Disciplinary Profile Research Articles

Understanding differences of the OA uptake within the German University landscape (2010–2020): Part 2—repository-provided OA

This article is the second part of the investigation of the determinants for the uptake of Open Access (OA). While the first part focusses on journal-based OA (hybrid and full OA) (Taubert et al. in Scientometrics 128(6):3601–3625, 2023), the article at hand investigates the determinants for the uptake of institutional and subject repository OA in the university landscape of Germany. Both articles consider three types of factors: the disciplinary profile of universities, their OA infrastructures and services and large transformative agreements The article also apply a conjoint methodological design: the uptake of OA as well as the determinants are measured by combining several data sources (incl. Web of Science, Unpaywall, an authority file of standardised German affiliation information, the ISSN-Gold-OA 4.0 list, and lists of publications covered by transformative agreements). For universities’ OA infrastructures and services, a structured data collection was created by harvesting different sources of information and by manual online search. To determine the explanatory power of the different factors, a series of regression analyses was performed for different periods and for both institutional as well as subject repository OA. Given that both articles derive from the same project, there is a thematical overlap in the methods and data section. As a result of the regression analyses, the most determining factor for the explanation of differences in the uptake of both repository OA-types turned out to be the disciplinary profile, whereas all variables that capture local infrastructural support and services for OA turned out to be non-significant. The outcome of the regression analyses is contextualised by an interview study conducted with 20 OA officers of German universities. The contextualisation provides hints that the original function of institutional repositories, offering a channel for secondary publishing is vanishing, while a new function of aggregation of metadata and full texts is becoming of increasing importance.

Understanding differences of the OA uptake within the German university landscape (2010–2020): part 1—journal-based OA

This study investigates the determinants for the uptake of Full and Hybrid Open Access (OA) in the university landscape of Germany and distinguishes between three factors: The disciplinary profile, infrastructures and services of universities that aim to support OA, and large transformative agreements. The uptake of OA, the influence of the disciplinary profile of universities and the influence of transformative agreements is measured by combining several data sources (incl. Web of Science, Unpaywall, an authority file of standardised German affiliation information, the ISSN-Gold-OA 4.0 list, and lists of publications covered by transformative agreements). For infrastructures and services that support OA, a structured data collection was created by harvesting different sources of information and by manual online search. To determine the explanatory power of the different factors, a series of regression analyses was performed for different periods and for both Full as well as Hybrid OA. As a result of the regression analyses, the most determining factor for the explanation of differences in the uptake of both OA-types turned out to be the disciplinary profile. For the year 2020, Hybrid OA transformative agreements have become a second relevant factor. However, all variables that reflect local infrastructural support and services for OA turned out to be non-significant. To deepen the understanding of the adoption of OA on the level of institutions, the outcomes of the regression analyses are contextualised by an interview study conducted with 20 OA officers of German universities.

'Medical Corona Science': Philosophical and systemic issues: Re-thinking medicine? On the epistemology of Corona medicine.

The disciplinary profile and the quality of production of knowledge on Corona pandemic is studied. This scientific field is called 'Medical Corona Science'. Criteria of analytical philosophy of science and science studies are systematically applied. It is shown that mainly auxiliary medical disciplines such as virology and epidemiology but not clinical disciplines provide Corona knowledge. We see a laboratory-centered, technology- and data-driven science, largely ignoring clinical issues. Therefore we call these approaches "Medical Corona Science" (MCS). We see the need to adapt to features of a 'post-normal science', a 'mode 2 science' and of 'Integration and Implementation Science', especially as clinical knowledge must be integrated. There is also a severe lack of theoretical considerations that could help to frame the pandemic as a complex dynamic system. We suggest a deeper meta-scientific discussion of the epistemic value of MCS and propose the application of tools from systems science.

Worldwide bilateral geopolitical interactions network inferred from national disciplinary profiles

