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Despite the scholarly attention for the integration of sustainability within business strategy and processes, little is known about how strategic orientations of companies influence this integration. Drawing on stewardship theory, this paper aims to analyse the influence of strategic orientation of companies on their environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) performance and the moderating effect of three different political models of economy (Rhine, British and American).

This paper creates a measurement for strategic orientations by using a coding scheme with a five-category evaluation matrix. The main empirical analysis is done by a fixed-effect model with a panel data set covering 179 publicly traded companies over the 2009-2016 period.

The conclusions of this paper present that – consistent over time – a stronger orientation on stewardship positively associates with higher ESG performance. Additionally, the political model of economy significantly alters the relationship indicating the effect of strategic orientation on ESG performance. The relationship is significantly stronger in the Rhine model and significantly weaker in the British model, when both compared to the American model.

The implications of this paper are vital to understanding corporate strategic orientation and its relationship to actual corporate behaviour and long-term performance. Implementing the elements of focus, motivation, commitment, support and communication linked to a stewardship orientation is fundamental to achieve higher levels of sustainability performance.

This research covers a rather unexplored area of customer relationship management (CRM) by questioning the mechanism between on the one hand the Pareto-principle and on the other hand traditional non-IT supported operational CRM processes. Thus, the paper aims to explore whether a minority of processes and process-aspects deserves credit for achieving a majority of CRM goals.

A qualitative approach is the most appropriate due to the assumption that access to the reality of a situation is only possible through social construction. A qualitative approach seeks to answer questions posed by studying different social settings. As noted by Berg, qualitative techniques make it possible for researchers to participate in understanding and perceiving others, as well as permitting them to discover how people structure their daily lives to make them more meaningful.

The questioned mechanism of on the one hand traditional non-IT supported operational CRM process-aspects and on the other hand the Pareto-principle is confirmed by the majority of interviewees who answered affirmatively to small things making big differences in customer contact.

Regarding the limitations of this study, the results are hard to generalise as the research context depends on a single case study. However, the high levels of detail that allows for greater insight into manufacturing SMEs in HGV-Trailer that want to adopt non-IT support operational CRM where there is lack of financial resources justify the choice of this case study.

This study is important for management to focus and develop social on top of technical competencies. This was clear from the importance of social intercourse as the glue that links all the non-IT supported operational processes from break down to invoices. It helps in removing the uncertainty from the view point of customers and highlights the importance of the care that companies need to give to the human side of the process more than objectifying things. Moreover, the finding provides an important implication for practitioners involved spare-parts purchasing process and the warranty claiming process should continuously assess whether they operate in support of a breakdown or not and subsequently use this insight to prioritize their tasks.

This research tried to answer how the Pareto-principle applies to traditional non-IT supported operational CRM process-aspects by concluding that the first social intercourse, as well as problem ownership, belongs – from a customers' viewpoint – to the “vital few” leading to “trivial many” results of rational and emotional nature. This is especially true in the breakdown process, and processes that operate in support of breakdowns.

We examine the determinants of multinational firms’ propensity to conduct R&D activities in host countries, with specific attention to the influence of host countries’ university research. We consider heterogeneous locational drivers related to the type of R&D activity: basic research, applied research, development for local markets, and development for global markets. Drawing on official survey data on R&D activities by 498 Japanese multinational firms in 24 host countries and estimating two-stage models, we find that the likelihood that firms conduct R&D in a host country is generally increasing in the strength of university research. Conditional on a firm’s R&D presence, university research strength is associated with a greater propensity to conduct (basic) research activities rather than (local) development, while the intensity of host country university–industry collaboration is most strongly associated with applied research. Host country experience and the depth of the firm’s manufacturing presence are also associated higher propensities to engage in research.

