Diamond Open Access (DOA) is a noncommercial model of scholarly publishing that removes financial barriers for authors and readers. While international studies have outlined the global uptake of DOA, this paper investigates the presence and characteristics of the DOA landscape in Italy. We conducted a quantitative analysis on the 168 Italian journals classified as Diamond by EZB, and we studied their publishing volume, disciplinary distribution and citation impact by integrating information from the following open resources: DOAJ, OpenAIRE, ROAD, SCImago Journal Rank, and the ANVUR classification used in the Italian Research Assessment Framework (VQR). Key findings include the significant growth of DOA journals, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, as well as the high level of international citations, indicating strong global relevance. The study also highlights challenges such as the need for better indexing and comprehensive data to fully capture the DOA landscape.
Science is a collaborative endeavor in which "who collaborates with whom" profoundly shapes academic success. However, the way in which scientists facilitate new collaborations among their peers-a well-studied process called brokerage-has received little attention in the context of academic careers. Here, we quantify brokerage in physics and examine its relationship with academic success in over 130,000 careers spanning a century. Early engagement in brokerage predicts more brokerage events in subsequent career stages, revealing its cumulative nature. More successful scientists engage in brokerage more frequently and at increasing rates across comparable career stages. These results hold when controlling for career entry decade and brokerage roles. While brokerage-success correlations apply to women and men, the cumulative advantage intensifies at senior levels where women remain underrepresented owing to later entry into physics and higher dropout rates. Thus, the cumulative nature of brokerage intertwines with gender disparities and the unequal distribution of success in physics.
In response to concerns that their research funding systems impose unwarranted epistemic restrictions on scientific research and discourage unconventional and risky projects, funders are exploring alternative funding instruments. This paper presents analyses of Spark, a pilot funding instrument of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) for unconventional and high-risk research that introduced a double-blind evaluation process without review panel discussions. We explore how these program terms may promote unconventional research by affecting who are applying, their motivations, and the assessments of proposed projects. Comparing Spark with a standard SNSF funding scheme we find that the two programs attracted very different groups of applicants. Anonymized proposals more often inspired nonestablished and younger researchers to apply, and those inspired to do unconventional and high-risk research were more often funded. Moreover, Spark was effective in avoiding bias against those not holding a professorship or affiliated with a university of applied sciences. Notably, double-blinding was not the sole difference between the two funding schemes, and part of the effects may result from other characteristics of Spark. We discuss implications for how to encourage unconventional research, and the dilemmas of incorporating risk into funding decisions.
In addition to publication and knowledge dissemination, the selection and peer review of scientific articles are among the central contributions of journals to scholarly communication. Feedback from researchers about inconsistencies in the review process and the resignation of entire editorial teams following a dispute about journal business models point to problems that often concern the interaction between academic editors and commercial publishers. In order to provide empirical evidence regarding expectations and perceptions towards the peer review process, this study reports the results of two experimental factorial surveys embedded in a two-country study across 25 German and Swiss research institutions. It uses answers submitted by more than 3,200 scholars across 15 scientific fields on the topic of review and decision practices to further the debate about the future of scholarly publishing, given existing role conflicts, extractive entrepreneurial strategies, and potential decrease in scientific quality.
Differences between the impacts of Open Access (OA) and non-OA research have been observed over a range of citation and altmetric indicators, usually finding an Open Access Advantage (OAA). However, science-wide analyses covering multiple years, indicators, and disciplines are lacking. Using citations and six altmetrics for 33.3 million articles published during 2011-2021, we compare OA and non-OA papers. The results show that there is no universal OAA across all disciplines or impact indicators: The OAA for citations tends to be lower for recent papers, whereas the OAAs for news, blogs, and Twitter are consistent across years and unrelated to volume of OA publications. Wikipedia OAAs are consistently pronounced for all subjects except Humanities and Social Sciences. Patent OAAs for are strongest for Medical & Health Sciences and Life Sciences. Uniquely, the OAAs for Policy citations are stronger for recently published research. These results support different hypotheses for different subjects and indicators. The evidence is consistent with OA accelerating research impact in Medical & Health Sciences, Life Sciences, and Humanities; increased visibility/discoverability being a factor in promoting the socioeconomic impact; and that OA is a factor in growing online engagement with research. OAAs are therefore complex, dynamic and multifactorial, and require considerable analysis to understand.
