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Abstract This paper maps research outcomes and identifies spillover effects at a US University Research Center (URC) that offers user facilities for nanotechnology research. We use scientometric and network science approaches to analyze measures of topical orientation, productivity, impact, and collaboration applied to URC-related Web of Science abstract publications records. A focus is on the analysis of spillover effects on external organizations (i.e., non-affiliated users). Our findings suggest the URC’s network relies on external organizations acting as brokers, to provide access to the facilities to other external organizations. Analysis of heterophily indicates that collaboration among internal and external organizations is enhanced by the facilities, while articles written by a mix of co-authors affiliated with internal and external organizations are likely to be more cited. These results provide insights on how URCs with user facilities can create conditions for diverse collaboration and greater research impact. 

The ability to identify scholarly authors is central to bibliometric analysis. Efforts to disambiguate author names using algorithms or national or societal registries become less effective with increases in the number of publications from China and other nations where shared and similar names are prevalent. This work analyzes the adoption and integration of an open source, cross-national identification system, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID system (ORCID), in Web of Science metadata. Results at the article level show greater adoption, to date, of the ORCID iD in Europe as compared with Asia and the US. Focusing analysis on individual highly cited researchers with the shared Chinese surname “Wang,” results indicate wide scope for greater adoption of ORCID. The mechanisms for integrating ORCID iDs into articles also come into question in an analysis of co-authors of one particular highly cited researcher who have varying percentages of articles with ORCID iDs attached. These results suggest that systematic variations in adoption and integration of ORCID into publication metadata should be considered in any bibliometric analysis based on it.