International collaboration in science: Participation by the Asian giants

Science in the last few years has become increasingly global and collaborative. The number of internationally coauthored papers has been increasing steadily. We have counted internationally jointly authored papers involving authors from the advanced countries and the Third World countries, usingSCI 1991. We have looked at the number of papers resulting from collaboration among authors residing in the countries of the North (e.g. EC and OECD countries), authors residing in the South (e.g. India and Bangladesh, Mexico and Brazil, China and Pakistan) and papers resulting from collaboration between authors residing in the countries of the South and the North (e.g. India and UK, China and USA). Despite its late start, China has published many more collaborative papers with most Asian countries and the advanced countries of the West except the UK than India — confirming the effectiveness of the open door policy of post-Mao China. Both India and China collaborate with USA much more often in physics than in other areas, followed by clinical medicine. However, India collaborates more with USA in chemistry than China. In Indo-US and Sino-US collaborations, collaborating institutions are mostly universities and institutes of higher learning in India and USA, whereas in China several institutions under the Academies also take part. The percentage of collaborative papers involving authors from India is even smaller than the percentage of journal articles originating from India. In general, papers resulting from international collaboration appear in better journals and are cited more often than papers that are the outcome of local research.Paper presented at the Fourth International Conference on Bibliometrics, Informetrics and Scientometrics in Berlin (Germany), September 11–15, 1993.     

Bibliometric analysis of complementary and alternative medicine research over three decades

This study applies bibliometric analysis to investigate the quantity and citation impact of scientific papers in the field of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). The data are collected from 19 CAM journals in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-E) database during 1980–2009, and 17,002 papers are identified for analysis. The study analyzes the document types, geographical and institutional distribution of the authorship, including international scientific collaboration. This study suggests that the major type of document is original article. The CAM papers are mostly published by North America, East Asia, and European countries, of which publications authored in East Asia are cited most. Country-wise, major contributors of CAM papers are from USA, People’s Republic of China, India, England and Germany. India has the highest CPP value, attracting high attentions in CAM community. This article also finds that international co-authorship in the CAM field has increased rapidly during this period. In addition, internationally collaborated publications generate higher citation impact than papers published by authors from single country. Finally, the research identifies productive institutions in CAM, and China Medical University located in Taiwan is the most productive organization.     

An exploratory study on collaboration profiles of Chinese publications in Molecular Biology

Summary As science has become much complex and sophisticated, greater attention is paid to scientific collaboration within recent bibliometric studies. A total of 6538 publications in Molecular Biology from China during 1999-2003, as indicated by data collected from database of the Science Citation Index Expanded - Web Edition, have been analyzed. A large proportion of publications have been authored by more than 3 scientists. The composition of publications grouped by collaboration patterns are: 1.58% non-collaborative papers, 42.43% local papers, 34.37% domestic papers and 21.62% international papers on average during the studied period. The countries with which China has collaborative links and their frequencies are all itemized to indicate the intensity of international collaboration in the field of Molecular Biology. Finally, the differences between the impact of wholly indigenous papers and internationally collaborative papers have been compared. The results indicate that foreign collaboration does contribute a lot to the improvement of the mainstream connectivity and international visibility.     

Knowledge mapping of the Iranian nanoscience and technology: a text mining approach

Nanoscience and technology (NST) is a relatively new interdisciplinary scientific domain, and scholars from a broad range of different disciplines are contributing to it. However, there is an ambiguity in its structure and in the extent of multidisciplinary scientific collaboration of NST. This paper investigates the multidisciplinary patterns of Iranian research in NST based on a selection of 1,120 ISI??indexed articles published during 1974?C2007. Using text mining techniques, 96 terms were identified as the main terms of the Iranian publications in NST. Then the scientific structure of the Iranian NST was mapped through multidimensional scaling, based upon the co-occurrence of the main terms in the academic publications. The results showed that the NST domain in Iranian publications has a multidisciplinary structure which is composed of different fields, such as pure physics, analytical chemistry, chemistry physics, material science and engineering, polymer science, biochemistry and new emerging topics.     

