Computer science research: more production,less productivity

It is commonly accepted that scientific research or, more precisely, the number of scientific publications, in computer science has greatly increased over the last few years. The reason would appear to be the pressure to publish, coined by the expression ”Publish or perish”, which is, among other things, necessary for promotions and applications for grants or projects. In this paper we have conducted a study that covers computer science publications from 1936 to 2010 in order to quantify this increase in publications regarding computing research. We have considered the computing conferences and journals available in the DBLP computer science bibliography (DBLP 2013) database, including more than 1.5 million papers, and more than 4 million authors (more than 900,000 different people), corresponding to about 1,000 different journals and 3,000 different conferences and workshops. Our study confirms and quantifies these increases with regard to the number of papers, number of authors, number of papers per author, etc. However, it also reaches a surprising conclusion: the real productivity of researchers has decreased throughout history. The reason for this decrease is the average number of authors per paper, which has grown significantly and is currently three.     

Learning about learning: patterns of sharing of research knowledge among Education,Border, and Cognitive Science fields

This study explores the patterns of exchange of research knowledge among Education Research, Cognitive Science, and what we call “Border Fields.” We analyze a set of 32,121 articles from 177 selected journals, drawn from five sample years between 1994 and 2014. We profile the references that those articles cite, and the papers that cite them. We characterize connections among the fields in sources indexed by Web of Science (WoS) (e.g., peer-reviewed journal articles and proceedings), and connections in sources that are not (e.g., conference talks, chapters, books, and reports). We note five findings—first, over time the percentage of Education Research papers that extensively cite Cognitive Science has increased, but the reverse is not true. Second, a high percentage of Border Field papers extensively cite and are cited by the other fields. Border Field authors’ most cited papers overlap those most cited by Education Research and Cognitive Science. There are fewer commonalities between Educational research and Cognitive Science most cited papers. This is consistent with Border Fields being a bridge between fields. Third, over time the Border Fields have moved closer to Education Research than to Cognitive Science, and their publications increasingly cite, and are cited by, other Border Field publications. Fourth, Education Research is especially strongly represented in the literature published outside those WoS-indexed publications. Fifth, the rough patterns observed among these three fields when using a more restricted dataset drawn from the WoS are similar to those observed with the dataset lying outside the WoS, but Education Research shows a far heavier influence than would be indicated by looking at WoS records alone.

     

Role of interdisciplinarity in computer sciences: quantification,impact and life trajectory

The tremendous advances in computer science in the last few decades have provided the platform to address and solve complex problems using interdisciplinary research. In this paper, we investigate how the extent of interdisciplinarity in computer science domain (which is further divided into 24 research fields) has changed over the last 50 years. To this end, we collect a massive bibliographic dataset with rich metadata information. We start with quantifying interdisciplinarity of a field in terms of the diversity of topics and citations. We then analyze the effect of interdisciplinary research on the scientific impact of individual fields and observe that highly disciplinary and highly interdisciplinary papers in general have a low scientific impact; remarkably those that are able to strike a balance between the two extremes eventually land up having the highest impact. Further, we study the reciprocity among fields through citation interactions and notice that links from one field to related and citation-intensive fields (fields producing large number of citations) are reciprocated heavily. A systematic analysis of the citation interactions reveals the life trajectory of a research field, which generally undergoes three phases—a growing phase, a matured phase and an interdisciplinary phase. The combination of metrics and empirical observations presented here provides general benchmarks for future studies of interdisciplinary research activities in other domains of science.     

Investigating the concentration within a research community using joint publications and co-authorship via intermediaries

Given extensive research collaboration in modern science, both at thenational and international level, one might wonder whether the network ofresearchers within each discipline is now sufficiently meshed that a largeproportion of contributors to peer-reviewed journals in a given field couldeither share joint publications or, more realistically, be connected throughchains of co-authorships. Such is not the case yet in the fields of probabilityand statistics, however, as shown here using a large data base covering 9reknown journals from each of these two areas over the period 1986-1995. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Do interdisciplinary research teams deliver higher gains to science?

The present paper takes its place in the stream of studies that analyze the effect of interdisciplinarity on the impact of research output. Unlike previous studies, in this study the interdisciplinarity of the publications is not inferred through their citing or cited references, but rather by identifying the authors’ designated fields of research. For this we draw on the scientific classification of Italian academics, and their publications as indexed in the WoS over a 5-year period (2004–2008). We divide the publications in three subsets on the basis the nature of co-authorship: those papers coauthored with academics from different fields, which show high intensity of inter-field collaboration (“specific” collaboration, occurring in 110 pairings of fields); those papers coauthored with academics who are simply from different “non-specific” fields; and finally co-authorships within a single field. We then compare the citations of the papers and the impact factor of the publishing journals between the three subsets. The results show significant differences, generally in favor of the interdisciplinary authorships, in only one third (or slightly more) of the cases. The analysis provides the value of the median differences for each pair of publication subsets.     

