Study On The Research Collaboration Among Biomedical Research Professors From Local Medical Colleges And Universities

PurposesTaking the professors in biomedical domain from local medical colleges and universities as study objects, using methods such as social network analysis, this paper analyzed their scientific research collaboration, explored the status quo in biomedical research domain, and discovering certain pattern. This paper aims at providing references for the growth and development of scientific research teams and teachers particularly young teachers in colleges and universities, and providing evidences to enhance the competitiveness of science and technology in higher medical colleges and universities, to promote the connotation development of higher medical education, and to provide evidences for science and technology management decisions regarding biomedical research and education.Materials1.The source data in this paper are collected from databases listed below: Science Citation Index (SCI) database,2008-2012China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI),2002-2012Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD),2002-20122. The higher education department at a provincial education bureau3. A provincial medical university’s website4. Related books, journals, magazines, and reports5. Personal home pages of the involved ProfessorsMethods1. Literature study method2. The h-index research methods3. Social network analysis4. Data processing and analysis Results1. The research collaboration among the professors from the local medical college professors(1) The professor’s publication tends to increase over time along with his or her appointment time; papers are mainly in Chinese, while papers in foreign language are relatively few. The number of professors is unevenly distributed among different primary disciplines, the publication number per person is23.5-23.5.(2) The professor h-index is highly correlated with the total number of papers, the citations of papers, and the number of cited articles.(3) Paper CI and DC of biomedical professors in local medical university of are4.73and98.50%respectively. The number of authors in a single paper published by professors in primary discipline is between3-5, collaboration rate is greater than0.90; the number of papers published by2-5authors is the largest, accounting for72.39%of the total number of papers, in which3-author papers take the largest proportion, reached the peak.2. Collaboration network analysis among biomedical professors from Local medical colleges and universities(1) The core authors collaboration network as a whole is disconnected, which contains many independent small groups, the structures of the small groups are divided into four categories:zero core networks, single core networks, dual core network, multi-core network.(2) The network of the core authors collaboration network is small, the largest subnetwork density is attributed to two people and three people cooperation, the density of the network is1; As the team scale increases, the network density becomes smaller and smaller.(3) In the overall network, the degrees of the most professors are comparatively high, and the productivity of professors is highly correlated with the degree centrality and the closeness centrality.(4) The relationship between three typical collaboration network nodes reveals that, co-authorship are mostly "teacher-student" and "teacher-teacher" types; the "teacher-student" type is mainly comprised of professors and their graduate students, while the "teacher-teacher" type commonly happens between professors and teachers. Collaboration between professors only accounts for a small proportion and primarily carried out within the same school or discipline.Conclusion1. The scientific collaboration among biomedical professors from local medical colleges and universities mainly happens between teachers and students or teachers and teachers within the same discipline or school. 2. The scientific collaboration network among biomedical professors from local medical colleges and universities presents the characteristics of "small world".3. The closer the local medical college biomedical professors’ collaboration is, the stronger their scientific research ability is.4. The inner structure of the local medical college biomedical professors’ cooperation is not well organized.5. Collaboration among local medical university biomedical professors needs to be improved.EnlightenmentsWe should:1. Establish win-win partnership among professors.2. Encourage research collaboration among professors from different fields to enhance the overall quality of scientific research of the university.3. Strengthen the resource integration within the university’s scientific research team to expand the interactive space of the scientific research collaboration.InnovationsStudied the collaboration among biomedical research professors from local medical universities from the perspective of scientometrics, established and analyzed the collaboration networks, provided evidences for science and technology management decisions regarding biomedical education and research.Suggestions for making further investigations1. Continue to conduct a thorough analysis on author collaboration networks of biomedical research professors from local medical colleges and universities.2. Expand the sample range, make a more extensive in-depth analysis of the scientific research collaboration among the teachers from local medical colleges and universities.