Mapping knowledge flows in scientific research | |
| Author | Hassan, Saeed Ul |
| Call Number | AIT Diss. no.IM-12-02 |
| Subject(s) | Research--Management Mappings (Mathematics) Knowledge management |
| Note | A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Info1mation Management, School of Engineering and Technology |
| Publisher | Asian Institute of Technology |
| Abstract | The research collaboration facilitated by the Internet and the greatly increased global mobility of researchers have resulted in a new highly dynamic global marketplace for ideas. The possession of knowledge, the value of which depreciates at an increasingly rapid rate, is no longer as valuable as the ability to participate in the knowledge flows associated with these marketplaces. As observed by John Hagel et al. (2009) in the context of business competitiveness, "Knowledge flows - which occur in any social, fluid environment where learning and collaboration can take place - are quickly becoming one of the most crucial sources of value creation". Thus understanding a research landscape increasingly requires understanding the dynamics of the relevant knowledge flows. Measuring knowledge flows is important for a number of reasons, for instance, knowledge of a country utilized by other countries shows its international influence; research influence can help to produce a positive environment for marketing of a country's commercial technology and contributes to positive dependencies among countries. This dissertation presents analytical tools and techniques based on publication and citation data to quantify flows of scientific knowledge and international scholarly impact between countries, to map them, and to semantically analyze them in order to understand what and how knowledge is being used. We present a new quantitative indicator to measure international scholarly impact of countries. We then measure the spread of international scholarly impact over countries to investigate the distribution of scholarly impact of a given country over other countries. Furthe1more, we apply co1Telation analyses to demonstrate that the international scholarly impact is not necessarily bound to the corresponding publication output. We also develop analytical techniques to semantically analyze scientific knowledge flows to understand what knowledge is being used in what way. In order to geographically visualize knowledge flows among countries we introduce a web-based tool called Knowledge-MAPPER. We then present results of a case study to illustrate the use of our proposed measures in the subject area Energy over the period 1996- 2009. Finally, we present results from a set of evaluation studies designed to validate the claims made in this dissertation. We measure the international scholarly impact of individual scientists in the field of Computer Science, and then use it to rank the scientists who are the recipients of international award (i.e. ACM Turing Award) in the selected field. Results indicate that the winners of ACM Turning A ward show high rank in terms of their international scholarly impact among the scientists in the field. At the institute level, we compare the ranking of institutes based on their international scholarly impact measure in the selected fields with the Shanghai Jiao Tong's institute award ranking. The results show that the top ranked institutes in the Shanghai Jiao Tong award ranking also take top positions in terms of their international scholarly impact measure in the respective fields. The evaluation studies show that our work makes an imp01iant contribution in providing a methodology to use bibliometrics to measure international scholarly impact of scientific research. |
| Year | 2012 |
| Type | Dissertation |
| School | School of Engineering and Technology |
| Department | Department of Information and Communications Technologies (DICT) |
| Academic Program/FoS | Information Management (IM) |
| Chairperson(s) | Duboz, Raphael;Haddawy, Peter; |
| Examination Committee(s) | Tripathi, Nitin Kumar ;Bonaccorsi, Andrea ; |
| Scholarship Donor(s) | Higher Education Commission (HEC), Pakistan - AIT Fellowship ; |
| Degree | Thesis (Ph.D.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2012 |