Public research funding agencies increasingly seek to steer health research toward higher levels of translation and societal relevance. Yet it remains unclear to what extent such policy shifts are effectively implemented and reflected in funded projects and scientific outputs. This study examines the evolution and changes in the orientation of health research portfolios since 2008 within European funding (Framework Programmes FP7, Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe funding for collaborative health research, FP-HR, and ERC Life Sciences grants), compared with NIH funding for collaborative research (P01, U01, and UM1). Using large-scale text analysis and supervised classification, we analyze both project descriptions and the associated scientific publications. At the project level, the EU FP-HR programs show pronounced shifts toward population-level, diagnostic, and health systems-oriented research, whereas investigator-driven ERC life sciences, and NIH P01 and U01, display greater stability with a predominance of basic biomedical research. Publication-level analyses reveal more moderate changes, with basic biomedical research remaining a central component, including in EU FP-HR, indicating partial translation of funding priorities into outputs. By jointly analyzing projects and publications, this study identifies and distinguishes between changes in funder expectations and realized research trajectories, highlighting how strategic funding shapes research portfolios within enduring epistemic and institutional constraints.
Abstract German academia has faced multiple changes over the last two decades, including new academic pathways to full professorship inspired by the Anglo-Saxon academic system, such as junior professorship and tenure track. Our study investigates the patterns of academic career trajectories to full professorship that have emerged subsequently. We illuminate the relationship between those “career types” and their determinants. Using data from the prof*panel (N = 660) and sequence-cluster analysis, we find four academic career clusters: a Traditional Career with a long postdoctoral phase inside German academia and habilitation (degree after doctorate); a shorter, and more Efficient Career with fewer habilitations; a group with more Unconventional Careers (the fastest tracks to full professorship); and International Careers, mostly spent outside Germany. Cluster affiliation is mainly related to time-to-tenure, habilitation, working abroad, and discipline. Our findings suggest that traditional career paths still play a major role, although the influence of internationalization and novel academic career steps, like junior professorship, is growing. Less conventional career paths attract a higher proportion of women and are characterized by more diverse professional experiences. Our findings underscore the ongoing changes in the landscape of academic careers, highlighting both persistent challenges and new opportunities for aspiring professors.
Abstract Researchers increasingly hold multiple organizational affiliations, yet the effects of such arrangements on organizational performance remain poorly understood. We develop a scalable network-based framework that represents simultaneous affiliations as relational links and apply it to harmonized bibliometric data from Austria. Two coaffiliation networks are constructed: a network capturing all simultaneous affiliations and a temporally filtered network retaining recurring affiliation pairs. Analyzing these networks in parallel allows us to distinguish transient from persistent coaffiliations and examine how short-lived and enduring ties shape organizational connectivity. Network regressions show that geographic proximity remains an important determinant, with greater distance reducing the likelihood of a coaffiliation link forming. Once transient affiliations are removed, most same-type organizational links lose statistical significance, indicating that many observed coaffiliations reflect temporary overlaps rather than durable structural ties. Persistent cross-type links are rare, with ties primarily observed between universities and research institutes. To evaluate the effects of coaffiliations on organizational citation impact, we use field- and year-normalized indicators. Sensitivity analyses show that citation impact depends on how affiliations of multiaffiliated authors are assigned, including whether the first or last listed affiliation is used. Research institutes and universities exhibit higher citation impact, and persistent coaffiliations are associated with greater visibility.
Abstract Currently, much medical research is wasted due to inappropriate study design or analysis. Qualified statisticians are essential for ensuring ideal study design and analysis, and the ethical review process is an ideal stage for their input. We estimated the percentage of Australian ethics committees with access to a qualified statistician. Sixty percent of committees reported access to a qualified statistician, either as a full committee member or as a nonmember who could be consulted when needed; however, when accounting for statistical qualifications this dropped to 35%. Many committees rely on “highly numerate” researchers in place of qualified statisticians, as they viewed research experience and advanced statistical training as equivalent. Many committees felt that improving study designs was not part of their remit. Some committee chairs viewed formal statistical input as essential; however, there was also a common belief that statistical review was only applicable to some study designs and that “simple” studies did not need review. There was a surprising variance in practice and attitudes towards the involvement of statisticians on research ethics committees. The high number of research studies that receive approval without statistical review risks approving studies that could cause harm due to flawed evidence.
Abstract Traditional “Mertonian” social norms are thought to safeguard fairness and impartiality in academic science. However, as university-based research increasingly responds to market demands and stakeholder accountability, these ideals may be blending with, or supplanted by, industrial norms of science, reflecting a shift toward a “post-academic” normative structure. Despite this potential transformation, empirical studies of contemporary scientists’ normative attitudes remain limited. We conducted an exploratory survey of 615 Canadian faculty and trainees to examine perceptions of academic and industrial norms, both as aspirational ideals and enacted behaviors. Specifically, we assessed: continued endorsement of Mertonian norms; perceived endorsement in practice; and the extent to which industrial norms have permeated academic culture. We also explored how personal (e.g., career stage), contextual (e.g., discipline), and experiential (e.g., industrial research engagement) factors predict norm adherence. Our findings reveal a clear tension: While respondents strongly affirmed traditional academic norms as ideals, their assessments of actual practices diverged considerably. Moreover, normative orientations varied in subtle but meaningful ways by research domain, gender, career stage, industry-based research experience, and for international students. Taken together, these findings offer insight into the pressures reshaping the normative landscape of academic science in a Canadian context.
