We studied gender differences among Polish top performers (the upper 10% of scientists in terms of research productivity) in international research collaborations in 15 STEMM disciplines and over time. We examined five 6-year periods from 1992 to 2021. We operationalized international research collaboration by using international publication co-authorships in Scopus and used a sample of 152,043 unique Polish authors and their 587,558 articles published in 1992-2021. Our data show that a gender gap in international collaboration by top performers (and among the whole population of scientists) steadily widened: the gap was smallest in the early 1990s and grew over the next 30 years. Among top performers, internationalization intensity in four of the disciplines (AGRI, BIO, ENVI, and MED) was higher for men than for women. To capture the multidimensional nature of international research collaboration, we estimated a fractional logistic regression model with fixed effects that confirmed a persisting moderate but statistically significant international collaboration gender gap among top performers. We found an approximately 11% higher probability of international collaboration by men to
In recent years, Asia's rapid growth in research output has been reshaping the computing research landscape. What was once a two-block system (America and Europe) is evolving into a multipolar world with three major hubs: America, Europe, and Asia. To study these pivotal changes and evaluate international diversity, we have analyzed the past 13 years of 13 international systems research conferences: ASPLOS, NSDI, OSDI, SIGCOMM, ATC, EuroSys, ICDCS, Middleware, SoCC, CCGRID, IC2E, IEEE Cloud and EuroPar. Our analysis focuses on accepted papers and participation in the Program Committee, grouping the results by region (America, Europe, and Asia). Surprisingly, we find a pronounced historical imbalance in international diversity among top-tier systems conferences (ASPLOS, OSDI, NSDI, SIGCOMM). While most other conferences have progressively reflected Asia's growing research presence over the past decades, this group has shown a noticeable adjustment only in the recent four years. We also identify persistent rigidities in how program committee (PC) diversity adapts to shifts in accepted paper origins, with a consistent under-representation of researchers from Asian organizations in man
Scientific collaboration at international level has increased manifolds during last two decades. Collaboration is not only associated with higher research productivity but has also been found to be positively correlated with impact. Considering the benefits and advantages of international collaboration for the national science and technology systems of a country, policymakers in different countries have designed programs to promote international collaboration in science. This paper attempts to measure and characterize the international collaboration patterns in Indian scientific research. Research publication data for the last 20 years (2001-2020), obtained from Web of Science, is analysed for the purpose. Analytical results show that India's international collaboration has grown at a rate of 12.27% during this period, rising from only 20.73% internationally collaborated papers in 2001 to 32.35% internationally collaborated papers in 2020. USA, Germany, England, South Korea and China are found to be the top collaborating partners for India during his period, however, some subject area-wise variations are also seen. Among the internationally collaborated papers, about 50% papers hav
The premature development of artificial superintelligence poses major risks to humanity, so researchers have proposed international agreements halting such development until it can be done safely. AI progress depends primarily on compute, algorithms, and data; a durable halt would address all three so that advances in one input do not counteract restrictions on another. Improvements to AI algorithms are driven largely through research activities, so this research may need to be restricted during a halt. Given low international trust, signatories will want to verify compliance. This paper analyzes how such restrictions on AI research could be verified, while remaining agnostic about what specific research would be prohibited. It first explores key considerations that affect the verifiability of research restrictions, such as the computational infrastructure necessary for experiments. It then catalogs 28 candidate verification mechanisms. These mechanisms include whistleblowers, search warrants, reviews of AI training code, standard intelligence gathering tools, and more. Some of these mechanisms are not yet implementation-ready, and some might be undesirable upon further inspection.
