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Abstract: It is scientists who carry out scientific research. Particularly, scientists with outstanding research achievements are called "star scientists." Star scientists have not only an academic impact but also can have a substantial impact on society and the economy as previous works have suggested. However, there are no clear consensuses on how to detect star scientists. This paper proposes a method to detect star scientist from multiple viewpoints, including not only academic articles but also patents. We empirically show what classification of star scientist and the distribution in Japan based on our method. We also explain the transition of the distribution of star scientists in Japan for 30 years before and behind "Science and technology basic law" in 1995. Additionally, we focus on one of the categorized group of star scientists, all-rounder star group, who has both outstanding academic and practical achievements.
Keywords: Star scientist; Innovation; Academic article; Patent; Science and technology basic law, Pasteur-type; Bohr-type; Edison-type; Science and technology policy; Knowledge transfer
1 Introduction
Scientific research is an important source of innovation. The outcomes of scientific research are often transferred to enterprises, becoming advanced technologies. These technologies are the source of developing new products and services, which satisfy the market needs. Meeting the needs of the market will ultimately lead to improvements in national welfare. Therefore, it is important to produce revolutionary scientific research outcomes and transfer the knowledge from the outcomes to the industry for policy.
It is "scientists" who carry out scientific research. We think that a scientist is an important unit to analyze a mechanism producing scientific knowledge and transferring it to the industry. Particularly, scientists with outstanding research achievements are called "star scientists." Star scientists have not only an academic impact but also can have a substantial impact on society and the economy in that they can create research achievements leading to innovative inventions or innovation in general. Therefore, we believe that research focused on star scientist is an important topic to explain how we can get revolutionary scientific research and how we can transfer the research outcomes to the industry.
However, there are no clear consensuses on how to detect star scientists. There is no doubt that they have outstanding academic achievements represented by papers, etc. However, we...