Global trends in sediment-related research in earth science during 1992–2011: a bibliometric analysis

An effective bibliometric analysis based on the Science Citation Index-Expanded database was conducted to evaluate earth science sediment-related research from different perspectives from 1992 to 2011. The geographical influences of the authors were subsequently visualized. Sediment-related research experienced notable growth in the past two decades. Multidisciplinary geosciences and environmental sciences were the two major categories, and Environmental Science and Technology was the most active journal. Damsté JSS and Schouten S were the two most prolific authors with the most high-quality articles and the greatest geographic influences. The major spatial clusters of authors overlapped quite well with regions with high economic growth in the USA, Western Europe, and Eastern Asia. The USA was the largest contributor in global sediment research with the most independent and collaborative papers, and the dominance of the USA was also confirmed in the national collaboration network. National academic output was positively associated with its economic capability. The Chinese Academy of Sciences, the US Geological Survey and the Russian Academy of Sciences were the three major contributing institutions. A keywords analysis determined that “evolution”, “water”, “soil(s)”, and “model” were consistent hotspots in sediment research. Several keywords such as “organic-matter”, “Holocene”, “dynamics”, “erosion”, “sediment transport”, “climate”, and “heavy-metal” received dramatically increased attention during the study period. Through co-word analysis, significant differences were observed between environmental and multidisciplinary geosciences in terms of the most frequently used keywords, and the prevalent research topic patterns were ascertained.     

A bibliometric investigation on China–UK collaboration in food and agriculture

Based on data from the Web of Science, international collaboration between China and the UK in food and agriculture has been investigated from various perspectives. A new method for classifying cross- or multi-disciplinary fields has been created. The comparative study focuses on China’s collaboration with selected countries including the USA, the UK, Germany and Japan. The newly proposed Integrated Impact Indicator (I3) is applied to evaluate publication impact. Although China’s total publications dropped in 2010, its research productivity in food and agriculture nevertheless kept growing and international collaboration, reflected by the number of publications, also increased in an exponential way. The growth rate of China’s internationally collaborated publications was lower than that of China’s total publications. The USA, Japan, Canada, Australia, the UK and Germany are the top partners for Chinese researchers in this field. China-UK joint publications overall increased although their share in China’s total internationally collaborated publications decreased. To China, collaborating with the USA, the UK and Germany, instead of Japan, seems to offer an option to raise impact. The rapidly growing number of international publications and impact of Chinese research in food and agriculture offers great collaboration potential for the country. The fact that the average impact of China-UK collaborative publications is higher than the domestic publications of either country implies that collaboration benefits both sides as has been found in several other studies.     

An overview of the Web of Science record of scientific publications (2004–2013) from Nepal: focus on disciplinary diversity and international collaboration

This study attempts to use bibliometry as a tool for exploration of the passage of development of the science and technology through analysis of the scientific publications from a developing country by taking into account its state of higher education and the unique political, economic and geo-bio-environmental conditions. It deals with Nepal considering its scientific output during 1966–2016 reflected as publications indexed in the Web of Science Database. Preliminary examination of the publication record for Nepal reveals a number of the following characteristics: (1) low volume, negligible growth and lack of distinct trend until 1989; (2) a marked growth followed by stagnation linked to political instability during the next 15 years; and (3) recovery and accelerated growth thereafter. Research publications during 2004–2013 increased thrice compared to 1994–2003, with expansion and shifts in disciplinary profile expressed in Essential Science Indicators 22 fields. Detailed bibliometric analysis of the 2004–2013 publications (3011 articles and reviews) from Nepal suggests the citation impact of about the world average, but very high (76%) average international co-authorship. The disciplinary profile is diverse judging from seven most productive fields (clinical medicine, plant and animal science, environment/ecology, geosciences, agricultural sciences, and chemistry) with 4–40% national disciplinary share. Clinical medicine, geosciences and agricultural sciences exhibit relatively high impact. Fields with the smaller share (< 3%), such as molecular biology and genetics, economics and business, psychiatry and psychology, materials science, and biology and biochemistry, exhibit citation impact distinctly higher than the world average. Publications from Nepal show the presence of a vast international collaborative network that is dominated by authors affiliated to institutions in the USA, India, UK, Japan, South Korea and Germany. Based on the analysis of the disciplinary diversity and the national versus global relative disciplinary shares, Nepal’s publication profile is inferred to be a hybrid of the ‘bio-environmental’ and ‘western’ models. Concerning the state of the development of science and technology in Nepal during 2004–2013, the high dependence on international collaboration in the internationally visible publications in most of the bio-environmental, physico-chemical and engineering fields points to basically a ‘building-up stage’. In clinical medicine (with a large share of public health) and geosciences, however, Nepal has demonstrated research strengths evident from the high citation impact in these fields. Moreover, the available data suggest that significant advances were made in higher education sector in both fields during the last 25 years. Despite the notable negative effect of the prolonged domestic armed political conflict on the research activities and acquisition of new data in the field-based sciences, the post-conflict period shows signs of recovery in both domestic and international collaborations leading to again an accelerated growth in scientific publications.     

