Transformative science: a new index and the impact of non-funding, private funding, and public funding

Abstract

Understanding how impactful scientific articles were funded informs future funding decisions. The structural significance of articles is broken down into two submeasures: citation count and “generativity” (a novel measure defined as being highly cited and also leading to a comparatively large number of other highly cited work). Generativity is an attempt to provide a quantitative operationalization of transformativeness, a concept often used as a funding criterion despite not being a well-defined construct. This report identifies highly impactful and generative publications indexed in the subject area of psychology in the Web of Science in the year 2002. Publications that reported funding sources were found to be more generative than those that did not, and research that was privately funded was found to be more generative than publicly funded research. This analysis is exploratory, and hopefully contributes to a foundation for future empirical investigations into the structure and nature of transformative science that granting agencies would want to fund.

Keywords:

• Bibliometrics
• impact factor
• metascience
• psychology of science
• citation analysis
• scientometric

Notes

1. The choice to focus on ideas should not be construed as denying the impact of the individual participants in shaping a particular course – ‘Generic eventuality is not equivalent to specific inevitability’ (Simonton 2004).

2. One possible drawback of the tree of life metaphor is that it implicitly downplays the impact of interdisciplinary work. These collaborations would be metaphorically equivalent to horizontal gene transfer, which in fact does occur in most branches (prokaryotes, bacteria, and archea) of the tree of life.

3. The ISI Web of Science uses two fields to categorize articles by subject, Subject Area and Web of Science Category. The Subject Areas correspond to thesauri managed by the indexers and editorial staff of Thomson Reuters. Notes that clarify and define the scope for the various subject areas, which are specific to each index, are available online (http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/mjl/scope/). Web of Science categories are assigned at the journal level. These categories are assigned in the Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports, and carry over to the Web of Science.

4. Ideally the percentage used in this ranking would be equal to the number of Generative articles divided by the number of published articles. In the present example (Table 6) the number of published articles only includes those collected in our sample.