Abstract
In the last decade, research literature reached an enormous volume with an unprecedented current annual increase of 1.5 million new publications. As research gets ever more global and new countries and institutions, either from academia or corporate environment, start to contribute with their share, it is important to monitor this complex scenario and understand its dynamics.
We present a study on a conference proceedings dataset extracted from Springer Nature Scigraph that illustrates insightful geographical trends and highlights the unbalanced growth of competitive research institutions worldwide. Results emerged from our micro and macro analysis show that the distributions among countries of institutions and papers follow a power law, and thus very few countries keep producing most of the papers accepted by high-tier conferences. In addition, we found that the annual and overall turnover rate of the top 5, 10 and 25 countries is extremely low, suggesting a very static landscape in which new entries struggle to emerge. Finally, we highlight the presence of an increasing gap between the number of institutions initiating and overseeing research endeavours (i.e. first and last authors’ affiliations) and the total number of institutions participating in research. As a consequence of our analysis, the paper also discusses our experience in working with affiliations: an utterly simple matter at first glance, that is instead revealed to be a complex research and technical challenge yet far from being solved.
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Notes
- 1.
Springer Nature SciGraph, https://www.springernature.com/gp/researchers/scigraph.
- 2.
Scopus, https://www.scopus.com.
- 3.
Web of Science, https://clarivate.com/products/web-of-science.
- 4.
Microsoft Academic, https://academic.microsoft.com.
- 5.
Semantic Scholar, https://www.semanticscholar.org.
- 6.
Crossref, https://www.crossref.org.
- 7.
- 8.
SciGraph datasets, http://scigraph.springernature.com/explorer/downloads/.
- 9.
GRID, https://www.grid.ac.
- 10.
GRID dataset, https://www.grid.ac/downloads.
- 11.
GraphDB, http://graphdb.ontotext.com.
- 12.
- 13.
For the sake of clarity, if paper p is authored by authors \(a_1\) and \(a_2\), two distinct contributions (i.e. two distinct rows) are present in our dataset, one for each author.
- 14.
Jupiter notebook, https://ipython.org/notebook.html.
- 15.
Pandas library, https://pandas.pydata.org.
- 16.
Code and datasets, https://github.com/andremann/SAVE-SD-2018.
- 17.
- 18.
EasyChair conference management system, http://easychair.org.
- 19.
ConfTool conference & event management software, http://www.conftool.net.
- 20.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the SciGraph team, especially Dr. Michele Pasin, whose work and prompt response made this study possible.
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Mannocci, A., Osborne, F., Motta, E. (2018). Geographical Trends in Research: A Preliminary Analysis on Authors’ Affiliations. In: González-Beltrán, A., Osborne, F., Peroni, S., Vahdati, S. (eds) Semantics, Analytics, Visualization . SAVE-SD SAVE-SD 2017 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10959. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01379-0_5
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