Universidad Simon Bolivar, Caracas, Venezuela.
Facultad de Administracion, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia.
PLoS One. 2020 May 13;15(5):e0232458. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0232458. eCollection 2020.
Research productivity has been linked to a country's intellectual and economic wealth. Further analysis is needed to assess the association between the distribution of research across disciplines and the economic status of countries.
By using 55 years of data, spanning 1962 to 2017, of Elsevier publications across a large set of research disciplines and countries globally, this manuscript explores the relationship and evolution of relative research productivity across different disciplines through a network analysis. It also explores the associations of those with economic productivity categories, as measured by the World Bank economic classification. Additional analysis of discipline similarities is possible by exploring the cross-country evolution of those disciplines.
Results show similarities in the relative importance of research disciplines among most high-income countries, with larger idiosyncrasies appearing among the remaining countries. This group of high-income countries shows similarities in the dynamics of the relative distribution of research productivity over time, forming a stable research productivity cluster. Lower income countries form smaller, more independent and evolving clusters, and differ significantly from each other and from higher income countries in the relative importance of their research emphases. Country-based similarities in research productivity profiles also appear to be influenced by geographical proximity.
This new form of analyses of research productivity, and its relation to economic status, reveals novel insights to the dynamics of the economic and research structure of countries. This allows for a deeper understanding of the role a country's research structure may play in shaping its economy, and also identification of benchmark resource allocations across disciplines for developing countries.
研究生产力与一个国家的知识和经济财富密切相关。需要进一步分析，以评估跨学科研究分布与各国经济地位之间的关联。
本研究使用了全球大量研究学科和国家在 1962 年至 2017 年期间跨越 55 年的数据，通过网络分析探讨了不同学科相对研究生产力的关系和演变。它还探讨了与经济生产力类别的关联，这些关联由世界银行的经济分类来衡量。通过探索这些学科在跨国界的演变，还可以对学科相似性进行额外分析。
结果表明，大多数高收入国家的研究学科相对重要性存在相似之处，而其余国家则存在更大的特殊性。这组高收入国家在研究生产力相对分布的动态方面表现出相似性，形成了一个稳定的研究生产力集群。低收入国家形成更小、更独立和不断发展的集群，与高收入国家在研究重点的相对重要性方面存在显著差异。国家层面的研究生产力分布也似乎受到地理接近度的影响。
这种研究生产力的新形式分析及其与经济地位的关系，揭示了国家经济和研究结构动态的新见解。这使得我们能够更深入地了解一个国家的研究结构在塑造其经济方面可能发挥的作用，以及为发展中国家确定跨学科的基准资源分配。
