Originally published in the Jornal da Unicamp. Click here to read the original text.
The text by philosopher Isaiah Berlin titled “The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History,” from 1953, revived the Greek adage about the fox and the hedgehog, which suggests that people can be divided into those who pursue many things not so deeply (foxes) and those who dedicate themselves deeply to one big thing (hedgehogs).
This metaphor of behaviors and approaches, initially applied to intellectual types, was soon disseminated and adopted to characterize organizations. Some are more focused and specialized in doing one big thing very well; others are more comprehensive, acting on various fronts.
In this logic, universities should always be understood as foxes, as they deal with the universe of knowledge, with tendencies directed towards different lights, driven by the relentless pursuit of knowledge.
In a competitive world, this is not always the case.
A recent study published in the journal Research Policy analyzed the behavior of about 4,800 universities in 176 countries, based on scientific publications (more than 66 million publications) between 1990 and 2017 in a dozen fields of knowledge.[1]
The study applies concepts from ecology to define the functioning dynamics of knowledge areas on a global scale. The key concept is that of the ecosystem.
The authors argue that the research areas and fields of knowledge for which universities are recognized can be explained by models borrowed from ecology. For example, the areas would be organized as emerging loci that house communities of one or more species, forming networks, like birds occupying islands in an archipelago and interacting with each other.
They use the Nestedness metric based on overlap and decreasing fill as a way to measure interactions and distributions in a network.[2]
Analyzing the metadata and citations of publications through the lens of nestedness and comparing them with university rankings, the authors suggest that universities will be recognized by the degree of nestedness in their areas of knowledge (there would be a positive correlation).
Universities with greater nestedness in a larger number of knowledge areas are the most recognized and stand out the most in rankings (in this case, the ARWU ranking was used). Up to this point, the authors might be measuring things similar to those of the rankings.
But the main finding of the study is primarily prospective: the historical evolution of nestedness measures allows predicting in which subareas a university might stand out in the future. In practical terms, the method could be a tool for planning and managing a university in building its reputation on a global scale – but applicable in any context. It’s worth checking out.
Another study, this time conducted in Brazil by the Federal Comptroller General’s Office in 2023, analyzed the participation of the 69 Brazilian federal universities in technological production and innovation generation.[3] The study was based on primary data collection from the universities and brought interesting results. Secondary data on scientific and technological production were also later collected and analyzed.[4]
Among the various findings, one stands out: there is great variability among federal universities regarding scientific production, technological production, and innovation, even considering the time of existence, size, and location.
Both older and larger universities, as well as newer and smaller ones, are distributed among groups with higher and lower measures for these indicators.
There are newer and smaller federal universities with indicators as high or higher compared to some of the country’s most traditional ones; just as there are cases of new and traditional institutions, large and small, with very low indicators. It is noteworthy that geographic location is not a significant differentiator: there are universities with superior performance outside the Southeast and South regions.
Overall, the measures of scientific production per faculty member have relatively low medians, both in publications (0.25 per faculty member/year) and in impact weighted by the area of knowledge and time of publication (0.81, with 1 being equal to the global average measured on the Scival platform). This occurs for both new and traditional universities.
It is interesting to note that some of the more recent universities outside the Southeast/South axis have achieved high indicators of technological production (measured by patents filed). For example, when considering technological production per faculty member per year of the institution’s existence, none of the top four is in the Southeast/South axis: three are in the Northeast (one of them in first place by any criterion) and one in the North region.
This dispersion of performance and profiles of universities calls for further studies.
A hypothesis to be tested is that newer institutions outside the Southeast/South geographic axis have planning and direction and are beginning to gain a reputation for it, already emerging as “hedgehogs.”
The fact is that more and more universities are standing out for planning their growth, their breadth, their connections. Having good faculty and researchers is no longer enough to stand out. All universities have them.
We need to know more and better what makes us better and more recognized. First nationally, then regionally and globally. Indicators and methods abound, let’s research.
[1] Charles J. Gomez, Dahlia Lieberman, Elina I. Mäkinen. Hedgehogs, foxes, and global science ecosystems: Decoding universities’ research profiles across fields with nested ecological networks. Research Policy 53 (2024) 105040.
[2] The concept of entropy (Shannon entropy) is also used: maximum entropy would correspond to the recognition of a university in many areas of knowledge; minimum entropy, to recognition in only one area.
[4] This data collection and analysis was conducted by the Laboratory for Studies on Research and Innovation Organization (Lab-Geopi).