A new model to identify the productivity of theses in terms of articles using co-word analysis

Abstract

A thesis defense should be considered as not the end but the starting point for scientific communication flow. How many articles truly extend doctoral research? This article proposes a new model to automatically identify the productivity of theses in terms of article publications. We evaluate the use of the co-word analysis technique to establish relationships among 401 doctoral theses and 2,211 articles journal articles published by students in a graduate program at a Brazilian National Nuclear Research Institution (IPEN-CNEN/SP).To identify the relationship between a thesis and an article published by the same author, we used co-descriptor pairs from a controlled vocabulary. To validate the proposed model, a survey was applied to a random sample of theses authors (n = 128, response rate of 79%), thus establishing a minimum threshold of three coincident co-descriptors to identify the relationship between theses and articles. The agreement level between an author's opinion and the automatic method was 86.9%, with a sampling error of 7.36%, which indicates an acceptable level of accuracy. Differences between the related or nonrelated distributions of articles were also demonstrated, as was a reduction in the median lag time to publication and the supervisor's influence on student productivity.

Analysis of an Advisor–Advisee Relationship: An Exploratory Study of the Area of Exact and Earth Sciences in Brazil

“…A recent study of the productivity of post-graduate students from the Institute of Energy and Nuclear Research post-graduate program, show that, in its more than 30 years of existence, the time period to publish papers related to that spent on a thesis has declined in the last 10 years [ 5 ] (this period is calculated as the mean of the difference between the years of publication of the papers and the year of the thesis defense) and in recent decades, there has been an increasing number of papers derived from each thesis.…”

“…The first large-scale analysis of Canadian doctoral student research effort is provided by [ 15 ] that uses automatic and manual validation to solve homonym’s problems. Another factor is the time of publication that is required to collect published papers: for example, 5 years before and after the thesis defense [ 5 ].…”

Virtual Laboratories- A historical review and bibliometric analysis of the past three decades

“…There are several approaches to studying the network structure of a research topic such as bibliographic coupling (Boyack & Klavans, 2010 ), co-words analysis (Igami et al, 2014 ), and co-authorship analysis (Huang et al, 2015 ).…”

Algorithmic identification of Ph.D. thesis-related publications: a proof-of-concept study

“…A study on the automated identification of publications resulting from doctoral work in Brazilian nuclear physics was conducted by Zamudio Igami et al (2014). They calculated the optimal number of common keywords from a controlled disciplinary vocabulary to link authors' articles based on the same research project as the Ph.D. theses with a validation by the original authors using a corpus of 401 theses and 2211 candidate journal articles of the same authors.…”