Key Actors in Higher Education Research and Science Studies (HERSS)

From September I have joined DZHW (German Center for Higher Education Research and Science Studies) as a postdoctoral researcher on Research System and Science Dynamics.

One of my first tasks was to prepare a world-wide view to Higher Education Research and Science Studies (HERSS) field with a specific focus to how Germany has been active in this world!

Here is the link to the dashboard (https://forschungsinfo.de/dash_akb/science_studies_dashboard_map.html) and I have copied bellow the summary of data used to prepare it. It is a Flexdashboard develped in R with Rmarkdown. Here is the link to BMBF ministry (Federal Ministry of Education and Research) description of the dashboard.

HERSS Dashboard Summary

This dashboard aims to explore the world of Higher Education Research and Science Studies (HERSS). We aim to provide an overview to the key actors in the field. We have also a focus on the research centers and organizations in Germany and their local and international collaborations.

We queried all the publications in 23 most prominent journals in the field (see journals section for the list). By looking at the cities, country of affiliation, higher education institutes and organizations, we tried to see which countries and organizations occupy the key positions.

We extracted all publications (29,898 ranging from 1971 to 2017) from Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science (From the data infrastructure of the German Competence Centre for Bibliometrics) that are published in one of the 23 main journals in HERSS. The list of these journals were extracted from website of Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) of Germany. Data included articles’ title, keywords, abstract, publication year, authors’ names and affiliations, and number of citations received.

Dashboard sections:

• HERSS World
  1. HERSS World Map: presents the countries’ publications, historical information and main collaborators in HERSS field. It also shows the main organizations that have been collaborating with Germany in HERSS research. It presents the first and last HERSS publication year, importance of each institution in the collaboration network based on normalized degree centrality scaled to 0-1 with 1 showing the highest influence and it provides the list of institutions collaborating in HERSS field. Choosing Past 10 years on the map presents the same information with a specific focus on 10 most recent years (from 2007 - 2017)
  2. Continents/Countries: presents the distribution of HERSS organizations in each continent, country and cities which are sized based on the count of HERSS publications
  3. German Cities: presents the distribution of HERSS organizations in German cities which are sized based on the count of HERSS publications
• Data
  1. Journals: presents the number of publications in each of 23 main HERSS journals and the earliest and latest HERSS publication years
  2. Top Organizations: presents the 100 most prolific organizations, the earliest and latest HERSS publication years and total number of HERSS publications. In a separate tab it shows the most prolific organizations in the past 10 years.

Dynamic version of HERSS dashboard

In the video below a dynamic version of the HERSS dashboard which is developed using Shiny dashboards is presented.

Link to the video: https://youtu.be/75GWdAgGwnw