Lin Zhang

KU Leuven | ku leuven · Department of Managerial Economics, Strategy and Innovation (MSI)

As of the middle of April 2020, the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has claimed more than 137,000 lives 1. Because of its extremely fast spreading, the attention of the global scientific community is now focusing on slowing down, containing and finally stopping the spread of this disease. This requires the concerted action of researchers and practi...

This study uses mixed methods—classical citation analysis, altmetric analysis, a survey with researchers as respondents, and text analysis of the abstracts of scientific articles—to investigate gender differences in the aims and impacts of research. We find that male researchers more often value and engage in research mainly aimed at scientific pro...

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, gaining insights into how academia has responded to this urgent challenge is of great significance. This article presents academic response patterns at a global, regional and national level from an analysis of publication volume versus reported cases of COVID-19, scientific collaboration and research focus....

On 31st December 2020, The National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) released a list of 65 international scientific journals, all of them indexed by the Web of Science, that were said to be potentially in conflict with academic rigour. The list immediately influenced the publication patterns of Chinese researchers. A year la...

Open Access (OA) emerged as an important transition in scholarly publishing worldwide during the past two decades. So far, this transition is increasingly based on article processing charges (APC), which create a new paywall on the researchers’ side. Publishing is part of the research process and thereby necessary to perform research. This study an...

The impact of scientific research beyond academia is receiving increasing attention from both scientists and the broader community. However, the mechanisms driving this impact remain unclear. This study systematically reviews existing theoretical models and seeks empirical evidence from the REF impact case data. Through grounded coding analysis of...

We study the possible influences of the Russia-Ukraine War on Russia’s research productivity and international collaboration in science. For this purpose, we introduce and apply two recently developed indicators of relative intensity and balance in international collaboration. To see whether longitudinal trends have changed recently, we combine a l...

Traditionally, scientific evaluation leaning on quantity and citation metrics rarely places a study within a specific context or a particular historical process for examination, making it difficult to fully reveal its substantial contributions. In a specific scientific field, each study focuses on a certain topic and corresponds to a certain evolut...

It is generally acknowledged that researchers who cross the boundary of disciplines are more likely to produce novel outputs. The knowledge exchanges contributed by boundary crossing provide a good explanation for the underlying mechanism. However, previous studies provide limited empirical evidence on whether and how these contributions are made....

The advent of open science calls for open data platforms with high data quality. As a fully open catalog of the global research system launched in January 2022, OpenAlex features two main advantages of easy data accessibility and broad data coverage, which has been widely used in quantitative science studies. Remarkably, OpenAlex is adopted as an i...

We study the possible influences of the Russian conflict in the Ukraine on Russia's research productivity and international collaboration in science. For this purpose, we introduce and apply two recently developed indicators of relative intensity and balance in international collaboration. To see whether longitudinal trends have changed recently, w...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the validity of tweets about scientific publications as an indicator of societal impact by measuring the degree to which the publications are tweeted beyond academia. We introduce methods that allow for using a much larger and broader data set than in previous validation studies. It covers all areas of re...

In recent years, collaboration within a team to solve complicated scientific and social problems has attracted growing popularity. In particular, many complex challenges and opportunities require expertise and skills across disciplinary, organizational, and cultural boundaries. However, rapid growth in the demand for scientific collaboration has ou...

Promoting growth in patent activity was an important stated goal of China’s Medium- and Long-Term Plan for Science and Technology Development (2006–20), and it was a successful one. By the end of this ambitious blueprint, China had witnessed enormous growth in the number of granted patents, especially those granted to public universities. This vita...

In this paper, we study how research topics and trends have evolved in the field of the science of team science (SciTS). Over the past 12 years, the International Science of Team Science conference has been making efforts to understand and enhance the processes and outcomes of collaborative team science. We argue that the sessions and papers in aca...