A disciplinary profile of a country is defined as the versor whose components are the number of papers produced in a given discipline divided by the overall production of the country. Starting from the Essential Science Indicators (ESI) schema of classification of subject areas, we obtained the yearly disciplinary profiles of a worldwide graph, where on each node sits a country, in the two time intervals 1988--1988 and 1992--2017, the fall of the Berlin Wall being the watershed. We analyze the empirical pairwise cross-correlation matrices of the time series of disciplinary profiles. The contrast with random matrix theory proves that, beyond measurement noise, the empirical cross-correlation matrices bring genuine information. Arising from the Shannon theorem as the least-structured model consistent with the measured pairwise correlations, the stationary probability distribution of disciplinary profiles can be described by a Boltzmann distribution related to a generalized ${n}_{d}$-dimensional Heisenberg model. The set of network interactions of the Heisenberg model has been inferred and to it, two clusterization methods, hierarchical clustering, and principal component analysis have been applied. This allows obtaining a characterization of the worldwide bilateral interactions based on physical modeling. A simple geopolitical analysis reveals the consistency of the results obtained and gives a boost to a deeper historical analysis. In order to obtain the optimal set of pairwise interactions, we used a pseudolikelihood approach. We analytically computed the pseudolikelihood and its gradient. The analytical computations deserve interest in whatever inference Bayesian problem involving an ${n}_{d}$-dimensional Heisenberg model.

A Tricky Start

Abstract The earliest encounters between cinema and anthropology occurred while the former was taking its first steps and the latter was trying to better define its disciplinary profile. Among the first to be involved was the Frenchman Félix Regnault, an investigator of many topics and a lifelong supporter of the importance of ethnographic cinema. Racial differences were at the center of his interests, although attempts to highlight them yielded contradictory results. Some years later, the Britain Alfred C. Haddon brought a camera with him on the legendary Cambridge expedition to the Torres Strait (1898) and recorded a few films. The third example discussed here is that of Baldwin Spencer, who, together with Francis Gillen, included the filming of native ceremonies in his studies on the indigenous populations of Central Australia. Not only did technical and logistical problems trouble the start of ethnographic cinema. The theoretical framework of social evolutionism was weakening and anthropology was turning more and more to the study of language, kinship and belief systems. Here the contribution that cinema could make seemed temporarily to be in question.

Tracing the context in disciplinary classifications: A bibliometric pairwise comparison of five classifications of journals in the social sciences and humanities

Abstract Despite the centrality of disciplinary classifications in bibliometric analyses, it is not well known how the choice of disciplinary classification influences bibliometric representations of research in the social sciences and humanities (SSH). This is especially crucial when using data from national databases. Therefore, we examine the differences in the disciplinary profile of an article along with the absolute and relative number of articles across disciplines using five disciplinary classifications for journals. We use data on journal articles (2006–2015) from the national bibliographic databases VABB-SHW in Flanders (Belgium) and Cristin in Norway. Our study is based on pairwise comparisons of the local classifications used in these databases, the Web of Science subject categories, the Science-Metrix, and the ERIH PLUS journal classifications. For comparability, all classifications are mapped to the OECD Fields of Research and Development classification. The findings show that the choice of disciplinary classification can lead to over- or underestimation of the absolute number of publications per discipline. In contrast, if the focus is on the relative numbers, the choice of classification has practically no influence. These findings facilitate an informed choice of a disciplinary classification for journals in SSH when using data from national databases.

Do Literary Studies Have a Present? Five Snapshots of an Institutional Void

ABSTRACT The future of literary studies depends on the acknowledgment of its present. After the emergence of post-theoretical times, in the 1990s, the academy faces a discontinuity with the intellectual projects of the twentieth century, which results in an experience of institutional void. The created space allows idiosyncratic practices, without a characterization of a disciplinary profile. In order to think about an institutional continuation of literary studies, it is necessary to recognize this void-like quality that the present times exhibit.

Cross-disciplinary collaboration versus coexistence in LIS serials: analysis of authorship affiliations in four European countries

The interdisciplinary nature of library and information science (LIS) research has been highlighted for some time now. The term “interdisciplinary” is used primarily in the LIS literature as a general concept with different meanings that refer either to the coexistence of researchers from different scientific fields or to cross-disciplinary collaboration expressed in the form of coauthorship. This study analyses the disciplinary profile of LIS researchers with a view to ascertaining the actual level of cross-disciplinary collaboration and identifying all fields involved. Because of the complexity of identifying accurate affiliations at knowledge area level, the study was limited to authors from France, Germany, Spain and the UK. This analysis of authorship affiliation was performed based on research published in LIS serial titles indexed in Scopus during the 2010–2017 period. A rigorous and laborious process of identifying author affiliations was carried out. This involved checking the authorship of each paper and complementing this with information from websites, scientific social networks and other research endeavours whenever ambiguous situations arose. We observed that LIS departments produce barely a third of the research published in serial titles in the LIS subject category. Cross-disciplinary collaboration among all of the scientific fields involved is low, and even lower in LIS than in other fields. The low level of cross-disciplinary collaboration in LIS contradicts the interdisciplinary nature of LIS highlighted in the literature.

