On the dynamics of national scientific systems: a reply

Abstract

The comments of Everett (2011) and Light and Moody (2011) confirm our sense that, as a part of studying the dynamics of scientific change, we are tackling an interesting and important set of problems by using a wonderful data set. We appreciate their constructive critiques, especially their prompts to look more closely at the data we have. Their comments also make it clear that we are greatly indebted to the people at Institute of Information Science in Maribor (IZUM) for their maintenance of the Current Research Information System (SICRIS) and Cooperative Online Bibliometric and Services (COBISS) data archives. Without these data sets we could not study total disciplinary networks within the Slovene national science system. We are privileged in having access to these data. We agree with Everett (2011) about the value of comparing this national system with other such systems. However, we do not know of one and hope that our efforts could help promote the idea of creating comparable data sets in other nations. They may, indeed, exist and, if so, we would be more than willing to share ideas with researchers elsewhere regarding national scientific systems. We agree also with Everett that attention to how data sets are created is merited, especially with regard to the many decisions that must be made in designing them. Some of these decisions are made explicitly while others are made implicitly. We know that some features of the results we report in our paper Kronegger et al. (2011), henceforth KFD, differ somewhat from those of both Newman (2004) and Moody (2004) because of the wider framework used by IZUM for including information. We think that our research program is enhanced by this expansive inclusion of more types of scientific productions. This is a particularly valuable