Our friend Tania Vichnevskaia of the French National Institute for Health (INSERM) presented the paper ‘Applying onomastics to scientometrics‘ yesterday at IREG International symposium organised by University of Maribor and Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
NamSor as a private start-up company has been solicited in 2014 by a European country to help measure the ‘brain drain’ affecting its competitiveness in the BioTech sector and to produce a global map of its scientific Diaspora (who are they, where are they and what are they doing). The objective was to build up the country’s scientific international cooperation and to engage its Diaspora.
Serendipity led analysts to discover interesting patterns in the way scientists names affect co-authorship and citation – not just for this particular country, but globally.
Last year, during ICOS2014 conference at Glasgow University, we presented how data mining millions of scientific articles in PubMed/PMC LifeSciences database uncovered amazing patterns in the way scientists names correlate with whom they publish, and who they cite in their papers.
We were interested to mine the large commercial bibliographic databases (Thomson WoS, Scopus) because they offer better data quality on citations and useful additional information, compared to PubMed:
– firstly, they have the full name in addition to the short name cited with just initials; this significantly reduces the error rate of onomastic classification
– secondly, they link scientists to research institutions (affiliations) and geographies (country of affiliation) ; this allows additional analysis on the topic of Diasporas and brain drain, comparing -for example- the research output of Chinese / Chinese American scientists in the US with that of scientists of Mainland China;
– thirdly, those databases have a larger coverage in terms of scientific disciplines, allowing comparison between different fields of research.
So collaboration started between NamSor and bibliometric experts at INSERM –the French National Institute for Health- to evaluate and visualize the effects of migration, Diaspora engagement and possibly cultural biases in Science.
This is Tania’s presentation at the conference:
What does the ‘onomastic millefeuille‘ of the global Cancer Research community look like?
- ‘Is China really becoming a science and technology superpower?‘
- NamSor™ for Life Sciences commercial brochure
- Example of Pilot Project
- Credential : Institute of Biotechnology (Vilnius)
The agenda of the Symposium is presented below
2nd Maribor Academicus Event
Academic Excellence: BETWEEN HOLY GRAIL AND MEASURABLE OBJECTIVES
International symposium organised by University of Maribor and Shanghai Jiao Tong University
within the IREG Project on Academic Excellence
19-20 January 2015, Maribor, Slovenia
Higher education can importantly benefit from the rankings and league tables when used in a context with clear perspective of what ranking actually reflects (Prof. Jan Sadlak, President of IREG)
Active participants at the conference will be:
- Prof. Jan Sadlak, President of IREG,
- Prof. Gero Federkeil, CHE (Coordinator of Multi-Ranking),
- Prof. Nian Cai Liu, Jiao Tong University in Shanghai (Author of the Shanghai ranking list),
- Prof. Seeram Ramakrishna, National University of Singapore,
- Prof. Santo Fortunato, Aalto University,
- Prof. Karin Stana Kleinschek, University of Maribor,
- Prof. Henryk Ratajczak, member of Czech Academy of Sciences,
- Prof. Edvard Kobal, Slovenian Science Foundation,
- Roberta Sinatra, PhD, Northeastern University,
- Tania Vichnevskaia, French National Institute for health (INSERM),
- Prof. Andrée Sursock, Senior Adviser at EUA,
- Prof. Øivind Andersen, University of Oslo.
About NamSor
NamSor™ Applied Onomastics is a European vendor of Name Recognition Software (NamSor sorts names). NamSor mission is to help understand international flows of money, ideas and people.
NamSor launched FDIMagnet, a consulting offering to help Investment Promotion Agencies and High-Tech Clusters leverage a Diaspora to connect with business and scientific communities abroad.