Citation regression analysis of computer science publications in different ranking categories and subfields

A number of bibliometric studies point out that the role of conference publications in computer science differs from that in other traditional fields. Thus, it is interesting to identify the relative status of journal and conference publications in different subfields of computer science based on the citation rates categorised by the China Computer Federation (CCF) classifications and venue types. In this research, we construct a dataset containing over 100,000 papers recommended by the CCF catalogue and their citation information. We also investigate some other factors that often influence a paper’s citation rate. An experimental study shows that the relative status of journals and conferences varies greatly in different subfields of computer science, and the impact of different publication levels varies according to the citation rate. We also verify that the classification of a publication, number of authors, maximum h-index of all authors of a paper, and average number of papers published by a publication have different effects on the citation rate, although the citation rate may have a different degree of correlation with these factors.     

Conferences 2017

We take a look back at the conferences we attended in 2017. There was a mix between small and large, academic and industry, that gives a broad and exciting view of the patent information usage landscape. The industry conferences have demonstrated, once again, the hot buzz around Industry 4.0 and anything “AI”, while the academic conferences show that there is real progress in the AI direction in computer science, albeit it is rarely used for the intellectual property domain, so far.     

Long-term trends in the multidisciplinarity of some typical natural and social sciences,and its implications on the SSH versus STM distinction

Macro-level domains of the science system, usually referred to as STM and SSH disciplines, have often been contrasted from various perspectives, regarding the characteristic composition of their publication channels, referencing or communication practices, and the related consequences in research evaluation. It is also long been conjectured that social science fields (along with the humanities) are more multidisciplinary than natural science fields, regarding their patterns of scholarly communication (“multidisciplinarity thesis”). The main goal of the study reported in this paper is twofold: (1) to revisit the differences in multidisciplinarity between the SSH versus STM domain, via a long-term longitudinal survey including the most recent trends, and (2) to utilize, for this task, state-of-the-art metrics and models of Interdisciplinary Research, taking into account their limitations, that is, the data sources that most naturally feed these models (typically the Web of Science). Our conclusions provides further confirmation, from the perspective of multidisciplinarity, that the concepts of SSH and STM are mainly tools for communication, rather than empirically valid constructs.     

Towards medical knowmetrics: representing and computing medical knowledge using semantic predications as the knowledge unit and the uncertainty as the knowledge context

In China, Prof. Hongzhou Zhao and Zeyuan Liu are the pioneers of the concept “knowledge unit” and “knowmetrics” for measuring knowledge. However, the definition on “computable knowledge object” remains controversial so far in different fields. For example, it is defined as (1) quantitative scientific concept in natural science and engineering, (2) knowledge point in the field of education research, and (3) semantic predications, i.e., Subject-Predicate-Object (SPO) triples in biomedical fields. The Semantic MEDLINE Database (SemMedDB), a high-quality public repository of SPO triples extracted from medical literature, provides a basic data infrastructure for measuring medical knowledge. In general, the study of extracting SPO triples as computable knowledge unit from unstructured scientific text has been overwhelmingly focusing on scientific knowledge per se. Since the SPO triples would be possibly extracted from hypothetical, speculative statements or even conflicting and contradictory assertions, the knowledge status (i.e., the uncertainty), which serves as an integral and critical part of scientific knowledge has been largely overlooked. This article aims to put forward a framework for Medical Knowmetrics using the SPO triples as the knowledge unit and the uncertainty as the knowledge context. The lung cancer publications dataset is used to validate the proposed framework. The uncertainty of medical knowledge and how its status evolves over time indirectly reflect the strength of competing knowledge claims, and the probability of certainty for a given SPO triple. We try to discuss the new insights using the uncertainty-centric approaches to detect research fronts, and identify knowledge claims with high certainty level, in order to improve the efficacy of knowledge-driven decision support.

     

Research output analysis of municipal solid waste: a case study of China

Municipal solid waste (MSW) management in China draws particular attention as China has become the largest MSW generator in the world. The paper analyzed the growth and development of MSW research productivity in China in terms of publication output as reflected in science citation index for the period 1997–2011. The study revealed that the output of MSW research in China has rapidly increased over the 15 years in contrast with USA. Chinese authors contributed 730 publications out of which 708 were journal articles, 17 reviews, 3 editorial materials, 1 correction and 1 meeting abstract, from 421 institutions. About 13.70 % of publications were contributed by Chinese Academy of Sciences, followed by Tongji University, Shanghai (13.15) and Tsinghua University, Beijing (11.10 %). That impact factors of the top 20 journals publishing most papers were between 0.30 and 4.63. Leading 20 authors in the area of MSW research published at least 13 articles per person. The annual share of publications varied from 0.27 to 20.96 % per year. The share was highest in the year 2009 at 20.96 %. An analysis of the title-words showed that “landfill”, “incineration” and “management” were recent major topics of municipal solid waste research in China. The results could help researchers understand the characteristics of research output and search hot spots of MSW field in China.     