Citation analysis can provide us with models of the evolutionary dynamics in scholarly and scientific communication. We propose to distinguish between institutional research evaluation (usually, ex post) and knowledge evaluation ex ante, in relation to directionality in citation analysis. We discuss the theoretical literature on communication syste...

The academic literature of social sciences records human civilization and studies human social problems. With its large-scale growth, the ways to quickly fnd existing research on relevant issues have become an urgent demand for researchers. Previous studies, such as SciBERT, have shown that pre-training using domain-specifc texts can improve the p...

The literature on policy coordination between government agencies reveals little about how coordination is managed in centralized political systems. This paper, therefore, presents a dynamic and quantitative analysis of policy coordination in China based on the science and technology (S&T) policy documents issued by China’s central government agenc...

This article aims to add to the body of indicators used to study collaboration in science. We propose a new indicator to measure balance in collaboration (BIC) which is based on the Gini evenness index for a weighted Lorenz curve. The new indicator of balance builds upon and extends the use of, our previously introduced indicator of relative intens...

Background Academic research is one of the main avenues through which humans can fight the threat of infectious diseases. However, there have been concerns regarding whether the academic system has provided sufficient efforts to fight infectious diseases we potentially face. Answering these questions could contribute to evidence-based recommendatio...

Considerably little effort has been devoted to systematically exploring the landscape of government-funded innovation schemes, leaving policymakers and academics little empirical evidence with which to grasp the overall situation of national R&D funding strategies. In the United States (US), patents with a government right or financial interest are...

In 2016, the United Nations officially launched the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to address urgent global challenges over the next 15 years. Among the seventeen SDGs, Gender Equality (SDG5) is recognized as important for the achievement of the other 16 goals because gender inequality exists across education, employment oppor...

The academic literature of social sciences is the literature that records human civilization and studies human social problems. With the large-scale growth of this literature, ways to quickly find existing research on relevant issues have become an urgent demand for researchers. Previous studies, such as SciBERT, have shown that pre-training using...

Technology development is a blend of inheritance and innovation that follows certain rules along a technology trajectory. This trajectory charts a technology's evolution and is among the best-supporting data for decision making. Technology life cycle (TLC) analysis, as one of the foundational topics in the field of technology management field, is o...

Open Access (OA) emerged as an important transition in scholarly publishing worldwide during the past two decades. So far, this transition is increasingly based on article processing charges (APC), which create a new paywall on the researchers’ side. Publishing is part of the research process and thereby necessary to perform research. This study an...

The classification of scientific literature into appropriate disciplines is an essential precondition of valid scientometric analysis and significant to the practice of research assessment. In this paper, we compared the classification of publications in Nature based on three different approaches across three different systems. These were: Web of S...

In the context of the most challenging health crisis since World War II that is COVID-19, gaining insights into how academia has responded to this urgent challenge is of great significance. This paper presents academic response patterns at a global, regional, and national level from an analysis of publication volume versus reported cases of COVID-1...

The top-1% most-highly-cited articles are watched closely as the vanguards of the sciences. Using Web of Sciencee data, one can find that China had overtaken the USA in the relative participation in the top-1% (PP-top1%) in 2019, after outcompeting the EU on this indicator in 2015. However, this finding contrasts with repeated reports of Western ag...

The top 1 percent most highly cited articles are watched closely as the vanguards of the sciences. Using Web of Science data, one can find that China had overtaken the USA in the relative participation in the top 1 percent in 2019, after outcompeting the EU on this indicator in 2015. However, this finding contrasts with repeated reports of Western...

Peer review of scientific manuscripts before publication is essential in scholarly publishing, and most active researchers hold relationships with a number of journals as both an author and a reviewer. There have been several studies focusing on gender balance in academic research and authorship, but fewer studies on our role as reviewers. Publons...

Governments typically formulate sets of policies to guide the direction of scientific research. And the possible effects of these policies on scientific research have been explored. However, there is limited literature reflecting how policy information is incorporated and concerned by scientific research. In this research, we explore policy usages...