This paper presents a scientometric analysis of research output from the University of Lagos, focusing on the two decades spanning 2004 to 2023. Using bibliometric data retrieved from the Web of Science, we examine trends in publication volume, collaboration patterns, citation impact, and the most prolific authors, departments, and research domains at the university. The study reveals a consistent increase in research productivity, with the highest publication output recorded in 2023. Health Sciences, Engineering, and Social Sciences are identified as dominant fields, reflecting the university's interdisciplinary research strengths. Collaborative efforts, both locally and internationally, show a positive correlation with higher citation impact, with the United States and the United Kingdom being the leading international collaborators. Notably, open-access publications account for a significant portion of the university's research output, enhancing visibility and citation rates. The findings offer valuable insights into the university's research performance over the past two decades, providing a foundation for strategic planning and policy formulation to foster research excellence
Software is at the core of most scientific discoveries today. Therefore, the quality of research results highly depends on the quality of the research software. Rigorous testing, as we know it from software engineering in the industry, could ensure the quality of the research software but it also requires a substantial effort that is often not rewarded in academia. Therefore, this research explores the effects of research software testing integrated into teaching on research software. In an in-vivo experiment, we integrated the engineering of a test suite for a large-scale network simulation as group projects into a course on software testing at the Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden, and qualitatively measured the effects of this integration on the research software. We found that the research software benefited from the integration through substantially improved documentation and fewer hardware and software dependencies. However, this integration was effortful and although the student teams developed elegant and thoughtful test suites, no code by students went directly into the research software since we were not able to make the integration back into the research software
Research articles produced through international collaboration are more highly cited than other work, but are they also more novel? Using measures developed by Uzzi et al. (2013), and replicated by Boyack and Klavans (2014), this article tests for novelty and conventionality in international research collaboration. Scholars have found that coauthored articles are more novel and have suggested that diverse groups have a greater chance of producing creative work. As such, we expected to find that international collaboration tends to produce more novel research. Using data from Web of Science and Scopus in 2005, we failed to show that international collaboration tends to produce more novel articles. In fact, international collaboration appears to produce less novel and more conventional knowledge combinations. Transaction costs and communication barriers to international collaboration may suppress novelty. Higher citations to international work may be explained by an audience effect, where more authors from more countries results in greater access to a larger citing community. The findings are consistent with explanations of growth in international collaboration that posit a social dy
Scientists' topic choices strongly influence both individual careers and the advancement of the scientific frontier. While a sizeable body of literature shows that specialisation in a few topics benefits individual careers and fosters impactful research, the role of research teams and their experience have been largely overlooked. This paper introduces experience as a concept distinct from specialisation and shifts the level of analysis from the individual to the research team, reflecting the increasingly team-based nature of science. Using novel publication-level measures of team specialisation and team experience applied to nearly 1 million biomedical publications, the study finds that both are positively associated with citation impact. However, the correlation with citation impact is markedly stronger for team experience than for team specialisation. The study demonstrates how science can be examined at the team level and suggests that future research should pay more attention to studying experience.
Modern research heavily relies on software. A significant challenge researchers face is understanding the complex software used in specific research fields. We target two scenarios in this context, namely long onboarding times for newcomers and conference reviewers evaluating replication packages. We hypothesize that both scenarios can be significantly improved when there is a clear link between the paper's ideas and the code that implements them. As a time- and staff-saving approach, we propose an LLM-based automation tool that takes in a paper and the software implementing the paper, and generates a trace mapping between research ideas and their locations in code. Initial experiments have shown that the tool can generate quite useful mappings.
Germany has become a major country of immigration, as well as a research powerhouse in Europe. As Germany spends a higher fraction of its GDP on research and development than most countries with advanced economies, there is an expectation that Germany should be able to attract and retain international scholars who have high citation performance. Using an exhaustive set of over eight million Scopus publications, we analyze the trends in international migration to and from Germany among published researchers over the past 24 years. We assess changes in institutional affiliations for over one million researchers who have published with a German affiliation address at some point during the 1996-2020 period. We show that while Germany has been highly integrated into the global movement of researchers, with particularly strong ties to the US, the UK, and Switzerland, the country has been sending more published researchers abroad than it has attracted. While the balance has been largely negative over time, analyses disaggregated by gender, citation performance, and field of research show that compositional differences in migrant flows may help to alleviate persistent gender inequalities i
This scientometric study analyzes Avian Influenza research from 2014 to 2023 using bibliographic data from the Web of Science database. We examined publication trends, sources, authorship, collaborative networks, document types, and geographical distribution to gain insights into the global research landscape. Results reveal a steady increase in publications, with high contributions from Chinese and American institutions. Journals such as PLoS One and the Journal of Virology published the highest number of studies, indicating their influence in this field. The most prolific institutions include the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Hong Kong, while the College of Veterinary Medicine at South China Agricultural University emerged as the most productive department. China and the USA lead in publication volume, though developed nations like the United Kingdom and Germany exhibit a higher rate of international collaboration. "Articles" are the most common document type, constituting 84.6% of the total, while "Reviews" account for 7.6%. This study provides a comprehensive view of global trends in Avian Influenza research, emphasizing the need for collaborative efforts ac
Demographic data collection is essential in education research, as demographic data allows researchers to better describe the participant population they study and to contextualize findings. However, current research practices for neurodiversity demographics often rely on prescriptive methods (e.g., requiring participants to report official diagnoses) rather than allowing participants to self-identify. This approach can: a) not allow participants to express their intersecting identities in ways that are authentic; and b) limit trustworthiness and reliability of the data and interpretation. In addition, inconsistent dissemination and representation of demographic data across studies hinder the accessibility and usability of this work. Through a literature review of neurodivergent student experiences with learning and performing STEM, we identified widespread discrepancies in how demographic information is collected and reported. This paper explores how neurodivergent identities can be more accurately and inclusively represented in education research. We present findings of a thematic analysis on the ways neurodivergent demographic data collection is done in the literature using data
Design Research Methodology (DRM) supports systematic design research through representations such as Reference Models and Impact Models. However, the practical construction and maintenance of these models often remains manual, requiring repeated redrawing, layout adjustment, and separate handling of assumptions, references, and supporting evidence. This can make DRM modelling time-consuming, visually cluttered, and difficult to revise as models increase in complexity. This paper presents DREAMS, an early-stage prototype modelling environment developed to support the creation and maintenance of DRM Reference Models and Impact Models. The tool enables users to construct typed causal models using DRM-relevant elements, define signed causal relationships, and attach assumptions, experiential inputs, and references directly to causal links. It also provides layout support and search functions to improve readability, modifiability, and retrieval of supporting information. A preliminary comparative evaluation with four DRM users was conducted against manual modelling practice. The results indicate reductions in model creation time, revision time, repositioning effort, edge crossings, and
Webology is an international peer-reviewed journal in English devoted to the field of the World Wide Web and serves as a forum for discussion and experimentation. It serves as a forum for new research in information dissemination and communication processes in general, and in the context of the World Wide Web in particular. This paper presents a Scientometric analysis of the Webology Journal. The paper analyses the pattern of growth of the research output published in the journal, pattern of authorship, author productivity, and subjects covered to the papers over the period (2013-2017). It is found that 62 papers were published during the period of study (2013-2017). The maximum numbers of articles were collaborative in nature. The subject concentration of the journal noted was Social Networking/Web 2.0/Library 2.0 and Scientometrics or Bibliometrics. Iranian researchers contributed the maximum number of articles (37.10%). The study applied standard formula and statistical tools to bring out the factual result.
