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Taiwan serves as a case study to investigate the association between the expansion and reform of higher education and the growth of science production. More specifically, what driving forces facilitated the growth of science production in different types of Taiwanese universities and other sectors, from 1980 to 2011.

The contribution charts differential contributions to overall production. Taiwanese data from Thomson Reuters’ Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) is analyzed to show the expansion of the higher education system and its relationship to the production of science. The author uses sociological organization theories to facilitate our understanding of how and why the landscape of science production changed.

Results show that the growth of science production is associated with processes of isomorphism and competition within the higher education system. Findings also suggest that universities quickly seized upon external opportunities and turned themselves into what is known as the “knowledge conglomerate.” Unique organizational features bolster universities’ position as the driving force behind advancing national innovation.

This study extends previous research by examining multiple sectors of higher education, using longitudinal and recent data, and highlighting themes that have been ignored or overlooked, such as competition and collaboration among universities and industry partners.

This chapter provides an overview of the findings and chapters of a thematic volume in the International Perspectives on Education and Society (IPES) series. It describes the common dataset and methods used by an international research team.

The chapter synthesizes the results of a series of country-level case studies and cross-national and regional comparisons on the growth of scientific research from 1900 until 2011. Additionally, the chapter provides a quantitative analysis of global trends in scientific, peer-reviewed publishing over the same period.

The introduction identifies common themes that emerged across the case studies examined in-depth during the multi-year research project Science Productivity, Higher Education, Research and Development and the Knowledge Society (SPHERE). First, universities have long been and are increasingly the primary organizations in science production around the globe. Second, the chapters describe in-country and cross-country patterns of competition and collaboration in scientific publications. Third, the chapters describe the national policy environments and institutionalized organizational forms that foster scientific research.

The introduction reviews selected findings and limitations of previous bibliometric studies and explains that the chapters in the volume address these limitations by applying neo-institutional theoretical frameworks to analyze bibliometric data over an extensive period.

This chapter describes the changing nature of Japanese science production. The author explains Japan’s rise to prominence as the country with the second largest number of annual research publications in the world, followed by its subsequent decline to fifth in the world. The chapter highlights implications for Japanese universities of shifts in research policy.

The author examines bibliometric data as well as contextual data from Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology to analyze the contributions of Japanese universities in STEM+ research from 1975 to 2010. The chapter examines changes in higher education funding policies and their relationship to university-based production of STEM+ research articles in recent decades. The chapter also includes brief comparative analyses with selected other countries, including highly productive countries in Asia (China, Korea, and Taiwan), Western Europe (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom), as well as the United States.

Bibliometric data show that Japan’s second-tier research universities contributed to Japan’s rise to the second largest producer of STEM+ scientific research. When these second-tier research universities received less money from the government, their scientific output declined and aggregate national research output declined relative to other countries.

The chapter uses more recent and comprehensive data than other studies of research output of Japanese universities and offers several implications for research policy and higher education funding. Indeed, the chapter argues that second-tier universities are the “unsung heroes” of Japanese science production. The chapter also suggests that Japanese policymakers may need to reconsider their reliance on competitive funding over block grants that sustain research universities.

During the 20th century, the United States rapidly developed its research capacity by fostering a broad base of institutions of higher education led by a small core of highly productive research universities. By the latter half of the century, scientists in a greatly expanded number of universities across the United States published the largest annual number of scholarly publications in STEM+ fields from one nation. This expansion was not a product of some science and higher education centralized plan, rather it flowed from the rise of mass tertiary education in this nation. Despite this unprecedented productivity, some scholars suggested that universities would cease to lead American scientific research. This chapter investigates the ways that the United States’ system of higher education underpinned American science into the 21st century.

The authors present a historical and sociological case study of the development of the United States’ system of higher education and its associated research capacity. The historical and sociological context informs our analysis of data from the SPHERE team dataset, which was compiled from the Thomson Reuters’ Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) database.

We argue that American research capacity is a function of the United States’ broad base of thousands of public and broadly accessible institutions of higher education plus its smaller, elite sector of “super” research universities; and that the former serve to culturally support the later. Unlike previous research, we find that American higher education is not decreasing its contributions to the nation’s production of STEM+ scholarship.

The chapter provides empirical analyses, which support previous sociological theory about mass higher education and super research universities.

This chapter provides a historical overview of policies on higher education in South Korea since 1945 and illustrates growth of science production based on expansion of higher education.

