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Chapters in cross-country analysis of science
Macháček, Vít ; Srholec, Martin (advisor) ; Münich, Daniel (referee) ; Lariviere, Vincent (referee) ; van Leeuwen, Thed (referee)
Vít Macháček Chapters in a cross-country analysis of science Dissertation Thesis Prague, October 25th, 2023 Abstract The dissertation consists of three independent chapters: Chapter 1 - Predatory publishing in Scopus: Evidence on cross-country differences - presents evidence on how predatory journals have infiltrated research systems across various countries. The chapter builds on data from the Scopus database in combination with the content of the so-called Beall's list. Based on this data we identify 324 potentially predatory journals. Then we compare the number of papers in these journals with the total number of papers for each country. The results reveal considerable heterogeneity across countries. While the most affected countries - Kazakhstan and Indonesia - published 17 % of their output in the journals indexed on Beall's list, the share was below 1 % in developed countries. The second chapter - Researchers' institutional mobility - bibliometric evidence on academic inbreeding and internationalization - analyzes researchers' career paths at 1,130 universities included in the Leiden Ranking 2020. Researchers affiliated with one of these universities and publishing in 2018 were split into categories according to the affiliation stated on their earliest publication: i) insiders published their first...
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Essays on the impact of technological change on economic structure
Pleticha, Petr ; Srholec, Martin (advisor) ; Bajgar, Matěj (referee) ; Goedhuys, Micheline (referee) ; Lábaj, Martin (referee)
Interní Essays on the Impact of Technological Change on Economic Structure Abstract This dissertation investigates the interplay between technological change and economic structure. Welcomed technological change sometimes brings changes to the structure of the economy which introduces not so welcomed economic frictions. On the other hand, economic structure can foster or hinder technological change. This thesis focuses mainly on structural changes such as R&D financing and global value chain (GVC) integration potentially translating into economic productivity. In Chapter 2, I show that business R&D spending exerts both direct and indirect positive effects on value added. Nevertheless, the heterogeneity of the returns to R&D has seldom been examined. Using detailed sectoral data from Czechia over the period 1995-2015, this study finds that privately funded business R&D has both direct and spillover effects, but that the publicly funded part of business R&D only leads to spillovers. The results further suggest that both upstream and downstream spillovers matter, regardless of the source of funding, and that during the period studied, R&D returns were heavily affected by the economic crisis. Lastly, private R&D offers significant returns only after reaching a critical mass, while the effects of public R&D...
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Differences in the costs of research in higher education across scientific fields: how different are they from „KENs“ in teaching?
Srholec, Martin
Much has been said and written recently about low wages in the social sciences and humanities. Academics have demonstrated in the streets about it, and there has even been talk of a strike. Although a solution seems to be out of sight, one positive outcome cannot be denied. Discussion has finally begun on whether the so-called „koeficienty ekonomické náročnosti“ (KEN), on the base of which the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (MEYS) distributes the main part of the subsidy for teaching in higher education over the past thirty years needs to be updated. This study compares the dispersion of KENs with the differences in costs of the academic activity closest to higher education teaching, which is undoubtedly research and development (R&D). We are not attempting to recalculate the KENs - which would be desirable, but is not feasible with the data and resources available to us - but at least to approximate the extent to which current KENs differ from the costs observed in R&D.
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Are subsidies to business R&D effective? Regression discontinuity evidence from the TA CR ALFA programme
Bajgar, Matěj ; Srholec, Martin
Governments subsidise business research and experimental development (R&D) to promote development of the economy, because externalities and information asymmetries inherent to the innovation process make private funding of these activities fall short of what is socially desirable. Nevertheless, how effective such subsidies are and whether they achieve their goals is an open question that needs to be studied empirically. This study leverages the state-of-the-art method of regression discontinuity (RD) that allows us to come very close to making causal inferences about the effects of subsidies, to find out whether the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic’s (TA CR) ALFA programme stimulated new business R&D inputs, outputs, and positive economic impacts that would not have happened otherwise.
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Public-private collaboration in research and development in the framework of regional innovation systems.
Deďo, Peter ; Hána, David (advisor) ; Srholec, Martin (referee)
The present thesis discusses the topic of public-private collaboration in research and development in Czech regions. A bibliometric keyword analysis was used in this elaboration, based on which a theoretical framework of the thesis was compiled, presenting the most important theoretical concepts related to the interaction of private companies with universities and research institutes. The thesis has two main objectives, based on which it aims to reveal the nature of the size of partial subsystems of regional innovation systems in Czech NUTS 3 regions in relation to economic and innovation performance and to confront the thesis on the link between the innovation performance of regions and the degree of interconnectedness of subsystems on data of collaborative projects in Czechia. The conducted analyses showed a negative dependence of the size of the private R&D segment and innovation performance. It turned out that in the conditions of Czechia the statement that developed regions with a developed innovation system show a larger relative representation of the private segment is not valid. The second finding supports the thesis of a correlation between the intensity of collaboration between research institutions and firms and their innovation performance. Keywords: regional innovation systems,...
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Where do universities recruit researchers from?