Scientific co-operation in Europe and the citation of multinationally authored papers

Under the sponsorship of the U.S. National Science Foundation, CHI Research, Inc. developed the bibliometric indicators for the U.S. National Science Board'sScience Indicators Reports starting withScience Indicators 1972. In the work reported here, for the Commission of the European Communities, CHI has extended the Science Indicators techniques and database to a study of publication, coauthorship and citation within 28 scientific fields related to various European Community programs.Perhaps the most important finding of the research was that internationally coauthored papers — papers authored by scientists affiliated with institutions in more than one EC country — were cited two times as highly as papers authored by scientists working at a single institution within a single country. These EC-EC internationally coauthored papers were cited as highly as EC-Non EC and Non-EC papers. This indicates that the internationally linked European science is of as high impact as any other science in the world.A second key finding was that, after compensating for national scientific size, the degree of international coauthorship did not appear to be particularly dependent upon size. However, linguistic and cultural factors were found to be very strong. The patterns of coauthorship amongst the European countries are far from homogeneous, and are quite heavily affected by linguistic, historical, and cultural factors.Finally, it was found that international coauthorship is increasing steadily, both within and outside of the Community, with some evidence that international cooperation is increasing more rapidly in scientific fields that have been targeted by the Commission.This work has been sponsored by the MONITOR programme of the Commission of the European Communities.     

High-impact papers presented in the subject category of water resources in the essential science indicators database of the institute for scientific information

The Essential Science Indicators (ESI) database is widely used to evaluate institutions and researchers. The objective of this study was to analyze trends and characteristics of papers in the subject category of water resources in the ESI database of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). Distributions of document type, language of publication, scientific output, and publication of journals are reported in this article. Five indicators (the number and ranking of total papers, first-author papers, corresponding-author papers, independent papers, and collaborative papers) were applied to evaluate country, institute, and author performances. In addition, the numbers of authors cited, numbers of institutes cited, numbers of countries cited, and numbers of subject areas cited were also used to evaluate ESI papers. Results showed that 265 papers, all written in English, were listed in 27 journals in the field of water resources. A review paper was more likely to be included in the ESI than a research paper. Journal of Hydrology published the most papers. The USA and UK were the two leading nations. ESI papers published in the US were more likely to involve inter-institutional collaboration than papers published in the UK. The University of Arizona was the most productive institute. Some papers that were almost excluded from the ESI database appear to have consistently received annual high frequencies of citation. Perhaps the 10 year criterion for inclusion in the ESI should be reassessed.     

Hirsch-index for countries based on Essential Science Indicators data

The authors present ranked lists of world’s countries — with main focus on EU countries (together with newly acceeded and candidate countries) — by their h-index on various science fields. As main source of data Thomson Scientific’s Essential Science Indicators (ESI) database was used. EU countries have strong positions in each field but none of them can successfully compete with the USA. The modest position of the newly accessed and candidate countries illustrate the importance of supportive economic and political background in order to achieve scientific success. An attempt is made to fit a recent theoretical model relating the h-index with two traditional scientometric indicators: the number of publications and the mean citation rate.     

