Centre for Scientometrics and Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (SciSTIP)
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- ItemCentres and institutes as academic organisational units(AFRICAN SUN MeDIA, 2016) Botha, JanIntroduction: A complex network of factors arise when academic organisational units are established or existing units are changed. These factors include academic values, convictions about the academic standards of disciplines or professional programmes, ideals and sentiments for the future and particular approaches of disciplines and/or professions. Then it becomes significant how power is used in staff appointments and in the allocation of resources, as the custodian of academic reputation plus individual and institutional development processes. In many universities traditions and customs determine how such issues are considered, debated and decided or are transformed into institutional policies and rules.
- ItemInstitutional research in higher education in South Africa : Looking Ahead(SUN PRESS, 2016) Webber, Karen; Muller, Nicole; Botha, JanThe fact that the Southern African Association (SAAIR) is nearing its 25th year, is evidence that Institutional Research (IR) has built a strong presence in South African higher education. Unfortunately, this is not yet evident in other countries in the region. The professional practice that has become known as “institutional research” is, of course, much older than the Association that was established by IR practitioners. Similarly, IR encompasses much more in South and Southern Africa than the activities of the Association. IR continues to widen its areas of influence and support, and IR practitioners are called upon to assist in a myriad of decision-support tasks that will help to make higher education in South Africa and the region only stronger. IR practitioners are valued for their analytic and technical skills and their higher education practices and processes. They are also valued because of their ability to place the issues within the context of the specific institution, cognisant of unique student, staff, or historical and cultural issues that must be considered. As we reflect on the formation and current status of IR in South Africa as evidenced in this book, it is notable that the SAAIR was established in 1994, the year in which the first democratic elections in the country took place. South African society, including the higher education system, changed significantly in the first two decades of democracy. Despite these changes, the student protests in South Africa that erupted in 2015 and that continue in 2016, can be attributed to the students’ experience and their belief that much more remains to be done: huge inequalities remain in the system and in institutions, the demand for study opportunities outpaces the available opportunities, student fees have become unaffordable for most students, and at a deeper level, the curriculum and the ethos of higher education institutions still predominantly reflect Western values, traditions and practices. The transformation agenda that was inaugurated in 1994 remains unfinished. The story of IR in South Africa is closely intertwined with the transformation agenda, both in terms of the gains of the past twenty years, and also of the many changes that lie ahead.
- ItemInstitutional research in South African higher education: Framing the contexts and practices(SUN PRESS, 2016) Botha, Jan; Muller, Nicole; Webber, KarenUniversities are among the oldest social organisations in the world. Few would doubt that universities are crucially important social organisations. The public and private good of universities is generally recognised (and widely debated, cf. Singh 2001). The broad range of purposes ascribed to universities and society’s expectations of the value added by universities add up to form an intriguing phenomenon which is the object of research in a range of academic disciplines and professional practices.
- ItemLink‑based approach to study scientific software usage : the case of VOSviewer(Springer, 2021-07) Orduna‑Malea, Enrique; Costas, RodrigoScientific software is a fundamental player in modern science, participating in all stages of scientific knowledge production. Software occasionally supports the development of trivial tasks, while at other instances it determines procedures, methods, protocols, results, or conclusions related with the scientific work. The growing relevance of scientific software as a research product with value of its own has triggered the development of quantitative science studies of scientific software. The main objective of this study is to illustrate a link-based webometric approach to characterize the online mentions to scientific software across different analytical frameworks. To do this, the bibliometric software VOSviewer is used as a case study. Considering VOSviewer’s official website as a baseline, online mentions to this website were counted in three different analytical frameworks: academic literature via Google Scholar (988 mentioning publications), webpages via Majestic (1,330 mentioning websites), and tweets via Twitter (267 mentioning tweets). Google scholar mentions shows how VOSviewer is used as a research resource, whilst mentions in webpages and tweets show the interest on VOSviewer’s website from an informational and a conversational point of view. Results evidence that URL mentions can be used to gather all sorts of online impacts related to non-traditional research objects, like software, thus expanding the analytical scientometric toolset by incorporating a novel digital dimension.
- ItemLocalization, regionalization and globalization of university-business research co-operation in the United Kingdom(John Wiley & Sons, 2020-03-21) Tijssen, Robert; Van de Klippe, Wouter; Yegros, AlfredoThis empirical study analyzes university-business co-operation (UBC) from a distance-based perspective. Focusing on the UK's 48 largest research universities, we collected data from author affiliate addresses in 2008–2017 university-business research publications (UBRPs). The spatial proximity between university and its business partners listed in these co-authored research publications concerns three main distance zones: “local” (0–99 km); “regional” (100–499 km); “global” (500 km or more). The annual UBRP trends reveal a tendency towards UBC globalization. Several universities show signs of UBC glocalization, where the numbers of their global UBRPs have increased more rapidly than local UBRPs. Four common factors largely determine the UBRP quantities, irrespective of the zone: business sector R&D-intensity in the university's local geographical area; university's research size; university's high-end international citation impact; presence of university researchers with work experience in the business sector.
- ItemThe Synergy between the SAAIR Conference Events and South African Higher Education Policy Initiatives during 1994-2015(SUN PRESS, 2016) Botha, JanIntroduction: The focus areas of Institutional Research (IR) practitioners in South Africa and an analysis of the synergy between these focus areas and the major higher education policy developments during the first two decades of the democratic dispensation in South Africa are the concerns of this chapter. To what extent did these policy developments determine the priorities of IR practitioners, or, to what extent did the results of the work of IR practitioners provide the evidence on which these policies were based? Or, is this a complex, dynamic relationship and that plays out in both directions at different times and in different contexts? Despite various voices arguing for multiple new roles for IR, for example, Swing (2009), and Calderon and Webber (2015), Saupe’s (1981) and Dressel’s (1981) classic definition that IR is conducted to support institutional management, and by implication, to provide evidence on which (policy) decisions can be based, remains a valid expression of what institutional leaders and policy makers expect from IR. On the other hand, the extent to which higher education policy makers actually base their decisions on the information provided by IR practitioners, is not easy to demonstrate definitively with empirical evidence. Therefore no assertions will be made in this chapter regarding any possible causal link between higher education policy developments and the work of IR practitioners, and consequently the softer term “synergy” was chosen to characterise the aim of the study.