In 2016, the United Nations officially launched the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to address urgent global challenges over the next 15 years. Among the seventeen SDGs, Gender Equality (SDG5) is recognized as important for the achievement of the other sixteen goals because gender inequality exists across education, employment...

The purpose of this study is to explore the gender distribution of researchers in the field of gender studies. We used bibliometrics methods on a dataset of gender studies from Web of Science between 2007 and 2019. The results show that unlike other fields in scientific communities, gender studies are dominated by female researchers. The majorities...

There is widespread agreement that questionable journals pose a threat to the integrity of scholarly publishing and the credibility of academic research. However, there is currently no agreed upon definition of what constitutes a questionable journal. The characteristics of questionable journals have not been delineated, standardized, nor broadly a...

Background: Academic research is one of the main avenues through which humans can fight the threat of infectious diseases. However, there has been concerns regarding whether academic system has provided sufficient efforts to fight infectious diseases we potentially face. Answering these questions could contribute to evidence-based recommendations f...

Peer review of scientific manuscripts before publication is essential in scholarly publishing, and most active researchers hold relationships with a number of journals as both an author and a reviewer. There have been several studies focusing on gender balance in academic research and authorship, but fewer studies on our role as reviewers. Publons...

This study uses mixed methods – classical citation analysis, altmetric analysis, a survey with researchers as respondents, and text analysis of the abstracts of scientific articles – to investigate gender differences in the aims and impacts of research. We find that male researchers more often value and engage in research mainly aimed at scientific...

Purpose Interdisciplinarity is a hot topic in science and technology policy. However, the concept of interdisciplinarity is both abstract and complex, and therefore difficult to measure using a single indicator. A variety of metrics for measuring the diversity and interdisciplinarity of articles, journals, and fields have been proposed in the liter...

This study investigates the convergence of two bibliometric approaches to the measurement of interdisciplinary research: one based on analyzing disciplinary diversity in the reference list of publications, the other based on the disciplinary diversity of authors of publications. In particular we measure the variety, balance, disparity and integrate...

Addressing many of the world's contemporary challenges requires a multifaceted and integrated approach and, in this respect, interdisciplinary research (IDR) is increasingly recognized as central to both academic interests and national science policies. In spite of the growing attention given to IDR, the impact of IDR remains under-investigated. In...

Purpose Building on Leydesdorff, Bornmann, and Mingers (2019), we elaborate the differences between Tsinghua and Zhejiang University as an empirical example. We address the question of whether differences are statistically significant in the rankings of Chinese universities. We propose methods for measuring statistical significance among different...

Prof. Zeyuan Liu was the first to introduce the concept of knowledge-domain mapping to the scientific community in China. Knowledge-domain maps are useful tools for tracking the frontiers of science and technology, facilitating knowledge management, and assisting scientific and technological decision-making. Science overlay mapping as a type of kno...

Journal evaluation systems reflect how new insights are critically reviewed and published, and the prestige and impact of a discipline’s journals is a key metric in many research assessment, performance evaluation, and funding systems. With the expansion of China’s research and innovation systems and its rise as a major contributor to global innova...

The past 40 years have witnessed profound changes in the international competitiveness of Mainland China’s scientific research. Based on publication data from Chinese researchers in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) from the Web of Science (WoS), this study aims to provide a bird’s-eye view of how social science research in Mainland China h...

Purpose: We address the question of whether differences are statistically significant in the rankings of universities. We propose methods measuring the statistical significance among different universities and illustrate the results by empirical data. Design/methodology/approach: Based on z-testing and overlapping confidence intervals, and using da...

Purpose In this contribution we provide two new co-authorship indicators based on fractional counting. Design/methodology/approach Based on the idea of fractional counting we reflect on what should be an acceptable indicator for co-authorship between two entities. From this reflection we propose an indicator, the co-authorship score, denoted as cs...

Recent years have witnessed an incipient shift in science policy from a focus mainly on academic excellence to a focus that also takes into account “societal impact”. This shift raises the question as to whether medical research has given proper attention to the diseases imposing the greatest burden on society. Therefore, with the aim of identifyin...

