New Webinar@AIMS: Under-representation of local needs in the global south in mainstream bibliographic databases. The case of rice research
Although the main bibliometric databases (Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus) claim to include journals on the basis of scientific and publication standards, there have long been concerns that its coverage is biased in favour of journals from industrialised countries and towards topics relevant to these countries. This webinar presents an investigation of this claim for research on rice, comparing the database CAB Abstracts with the mainstream databases. We find clear evidence that for a field such as rice, statistics based on WoS and Scopus strongly under-represent the scientific production by developing countries, and over-represent production by industrialised countries. More importantly, we also find a substantial bias in coverage of different research topics. The study suggests that statistics based on mainstream databases provide a significantly distorted view of the amount of research and diversity of agendas in most countries. Given that bibliometric statistics are often used for benchmarking and evaluation purposes, the database biases may translate into policy framings that undervalue domestic capabilities and research agendas more attuned to local needs in the global south.
Authors:
Ismael Rafols
Ismael Rafols is a science and technology policy analyst at Ingenio (CSIC-UPV), a visiting fellow at SPRU (Univ. Sussex) (where he was from 2004 to 2012), and a research associate at the OST (HCERES, Paris). He works on the assessment of science and technology, studying both how research is evaluated and how evaluations may influence science and technology.
Ismael is interested in opening up new perspectives for visualising diverse scientific contributions, in particular those which tend to be neglected by conventional quantitative assessment. For this purpose, he developes methods to map and measure interdisciplinary research, knowledge exchange and societal contributions of science (the so-called "impact" agenda). In particular, He is working on visualisations that help interrogate the research landscapes or portfolios of grand challenges such as bird flu or obesity, or the knowledge base of funding agencies and organisations such as universities or pharmaceutical firms.He received an MSc in Science and Technology Policy from SPRU (Sussex, 2006), a BSc in Physics from the Univ. Barcelona (1993), a PhD in biophysics from Tohoku University (Sendai, Japan, 2001) and a postdoctoral in nanobiotechnology at Cornell University. In between academic positions, he has worked on international cooperation in Oxfam (1994) and the City Council of Barcelona (2003-04).
All publications of Ismael Rafols are available via green open access as shown in Google Scholar's profile: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=puqLKfsAAAAJ&hl=ca
Website: http://www.ingenio.upv.es/en/Ismael-Rafols
