper featured on the cover of a journal...     

When do firms focus on public research? : evidence from U.S. medical device industry

Public research including universities and research institutes is an important source of innovation. This paper describes how a performance feedback model explains the conditions under which firms source external knowledge through universities and research institutes. In the U.S. medical device industry, we show that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between performance below aspirations and knowledge sourcing from public research. Furthermore, we find that firms respond to historical aspirations more sensitively than social aspirations, and slack resources tend to attenuate the relationship between performance below historical aspirations and knowledge sourcing from public research.     

Research or management? An investigation of the impact of leadership roles on the research performance of academic administrators

This study quantitatively investigated whether the research performance of academic administrators (leaders) was affected by their administrative services. We sampled 111 academic administrators, including 90 department deans and 21 university presidents, from 26 universities. These leaders’ research performance was determined by the number of their publications and citations in the Web of Science databases. To compare the effect on their research performance by their administrative roles, we proposed four periods: the pre-position period, the latest position period, the reference period, and the in-position period. Statistical methods were applied to compare the research performance of the sampled administrators before and after they accepted the current administrative roles. The results suggest that 80% of academic leaders’ productivity and citation have fallen by 42 and 62% averagely. The extent of such impact varied in different disciplines. Leaders’ performance in medicine fields has declined the most (60%). The impact on research productivity appeared to be stronger for administrators serving in higher-ranking universities. In addition, the research performance of both university presidents and department deans were substantially influenced by their administrative services.     

Are classic references cited first? An analysis of citation order within article sections

Scientometrics - Early citations within an article section may have an agenda-setting role but contribute little to the new research. To investigate whether this practice may be common, this...     

Are the strategic research agendas of researchers in the social sciences determinants of research productivity?

Scientometrics - This study analyzes the association between the strategic research agendas of researchers in the social sciences and their research performance. Based on a worldwide sample of 604...     

Are international co-publications an indicator for quality of scientific research?

This article deals with the role of internationally co-authored papers (co-publications). Specifically, we compare, within a data-set of German research units, citation and co-publication indicators as a proxy for the unobserved quality dimension of scientific research. In that course we will also deal with the question whether both citations and co-publications are considerably related. Our results suggest that, although there is a strong partial correlation between citations and co-publications within a multivariate setting, we cannot use reasonably normalised co-publication indicators as an alternative proxy for quality. Thus, concerning quality assessment, there remains a primer on citation analysis.     

A gender analysis of top scientists’ collaboration behavior: evidence from Italy

Scientometrics - This work analyzes the differences in collaboration behavior between males and females among a particular type of scholars: top scientists, and as compared to non top scientists....     

A historical review and bibliometric analysis of GPS research from 1991–2010

We performed a bibliometric analysis of published research on Global Positioning System (GPS) for the period of 1991–2010, based on the Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index databases. Our search identified a total of 15,759 GPS-related publications in the period. We analyzed the patterns of publication outputs, subject categories and major journals, international productivity and collaboration, geographic distribution of authors, and author keywords. The annual number of publications in GPS research increased from 98 in 1991 to 1934 in 2010. “Geochemistry & Geophysics”, “Geosciences, Multidisciplinary”, and “Engineering, Electrical & Electronic” were the top 3 most popular subject categories. As the flagship journal in the field, Geophysical Research Letters had the highest publication count. The USA, the UK and Germany were the top 3 most productive countries. The most productive institution was the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), followed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Colorado. The USA was the most frequent partner in international collaborations. Caltech took the central position in the collaboration network. The major spatial clusters of authors were in the USA, the Europe Union, and East Asia (including China, Japan and South Korea). “Ionosphere”, “Remote Sensing” and “Monitoring” are growing research subjects in the field of GPS, while “Deformation”, “Geoid” and “Tectonics” are becoming gradually less significant. Our study revealed underlying patterns in scientific outputs and academic collaborations and may serve as an alternative and innovative way of revealing global research trends in GPS.     

What characterises funded biomedical research? Evidence from a basic and a clinical domain

Scientometrics - Improving our knowledge about funding patterns in different research domains and how funding contributes to research is a matter of great interest for funders and policymakers....     

Applicability of AZ31B-H24 magnesium in Fibre Metal Laminates – An experimental impact research

Drop-weight impact testing was carried out on AZ31B-H24-based Fibre Metal Laminate (FML) and two aluminium-based Glare FMLs. Identical S2-glass/epoxy layers were utilized in all the FMLs. The purpose of the research was to study the applicability of AZ31B-H24 magnesium in FMLs and the role of metal layers on the impact behaviour of FMLs in general. Comparisons between the laminates were made through the equal bending stiffness and equal laminate thickness approaches. The impact resistance of the FMLs was compared by defining the failure energy limits for first cracking, second cracking and perforation. Impact damage resistance was studied by force–time measurements, ultrasonic testing and cross-sectional imaging. The results revealed that the metal layers of AZ31B-H24-based FML (MgFML) crack with lower impact energies and damage more extensively when compared to Glare FMLs. The specific perforation limit of MgFML was on an equal level with Glare FMLs.     

When do the USPTO examiners cite as the EPO examiners? An analysis of examination spillovers through rejection citations at the international family-to-family level

Scientometrics - This paper empirically examines coincidences between “rejection citations” (i.e., those cited as grounds for rejections) added by the United States Patent and Trademark...