A radical reform of research assessment was recently launched in China. It seeks to replace a focus on Web of Science-based indicators with a balanced combination of qualitative and quantitative research evaluation, and to strengthen the local relevance of research in China. It trusts the institutions to implement the policy within a few months but...

Recent years have witnessed an incipient shift in science policy from a focus mainly on academic excellence to a focus that also takes into account “societal impact”. This shift raises the question as to whether medical research has given proper attention to the diseases imposing the greatest burden on society. Therefore, with the aim of identifyin...

The past 40 years have witnessed profound changes in the international connectivity and competitiveness of Mainland China’s scientific research. Based on publication data about Chinese researchers in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) from the Web of Science (WoS), this study aims to provide a birds-eye view of how social science research in...

Evaluating and ranking journals is a crucial part of assessing the quality of science and technology output for government agencies, research institutions, and academic researchers. As China’s research output and strength continue to increase, ranking indexes abound and journal evaluation and selection are becoming an area of wide attention. In thi...

The past 40 years have witnessed profound changes in the international connectivity and competitiveness of Mainland China’s scientific research. Based on publication data about Chinese researchers in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) from the Web of Science (WoS), this study aims to provide a birds-eye view of how social science research in...

We develop and propose a new counting method at the aggregate level for contributions to scientific publications called modified fractional counting (MFC). We show that, compared to traditional complete-normalized fractional counting, it eliminates the extreme differences in contributions over time that otherwise occur between scientists that mainl...

The classification of science into disciplines is at the heart of bibliometric analyses. While most classifications systems are implemented at the journal level, their accuracy has been questioned, and paper-level classifications have been considered by many to be more precise. However, few studies investigated the difference between journal and th...

This study explores the characteristics of scientific activity patterns through co-author affiliations to obtain new insights into interdisciplinary research. To classify the interdisciplinarity in research, we explored and compared two different approaches: the diversity of disciplines reflected in the listed affiliations of the authors and the di...

Proceeding from Moravcsik’s paradigmatic ideas of how to build indigenous capability and sustainable science systems in developing countries, we attempted to further focus on the peculiarities of the twenty-first century and the new challenges of globalisation. In doing so, we selected three particular topics deemed relevant in this context: increa...

The scientific foundation for the criticism on the use of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) in evaluations of individual researchers and their publications was laid between 1989 and 1997 in a series of articles by Per O. Seglen. His basic work has since influenced initiatives such as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), the Le...

In the first part of our study (Zhang and Glänzel in Scientometrics, 2017) we provided a view of the literature ageing based on a synchronous approach. Taking up the ideas by Egghe (Scientometrics 27(2):195–214, 1993) and Glänzel et al. (Scientometrics 109(3):2165–2179, 2016) we extend our study in the second part by applying a diachronous approach...

We provide a view of the literature aging features in the sciences and social sciences, at different aggregation levels, of major fields, subfields, journals and individual papers and from different perspectives. Against to the wide belief that scientific literature may become more rapidly obsolete, we found that, in general, the share of more rece...

The number of citations that a patent receives is considered an important indicator of the quality and impact of the patent. However, a variety of methods and data sources can be used to calculate this measure. This paper evaluates similarities between citation indicators that differ in terms of (a) the patent office where the focal patent applicat...

Using the example of the ‘h-related’ publication dataset created for a previous study on the literature of Hirsch-type measures (Zhang et al. in J Informetri 5(3):583–593, 2011) and updated for the present paper, we attempt to study the robustness and dynamic evolution of ‘core documents’. With using two different methods that have been recently in...

An attempt is made to apply bibliographic coupling to journal clustering of the complete Web of Science database. Since the sparseness of the underlying similarity matrix proved inappropriate for this exercise, second-order similarities have been used. Only 0.12% out of 8282 journals had to be removed from the classification as being singletons. Th...