Volumen 7 (2022): Edición 4 (November 2022)

We aim to extend our investigations related to the Relative Intensity of Collaboration (RIC) indicator, by constructing a confidence interval for the obtained values.

We use Mantel-Haenszel statistics as applied recently by Smolinsky, Klingenberg, and Marx.

We obtain confidence intervals for the RIC indicator

It is not obvious that data obtained from the Web of Science (or any other database) can be considered a random sample.

We explain how to calculate confidence intervals. Bibliometric indicators are more often than not presented as precise values instead of an approximation depending on the database and the time of measurement. Our approach presents a suggestion to solve this problem.

Our approach combines the statistics of binary categorical data and bibliometric studies of collaboration.

The 5th Plenary Session of the 19th Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee clearly states that developing science and technology through self-reliance and self-strengthening provides the strategic underpinning for China's development. Based on this background, this paper explores a metric model for assessing national scientific research strength through collaboration on research papers.

We propose a novel metric model for assessing national scientific research strength, which sets two indicators, national scientific self-reliance (SR) and national academic contribution (CT), to reflect “self-reliance” and “self-strengthening” respectively. Taking the research papers in quantum technology as an example, this study analyzes the scientific research strength of various countries around the world, especially China in quantum technology.

The results show that the research of quantum technology in China has always been relatively independent with fewer international collaboration papers and located in a more marginal position in cooperation networks. China's academic contribution (CT) to global quantum technology research is increasing and has been greater than that of the United States in 2020. Combining the two indicators, CT and SR, China's research strength in the quantum field closely follows the United States, and the United States is the most powerful with high research autonomy.

This paper only reflects China's scientific research strength in quantum technology from collaboration on research papers and doesn’t consider the segmentation of quantum technology and the industrial upstream and downstream aspects, which need further study.

The model is helpful to better understand the national scientific research strength in a certain field from “self-reliance” and “self-strengthening”.

We propose a novel metric model to measure the national scientific research strength from the perspective of “self-reliance” and “self-strengthening”, which provides a solid basis for the assessment of the strength level of scientific research in countries/regions and institutions.

The aim of our paper is to investigate the role of a mentor leading a research team in the overall scientific performance of an academic institution and the possible risks of their departure with a special attention to their publication output.

By using SciVal subject area data, we composed a formula describing the level of vulnerability of any given university in the case of losing any of its leading mentors, identifying other risk factors by dividing their careers into separate stages.

It turns out that the higher field-weighed citation impact is, the better position universities reach in the rankings by subject and the vulnerability of institutions highly depends on the mentors, especially in view of their contribution to the topic clusters.

The analysis covers the publication output of leading researchers working at four Hungarian universities, the scope of the analysis is worth being extended.

Our analysis has the potential to give an applicable systemic approach as well as a data collection scheme to university managements so as to formulate an inclusive and comprehensive research strategy involving the introduction of a reward system aimed at publications and further encouraging national and international research cooperation.

The methodology and the principles of risk assessment laid down in our paper are not restricted to measuring the vulnerability level of a limited group of academic institutions, they can be appropriately used for investigating the role of mentors or leading researchers at every university across the globe.