Purpose:Diaspora researchers work in one country but have ancestral origins in another,either through moves during a research career(mobile diaspora researchers)or by starting research in the target country(embedded d...Purpose:Diaspora researchers work in one country but have ancestral origins in another,either through moves during a research career(mobile diaspora researchers)or by starting research in the target country(embedded diaspora researchers).Whilst mobile researchers might be tracked through affiliation changes in bibliometric databases,embedded researchers cannot.This article reports an evidence-based discussion of which countries’diaspora researchers can be partially tracked using first or last names,addressing this limitation.Design/methodology/approach:A frequency analysis of first and last names of authors of all Scopus journal articles 2001-2021 for 200 countries or regions.Findings:There are great variations in the extent to which first or last names are uniquely national,from Monserrat(no unique first names)to Thailand(81%unique last names).Nevertheless,most countries have a subset of first or last names that are relatively unique.For the 50 countries with the most researchers,authors with relatively national names are always more likely to research their name-associated country,suggesting a continued national association.Lists of researchers’first and last name frequencies and proportions are provided for 200 countries/regions.Research limitations:Only one period is tracked(2001-2021)and no attempt was made to validate the ancestral origins of any researcher.Practical implications:Simple name heuristics can be used to identify the international spread of a sample of most countries’diaspora researchers,but some manual checks of individual names are needed to weed out false matches.This can supplement mobile researcher data from bibliometric databases.Originality/value:This is the first attempt to list name associations for the authors of all countries and large regions,and to identify the countries for which diaspora researchers could be tracked by name.展开更多
Collaborative research causes problems for research assessments because of the difficulty in fairly crediting its authors.Whilst splitting the rewards for an article amongst its authors has the greatest surface-level ...Collaborative research causes problems for research assessments because of the difficulty in fairly crediting its authors.Whilst splitting the rewards for an article amongst its authors has the greatest surface-level fairness,many important evaluations assign full credit to each author,irrespective of team size.The underlying rationales for this are labour reduction and the need to incentivise collaborative work because it is necessary to solve many important societal problems.This article assesses whether full counting changes results compared to fractional counting in the case of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework(REF)2021.For this assessment,fractional counting reduces the number of journal articles to as little as 10%of the full counting value,depending on the Unit of Assessment(UoA).Despite this large difference,allocating an overall grade point average(GPA)based on full counting or fractional counting gives results with a median Pearson correlation within UoAs of 0.98.The largest changes are for Archaeology(r=0.84)and Physics(r=0.88).There is a weak tendency for higher scoring institutions to lose from fractional counting,with the loss being statistically significant in 5 of the 34 UoAs.Thus,whilst the apparent over-weighting of contributions to collaboratively authored outputs does not seem too problematic from a fairness perspective overall,it may be worth examining in the few UoAs in which it makes the most difference.展开更多
文摘Purpose:Diaspora researchers work in one country but have ancestral origins in another,either through moves during a research career(mobile diaspora researchers)or by starting research in the target country(embedded diaspora researchers).Whilst mobile researchers might be tracked through affiliation changes in bibliometric databases,embedded researchers cannot.This article reports an evidence-based discussion of which countries’diaspora researchers can be partially tracked using first or last names,addressing this limitation.Design/methodology/approach:A frequency analysis of first and last names of authors of all Scopus journal articles 2001-2021 for 200 countries or regions.Findings:There are great variations in the extent to which first or last names are uniquely national,from Monserrat(no unique first names)to Thailand(81%unique last names).Nevertheless,most countries have a subset of first or last names that are relatively unique.For the 50 countries with the most researchers,authors with relatively national names are always more likely to research their name-associated country,suggesting a continued national association.Lists of researchers’first and last name frequencies and proportions are provided for 200 countries/regions.Research limitations:Only one period is tracked(2001-2021)and no attempt was made to validate the ancestral origins of any researcher.Practical implications:Simple name heuristics can be used to identify the international spread of a sample of most countries’diaspora researchers,but some manual checks of individual names are needed to weed out false matches.This can supplement mobile researcher data from bibliometric databases.Originality/value:This is the first attempt to list name associations for the authors of all countries and large regions,and to identify the countries for which diaspora researchers could be tracked by name.
基金This study was funded by Research England,Scottish Funding Council,Higher Education Funding Council for Wales,and Department for the Economy,Northern Ireland as part of the Future Research Assessment Programme(https://www.jisc.ac.uk/future-research-assessment-programme).
文摘Collaborative research causes problems for research assessments because of the difficulty in fairly crediting its authors.Whilst splitting the rewards for an article amongst its authors has the greatest surface-level fairness,many important evaluations assign full credit to each author,irrespective of team size.The underlying rationales for this are labour reduction and the need to incentivise collaborative work because it is necessary to solve many important societal problems.This article assesses whether full counting changes results compared to fractional counting in the case of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework(REF)2021.For this assessment,fractional counting reduces the number of journal articles to as little as 10%of the full counting value,depending on the Unit of Assessment(UoA).Despite this large difference,allocating an overall grade point average(GPA)based on full counting or fractional counting gives results with a median Pearson correlation within UoAs of 0.98.The largest changes are for Archaeology(r=0.84)and Physics(r=0.88).There is a weak tendency for higher scoring institutions to lose from fractional counting,with the loss being statistically significant in 5 of the 34 UoAs.Thus,whilst the apparent over-weighting of contributions to collaboratively authored outputs does not seem too problematic from a fairness perspective overall,it may be worth examining in the few UoAs in which it makes the most difference.
