On August 30th, the iSchool of Sun Yat-sen University and Asia-Pacific iSchools Next Generation Committee (AP iNext) successfully held a young scholars’ forum. The theme of this forum was Frontier Research in Informetrics and Scientific Evaluation. Over 170 participants from the Asia-pacific region joined the forum.
Professor Yang Zhang, Dean of the iSchool of Sun Yat-sen University presented the welcoming speech, followed by Dr. Di Wang, Chair of AP iNext. Associate professor Houqiang Yu of Sun Yat-sen University organized and chaired the forum. Five young scholars from different iSchools in the AP region were invited to give presentations about their recent studies related to informetrics and scientific innovation.
Assistant professor Yi Bu from Peking University, with the topic of "Pandemics are Catalysts of Scientific Novelty: Evidence from COVID-19", elaborated on the influence of COVID-19 on scientific outputs, especially scientific novelty. His research explored how scientific novelty, first-time collaboration, and international collaboration evolved before and during COVID-19 by using a DID approach. At the same time, he shared the ways of using multiple databases to search articles related to the pandemic, extract bio-entities and calculate scientific novelty.
Assistant professor Hiroyoshi Ito from the University of Tsukuba gave a talk named "Data mining for social networks: towards modeling, forecasting, controlling”. He developed a general control scheme to automatically intervene and predict the changes in network structure and node’s attribute values and carried out experiments using synthetic datasets and real-world datasets. This research work not only innovates the method but also could further predict the social trend, market sizes, and the mechanism of human relationships, which could well meet the actual needs.
Associate professor Ying Huang from Wuhan University, with the topic of “Exploring Technology Evolution Pathways to Facilitate Technology Management: from a Technology Life Cycle Perspective”, defined the meaning of Technology Life Circle (TLC), introduced two traditional identification methods, such as growth-curve approach and multiple indicators approaches, and proposed a new method——dynamic patent citation networks, which realized the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, technological breakthrough and future prediction.
Assistant researcher Chao Min from Nanjing University explained the interaction between scientific breakthroughs and the knowledge structure of science in detail with the topic of " Predict Scientific Breakthrough based on Knowledge Structure Variations", and reminded us that disciplinary differences existed in knowledge structure, confirming the negative prediction effect of direct citation counts on scientific breakthroughs, but we would also pay attention to the influence of time.
Associate professor Haoyang Song from Sun Yat-sen University reported the recent research results and progress on the catalytic capacity of technological innovation (CCTI), together with Houqiang Yu discussing the frontier issues of informetrics and scientific innovation with all participants.
As emphasized and concluded by Professor Yang Zhang, this forum not only help outstanding young talents to share research frontiers and build a high-level academic exchange platform but also cultivate reserve forces for consolidating discipline development in Asia-Pacific region.