A quantitative analysis of Antarctic related articles in humanities and social sciences appearing in the world core journals

To demonstrate the importance and the actual research situation of Antarctic studies in the humanities and social sciences, we collected data from the SSCI and A&HCI covering a period of over 100 years and focused on the number of articles published each year, major journals, types of document, authors and their countries publishing the most articles, collaboration, the major research subjects covered, and citations. Comparisons were also made with the Arctic studies to show some similarities and differences. The results suggest that the research in the fields of humanities and social sciences has been in the long-run developing without interruption over 100 years. With regard to the number of articles in high-capacity journals, Geographical Journal performs best, followed by the Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen and Scottish Geographical Magazine. The documentation is rather scattered without a strong cohesion, while book review and article are the two most common types of document. There haven’t many stable collaborated teams on Antarctic topics. Joyner, Savours, and Beck are the three authors having the highest number of publications. USA is the most active country while the most active research institute is University of Tasmania in Australia. The Antarctic expedition has been the main theme lasted for centuries. In addition, the research in the fields of humanities and social sciences has generated a lot of high-impact articles, among which the article entitled “Chemical concentrations of pollutant lead aerosols, terrestrial dusts and sea salts in Greenland and Antarctic snow strata” enjoys the highest citation counts.     

Der Erfolg der „Dummheit“

The competition between the chess computer Deep Blue and the former chess world champion Garri Kasparov in 1997 was a spectacle staged for the media. However, the chess game, like other games, was also a test field for artificial intelligence research. On the one hand Deep Blue’s victory was called a “milestone” for AI research, on the other hand, a dead end, since the superiority of the chess computer was based on pure computing power and had nothing to do with “real” AI.The article questions the premises of these different interpretations and maps Deep Blue and its way of playing chess into the history of AI. This also requires an analysis of the underlying concepts of thinking. Finally, the essay calls for assuming different “ways of thinking” for man and computer. Instead of fundamental discussions of concepts of thinking, we should ask about the consequences of the human-machine division of labor.     

认知科学与设计研究

目的阐述设计师应如何看待认知科学。方法结合高端重大装备设计领域的学识和经验,详细解读认知科学。结论认知科学是人工智能的基础,设计师必须具备理解任务内容和解决问题的智慧,也就是“心智”,即人类学习、理解、产生决策的心智能力。人工智能尝试用计算来表达人的理解和心智。心智是认知过程产生结果的“集合”,因此设计师首先要懂得认知科学。     

Mapping the social and behavioral sciences world-wide: Use of maps in portfolio analysis of national research efforts

We have developed a method to identify and map the internationally most visible research topics occurring in the social and behavioral sciences, as well as the topics which changed most over a decade. Methods and data relevent to a portfolio analysis of national research efforts are described. Keywords used by authors in scientific or scholarly publications provide a window on scientific developments and changes in scientific research. Using an interdisciplinary database, the SSCI, developments in publications were traced world-wide and for the US, UK, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. We compared two periods: 1981–85 and 1986–90 We discuss the major substantive developments occurring during 1981–1990, as visible in maps depicting both topics and disciplines. It is shown that the maps, enriched with scientometric indicators of strengths and weaknesses of national research efforts, can be important tools for science policy. The findings indicate that the research front on many topics in both social and behavioral sciences is international in the late 1980s.     

Worsening file-drawer problem in the abstracts of natural,medical and social science databases

The file-drawer problem is the tendency of journals to preferentially publish studies with statistically significant results. The problem is an old one and has been documented in various fields, but to my best knowledge there has not been attention to how the issue is developing in a quantitative way through time. In the abstracts of various major scholarly databases (Science and Social Science Citation Index (1991–2008), CAB Abstracts and Medline (1970s–2008), the file drawer problem is gradually getting worse, in spite of an increase in (1) the total number of publications and (2) the proportion of publications reporting both the presence and the absence of significant differences. The trend is confirmed for particular natural science topics such as biology, energy and environment but not for papers retrieved with the keywords biodiversity, chemistry, computer, engineering, genetics, psychology and quantum (physics). A worsening file-drawer problem can be detected in various medical fields (infection, immunology, malaria, obesity, oncology and pharmacology), but not for papers indexed with strings such as AIDS/HIV, epidemiology, health and neurology. An increase in the selective publication of some results against some others is worrying because it can lead to enhanced bias in meta-analysis and hence to a distorted picture of the evidence for or against a certain hypothesis. Long-term monitoring of the file-drawer problem is needed to ensure a sustainable and reliable production of (peer-reviewed) scientific knowledge.     