Multiple Identities and Scholarship in International Studies: 2019 ISA Presidential Address

Abstract The International Studies Association (ISA) has gone through a variety of internal changes as a result of growth in our membership. Such growth transformed the association from a regional American enterprise into a global organization, diversified our disciplinary profile away from the dominance of political science, and incorporated individuals represented by a wide array of cultural identities into the membership. These changes have had huge effects on ISA's organizational identity and our attempts to manage it. I describe various options available for organizations to manage identity, including ISA's traditional strategy for identity management, and conclude with a plea for an aggregation strategy that refocuses attention on international studies as our master identity. I argue that such a strategy allows us to embrace and enhance the diversity of the association to pursue the major challenges facing the globe today.

Nonlinear Estimation of Similarity Among Scientists’ Disciplinary Profiles. A Case Study

Purpose/Thesis: Authors estimate the disciplinary similarity of researchers according to selected academic units with a different cross-section of specializations. The paper presents the model for studying disciplinary diversity of scientific units. The premise of the article is that knowledge of di­sciplinary profiles of researchers can be applied to create interdisciplinary teams, or one disciplinary team with a focused specializations.Approach/Methods: The approach is based on the visualization and comparison of disciplinary space and space of co-authorship. Fuzzy logic and aggregation norm were used to calculate disciplinary weights of each journal listed in the database. For visualization, new, dimension reduction algorithm t-SNE was applied. Achieved results were verified by using the expert’s knowledge.Results and conclusions: In the evaluation of scientific collaboration, a co-authorship relationship can be complemented by researchers’ disciplinary profiles represented by aggregation norm. Thanks to the continuity of researchers’ publishing activity, the proposed measure based on the disciplinary profile is stable.Research limitations: The sample of both selected teams and journals database is limited. The journals from WoS/Scopus list were considered because analyzed researchers publish articles there. Additionally, during linking these two databases, problems of matching journals titles appeared.Practical implications: The authors proposed a model of evaluating scientists’ disciplinary similarity and further, to estimate the potential of their collaboration.Originality/Value: This approach applies fuzzy logic algorithms to quantifying scientific interests and is another rare instance of practical application of artificial intelligence algorithms (fuzzy logic) in scientometric studies.

How Efficiently Do Elite US Universities Produce Highly Cited Papers?

While output and impact assessments were initially at the forefront of institutional research evaluations, efficiency measurements have become popular in recent years. Research efficiency is measured by indicators that relate research output to input. The additional consideration of research input in research evaluation is obvious, since the output depends on the input. The present study is based on a comprehensive dataset with input and output data for 50 US universities. As input, we used research expenses, and as output the number of highly-cited papers. We employed Data Efficiency Analysis (DEA), Free Disposal Hull (FDH) and two more robust models: the order-m and order-α approaches. The results of the DEA and FDH analysis show that Harvard University and Boston College can be called especially efficient compared to the other universities. While the strength of Harvard University lies in its high output of highly-cited papers, the strength of Boston College is its small input. In the order-α and order-m frameworks, Harvard University remains efficient, but Boston College becomes super-efficient. We produced university rankings based on adjusted efficiency scores (subsequent to regression analyses), in which single covariates (e.g., the disciplinary profile) are held constant.

CONSTITUCIÓN MATERIAL Y JUSTICIA POLÍTICA/ CONSTITUIÇÃO MATERIAL E JUSTIÇA POLÍTICA

This paper aims to explore to the maximum Latin American Philosophy of Liberation and the so-called decolonizer or decolonial turn to found the constitutional theory, from the practices of the New Latin American Constitutionalism, specially new constitutional texts and systems from Venezuela (1999), Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2009), which propose a series of institutional and social innovations. The text has a multi disciplinary profile, passing through the areas of Law and Philosophy, and has as basis classic authors from the Latin American thought. Keywords: Constitution; justice; politics; Latin America;