We introduce Biomed-Enriched, a biomedical text dataset constructed from PubMed via a two-stage annotation process. In the first stage, a large language model annotates 400K paragraphs from PubMed scientific articles, assigning scores for their type (review, study, clinical case, other), domain (clinical, biomedical, other), and educational quality. The educational quality score (rated 1 to 5) estimates how useful a paragraph is for college-level learning. These annotations are then used to fine-tune a small language model, which propagates the labels across the full PMC-OA corpus. The resulting metadata allows us to extract refined subsets, including 2M clinical case paragraphs with over 450K high-quality ones from articles with commercial-use licenses, and to construct several variants via quality filtering and domain upsampling. Clinical text is typically difficult to access due to privacy constraints, as hospital records cannot be publicly shared. Hence, our dataset provides an alternative large-scale, openly available collection of clinical cases from PubMed, making it a valuable resource for biomedical and clinical NLP. Preliminary continual-pretraining experiments with OLMo2
The sixth international conference AsiaHaptics 2024 took place at Sunway University, Malaysia on 28-30 October 2024. AsiaHaptics is an exhibition type of international conference dedicated to the haptics domain, engaging presentations accompanied by hands-on demonstrations. It presents the state-of-the-art of the diverse haptics (touch)-related research, including perception and illusion, development of haptics devices, and applications to a wide variety of fields such as education, medicine, telecommunication, navigation and entertainment. This proceedings volume is a valuable resource not only for active haptics researchers, but also for general readers wishing to understand the status quo in this interdisciplinary area of science and technology.
The project of the international Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR), co-located to the GSI facility in Darmstadt, has been officially started on November 7, 2007. The current plans of the facility and the planned research program will be described. An investment of about 1 billion euro will permit new physics programs in the areas of low and medium energy antiproton research, heavy ion physics complementary to LHC, as well as in nuclear structure and astrophysics. The facility will comprise about a dozen accelerators and storage rings, which will enable simultaneous operations of up to four different beams.
The production of knowledge has become increasingly a global endeavor. Yet, location related factors, such as local working environment and national policy designs, may continue to affect what kind of science is being pursued. Here we examine the geography of the production of creative science by country, through the lens of novelty and atypicality proposed in Uzzi et al. (2013). We quantify a country's representativeness in novel and atypical science, finding persistent differences in propensity to generate creative works, even among developed countries that are large producers in science. We further cluster countries based on how their tendency to publish novel science changes over time, identifying one group of emerging countries. Our analyses point out the recent emergence of China not only as a large producer in science but also as a leader that disproportionately produces more novel and atypical research. Discipline specific analysis indicates that China's over-production of atypical science is limited to a few disciplines, especially its most prolific ones like materials science and chemistry.
International research collaboration (IRC) measurement is important because countries can and want to benefit from international collaboration but performing the same measurement procedure on different data sets can lead to different results. This study aims to explore the effects of data set choice on IRC measurement.
This study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on information-seeking behaviors among international students, with a focus on the r/f1visa subreddit. Our study indicates a considerable rise in the number of users posting more than one question during the pandemic. Those asking recurring questions demonstrate more active involvement in communication, suggesting a continuous pursuit of knowledge. Furthermore, the thematic focus has shifted from questions about jobs before COVID-19 to concerns about finances, school preparations, and taxes during COVID-19. These findings carry implications for support policymaking, highlighting the importance of delivering timely and relevant information to meet the evolving needs of international students. To enhance international students' understanding and navigation of this dynamic environment, future research in this field is necessary.