arXiv subjects

Alonso Rodríguez-Navarro

Publications and source records attributed to Alonso Rodríguez-Navarro.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Improving disruptive research in the EU: why strengthening European Research Council grants alone is not enough

Disruptive innovation in the EU is not sufficiently competitive; this weakness puts at risk the social benefits that its citizens take for granted. This report argues that, in addition to addressing structural and economic deficiencies, the EU must improve disruptive research to strengthen its disruptive innovation capacity. Currently, the level of disruptive research is too low. Using graphene research as an example, for which the EU has a specific programme, this report shows that Germany, France, Italy, and Spain cannot compete with Singapore. Even more concerning, the research funded by the European Research Council on graphene fails to compete with research conducted in Singapore. Similarly, the EU is far from competing with the USA or China. A few examples in this report and cited references evidence that the situation is similar in other technologies. To overcome this situation, the EU must adopt drastic changes in research policy. However, such changes face a vanity culture among policymakers and, perhaps, scientists who have been proclaiming an inexistent research excellence for decades. Without drastic changes, the prospect of the EU becoming a technological leader at the level of the USA and China cannot be considered realistic.

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arXiv2026

A 'normal' research trap limits scientific breakthroughs and disruptive innovation in the European Union

Europe is experiencing prolonged slow growth, resulting in part from a shortage of disruptive innovations that has locked its industry into a middle technology trap. Although greater investment and deeper integration among EU member states are widely proposed as solutions, this study argues that these measures alone will be insufficient if breakthrough research is not improved. In research systems, breakthrough discoveries depend on both size and efficiency. The EU research system is constrained by a dual problem: it is substantially smaller than China's and significantly less efficient than that of the United States. As a result, it generates too few breakthrough discoveries to sustain competitiveness in high-technology sectors. Compared with the United Kingdom, the persistent underperformance of the EU's largest research systems, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain has long been evident, yet meaningful reforms have not been implemented. Meanwhile, China's capacity for breakthrough research continues to expand rapidly. Despite sustained academic criticism, the European Commission has largely based its research policy on overly optimistic assessments of research performance that satisfy policymakers and researchers but fail to address structural weaknesses. Achieving a more balanced global technological landscape and strengthening Europe's competitiveness will require not only greater integration among member states but also a substantial improvement in research efficiency. Without such gains, the EU is unlikely to attract the private investment needed for high technology industries, while additional public spending risks diverting resources from other sectors without addressing the underlying causes of Europe's innovation deficit.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2024

Distinct citation distributions complicate research evaluations. A single indicator that universally reveals research efficiency cannot be formulated

Purpose: Analyze the diversity of citation distributions to publications in different research topics to investigate the accuracy of size-independent, rank-based indicators. Top percentile-based indicators are the most common indicators of this type, and the evaluations of Japan are the most evident misjudgments. Design/methodology/approach: The distributions of citations to publications from countries and in journals in several research topics were analyzed along with the corresponding global publications using histograms with logarithmic binning, double rank plots, and normal probability plots of log-transformed numbers of citations. Findings: Size-independent, top percentile-based indicators are accurate when the global ranks of local publications fit a power law, but deviations in the least cited papers are frequent in countries and occur in all journals with high impact factors. In these cases, a single indicator is misleading. Comparisons of proportions of uncited papers are the best way to predict these deviations. Research limitations: The study is fundamentally analytical; its results describe mathematical facts that are self-evident. Practical implications: Respectable institutions, such as the OECD, European Commission, US National Science Board, and others, produce research country rankings and individual evaluations using size-independent percentile indicators that are misleading in many countries. These misleading evaluations should be discontinued because they cause confusion among research policymakers and lead to incorrect research policies. Originality/value: Studies linking the lower tail of citation distribution, including uncited papers, to percentile research indicators have not been performed previously. The present results demonstrate that studies of this type are necessary to find reliable procedures for research assessments.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2019

The USA is an indisputable world leader in medical and biotechnological research

A country's research success can be assessed from the power law function that links country and world rank numbers when publications are ordered by their number of citations; a similar function describes the distribution of country papers in world percentiles. These functions allow calculating the ep index and the probability of publishing highly cited papers, which measure the efficiency of the research system and the ability of achieving important discoveries or scientific breakthroughs, respectively. The aim of this paper was to use these metrics and other parameters derived from the percentile-based power law function to investigate research success in the USA, the EU, and other countries in hot medical, biochemical, and biotechnological topics. The results show that, in the investigated fields, the USA is scientifically ahead of all countries and that its research is likely to produce approximately 80% of the important global breakthroughs in the research topics investigated in this study. EU research has maintained a constant weak position with reference to USA research over the last 30 years.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2019

Might Europe one day again be a global scientific powerhouse? Analysis of ERC publications suggests it will not be possible without changes in research policy

Numerous EU documents praise the excellence of EU research without empirical evidence and against academic studies. We investigated research performance in two fields of high socioeconomic importance, advanced technology and basic medical research, in two sets of European countries, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain (GFIS), and the UK, the Netherlands, and Switzerland (UKNCH). Despite historical and geographical proximity, research performance in GFIS is much lower than in UKNCH, and well below the world average. Funding from the European Research Council (ERC) greatly improves performance both in GFIS and UKNCH, but ERC-GFIS publications are less cited than ERC-UKNCH publications. We conclude that research performance in GFIS and in other EU countries is intrinsically low even when it is generously funded. The technological and economic future of the EU depends on improving research, which requires structural changes in research policy within the EU, and in most EU countries.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2019

Evaluating research and researchers by the journal impact factor: is it better than coin flipping?

The journal impact factor (JIF) is the average of the number of citations of the papers published in a journal, calculated according to a specific formula; it is extensively used for the evaluation of research and researchers. The method assumes that all papers in a journal have the same scientific merit, which is measured by the JIF of the publishing journal. This implies that the number of citations measures scientific merits but the JIF does not evaluate each individual paper by its own number of citations. Therefore, in the comparative evaluation of two papers, the use of the JIF implies a risk of failure, which occurs when a paper in the journal with the lower JIF is compared to another with fewer citations in the journal with the higher JIF. To quantify this risk of failure, this study calculates the failure probabilities, taking advantage of the lognormal distribution of citations. In two journals whose JIFs are ten-fold different, the failure probability is low. However, in most cases when two papers are compared, the JIFs of the journals are not so different. Then, the failure probability can be close to 0.5, which is equivalent to evaluating by coin flipping.

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