Orientalism and New musicology

The aim of this paper is to outline the history of the concept of Orientalism in the field of New musicology and to point out that musicological discussions of Orientalism significantly changed disciplinary profile of musicology in the direction of interdisciplinary or contextual musicology. The area of Postcolonial studies has been recognized by New musicology as a possible starting point for theorizing the new issues related to the questions of music, race, ethnic and national otherness, and European colonialism. In 1991, with the publication of Ralph P. Locke’s text “Constructing the Oriental ‘Other’: Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila” in Cambridge Opera Journal, the musicological research of the European professional music tradition from the aspects of postcolonial theories has been institutionalized and the concept of Orientalism has been introduced into the field of research objects of musicology. What is present as the common aspects of all musicological studies that address the issue of musical representations of the Orient are interdisciplinarity and contextuality. Contrary to the reduction of the complex Western European music practices to the idea of an autonomous work of music devoted to an aesthetic enjoyment, postcolonial musicology proposed poststructuralist analytical models of text and discourse and affirm the interest in the context of work of music. In that manner, musicology has been updated as a discipline that autocritically approaches Western European professional music practice by seeing it/ self as only one of the possible historical formations of culture/knowledge in which there are visible clusters, conflicts, and aspirations to present (Western) European capitalist patriarchal politics as a universal economic, political and cultural power.

An overview of the Web of Science record of scientific publications (2004–2013) from Nepal: focus on disciplinary diversity and international collaboration

This study attempts to use bibliometry as a tool for exploration of the passage of development of the science and technology through analysis of the scientific publications from a developing country by taking into account its state of higher education and the unique political, economic and geo-bio-environmental conditions. It deals with Nepal considering its scientific output during 1966–2016 reflected as publications indexed in the Web of Science Database. Preliminary examination of the publication record for Nepal reveals a number of the following characteristics: (1) low volume, negligible growth and lack of distinct trend until 1989; (2) a marked growth followed by stagnation linked to political instability during the next 15 years; and (3) recovery and accelerated growth thereafter. Research publications during 2004–2013 increased thrice compared to 1994–2003, with expansion and shifts in disciplinary profile expressed in Essential Science Indicators 22 fields. Detailed bibliometric analysis of the 2004–2013 publications (3011 articles and reviews) from Nepal suggests the citation impact of about the world average, but very high (76%) average international co-authorship. The disciplinary profile is diverse judging from seven most productive fields (clinical medicine, plant and animal science, environment/ecology, geosciences, agricultural sciences, and chemistry) with 4–40% national disciplinary share. Clinical medicine, geosciences and agricultural sciences exhibit relatively high impact. Fields with the smaller share (< 3%), such as molecular biology and genetics, economics and business, psychiatry and psychology, materials science, and biology and biochemistry, exhibit citation impact distinctly higher than the world average. Publications from Nepal show the presence of a vast international collaborative network that is dominated by authors affiliated to institutions in the USA, India, UK, Japan, South Korea and Germany. Based on the analysis of the disciplinary diversity and the national versus global relative disciplinary shares, Nepal’s publication profile is inferred to be a hybrid of the ‘bio-environmental’ and ‘western’ models. Concerning the state of the development of science and technology in Nepal during 2004–2013, the high dependence on international collaboration in the internationally visible publications in most of the bio-environmental, physico-chemical and engineering fields points to basically a ‘building-up stage’. In clinical medicine (with a large share of public health) and geosciences, however, Nepal has demonstrated research strengths evident from the high citation impact in these fields. Moreover, the available data suggest that significant advances were made in higher education sector in both fields during the last 25 years. Despite the notable negative effect of the prolonged domestic armed political conflict on the research activities and acquisition of new data in the field-based sciences, the post-conflict period shows signs of recovery in both domestic and international collaborations leading to again an accelerated growth in scientific publications.

Perspectives on an Evolving Research Field: Location Intelligence and Its Representation at the Applied Geography Conferences, 1978 to 2012

ABSTRACTGeography has an established relevance to many of the most important challenges facing society across the human–environmental spectrum. Among many areas of application, geography has a historical record of connecting location concepts, tools, and expertise to the key planning and operational issues confronting business and other institutions in society. This article examines the context for applied geographic research falling within this location intelligence sphere, and profiles the body of research in this field published at the Applied Geography Conferences over its first thirty-five years. Our analysis shows that although location intelligence has had an ongoing representation at the conference, its presence has fluctuated greatly. The disciplinary profile developed here tracks the shifting emphasis of location intelligence research and its relation to broader, real-world needs. We conclude by interpreting these findings and making recommendations related to increased self-assessment and repositioning of research in the location intelligence community.