Science is a continuum of experiences consisting of authors and their publications, and the authors’ experience is an integral part of their work that gets reflected through self-citations. Thus, self-citations can be employed in measuring the relevance between publications and tracking the evolution of research. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Based on the bibliographic data obtained from Scopus, this study constructs and visualizes the self-citation networks of ten Nobel laureates 2018, in the fields of Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry and Economic Science, to demonstrate the evolving process of each laureate’s research across his or her scholarly career.

Statistics indicate that prominent scientists, such as Nobel laureates, have also frequently cited their own publications. However, their self-cited rates are quite low. Self-citations constitute an indispensable part of the citation system but contribute little to authors’ scientific impact, regardless of artificial self-citations. Self-citation networks present a trajectory that shows the evolving process of research across a scientist’s long-term scholarly career. There are obvious differences in self-citation patterns and network structures of different laureates without a disciplinary difference observed. The structures of self-citation networks are significantly influenced by laureates’ productivity. In addition, it is laureates’ own research patterns and citation habits that lead to the diversified patterns and structures of self-citation networks.

Only scientific achievements presented in the form of publications are investigated and other kinds of scientific output, such as patents, are not included. Moreover, this approach is fit for scientists who have had a longer career and higher productivity.

This study proves the feasibility and effectiveness of self-citation analysis as a new way to examine research evolution.

Recent studies report that China is becoming a leading nation in the quantity of scientific output, including in the emerging field of nanotechnology. In nanotechnology, bibliometric measures based on citations also indicate improvements in the research impacts of Chinese scientific papers. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of international collaboration, including the role of knowledge moderation through Chinese researchers who collaborate in both domestic and international scientific cooperation, on the impacts of Chinese nanotechnology research publications.

Using a nanotechnology publication dataset, bibliometric analysis and statistical testing are adopted to explore the issues raised in the study.

International collaboration, through direct collaboration and indirectly through Chinese knowledge moderators, has a positive impact on the quality of Chinese research, controlling for language, discipline, research capacity, and other factors.

The concept of a Chinese knowledge moderator is introduced to identify Chinese researchers who bridge scientific worlds by publishing scientific papers with both domestic and international colleagues. This concept is operationalized to capture the indirect impacts in China of international knowledge linkages and spillovers including those associated with overseas Chinese researchers and with overseas returnees.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the global progress and explore research areas and development trends of open government data (OGD) field from the Web of Science (WOS) database by applying the bibliometric visualization approach.

This paper conducted a bibliometric mapping study on OGD scientific research publications based on WOS from six aspects.

There are six research perspectives on OGD research. European countries and developed countries pay more attention to OGD movement. The 20 most cited and highly influential research documents were identified. What’s more, the analysis of journals level highlights the interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary characteristics of OGD research. Current six research topics for OGD research that have been formed and two major emerging research priorities in OGD research fields were identified.

The limitation is that data retrieval result which decided to include only 180 publications in the WOS-indexed publications produced a bias against research publications published in non-WOS publication sources. A fuller research trend would be obtained with the more extensively used electronic databases.

By dint of bibliometric analysis, this paper may be able to quantify research patterns on OGD, to analyze what has been done in this field and to identify the main research hotspots. Therefore, it can aid academic researchers and practicing professionals in contributing to the field more effectively and advancing scientific progress in the field of OGD research.

The results can also promote the study on OGD movement in academia, government and industry and also enrich the theory of OGD and provide some new perspectives for research on OGD.

This is the first study to quantify and evaluate global research patterns and development trends in OGD research based on WOS database, which provides a quantitative perspective on OGD studies that may assist in advancing the development of the field.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of the use of the citation‐based journal impact factor for evaluative purposes upon the behaviour of authors and editors. It seeks to give a critical examination of a number of claims as regards the manipulability of this indicator on the basis of an empirical analysis of publication and referencing practices of authors and journal editors

The paper describes mechanisms that may affect the numerical values of journal impact factors. It also analyses general, “macro” patterns in large samples of journals in order to obtain indications of the extent to which such mechanisms are actually applied on a large scale. Finally it presents case studies of particular science journals in order to illustrate what their effects may be in individual cases.