Agrifood research in Europe: a global perspective

The paper has the general aim of assessing the worldwide research activity in agricultural and food science and technology as it is reflected by the mainstream journal literature. The specific research questions were as follows: (1) What is the position of the European Research Area (ERA) represented by 33 countries in this study, on the world map of agrifood science publications? (2) Which countries are influential and what is their position? (3) Are there any specific European strengths and weaknesses by subfields of agrifood science? Overall, assessed by the total number of publications, the European Research Area (ERA), represented by 33 countries in this study, is in a dominant position on the world map of agrifood science. However, agrifood publications from the United States are more influential (judged by the average citation rates per paper). Correlation has been found between economic power and agrifood science publications: this is true not only for the total number of papers, but also for influence (measured by, again, the citation rates). Within Europe, the UK, Germany, France, Spain and the Netherlands dominate the agrifood research fields also in terms of citations. The Scandinavian countries, the Benelux states and Switzerland manage to produce influential papers across several fields of agrifood science. The EU??s New Member States??a populous area??together have less than 10% share in Europe??s agrifood publications and in citations they account for a 3?C4% portion only. It seems that deepening of the integration of the national research systems in the European Research Area is desirable to have more impact of European agrifood research viewed from a global perspective.     

Using content analysis to investigate the research paths chosen by scientists over time

We present an application of a clustering technique to a large original dataset of SCI publications which is capable at disentangling the different research lines followed by a scientist, their duration over time and the intensity of effort devoted to each of them. Information is obtained by means of software-assisted content analysis, based on the co-occurrence of words in the full abstract and title of a set of SCI publications authored by 650 American star-physicists across 17 years. We estimated that scientists in our dataset over the time span contributed on average to 16 different research lines lasting on average 3.5 years and published nearly 5 publications in each single line of research. The technique is potentially useful for scholars studying science and the research community, as well as for research agencies, to evaluate if the scientist is new to the topic and for librarians, to collect timely biographic information.     

Drivers,barriers and social considerations for AI adoption in business and management: A tertiary study

The number of academic papers in the area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its applications across business and management domains has risen significantly in the last decade, and that rise has been followed by an increase in the number of systematic literature reviews.The aim of this study is to provide an overview of existing systematic reviews in this growing area of research and to synthesise the findings related to drivers, barriers and social implications of the AI adoption in business and management.The methodology used for this tertiary study is based on Kitchenham and Charter's guidelines [14], resulting in a selection of 30 reviews published between 2005 and 2019 which are reporting results of 2021 primary studies.These reviews cover the AI adoption across various business sectors (healthcare, information technology, energy, agriculture, apparel industry, engineering, smart cities, tourism and transport), management and business functions (HR, customer services, supply chain, health and safety, project management, decision-support, systems management and technology adoption).While the drivers for the AI adoption in these areas are mainly economic, the barriers are related to the technical aspects (e.g. availability of data, reusability of models) as well as the social considerations such as, increased dependence on non-humans, job security, lack of knowledge, safety, trust and lack of multiple stakeholders’perspectives.Very few reviews outside of the healthcare management domain consider human, organisational and wider societal factors of the AI adoption.In addition to increased focus on social implications of AI, the reviews are recommending more rigorous evaluation, increased use of hybrid solutions (AI and non-AI) and multidisciplinary approach to AI design and evaluation.Furthermore, this study found that there is a lack of systematic reviews in some of the early AI adoption sectors such as financial industry and retail.     

A comparative study of interdisciplinary changes between information science and library science

This study employs the method of direct citation to analyze and compare the interdisciplinary characteristics of the two disciplines of library science and information science during the period of 1978–2007. Based on the research generated by five library science journals and five information science journals, library science researchers tend to cite publications from library and information science (LIS), education, business/management, sociology, and psychology, while researchers of information science tend to cite more publications from LIS, general science, computer science, technology, and medicine. This means that the disciplines with larger contributions to library science are almost entirely different from those contributing to information science. In addition, researchers of library science frequently cite publications from LIS; the rate is as high as 65.61%, which is much higher than the rate for information science, 49.50%. However, a decreasing trend in the percentage of LIS in library science indicates that library science researchers tend to cite more publications from non-LIS disciplines. A rising trend in the proportion of references to education sources is reported for library science articles, while a rising trend in the proportion of references to computer science sources has been found for information science articles. In addition, this study applies an interdisciplinary indicator, Brillouin’s Index, to measurement of the degree of interdisciplinarity. The results confirm that the trend toward interdisciplinarity in both information science and library science has risen over the years, although the degree of interdisciplinarity in information science is higher than that in library science.