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Academic research groups are treated as complex systems and their cooperative behaviour is analysed from a mathematical and statistical viewpoint. Contrary to the naive expectation that the quality of a research group is simply given by the…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
In this paper we distinguish between top-performance and lower performance groups in the analysis of statistical properties of bibliometric characteristics of two large sets of research groups. We find intriguing differences between…
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…
The gradual crowding out of singleton and small team science by large team endeavors is challenging key features of research culture. It is therefore important for the future of scientific practice to reflect upon the individual scientist's…
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…
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 recent years, the relationship of collaboration among scientists and the citation impact of papers have been frequently investigated. Most of the studies show that the two variables are closely related: an increasing collaboration…
The demand for global university league tables has been high over the past two decades. However, significant criticism of their methodologies is accumulating without being addressed. I revisit global university league tables by normalizing…
For the 100 largest European universities we studied the statistical properties of bibliometric indicators related to research performance, field citation density and journal impact. We find a size-dependent cumulative advantage for the…
Research funding systems are not isolated systems - they are embedded in a larger scientific system with an enormous influence on the system. This paper aims to analyze the allocation of competitive research funding from different…
Research funding and reputation in the UK have, for over two decades, been increasingly dependent on a regular peer-review of all UK departments. This is to move to a system more based on bibliometrics. Assessment exercises of this kind…
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…
Co-authored articles tend to be more cited in many academic fields, but is this because they tend to be higher quality or is it an audience effect: increased awareness through multiple author networks? We address this unknown with the…