Is the United States losing ground in science? A global perspective on the world science system

Based on the Science Citation Index-Expanded web-version, the USA is still by far the strongest nation in terms of scientific performance. Its relative decline in percentage share of publications is largely due to the emergence of China and other Asian nations. In 2006, China has become the second largest nation in terms of the number of publications within this database. In terms of citations, the competitive advantage of the American “domestic market” is diminished, while the European Union (EU) is profiting more from the enlargement of the database over time than the USA. However, the USA is still outperforming all other countries in terms of highly cited papers and citation/publication ratios, and it is more successful than the EU in coordinating its research efforts in strategic priority areas like nanotechnology. In this field, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has become second largest nation in both numbers of papers published and citations behind the USA.     

Mathematics Research in India Today: What Does the Literature Reveal?

Mathematics research in India, as reflected by papers indexed inMathsci 1988–1998, is quantified and mapped. Statistics, quantum theory and general topology are the three subfields contributing the most to India's output in mathematics research, followed by special functions, economics and operations research, and relativity and gravitational theory. Indian Statistical Institute and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research are the two leading publishers of research papers. Unlike in many other fields, Calcutta publishes the largest number of papers in mathematics, followed by Mumbai, New Delhi, Chennai and Bangalore. West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Delhi are the leading states. Researchers from 257 institutions spread over 134 cities/towns have published 17,308 papers in the 11 years. About 92% of these papers have appeared in 877 journals published from 62 countries. Journals published in the USA, UK and the Netherlands are popular with Indian mathematicians. Of the 36 journals that have published at least a hundred papers, 20 are Indian journals of which only two are indexed in Journal Citation Reports. In all, about 38.5% of papers have been published in Indian journals, as against about 70% in agriculture, 55% in life sciences, 33.5% in medicine and 20% in physics. In the later years, there has been a moderate shift to non-Indian journals. Close to 78% of papers have come from universities and colleges and 13% from the institutions under science related departments. Almost all papers in high impact journals are physics related and most of them have come from institutions under the Department of Atomic Energy. Over 15% of the 9760 papers published during 1993–1998 are internationally coauthored. In all of science, as seen from Science Citation Index, 14% of Indian papers were internationally coauthored in 1991 and 17.6% in 1998. The USA, Canada, and Germany are the important collaborating nations, followed by France, Italy, Japan and the UK. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Mapping of Indian computer science research output, 1999�C2008

The research output of India in computer science during 1999?C2008 is analyzed in this paper on several parameters including total research output, its growth, rank and global publication share, citation impact, share of international collaborative papers and major collaborative partner countries and patterns of research communication in most productive journals. It also analyses the characteristics of most productive institutions, authors and high-cited papers. The publications output and impact of India is also compared with China, South Korea, Taiwan and Brazil.     

Exploring the management information systems discipline: a scientometric study of ICIS, PACIS and ASAC

This paper examines the rapid growth of China in the field of nanotechnology and the rise of collaboration between China and the US in this emerging domain. Chinese scientific papers in nanotechnology are analyzed to indicate overall trends, leading fields and the most prolific institutions. Patterns of China–US nanotechnology paper co-authorship are examined over the period 1990–2009, with an analysis of how these patterns have changed over time. The paper combines bibliometric analysis and science mapping. We find rapid development in the number of China–US co-authored nanotechnology papers as well as structural changes in array of collaborative nanotechnology sub-fields. Implications for both China and the US of this evolving relationship are discussed.     

International earth science literature from Turkey — 1970–2005: Trends and possible causes

We investigated the publication trends in the international earth science literature coming out of Turkey in the period of 1970–2005 using the Science Citation Index Expanded database. A database of 2310 earth science publications with at least one of the authors with an address in Turkey was compiled. The number of earth science publications from Turkey shows a very rapid increase starting in the 1990’s in parallel with the increase in the total scientific output of Turkey. In the last decade the annual growth rate has been 16%. There was also a concomitant increase in the number of citations. The causes of the sharp increase in the publication numbers are, in order of importance, changes in the rules of academic promotion and appointment, changes in academic attitudes towards publishing, increasing support for research, financial incentives for publishing, and expansion of higher education. However, the sharp increase in the publication numbers was not accompanied by a similar increase in the impact of the publications as measured by the citations. Although publications with first authors from outside Turkey make up only 20% of the Turkish earth science publications in the period 1970–2005, these account for 38% of the total citations, and constitute 48 out of 100 most cited papers.     

