Abstract
Three characteristics of scientific research (subject matter, researchers' institutional sectors, and funding sources) were compared using bibliographic and survey data from a study of restorative dental materials research. Both types of data yielded similar findings on the distribution of research across subject areas and the distribution of researchers in government, university and industry sectors. Findings on the sources of research funding, however, were dissimilar and university research support appeared underreported in the bibliographic data. In general, data on publications (from bibliographic files or surveys) yielded lower estimates of industrial participation in research than data pertaining to projects.
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Case studies and patent analyses were also used in the original study. However, these methods covered different stages of the R&D process and were less directly comparable to the two methods discussed here.
A decision was made to exclude individuals with brief or minor participation in the field. These individuals would be difficult to locate and were expected to be less motivated to respond to a dental materials survey than active researchers in the field. Individuals who appeared only once as coauthors were dropped from the survey frame, while researchers who weresole author of an article or co-authors of more than one article were retained.
This definition of the study population did not prohibit the examination of collaboration involving industry researchers. It did require, however, that collaboration be studied from the perspective of the more completely enumerated government and academic researchers.
A separate survey of research sponsors achieved a response rate of 80 percent. The number of projects reported by sponsors and the combined budgets of these activities were very similar to the totals derived from the principal investigators portion of the research performers survey (seeApplied Management Sciences 1989 for details).
These were defined as projects with external funding or internal funds earmarked for research under the direct control of the investigator.
Analyses showed that over 98 percent of the articles cited in dental materials articles published in theJournal of Dental Research over a four year period were indexed by these three data files (seeApplied Management Sciences 1989: Appendix A).
Deleting rows with expected frequencies less than five and combining the two main outlying categories (casting alloys and general properties research), the null hypothesis could not be rejected in the one-sample goodness of fit test. With eight degrees of freedom, the chi-square value of 8.60 has a probability value greater than 0.30.
Free standing research institutes and other not-for-profit foundations were classified with universities and other academic institutions.
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Garrison, H.H., Herman, S.S. & Lipton, J.A. Measuring characteristics of scientific research: A comparison of bibliographic and survey data. Scientometrics 24, 359–370 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02017915
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02017915