A quantitative measure to compare the disciplinary profiles of research systems and their evolution over time

Abstract By modeling research systems as complex systems we generalize similarity measures used in the literature during the last two decades. We propose to use the mathematical tools developed within the spin-glasses literature to evaluate similarity within systems and between systems in a unified manner. Our measure is based on the ‘overlap’ of disciplinary profiles of a set of research systems and can readily be integrated in the framework of traditional bibliometric profile analysis. The investigation of the distribution of the overlaps provides useful insights on the dynamics of the general system, that is whether it converges toward a unique disciplinary structure or to a differentiated pattern. We illustrate the usefulness of the approach by investigating the dynamics of disciplinary profiles of European countries from 1996 to 2011. We analyze several bibliometric indicators (including publications and citations) of European countries in the 27 Scopus subject categories. We compare the disciplinary profiles of European countries (i) among them; (ii) with respect to the European standard; and (iii) to the World reference. We find that there is a convergence toward a unique European disciplinary profile of the scientific production even if large differences in the scientific profiles still remain. The investigation of the dynamics by year shows that developing countries are converging toward the European model while some developed countries are departing from it.

Discipline-building in synthetic biology

Despite the multidisciplinary dimension of the kinds of research conducted under the umbrella of synthetic biology, the US-based founders of this new research area adopted a disciplinary profile to shape its institutional identity. In so doing they took inspiration from two already established fields with very different disciplinary patterns. The analogy with synthetic chemistry suggested by the term ‘synthetic biology’ is not the only model. Information technology is clearly another source of inspiration. The purpose of the paper, with its focus on the US context, is to emphasize the diversity of views and agendas coexisting under the disciplinary label synthetic biology, as the two models analysed are only presented as two extreme postures in the community. The paper discusses the question: in which directions the two models shape this emerging field? Do they chart two divergent futures for synthetic biology?

Usage and Impact of Controlled Vocabularies in a Subject Repository for Indexing and Retrieval

Since 2009, the German National Library for Economics (ZBW) supports both indexing and retrieval of Open Access scientific publications like working papers, postprint articles and conference papers by means of a terminology web service. This web service is based on concepts organized as a ‘Standard Thesaurus for Economics’ (STW), which is modelled and regularly published as Linked Open Data. Moreover, it is integrated into the institution’s subject repository for automatically suggesting appropriate key words while indexing and retrieving documents, and for automatically expanding search queries on demand to gain better search results. While this approach looks promising to augment ‘off the shelf’ repository software systems in a lightweight manner with a disciplinary profile, there is still significant uncertainty about the effective usage and impact of controlled terms in the realm of these systems. To cope with this, we analyze the repository’s logfiles to get evidence of search behaviour which is potentially influenced by auto suggestion and expansion of scientific terms derived from a discipline’s literature.

Formalism and Eighteenth-Century English Fiction

when the editors of Eighteenth-Century Fiction asked me if I would like to edit a special number of the journal, I readily agreed but then wondered what might be a timely topic. What had the study of the eighteenth-century English novel lacked of late? What would justify and unify a special number? In recent years, I had become uneasy about what I perceived as the drift in some of eighteenth-century studies towards an extreme version of cultural studies that struck me as indifferent or even hostile to what I think of as the main tasks of literary study. The tendency of this brand of cultural studies seemed to mandate treating literary texts as simply part of the larger ideological and cultural field. Perhaps unfairly, I thought of W.H. Auden’s quip: “Thou shalt not sit / With statisticians nor commit / A social science.”1 At its most extreme, cultural studies can turn in the direction of a social science that denies or at least neglects traditional critical attention to literature as an imaginative and quite singular ordering of words distinct from other linguistic and cultural practices within its particular historical context. Indeed, a few years ago as president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) I had written a piece for the society newsletter in which I expressed some dis may about the disciplinary confusion and methodological inadequacy that professors of literature in general faced as they sought to participate in an uncompromised brand of cultural studies for which they had no particular or rigorous training. Here in part is what I wrote in my president’s column for the ASECS newsletter in spring 2009: “the essential part of the disciplinary and methodological profile of professors of literature is our intense

Absorptive capacity, innovation networks and products: SME in the Basque Country

Innovation networks and knowledge clusterisation depends to a great extent on the capacity of companies to acquire and assimilate external knowledge. The capacity of business to absorb scientific knowledge is associated with the disciplinary profile of its human resources. To explore the relationship between disciplinary absorption capacity, networks and innovation products, we suggest the concept of critical mass in science and technology-oriented human resources and compare two types of companies distinguished by differences in the profile of their critical masses. The results show that a relation does exist between the discipline-related makeup of the critical mass, the types of products obtained and the types of partners in innovation networks.