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This study was carried out within the framework of the evaluation of the third EEC ‘Non-Nuclear Energy’ program. The evaluation was conducted by the Center for the Sociology of Innovation at the request of the EEC. The results presented here owe much to advice from and collaboration withM. Callon, P. Laredo, D. Vinck, andP. Waldteufel.
P. Laredo et al.,L'Evaluation des Programmes Publics de R & D: le cas du Programme Communautaire Energie Non Nucléaire, Presses Universitaires de Namur, Belgique, 1989. Introduction.
P. Laredo,op. cit..
M. Callon, Les Réseaux Technico-Economiques: un Outil pour la Programmation et l'Evaluation des Transferts entre Recherche et Secteurs Socio-Economiques, Communication Journée AFME-Enterprises, Paris, 29. March 1988.
The few significant studies using contracts databases for evaluation purposes have been conducted in the United States by the teams of M.Carter (Rand Graduate Institute) and FrancisNarin. Carter and thenNarin used the databases of the National Institute of Health to evaluate its research policy. They also studied a group of 747 research projects and 51 research programs funded by the NIH during 1967. One of the interesting results of this work is that it brings out correspondences between bibliometric indicators for research productivity and non-bibliometric quantitative indicators, including financial information about the contracts. This allowed them, in particular, to calculate the number of publications produced per dollar invested, and thus in a certain sense to gauge the economic efficiency of research systems supported by the NIH. See:S. M. Carter,Peer Review, Citations, and Biomedical Research Policy: NIH Grants to Medical School Faculty, prepared for the Health Resources Administration and Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, R-1583-HEW (Washington DC, HEW, December 1974). See alsoF. Narin,Concordance between Subjective and Bibliometric Indicators of the Nature and Quality of Performed Biomedical Research; a Program Evaluation Report for the Office of Program, Planning and Evaluation, NIH (Washington DC: NIH), April 1983.
For want of time, we carried out this reorganization manually, using the principles of co-word analysis. We could have done it automatically, probably more rigorously, by using the Leximappe programs developed conjointly by the CNRS and the CSI. up until now these programs have in the main been used for databases of patents or publications. For a related subject, see the use of this method for the analysis of the activity of a research institute using the database of its research operations:J.P. Courtial, J.C. Remy, Towards the cognitive management of a research institute,Research Policy, 17 (1988) 225–233. For a presentation of its theoretic foundations, see:M. Callon, J.P. Courtial, W. Turner, G. Chartron,The Translation Model and its Exploitation through Coword Analysis using Graphs for negotiating Research Policies, Communication to Society for Social Studies of Science meeting, Troy (USA), October, 1985.
P. Laredo,op. cit., pp. 120–123.
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Mauguin, P. Using a contracts database for evaluating the dynamics of a technological program: The case of the European ‘non-nuclear energy’ program. Scientometrics 22, 207–228 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02019281
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02019281