Abstract Policy document citations are increasingly used to evidence the societal impact of research, yet we know little about how such indicators operate in small research systems. We conceptualize policy citation visibility as an infrastructurally mediated pathway that links Croatia's national CRIS (CroRIS), which provides PID- and CERIF-based provenance of outputs, with Overton, which records downstream policy mentions. We focus on research authored by scholars at Croatian public universities and research institutes and its visibility in Overton-indexed policy documents. Our analyses are based on a CroRIS-affiliated, Overton-retrievable, DOI-available subset of 6,022 publications and 16,330 policy citation events to these articles and therefore capture policy visibility under specific infrastructural conditions. We examine citation distributions by journal subject area, institutional affiliation, access type (open vs. closed), and the geographical and organizational origins of citing bodies. Fields with direct societal relevance, especially public health, environment, and sustainability, dominate among cited works. Open access is common among policy-cited Croatian articles, although a substantial share of frequently cited outputs remains closed. Most citations originate from European and international organizations, while Croatian government documents rarely cite domestic research and those that do are concentrated in a small number of ministries.
At the turn of the 21st century, China has achieved a spectacular surge in the scientific arena. However, its influence on the material core of chemistry, encoded in the chemical space of discovered substances, remains unexplored. Here we show, by analyzing the chemical space between 1996 and 2022, that its expansion has been dominated by China ever since 2013. Chinese dominance occurs at different levels, from organic to rare-earth chemistry, but is less dramatic in organometallic chemistry. We also found that Chinese dominance is mainly the product of the country's own efforts, rather than the result of international collaboration. China's surge mainly comes at the expense of the contribution of the United States. Interestingly, the US share of the chemical space is more dependent on international collaboration, which mainly occurs with China. We also observe the emergent role of India. We believe these results provide a contemporary account of the geopolitics of the chemical space, which may constitute the basis for future national and international science policies, as well as research and development agendas.
The generalizability of results from large-scale studies of science has often relied on the extent to which the studies can adequately control for differences across fields. However, disciplinary differences are not well understood. In this paper, we examine the extent to which disciplinary differences can be detected from inconsistencies in the use of a single word: serendipity. Drawing on Wittgenstein and an ordinary language analysis, we examine how and where authors use the term "serendipity" in astronomy, psychology, and psychopharmacology. Our results indicate normative differences not only in researchers' attitudes as to what constitutes "sound science" but also substantive differences in their empirical, theoretical, and methodological emphases. This contrasts with policy discussions that treat science largely as a singular entity, in which we might expect notions like serendipity to carry the same meaning across all fields. For science policy, our work suggests that the sciences are different, and the differences matter.
This paper examines the hiring and placement network of German professors in the fields of psychology and political science. It is well known that in the stratified university system of the United States, the capability of departments to place their PhD graduates as professors in academic departments is highly skewed. In contrast, the German university system is considered to be more egalitarian. Focusing on psychology and political science, this paper reveals that the placement network of German universities has a similar degree of inequality as that in the United States. We show that a few influential departments dominate their fields and that the majority of departments have little to no placement power. The paper also discusses whether department size and publication productivity are explanatory factors. The unequal success of departments in placing their PhD graduates as professors raises questions about intellectual diversity in the German university system.
Abstract The recent surge in bibliometric studies published has been accompanied by increasing diversity in the completeness of reporting these studies’ details, affecting reliability, reproducibility, and robustness. Our study systematizes the reporting of bibliometric research using open peer reviews. We examined 182 peer reviews of 85 bibliometric studies published in library and information science (LIS) journals and conference proceedings, and non-LIS journals. We extracted 968 reviewer comments and inductively classified them into 11 broad thematic categories and 68 sub-categories, determining that reviewers largely focus on the completeness and clarity of reporting data, methods, and results. We subsequently derived 49 recommendations for the details authors should report and compared them with the GLOBAL, PRIBA, and BIBLIO reporting guidelines to identify (dis)similarities in content. Our recommendations addressed 60–80% of the guidelines’ items, while the guidelines covered 45–65% of our recommendations. Our recommendations provided greater range and specificity, but did not incorporate the functions of guidelines beyond addressing academic content. We argue that peer reviews provide valuable information for the development of future guidelines. Further, our recommendations can be read as the implicit community standards for reporting bibliometric studies and could be used by authors to aid complete and accurate reporting of their manuscripts.