The paper shows that the commonly used journal impact factor can to some extent be relatively easily manipulated. It discusses several types of strategic editorial behaviour, and presents cases in which journal impact factors were – intentionally or otherwise – affected by particular editorial strategies. These findings lead to the conclusion that one must be most careful in interpreting and using journal impact factors, and that authors, editors and policy makers must be aware of their potential manipulability. They also show that some mechanisms occur as of yet rather infrequently, while for others it is most difficult if not impossible to assess empirically how often they are actually applied. If their frequency of occurrence increases, one should come to the conclusion that the impact of impact factors is decreasing.

The paper systematically describes a number of claims about the manipulability of journal impact factors that are often based on “informal” or even anecdotal evidences and illustrates how these claims can be further examined in thorough empirical research of large data samples.

This paper aims to discuss some caveats about the findings of Part 1 of the Royal Society's report from the perspective of the choice and reliability of the source base, and the bibliometric and scientometric indicators.

The paper argues that the Royal Society's report gives too much emphasis to the growth rate of the publications of Chinese researchers when interpolating those data and forecasting that, within the decade and possibly as early as 2013, China will be ahead of even the USA in terms of the number of publications.

In an era when the “publish or perish” slogan is replaced by the “get cited or perish” mantra, the report barely discusses how much China is behind the world average and especially the above countries in terms of the most important scientometric indicators that take into account the productivity/quantity aspect and the citedness of publications as a proxy for quality.

The paper illustrates that there are much better measures for the assessment of research activity than the one‐dimensional productivity numbers, such as the h‐index or the uncitedness rate, and the citations/publication rate where China is far below and the USA is far above the world average scores, and uses some charts to paint a more realistic picture of the scientific landscape.

The web application presented in this paper allows for an analysis to reveal centres of excellence in different fields worldwide using publication and citation data. Only specific aspects of institutional performance are taken into account and other aspects such as teaching performance or societal impact of research are not considered. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.

Based on data gathered from Scopus, field-specific excellence can be identified in institutions where highly-cited papers have been frequently published.

The web application (www.excellencemapping.net) combines both a list of institutions ordered by different indicator values and a map with circles visualising indicator values for geocoded institutions.

Compared to the mapping and ranking approaches introduced hitherto, our underlying statistics (multi-level models) are analytically oriented by allowing the estimation of values for the number of excellent papers for an institution which are statistically more appropriate than the observed values; the calculation of confidence intervals as measures of accuracy for the institutional citation impact; the comparison of a single institution with an “average” institution in a subject area: and the direct comparison of at least two institutions.

This study investigates an approach to book metrics for research evaluation that takes into account the complexity of scholarly monographs. This approach is based on work sets – unique scholarly works and their within-work related bibliographic entities – for scholarly monographs in national databases for research output.

This study examines bibliographic records on scholarly monographs acquired from four European databases (VABB in Flanders, Belgium; CROSBI in Croatia; CRISTIN in Norway; COBISS in Slovenia). Following a data enrichment process using metadata from OCLC WorldCat and Amazon Goodreads, the authors identify work sets and the corresponding ISBNs. Next, on the basis of the number of ISBNs per work set and the presence in WorldCat, they design a typology of scholarly monographs: Globally visible single-expression works, Globally visible multi-expression works, Miscellaneous and Globally invisible works.

The findings show that the concept “work set” and the proposed typology can aid the identification of influential scholarly monographs in the social sciences and humanities (i.e. the Globally visible multi-expression works).

In light of the findings, the authors outline requirements for the bibliographic control of scholarly monographs in national databases for research output that facilitate the use of the approach proposed here.

The authors use insights from library and information science (LIS) to construct complexity-sensitive book metrics. In doing so, the authors, on the one hand, propose a solution to a problem in research evaluation and, on the other hand, bring to attention the need for a dialogue between LIS and neighbouring communities that work with bibliographic data.