"Expected-Actual-Extended" Model For Research Activities In Large Research Infrastructures

As scientific research becomes more advanced,the precision and performance of scientific instruments are receiving more and more attention from the research community.To achieve groundbreaking results in various disciplines,it is necessary to have a more accurate and specific understanding of their research objects.In this process,scientific instruments will also become more complex,and the main instrument that currently supports in-depth research in various disciplines is the Large Research Infrastructures.Large Research Infrastructures not only play a huge role in promoting disciplinary research,but also can promote international exchange and cooperation and enhance international influence.Due to their large scale and complexity,the cost of building Large Research Infrastructures is also extremely high.Based on these characteristics,Large Research Infrastructures also have the characteristics of sharing in use.It can be argued that to promote the development of science,the construction of large scientific devices is imperative.Moreover,such facilities are bound to be shared globally.How to maximize the value of the Large Research Infrastructures as much as possible is an issue that all countries need to focus on.This study takes SPring-8,the world’s largest third-generation synchrotron radiation facility,as the research object,and constructs an "expected-actual-expanded" model using the general proposals,the papers based on general proposals,and the citations of the papers of SPring-8 from 2017 to 2021 as data sources.The analysis is conducted in three dimensions: research discipline,research topic,and research team,to explore the characteristics and trends of these dimensions at three levels: proposals,papers,and citations.The LDA topic modeling method is used for the analysis of research topics,and the knowledge graph clustering method is used for the analysis of research disciplines and research teams.The study found that when using Large Research Infrastructures,the countries and management and operation organizations to which the facilities belong occupy a very large advantage in use,and developed countries,countries with the same type of Large Research Infrastructures and geographically neighboring countries are more active.In addition,the "expected-actual-extended" model for scientific research activities carried out by Large Research Infrastructures has three main characteristics:in terms of research disciplines,the overall change in research disciplines of proposals,papers,and citations is relatively small,and the number of disciplines involved has slightly increased;in terms of research themes,proposals and proposal-based papers are more consistent in terms of themes,and the research themes of papers are richer compared to proposals,and the themes of citations are more diverse compared with those of the papers,reflecting the wide application of the results of the Large Research Infrastructures;in terms of research teams,the total number of users of Large Research Infrastructures is large,but the number of core users is small,and the core users are usually the countries to which the devices belong and the more developed countries.Based on this,this study puts forward the suggestions applicable to the construction and operation of Large Research Infrastructures in China,such as building an open mode of cooperation and sharing,standardizing the management and operation structure of devices,and improving the personnel training and guarantee system.