Intensifying competition between the United States and China is recalibrating the balance between collaboration and competition in academic science among the two largest economies and global science producers. We explore the trajectory of nanotechnology research collaboration between the United States and China and probe the impacts of US-China decoupling on research impact. We trace changes in the frequency of US-China research collaboration between 2012 and 2024 and investigate whether the impact of research sponsored by American and Chinese funding agencies has changed in parallel with evolving patterns of research collaboration in this period. We find a decline in US-China coauthorship, which accelerates in the late 2010s. Additionally, we observe a decrease in the impact of publications funded by US funding agencies-a trend not mirrored in outputs supported by Chinese funding bodies. This study contributes to the growing body of literature exploring the influence of geopolitical dynamics on scientific activity.
Abstract Promotional language, or ‘hype,’ characterized by words like novel, outstanding, and promising, has been increasingly observed in scientific writing. To systematically analyze how hype is employed and evolves in structured biomedical abstracts, we introduce a probabilistic model to estimate the propensity of hype in selected candidate words in biomedical abstracts. Our analysis examines the positional distribution of 43 candidate hype words across approximately 14.5 million PubMed abstracts within the IMRaD (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) framework of structured writing. The model accounts for context, filtering out technical concepts (e.g., major histocompatibility complex or ‘vital capacity‘) and non-hyping uses (e.g., outstanding questions). We find that the degree of hype varies depending on the word and its context: words such as promising and noteworthy frequently convey hype, whereas others like major and central typically remain neutral. Temporal trends suggest that the increased hype is not due to a shift in the words’ propensity to hype but rather authors’ strategic rhetorical choices, particularly in the ‘Introduction’ and ‘Discussion’ sections. This analytical approach enhances the identification and understanding of hype’s role, and we provide a labeled dataset annotated with abstract-level hype probabilities to facilitate further research into its impact on scientific communication. Peer Review https://www.webofscience.com/api/gateway/wos/peer-review/10.1162/QSS.a.482
Abstract The growth of scientific journals is constrained by a trade-off between selectivity and reputation. A strong reputation attracts submissions but enhancing reputation requires selectivity, meaning many submissions must be rejected. Conversely, lowering selectivity allows journals to publish more papers but also lowers the average quality of published work, undermining reputation and eventually attracting fewer submissions. Because of this trade-off, scientific journals display moderate growth rates. In recent years, however, some publishers whose revenues depend largely on gold open access (OA) article processing charges (APC) have displayed staggering growth rates. One strategy to circumvent the selectivity–reputation trade-off is to inflate self-citations contributing to the journal impact factor (JIF). We investigate the citation flows of 8,360 journals from the 20 largest for-profit publishers included in the Journal Citation Report by Clarivate, over a period of 25 years (1997–2021). Using a gravity model of journal citation flows, we find that Gold OA journals display high self-citation rates, particularly to articles contributing to the JIF. This pattern is much more pronounced among journals owned by two large Gold OA publishers. Moreover, the intensity of self-citations for these two publishers’ journals increased with growth rate, suggesting that self-citations contributed to counteracting a decline in citations resulting from rapid expansion.
Abstract In recent years, scientific communities across disciplines have called for addressing the inequalities that structure their respective fields. Their calls are supported by a growing body of studies concerned with geographical and gender-related inequalities in scientific publishing. However, a persistent disconnect remains between quantitative and qualitative analyses, preventing an understanding of how authorship patterns relate to researchers’ experiences of publishing. Moreover, there is a paucity of studies theorizing the results obtained for a more comprehensive understanding of macro–micro-linkages. We address this gap with a mixed-methods study on publishing in forest governance research that draws on and advances Bourdieusian theory by shifting the spotlight on epistemic choices and struggles in relation to researchers’ capital and field positions. Using a bricolage approach, we triangulate quantitative bibliometric and qualitative interview analysis in an integrative mixed-methods design. We empirically show how geographical and gender inequalities emerging at the publication level (authors and articles) relate to the epistemic choices and struggles experienced by African forest governance researchers. The study highlights the potential of applying a coherent theoretical frame in mixed-methods research on inequalities in scientific publishing across local and international spaces.
Abstract Data citation and reuse are complex practices. While much research has examined the effect of disciplinary norms on data citation and reuse, much less work has examined the impact of career stages. In this paper, we present the results of a survey (n = 2,492) to explicitly investigate data citation practices, preferences, and motivations for indicating data reuse, using a sample of corresponding authors by career stage. We present findings about these researchers’ current practices and motivations for reusing and citing data and also examine their preferences for how they would like their own data to be cited. We find that researchers of various career stages have similar views and behaviors towards data sharing and reuse, with some key differences including the following points: 1) most sharing and reuse patterns with differences increased or decreased consistently along with career progression; 2) early career researchers place more importance on metrics about data created by others while 3) middle career researchers place more importance on metrics for their own data. Additionally, we discuss the unique qualities within each career stage, and present a future outlook on how research on this topic can be carried forward. Peer Review https://www.webofscience.com/api/gateway/wos/peer-review/10.1162/QSS.a.483