Macháček, Vít ; Srholec, Martin
Where do university researchers come from? How many remain at the same institution where they began doing research? How many have come from elsewhere? Does the tendency to employ researchers originally from the same place markedly differ across universities from different countries? How does this tendency differ between disciplines and over time? From the author affiliations in the Scopus citation database, we found how many researchers are currently based at the same university they were affiliated with at the beginning of their research careers. If their early articles were published under a different organization, we traced whether this was in the same country or abroad. We do not directly measure ‘academic inbreeding’ in the sense of universities hiring their own graduates, because due to differences in publishing practices, a researcher’s early articles may not have been published under his or her alma mater. However, in many disciplines, particularly natural sciences, this is likely to be the case. Our findings are presented for eleven large disciplines and our comparison covers eighteen major universities in fourteen countries, including the new EU member states of the Visegrad group: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary. Generalizations are difficult to make, as each discipline looks a bit different. Overall, however, the most inward-looking institutions in employing researchers prove to be the national flagship universities in the Visegrad countries. In contrast, hiring researchers originally from outside is most prevalent in the leading universities in the United States and the United Kingdom, such as Princeton and Oxford. The Visegrad universities appear to be similar in their tendency to employ researchers originally from the same university to KU Leuven, the University of Vienna and Lund University in many disciplines. The main dividing line does not seem to follow the traditional ‘East vs. West’ differences, but rather tends to highlight the gap between the institutions at the top of global university rankings and the rest. Not surprisingly, the flipside of employing researchers whose research careers began at the same university is low internationalization. Cosmopolitan universities in smaller countries have the highest shares of researchers with foreign’ origins, particularly ETH Zürich, which contrasts with a strong national focus in universities in the Visegrad countries. This analysis is original and its results are not available elsewhere. The findings should be of interest not only to research managers, academics and doctoral students who are based at the universities in the study, but also to policy-makers and the broader public. Human resources management issues tend to be often underrated in research evaluations, although they are a key factor in the development of universities.
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Foreign Direct Investment and Economic Growth
Hayat, Arshad ; Cahlík, Tomáš (advisor) ; Bruno, Randolph Luca (referee) ; Semerák, Vilém (referee) ; Srholec, Martin (referee)
Foreign Direct Investment and Economic Growth Abstract This dissertation consists of three empirical research papers on FDI inflow and economic growth and the role the host country natural resources abundance and institutional quality play in altering the FDI-growth relationship. The first paper (chapter 2) investigates the FDI-growth relationship and the impact of the host country's natural resource abundance on the FDI-growth relationship. The paper uses a dataset of 117 countries over the period 1991-2016 and use system GMM estimation method and found a positive and significant impact of FDI inflows on the economic growth of the host country. However, FDI-induced growth was found to be more pronounced in the low-and middle-income countries compared to high-income countries. Further, FDI-induced economic growth is slowed down by the increase in the size of the natural resource sector both in the low-and middle-income as well as high- income countries. The direct negative impact of natural resources on growth was found to be stronger in the low-and middle-income countries compared to the high-income countries. Building on the results of the first paper (chapter 3), the second paper estimated a fixed effect threshold for the level of natural resources and found that FDI inflow has a stronger positive impact...
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Predatory publications in Scopus: evidence on cross-country differences
Macháček, Vít ; Srholec, Martin
The paper maps the infiltration of so-called “predatory” scholarly journals into the citation database Scopus. Using the names of “potential, possible, or probable” predatory journals and publishers on Beall’s lists, we derived ISSNs of the respective journals from Ulrichsweb and searched Scopus with it. A total of 324 matched journals with 164 thousand documents indexed in Scopus over 2015-2017, making up a share of 2.8 % of the total articles have been identified. An analysis of cross-country differences in the tendency to publish in these journals reveals that overall the most affected are middle-income countries in Asia and North Africa. Kazakhstan is the country with the largest tendency to publish in predatory journals (18 %). More than 5 % is reported in 20 countries, including large countries such as Indonesia (18 %), Malaysia (11 %), India (10 %), or Nigeria (7 %). Neither developed countries are resistant to predatory publishing. More than 16 000 “potentially predatory” articles were published by authors from United States (0.67 %).
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Analysis of contractual research according to knowledge bases in Czech regional innovation systems
Štěpán, Marek ; Blažek, Jiří (advisor) ; Srholec, Martin (referee)
This work is focused on the analysis of contractual research in Czechia. The aim of the thesis is to clarify the role and nature of contractual research in the Czech regions. The theoretical framework is grounded in the theory of regional innovation systems and in the concept of knowledge bases. Particular attention is paid to the specific type of cooperation between the research institutions and firms. Through data analysis and network charts, regions are compared based on different characteristics. It turns out that the role and nature of contractual research across regions varies profoundly. Differences are found in the size and number of actors involved in contractual research. The embeddedness of companies in the transfer of knowledge, the openness of regional innovation systems and the field of specialisation are also studied. Using localization quotients, the intensity of representation of knowledge bases in the NUTS 3 regions is measured. Some regions are strongly oriented towards one of the bases, while in other regions the specialization is not pronounced. Finally, network analyses performed according to differentiated knowledge bases, identify the key actors in contractual research.
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Local journals in Scopus
Macháček, Vít ; Srholec, Martin
The study provides answers to these questions in particular. What are the characteristics of Czech and Slovak journals indexed in Scopus? Which journals appear to be only local and which are, in contrast, international? How many predominantly local journals are published in comparable countries? Are there also journals which publish a large share of articles that originate from the home institution of their publisher? How does this vary by type of publisher and field of research? Who publishes research articles in these journals and why? Why do certain academics devote so much time to this type of publishing? What does this mean for research evaluation? What should be done about it in the future?
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