Bibliometric review.
This study aims to understand the worldwide research productivity trends in spine-related research over the past five decades.
Research productivity in the field of spine surgery ...has increased tremendously over the past decades. However, knowledge regarding the detailed regional disparity is limited.
We evaluated original research articles published in four prestigious journals on spine research (European Spine Journal, Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine, Spine, and The Spine Journal) from 1976 to 2020. For 1 year of each decade, the origin of the first and the senior author was assigned to their region of origin. For the year 2020, a detailed analysis of countries and states of origin was performed, and the number of articles was normalized by registered MDs per country (per 10,000 population).
We included a total of 4436 articles and 8776 authors for analysis. From 1976 to 2020, the percentage of publications originating from North America decreased (77%-38%). In contrast, Asian contributions drastically increased (3%-36%), whereas articles originating from Europe only slightly raised (20%-22%). In 2020, the United States was the most productive country worldwide (34% with most articles from New York (19%), followed by China (16%) and Japan (10%). After normalization to registered MDs (per 10,000 population), the United States proved to have the highest number of articles. Besides this, India now ranked fourth and Egypt eighth in terms of the most productive countries per MDs.
North America contributed the largest share of all articles published in the last five decades. Asia, which ranks second in 2020, has overtaken Europe. Normalization to registered MDs can be a helpful tool to reflect a country's research productivity more accurately.Level of Evidence: 3.
This paper presents a study of the most cited papers, the most productive and influential institutions and countries, and the most influential authors in the tourism, leisure, and hospitality fields. ...The number of publications in journals focused on these areas has increased exponentially over the past 40 years. This paper examines the fundamental contributions in these areas using a bibliometric approach. This paper also uses the visualization of similarities to graphically map the main topics and keywords. No study has examined all journals indexed in the Web of Science in these fields over a period as wide as the one considered in this study. This study is valuable for several reasons. It can help scholars and researchers to identify the countries and institutions with the most potential to develop and share research, as well as where it would be interesting to carry out their doctoral studies and develop their careers.
Traditionally, the success of a researcher is assessed by the number of publications he or she publishes in peer-reviewed, indexed, high impact journals. This essential yardstick, often referred to ...as the impact of a specific researcher, is assessed through the use of various metrics. While researchers may be acquainted with such matrices, many do not know how to use them to enhance their careers. In addition to these metrics, a number of other factors should be taken into consideration to objectively evaluate a scientist's profile as a researcher and academician. Moreover, each metric has its own limitations that need to be considered when selecting an appropriate metric for evaluation. This paper provides a broad overview of the wide array of metrics currently in use in academia and research. Popular metrics are discussed and defined, including traditional metrics and article-level metrics, some of which are applied to researchers for a greater understanding of a particular concept, including varicocele that is the thematic area of this Special Issue of Asian Journal of Andrology. We recommend the combined use of quantitative and qualitative evaluation using judiciously selected metrics for a more objective assessment of scholarly output and research impact.
Problem definition
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We study the disproportionate impact of the lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak on female and male academic research productivity in social science.
Academic/practical ...relevance
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The lockdown has caused substantial disruptions to academic activities, requiring people to work from home. How this disruption affects productivity and the related gender equity is an important operations and societal question.
Methodology
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We collect data from the largest open-access preprint repository for social science on 41,858 research preprints in 18 disciplines produced by 76,832 authors across 25 countries over a span of two years. We use a difference-in-differences approach leveraging the exogenous pandemic shock.
Results
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Our results indicate that, in the 10 weeks after the lockdown in the United States, although total research productivity increased by 35%, female academics’ productivity dropped by 13.2% relative to that of male academics. We also show that this intensified productivity gap is more pronounced for assistant professors and for academics in top-ranked universities and is found in six other countries.
Managerial implications
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Our work points out the fairness issue in productivity caused by the lockdown, a finding that universities will find helpful when evaluating faculty productivity. It also helps organizations realize the potential unintended consequences that can arise from telecommuting.
The South African government announcement on revisiting the Policy for the Recognition of Higher Education Institutional Types has caused anxiety and ambivalence among Universities of Technology ...(UoTs), institutions that lack a solid foundation for conducting leading research. Most underperforming UoTs feared a possible downgrade or de-classification from being universities to becoming university colleges by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), potentially triggering attrition of experienced academic staff and students to prominent research-intensive universities. Paradoxically, this ambivalence has also stimulated renewed public interest and discourse on the constitution of research excellence and productivity for greater impact and their significance in UoTs contexts, as universities compete for academic existence, space and relevance amid highly demanding multiple stakeholders in the global community. Addressing specific aspects of research excellence and productivity, this conceptual paper employs Institutional Theory, secondary data of research productivity and the researcher's reflective insights to locate specific disciplinary areas where one UoT (hereinafter called 'Protea University') demonstrated formidable strength and research excellence areas it downplayed that require improvement. The study also proposes concrete strategies for transitioning this university to become a world-class leading research university in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world. The study proposes differentiated academic promotion criteria, research impact-lead international collaborations, benchmarking of the research practices and habits of research-intensive universities, innovation and consultancy-driven third-stream income generation and advancement of science communication as areas this UoT can build on to promote its image, reputation and drive of becoming a leading university on the African continent.
