Government's COE Program encourages research activities in universities across Japan: Study

Scopus- announced today that Kyoto University is employing the former's data and functions in a study performed by Dr. Takanori Ida, Professor at the Graduate School of Economics - Kyoto University. The study shows how effectively the government's large funding scheme, 21st Century Center of Excellence (COE) Program, encouraged research activities in universities across Japan. Through the use of Scopus as tool to identify all research papers related to this program, he examines whether a fair evaluation of the research output has been done.

This study, co-developed by the Graduate School of Economics - Kyoto University and Elsevier Japan, are gathering a list of research papers authored by 6,000 researchers who participated in the COE program. These papers served as object of study in Dr. Ida's quantitative analysis on the transition of the number of citations published by each researcher supported by the COE fund. By means of this investigation, Dr. Ida aims at capturing statistical evidence of policy effect on large funding. He is giving an interim report on June 25th at Kyoto University, along with the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS).

"As a participant of the program and from an academic point of view, I decided to examine policy effect. I chose Scopus because it has a unique author ID for each researcher and it enables the user to create a list of papers by combining full names or affiliation search. In order to reduce potential troubles with outdated data or lack of data caused by name variation, we have asked each researcher for feedback on their papers. Based on this data, we examine the difference between the number of papers and citations according to subject area; we plan to complete our survey within 2010," said Dr. Ida.

"We are honoured to support Dr. Ida in his research done with the help of Scopus. We will continue to improve Scopus with researchers' feedback, making Scopus a more comprehensive and reliable abstract and citation database," remarked Niels Weertman, Performance & Planning Tools director for Elsevier.