Abstract

This article compares the growth rates of Web of Science indexed research publications in 11 European countries from 2000 to 2015. The growth of publication output in the Czech Republic was very fast: the annual production increased more than threefold. However, the number of articles increased only 2.6-fold, whereas the number of proceedings papers increased eightfold. During 2013–15 almost one-third of the papers published by researchers based in the Czech Republic were proceedings papers, a much higher share than in any other benchmark country. Such a high share is undesirable, because proceedings papers are generally much less often cited than journal articles. The growth of the number of proceedings papers is fastest in 17 fields belonging to the social sciences which usually do not hold proceedings papers in high regard. Our analysis shows that this undesirable development started after the introduction of national performance-based research funding system (PRFS) in the Czech Republic. Hence, the effort made to publish proceedings papers seems to reflect an optimization strategy in the light of the PRFS. In the Czech PRFS, proceedings papers have been rewarded point values similar to articles in refereed journals and a large portion of the institutional funding is allocated according to the evaluation results. As a consequence of very fast growth of proceedings papers in the social sciences, the university institutional funding in these fields has grown faster than in other fields. In conclusion, the fast growth of proceedings papers represents an adaptive behavior to the context of the PRFS.

中文翻译：

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捷克共和国非典型领域议事论文数量的快速增长可能是基于国家绩效的研究资助系统的结果

摘要

本文比较了2000年至2015年在11个欧洲国家中用Web of Science编制索引的研究出版物的增长率。捷克共和国的出版物产出增长非常快：年产量增长了三倍以上。但是，文章数量仅增加了2.6倍，而会议论文的数量却增加了8倍。在2013-15年度期间，捷克共和国研究人员发表的论文中几乎有三分之一是会议论文，所占比例比任何其他基准国家都高得多。如此高的份额是不希望的，因为会议论文的引用通常比期刊论文少。在属于社会科学领域的17个领域中，诉讼论文数量的增长最快，而这些领域通常不会高度重视诉讼论文。我们的分析表明，这种不良发展是在捷克共和国引入基于国家绩效的研究资助系统（PRFS）之后开始的。因此，根据PRFS，发表会议论文的努力似乎反映了一种优化策略。在捷克PRFS中，会议论文的奖励分值与推荐期刊的文章相近，并且很大一部分机构资金是根据评估结果分配的。由于社会科学领域议论文的快速增长，这些领域的大学机构资金增长速度快于其他领域。总之，会议论文的快速增长代表了PRFS的适应性行为。