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Nowadays, scientific challenges usually require approaches that cross traditional boundaries between academic disciplines, driving many researchers towards interdisciplinarity. Despite its obvious importance, there is a lack of studies on…
We review briefly the concepts underlying complex systems and probability distributions. The later are often taken as the first quantitative characteristics of complex systems, allowing one to detect the possible occurrence of regularities…
To account for strong aging characteristics of citation networks, we modify Google's PageRank algorithm by initially distributing random surfers exponentially with age, in favor of more recent publications. The output of this algorithm,…
We tested Rousseau's (in press) recent proposal to define percentile classes in the case of the Integrated Impact Indicator (I3) so that the largest number in a set always belongs to the highest (100th) percentile rank class. In the case a…
A few weeks ago, Thomson Reuters published a list of the highly cited researchers worldwide (highlycited.com). Since the data is freely available for downloading and includes the names of the researchers' institutions, we produced a ranking…
A mere hyperbolic law, like the Zipf's law power function, is often inadequate to describe rank-size relationships. An alternative theoretical distribution is proposed based on theoretical physics arguments starting from the Yule-Simon…
Governments sometimes need to analyse sets of research papers within a field in order to monitor progress, assess the effect of recent policy changes, or identify areas of excellence. They may compare the average citation impacts of the…
The contribution to pushing the boundaries of knowledge is a critical metric for evaluating the research performance of countries and institutions, which in many cases is not revealed by common bibliometric indicators. The Rk-index was…
Public managers lack feedback on the effectiveness of public investments, policies, and programs instituted to build and use research capacity. Numerous reports rank countries on global performance on innovation and competitiveness, but the…
It is generally recognized that economical systems, and more in general complex systems, are characterized by power law distributions. Sometime, these distributions show a changing of the slope in the tail so that, more appropriately, they…
Statistical studies of languages have focused on the rank-frequency distribution of words. Instead, we introduce here a measure of how word ranks change in time and call this distribution \emph{rank diversity}. We calculate this diversity…
The Library of Babel, described by Jorge Luis Borges, stores an enormous amount of information. The Library exists {\it ab aeterno}. Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia, becomes a modern analogue of such a Library. Information retrieval…
When a publication is cited it generates a benefit. Through the country affiliations of the citing authors, it is possible to work upwards, tracing the countries that benefit from results produced in a national research system. In this work…
Scientific journals are currently the primary medium used by researchers to report their research findings. The transformation of print journals into e-journals has simplified the process of submissions to journals and also their access has…
Recently, a vast number of scientific publications have been produced in cities in emerging countries. It has long been observed that the publication output of Beijing has exceeded that of any other city in the world, including such leading…
Bayesian modelling and statistical text analysis rely on informed probability priors to encourage good solutions. This paper empirically analyses whether text in medical discharge reports follow Zipf's law, a commonly assumed statistical…
The purpose of this study is to compare the changing behavior of two counting methods (whole counting and whole-normalized counting) and inflation rate at country level research productivity and impact. For this, publication data on…
The work applies the funnel plot methodology to measure and visualize uncertainty in the research performance of Italian universities in the science disciplines. The performance assessment is carried out at both discipline and overall…
A standard measure of the influence of a research paper is the number of times it is cited. However, papers may be cited for many reasons, and citation count offers limited information about the extent to which a paper affected the content…
Multivariate linear regression models suggest a trade-off in allocations of national R&D investments. Government funding, and spending in the higher education sector, seem to encourage publications, whereas other components such as…