Search

There is increasing evidence that citations to Chinese research publications are rising sharply. A series of reasons have been highlighted in previous studies. This research explores another possibility-whether there is a 'clubbing' effect in China's surge in research citations, in which a higher rate of internal citing takes place among influential Chinese researchers. Focusing on the most highly cited research articles in nanotechnology, we find that a larger proportion of Chinese nanotechnology research citations are localized within individual, institutional, and national networks within China. Both descriptive and statistical tests suggest that highly cited Chinese papers are more likely than similar U.S. papers to receive internal and localized citations. Tentative explanations and policy implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the open access citation advantage (OACA) has been discussed extensively, scholars lack a clear understanding of the mechanisms through which switching from subscription‐based model to open access (OA) model affects the citation impact of a scholarly journal. Many journals have switched from subscription to OA, yet they later also flipped their preswitching articles (i.e., those under subscription model) to OA, thus leaving no subscription article to be compared with their postswitching OA counterparts. To detect the switching effect, our study instead focused on 60 journals that "reverse flipped" from OA to subscription. We use a difference‐in‐difference (DiD) analytical framework to analyze two propositions related to OACA, based on the bibliographic and citation data of pre‐ and postswitching publications in these journals. Our findings indicate that reverse flipping is unlikely to affect the journals' impact through changing the visibility of their articles. Instead, it could lead to a systematical shift in the submissions to the journals and thus considerably affect their impact. Our findings have important theoretical and practical implications for subsequent studies, funding agencies, and scholarly journals considering a reverse flip. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Characterizing the leadership in research is important to revealing the interaction pattern and organizational structure through research collaboration. This research defines the leadership role based on the corresponding author's affiliation, and presents the first quantitative research on the factors and evolution of 5 proximity dimensions (geographical, cognitive, institutional, social, and economic) of research leadership. The data to capture research leadership consist of a set of multi‐institution articles in the fields of "Life Sciences & Biomedicine," "Technology," "Physical Sciences," "Social Sciences," and "Humanities & Arts" during 2013–2017 from the Web of Science Core Citation Database. A Tobit regression‐based gravity model indicates that the mass of research leadership of both the leading and participating institutions and the geographical, cognitive, institutional, social, and economic proximities are important factors for the flow of research leadership among Chinese institutions. In general, the effect of these proximities for research leadership flow has been declining recently. The outcome of this research sheds light on the leadership evolution and flow among Chinese institutions, and thus can provide evidence and support for grant allocation policies to facilitate scientific research and collaborations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research collaboration is promoted by governments and research funders, but if the relative prevalence and merits of collaboration vary internationally then different national and disciplinary strategies may be needed to promote it. This study compares the team size and field normalized citation impact of research across all 27 Scopus broad fields in the 10 countries with the most journal articles indexed in Scopus 2008–2012. The results show that team size varies substantially by discipline and country, with Japan (4.2) having two‐thirds more authors per article than the United Kingdom (2.5). Solo authorship is rare in China (4%) but common in the United Kingdom (27%). While increasing team size associates with higher citation impact in almost all countries and fields, this association is much weaker in China than elsewhere. There are also field differences in the association between citation impact and collaboration. For example, larger team sizes in the Business, Management & Accounting category do not seem to associate with greater research impact, and for China and India, solo authorship associates with higher citation impact in this field. Overall, there are substantial international and field differences in the extent to which researchers collaborate and the extent to which collaboration associates with higher citation impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]