International Collaboration in Indian Scientific Papers

Internationally co-authored publications may be regarded as an indicator of scientific co-operation between countries and is of interest in science policy. In this study, the extent of international collaboration in Indian science has been estimated from SCI data in 1990 and 1994. We find an increase in collaboration both in terms of output and the extent of the network and significantly higher impact (IF) associated with internationally co-authored papers in several disciplines. However, there was no significant increase in IF of collaborative papers over time, whereas Indian papers in general showed a statistically significant, though small, increase in average impact from 1990 to 1994. The bulk of Indian scientific co-operation was with the developed Western nations and Japan, but it was often the smaller countries with a few co-authored papers which showed higher average impact. Co-operation with South Asian countries, initially low, has doubled in four years. By a combination of multivariate data analysis techniques the relative positions of India's partners in scientific collaboration have been mapped with respect to the fields of co-operation.     

Multivariate statistical analysis of the bibliographic output from a research institution,in relation to the measures of scientific policy

The publications produced in a medical research institute in a 16 year interval were classified into five categories (scientific papers in the journals covered byCurrent Contents orScience Citation Index, scientific papers in other journals, books and monographs, technical papers, congress and symposia communications) and counted for each year separately. The number of researchers and yearly budgets were also recorded. The data were analysed by contingency table, correlation and factor-analytical methods. It was shown that, upon introducing quantitative minimal criteria for job promotions, the proportion of scientific papers increased. Principal component analysis indicated that the data can be approximately represented as linear combinations of three mutually independent factors. The approach used is recommended for evaluating the production of scientific information in research institutions and for assessing the effects of the measures of scientific policy.     

Network structure, distribution and the growth of Chinese international research collaboration

The paper studied 211,946 articles indexed in Thomson Reuters’s Web of Science from January 1st 2002 to December 31st 2011, in order to describe the growth and distribution of Chinese international research collaboration (IRC), from the perspective of amount, authors, countries, discipline fields and journals. By applying bibliometric and social network methods, this study provided the collaboration network of countries and fields. The main results were as follow: the number of article increased faster comparing with the stable growth in average annual of IRC degree; the articles collaborated with SAC are 80 % more than all IRC’s; as to the fields, collaboration in Social science is at disadvantage, while the largest field is physics and the fastest field is molecular biology and genetics; mathematics, physics, multidisciplinary and space science had more in fluencies than others in corresponding respective journals; as to the network, USA, as the largest and most important partner, had 30 % IRC articles, and collaborated with China in all 22 ESI fields.     

Scientometrics of Prolific and Non-Prolific Authors in Laser Science and Technology

An analysis of 766 publications by prolific authors in scientific journals indicate that prolific authors produce about 25% of the total scientific output in periodical literature in laser science and technology. The average productivity per author is about 2. Prolific authors from most of the countries belonged either to academic or research institutions except in USA and Japan. Prolific authors on average made more impact than non-prolific authors. However the situation varied from country to country.     

Collaboration patterns of Taiwanese scientific publications in various research areas

This paper employs bibliometric methods to observe collaboration patterns of scientific publications in biotechnology, information and computer technology, future energy, and nanotechnology among different institutions in Taiwan. The results show primary domestic and international collaborative patterns, the effect of collaborative papers on the world-wide average, collaborative networks, and the distribution of institutions on global map. The findings suggest that domestic collaboration in each area is higher in proportion than international collaboration. Biotechnology leads in both domestic and international collaborative percentage. Among cooperative benchmarking countries, the US and China are the main partners. Collaboration among research institutes and universities is the most frequent collaborative pattern in each area except biotechnology, which tends to occur between hospitals and universities. On average, international collaborative papers tend to have greater effect, except in nanotechnology. Academia Sinica collaborated frequently with foreign institutes in each research field. A further analysis on how each collaborative group forms is recommended, especially collaboration among the Triple-Helix relationships.