2013年10月我在第八届科学计量学与大学评价国际研讨会上的英文发言

武夷山

    2013年10月，第八届科学计量学与大学评价国际研讨会在宁波召开，这次会议的一个特别主题是纪念比利时科学计量学家鲁索教授与中国学者交往合作20周年。会后出版的论文集题为《鲁索与中国科学计量学的发展(第八届科学计量学与大学评价国际研讨会论文集)》（科学出版社，2015）。我在会上的简短发言回顾了鲁索教授与中国科学技术信息研究所的交流合作。

On behalf of the Special Interest Group on Scientometrics and Informetrics under the Chinese Association for Science of Science and Science and Technology Policy, I’d like to extend my most sincere thanks to all the participants to this symposium.

Now, in my another capacity as the deputy director general of ISTIC, I’d like to avail of this opportunity to say something about Prof. Rousseau’s communication or interaction with my institute, ISTIC.

Firstly, Ronald coauthored a paper with my colleagues and myself,  titled “Scientific collaboration in China as reflected in co-authorship”，which has been cited 52 times so far according to Google Scholar. Dr Wang Yan is the first author of this paper, who used to be my colleague in ISTIC and now is the deputy director general of China Science and Technology Exchange Center, an organization under the Ministry of Science and Technology of China. Wang Yan recalled that in August of 2003, during the 4^th COLLNET Conference, which is an event held immediately after the 9th ISSI conference in Beijing, Wang Yan presented a paper titled  “Status of collaboration in science and technology in China as reflected in co-authorship”. After her presentation, Prof Rousseau suggested to her that a journal paper be drafted based on this presentation, and he volunteered to help us to improve the manuscript. Later, Wang Yan had a lot of discussions with Prof. Rousseau through emails, and he made valuable detailed recommendations on literature review, cluster analysis and other aspects, and edited English expression of our manuscript. The manuscript was contributed to Scientometrics magazine in March of 2004, and got accepted soon. It was published in February 2005 issue of Scientometrics. So far it is the most highly cited paper among our internationally published papers. It won’t be a well cited paper without Prof. Rousseau’s involvement.

Secondly, Prof. Rousseau has given many lectures to ISTIC audience. I failed to keep an accurate record, but he made at least 4 presentations at ISTIC premises in recent 10 years, not including his other presentations in the events organized by ISTIC. These 4 lectures were given in April of 2004, January of 2008, January of 2009, and January of 2012, respectively, involving such topics as sociological aspects of scientific research,  h-index, h-index and h-type indices, crises in scientometrics, and so on. All these presentations left deep impressions upon our audience, especially our post-graduate students in information science among the audience.

Thirdly, Professor Rousseau sits in the editorial committee of the Journal of the China Society for Scientific and Technical Information, which is the Chinese counterpart to JASIST in USA. I am the chief editor of this journal. I should say that he is the most conscientious and responsible member of our twenty members in editorial committee. Sometimes he points out some errors in  the English titles, bylines or abstracts of our journal. Sometimes he requests the email contact of certain authors from us and he would discuss with these authors on issues of common academic interest. Such authors always feel it a great honor to get his or her paper noticed by an internationally renowned expert in information science so they will contribute more of their best works to our journal in the future.

I notice that after each email message of Prof. Rousseau, the following sentence is always attached:

“In scientific affairs one can never be too generous.”

I think that this is his motto, and he really puts this motto into action. That’s why he has given so much generous help to our Chinese colleagues. We will hear more of such stories later.

Last but not least, Prof. Egghe and Prof. Rousseau’s book, Introduction to Informetrics, was translated into Chinese and the Chinese version was published by Scientific and Technical Documents Publishing House (STDPH) in 1992. At that time, STDPH was affiliated with ISTIC, now it is an independent press.

Finally， I wish our symposium a complete success and wish the collaboration between Prof. Rousseau and his many Chinese friends more fruitful in the future.

Thank you very much !