Related papers: Critical mass and the dependency of research quali…

In recent years, evaluation of the quality of academic research has become an increasingly important and influential business. It determines, often to a large extent, the amount of research funding flowing into universities and similar…

Using the results of the UK's research assessment exercise, we show that the size or mass of research groups, rather than individual caliber or prestige of the institution, is the dominant factor which drives the quality of research teams.…

We consider groups of interacting nodes engaged in an activity as many-body, complex systems and analyse their cooperative behaviour from a mean-field point of view. We show that inter-nodal interactions rather than accumulated individual…

Using a recently developed model, inspired by mean field theory in statistical physics, and data from the UK's Research Assessment Exercise, we analyse the relationship between the quality of statistics and operational research groups and…

How can minorities of individuals overturn social conventions? The theory of critical mass states that when a committed minority reaches a critical size, a cascade of behavioural changes can occur, overturning apparently stable social…

Many different measures are used to assess academic research excellence and these are subject to ongoing discussion and debate within the scientometric, university-management and policy-making communities internationally. One topic of…

Citation metrics are becoming pervasive in the quantitative evaluation of scholars, journals and institutions. More then ever before, hiring, promotion, and funding decisions rely on a variety of impact metrics that cannot disentangle…

We study the evolution of cooperation under the assumption that the collective benefits of group membership can only be harvested if the fraction of cooperators within the group, i.e. their critical mass, exceeds a threshold value.…

Uncovering how inequality emerges from human interaction is imperative for just societies. Here we show that the way social groups interact in face-to-face situations can enable the emergence of disparities in the visibility of social…

Peer-evaluation based measures of group research quality such as the UK's Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), which do not employ bibliometric analyses, cannot directly avail of such methods to normalize research impact across disciplines.…

We discuss, at the macro-level of nations, the contribution of research funding and rate of international collaboration to research performance, with important implications for the science of science policy. In particular, we…

Like it or not, attempts to evaluate and monitor the quality of academic research have become increasingly prevalent worldwide. Performance reviews range from at the level of individuals, through research groups and departments, to entire…

Mentoring is a key component of scientific achievements, contributing to overall measures of career success for mentees and mentors. A common success metric in the scientific enterprise is acquiring a large research group, which is believed…

In this paper we propose a dynamical interpretation of the sociological distinction between large and small groups of interacting individuals. In the former case individual behaviors are largely dominated by the group effect, while in the…

We perform the analysis of scientific collaboration at the level of universities. The scope of this study is to answer two fundamental questions: (i) can one indicate a category (i.e., a scientific discipline) that has the greatest impact…

Bibliometric analysis has firmly conquered its place as an instrument for evaluation and international comparison of performance levels. Consequently, differences in coverage by standard bibliometric databases installed a dichotomy between…

The size-dependent nature of the so-called group or departmental h-index is reconsidered in this paper. While the influence of unit size on such collective measures was already demonstrated a decade ago, institutional ratings based on this…

In previous papers it was demonstrated that lower performance groups have a larger size-dependent cumulative advantage for receiving citations than top-performance groups. Furthermore, regardless of performance, larger groups have less…

A desirable goal of scientific management is to introduce, if it exists, a simple and reliable way to measure the scientific excellence of publicly-funded research institutions and universities to serve as a basis for their ranking and…

The birth and decline of disciplines are critical to science and society. However, no quantitative model to date allows us to validate competing theories of whether the emergence of scientific disciplines drives or follows the formation of…