We divide higher education policies into three historical time periods: (1) 1945–1950s, a period of developing modern higher education system; (2) 1960s–early 1990s, a period of rapid expansion of higher education, while government establishing a few research-focused science and technology institutions aimed at better quality research production; and (3) since mid-1990s, a period of fostering the workforce and raising science productivity in universities using targeted investments in research. We use the SPHERE project’s comprehensive historical dataset based on Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science and data from Higher Education in Korea to analyze growth in scientific publication in national and organizational level.

The analysis suggests that the combined private and public investments in the expansion of higher education, and sequential policy intervention facilitated the massive and ongoing growth of science production in Korea.

The chapter provides a thorough description about the growth of higher education and science production in South Korea and draws lessons for developing capacity for producing science.

The authors seek to better understand the relationships between science production, national wealth, inequality, and human development around the globe.

The chapter uses econometric models, including Granger causality, to test alternate hypotheses about whether more economic wealth is related to more science or if more science leads to more wealth.

The immediate result of our models is that a country’s wealth contributes to the conditions necessary for productive science. While large countries produce many research articles in the STEM+ fields more or less irrespective of their per capita GDP, with countries like the Soviet Union, China, or India being important contributors to world science, the most productive countries were the richer ones. GDP per capita values are important predictors for higher numbers of STEM+ research articles adjusted for population size. Nevertheless, human development and income equality also have a positive relationship with science productivity. While the effect of income equality is less strong, it has importantly and steadily increased over the last 50 years.

This chapter is among the first to show that countries with similar levels of human development that are more equal in income distribution are more productive in science, while countries of similar wealth that are more equal in income distribution are not necessarily more productive in science.

In this paper, we present and apply a new framework – the Poles of Production for Producers/Poles of Production for Users (PFP/PFU) model – to empirically study how one particular group of academic scientists has responded to neoliberal changes in science policy and funding in Canada. The data we use are from a qualitative case study of 20 basic health scientists affiliated with a research-intensive university in a large Canadian city. We use the PFP/PFU model to explore the symbolic strategies (the vision of scientific quality) and practical strategies (the acquisition of funding and production of knowledge outputs) scientists adopt to maintain or advance their own position of power in the scientific field. We also compare similarities and differences among scientists trained before and after the rise of neoliberal policy. The PFP/PFU model allows us to see how these individual strategies cumulatively contribute to the construction of dominant and alternate modes of knowledge production. We argue that the alignments and misalignments between quality vision and practice that scientists in this study experienced reflect the symbolic struggles that are occurring among scientists, and between the scientific and political field, over two competing logics and reward systems (PFP/PFU).

One common feature of different variants of participatory and action research is rejection of technocratic, undemocratic elements in science and inquiry, aiming to break the dominance of traditional academic views of science. These variants open up broader participation of people, and emancipate knowledge creation for the production of actionable knowledge with transformative potentials. The purpose of this chapter is to recognize and clarify a striving for knowledge democracy in these explicit or implicit democratizing ambitions and tendencies in the sense of broadening the participation of concerned parties in research and development work on open and equal terms. This recent concept, still in the process of formulation, has been proposed as a global mobilizing and unifying thinking for distributed networks and movements for participatory oriented research. The concept and movement had an initial embedding in the First Global Assembly for Knowledge Democracy in June 2017, Cartagena, Columbia. The purpose of the chapter is to elaborate on the meaning of knowledge democracy as a vision for the participatory and action research community. Particularly I will distinguish between different orientation to knowledge democracy, and the character of the logic of a more, open, democratic and coproductive science that can be a carrier of it.

This study aims to investigate the factors affecting the motivation of graduate students of information science in scientific and research activities and science production. This research is applied in terms of purpose and descriptive in terms of type and method.

The study's statistical population includes all postgraduate information science students studying in public universities. The random sampling method was simple. The data collection tool was a questionnaire. Descriptive statistics and one-sample t-test, independent t-test, and ANOVA were used to analyze the collected data by SPSS software.

Findings showed that all the main variables (internal motivations, external motivations, self-empowerment, and intellectual and specialized interactions) affect the participation of postgraduate students in research and scientific activities. Among the identified components, the creation of opportunities, research facilities, innovation, and formal relations between students and professors, has the most significant impact on students' motivation to participate in scientific and research activities and science production. There was no significant difference between education and age. From the results obtained from the present study, it can be said that the above variables, which were divided into four categories, with the intensity of the participation of graduate students of universities that in the present study examined the field of librarianship and information, with power and Or weakness are influential. This means that the students at the beginning of the research path, in other words, will be future researchers, should be constantly monitored as a source in the production of science.

This research is one of the few types of research that examines the influential variables in increasing the motivation to participate in the study, considering the population of postgraduate students of universities and scientific institutions as drivers of science production.