Global science and national comparisons: beyond bibliometrics and scientometrics

Abstract

In the last three decades, a networked global system has emerged in the natural-science-based disciplines, sustained by collegial epistemic relations in universities. Nationally ordered and funded science has expanded alongside the global science system. The common global pool of papers, defined by bibliometric collections, nevertheless excludes large components of knowledge. In the global system, four tendencies are apparent:(1) rapid growth of papers, (2) diversification of scientific capacity to many more countries, (3) expansion of networked international and national collaboration as measured by co-authorship, (4) growing multi-polarity of capacity, outputs and quality, with the rise of China and several middle-sized national systems outside the Euro-American bloc. The paper critiques the interpretation of global science dominant in scientometrics, in which positivist data analyses are applied to performative national comparisons. It argues for a historical-synthetic explanation of the global system that combines data and theorisation, and accounts for relations of power.

An evolving international research collaboration network: spatial and thematic developments in co-authored higher education research, 1998–2018

“…Along with the expansion of education systems, higher education research has grown, with its evolution relying increasingly on regional and worldwide theoretical paradigms; on investments and funding schemes, such as the European Union's Framework Programs (Marques, 2018); and on methodological advances. Distinct spatial and social patterns across countries and colonial legacies may endure, as Europe and North America continue to lead in producing natural and social science research, with a more recent shift to East Asia (Marginson, 2021;Mosbah-Natanson & Gingras, 2013). Indeed, East Asian higher education systems' rapid, yet diverse, development demands conceptual frameworks adequate to understand varying values and system characteristics (Horta & Jung, 2014;Horta et al, 2015).…”

“…The exponential rise in international co-authorships has been studied within single countries and world regions (e.g., Heilbron & Gingras, 2018;Kwiek, 2020a;Melin & Persson, 1996), in and across disciplines (e.g., Akbaritabar et al, 2020;Beaudry & Allaoui, 2012;Hou et al, 2008), and research fields longitudinally and worldwide (Marginson, 2021;Powell et al, 2017), also in the social sciences (Leydesdorff et al, 2014). Such studies confirm the pure exponential rise in co-authorships across all world regions, although with important spatial and temporal variations (see Powell et al, 2017;Baker and Powell, forthcoming).…”

“…Growth in co-authored scientific publications worldwide across the sciences has been exponential, yet more slowly in the social sciences (Mosbah-Natanson & Gingras, 2013;Powell et al, 2017). If co-authorships across national and cultural boundaries are also increasingly prominent in higher education (HE), this multidisciplinary field, increasingly theoretically and methodologically sophisticated, has only become collaborative over the past two decades-with important, persistent regional and country differences (e.g., Akbaritabar & Barbato, 2021;Avdeev, 2021;Kwiek, 2020a;Marginson, 2021). Global networks increasingly connect higher education's many organizational forms and researchers, especially those working internationally and comparatively (Kosmützky & Krücken, 2014).…”

The link between countries’ economic and scientific wealth has a complex dependence on technological activity and research policy

“…Further research is needed to achieve a numerical correction of the P top 10% /P ratio in countries with high technological activity and a culture of publishing incremental innovations in scientific journals. Applying such a correction would increase the accuracy of scientometrics and may address its criticisms (Marginson, 2021).…”

On Politics in Comparative and International Higher Education

“…Moulded by corporate templates, academic activism that is measured by indicators in local problem-solving may end up in efforts that ultimately neither resolve problems, nor satisfy local stakeholders (Rhodes, Wright and Pullen 2018;Taylor and Lahad 2018). Good scholarship does not automatically convert ideas into positive societal outcomes, nor does it lend itself to clear tracking of impacts (Chan, Johns and Moses 2018;Marginson 2021). However, by taking responsibility for social projects that they cannot control, or inflating promises of high returns on their social investments for the sake of quick wins in their performance evaluation, the so-called "useful" academics only legitimize corporate control over scholarship, rather than enhance opportunities for critical thinking and innovative research and teaching, which universities should be prioritizing in their institutional missions (Oleksiyenko 2019).…”