Among the explanations for prolonged economic stagnation in advanced economies, we find those that highlight the role of technical progress and its weakening impact on potential growth. Several ...contributions stress the apparent paradox of technological development and innovation going hand in hand with slowing labour productivity growth. This issue is in turn linked to numerous factors, among which the pattern of research productivity that appears to be falling in the last decades. This article aims to analyse the role of innovation expenditures and their effects on productivity. Using an SVAR model on US data from 1948Q1 to 2019Q4, the study estimates the effects of public versus private innovation expenditures on productivity. The findings indicate that public innovation spending has a stronger positive impact on productivity than private spending and strongly crowds in private R&D investment. Thus, the sustained decrease in public innovation expenditure relative to private expenditure contributes to prolonged stagnation.
•Analysis of the role of innovation expenditures and their effects on productivity.•SVAR model on US data from 1948Q1 to 2019Q4.•The sustained decrease in public innovation expenditure relative to private expenditure contributes to prolonged stagnation.
•A total of 15,280,382 scholarly articles over the previous five years were examined.•During the first year of the pandemic, the share of leading female authors decreased.•Female scholars were more ...vulnerable when they were in their mid-career and affiliated to the least influential organizations.•Female researchers in countries with less gender equality were more disadvantaged.•COVID-19 exacerbated the gender gap by increasing mortality and limiting mobility.
Female researchers may have experienced more difficulties than their male counterparts since the COVID-19 outbreak because of gendered housework and childcare. To test it, we constructed a unique dataset that connects 15,280,382 scholarly publications and their 11,828,866 authors retrieved from Microsoft Academic Graph data between 2016 and 2020 to various national characteristics from LinkedIn, Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, and Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports from Google. Using the dataset, this study estimated how much the proportion of female authors in academic journals on a global scale changed in 2020 (net of recent yearly trends). We observed a decrease in research productivity for female researchers in 2020, mostly as first authors, followed by last author position. We also identified various factors that amplified the gender gap by dividing the authors’ backgrounds into individual, organizational and national characteristics. Female researchers were more vulnerable when they were in their mid-career, affiliated to the least influential organizations, and more importantly from less gender-equal countries with higher mortality and restricted mobility as a result of COVID-19. Our findings suggest that female researchers were not necessarily excluded from but were marginalized in research since the COVID-19 outbreak and we discuss its policy implications.
In this paper we examine how incentives for collaboration shape collaborative behavior and researcher productivity in the context of EU-funded research networks. EU-funded research networks require ...researchers to collaborate as a condition for securing research funding. The presence of research funding, therefore, may influence collaborative behavior. Our approach involves isolating the effects of funding, collaboration and previous collaborations (prior to funding) on research output, and examining how the pattern of collaboration affects research productivity over time. Employing a panel of 294 researchers in 39 EU research networks over a 15-year period we find that while the impact of funding on productivity is generally positive the overall impact of collaboration within the funded networks is weak. When we delineate between pre-, during- and post-funding periods, however, we find some important differences. During the period of funding, collaboration did not lead to an increase in research production. In the post-funding period we find that although the number of collaborations decreases within the network, the impact of collaboration on productivity is positive and significant. Our findings suggest that collaborations formed to capitalize on funding opportunities, while not effective in enhancing researcher productivity in the short run, may be an important promoter of effective collaborations in the longer run.
•We investigate the relation between collaboration and research productivity.•Controlling for some personal and organizational variables.•We adopt a longitudinal approach based on cross-lagged panel ...models.•Collaboration at intramural and domestic level has a positive effect on productivity.•All forms of collaboration are positively affected by research productivity.
This work provides an in-depth analysis of the relation between the different types of collaboration and research productivity, showing how both are influenced by some personal and organizational variables. By applying different cross-lagged panel models, we are able to analyze the relationship among research productivity, collaboration and their determinants. In particular, we show that only collaboration at intramural and domestic level has a positive effect on research productivity. Differently, all the forms of collaboration are positively affected by research productivity. The results can favor the reexamination of the theories related to these issues, and inform policies that would be more suited to their management.
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