Productivity ratings of institutions based on publication in Scientometrics,Informetrics, and Bibliometrics, 1981–2000

The author surveyed a set of ten scholarly journals that publish the mainstream of papers in the field of Scientometrics, Informetrics, and Bibliometrics (SIB). The survey is limited only to the research articles published in the field for the two decades period 1981–2000. Each journal was examined issue by issue for the institutional affiliations of contributing authors. Institutional rankings for the total period and the two decade periods; 1981–1990 and 1991–2000 were determined by awarding credit to the authors" institutions based on authorship. In the composite of ten journals, the University Sheffield (England), the University of North Carolina (USA), the University of Leiden (Netherlands), the City University of London (England), the National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies (India), the University of Sussex (England), the University of Illinois (USA), the University of Michigan (USA), the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Library (Hungary), and Indiana University (USA) emerged as the ten most productive institutions for the period 1981–2000. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A scientometric analysis of international LIS journals: Productivity and characteristics

This paper presents a quantitative study of productivity, characteristics and various aspects of global publication in the field of library and information science (LIS). A total of 894 contributions published in 56 LIS journals indexed in SSCI during the years of 2000-2004 were analyzed. A total of 1361 authors had contributed publications during the five years. The overwhelming majority (89.93%) of them wrote one paper. The average number of authors per paper is 1.52. All the studied papers were published in English. The sum of research output of the authors form USA and UK reaches 70% of the total productivity. Most papers received few citations. Each article received on an average 1.6 citations and the LIS researchers cite mostly latest articles. About 48% of citing authors had tendency of self-citation. The productive authors, their contribution and authorship position are listed to indicate their productivity and degree of involvement in their research publications.     

Publishing in international journals

This paper examines patterns of Chinese authorship, focusing particularly on international co-authorship, in a sample of 37,526 articles from Elsevier journals published in 2004. Trends relating to potential influences such as subject, journal impact factor and article type are explored. A slightly higher proportion of articles with at least one Chinese author was observed as compared to previous studies. Articles that are a product of Chinese international collaboration account for almost 20% of the Chinese sample as a whole, a similar proportion to levels of international collaboration within the sample overall. Chinese international co-authorship is most common in the Earth & Environmental Sciences. Where China is involved in international collaboration, it is often a proactive participant: 49% of articles that are a result of Chinese international collaboration have a Chinese corresponding author. With some minor variations in subject categories, countries favoured in international co-authorship reflect world shares in publishing and factors such as geographical proximity and political links. In the context of this project, the term ‘Chinese authors’ is used to refer to authors, regardless of nationality, who are based at Chinese institutions. The term does not include Chinese nationality authors who are based in institutions outwith China.     

Characteristics and impact of grant-funded research: a case study of the library and information science field

This paper reports on a bibliometric study of the characteristics and impact of research in the library and information science (LIS) field which was funded through research grant programs, and compares it with research that received no extra funding. Seven core LIS journals were examined to identify articles published in 1998 that acknowledge research grant funding. The distribution of these articles by various criteria (e.g., topic, affiliation, funding agency) was determined. Their impact as indicated by citation counts during 1998–2008 was evaluated against that of articles without acknowledging extra funding and published in the same journals in the same year using citation data collected from Scopus’ Citation Tracker. The impact of grant-funded research as measured by citation counts was substantially higher than that of other research, both overall and in each journal individually. Scholars from outside LIS core institutions contributed heavily to grant-funded research. The two highest-impact publications by far reported non-grant-based research, and grant-based funding of research reported in core LIS journals was biased towards the information retrieval (IR) area, particularly towards research on IR systems. The percentage of articles reporting grant-funded research was substantially higher in information-oriented journals than in library-focused ones.     

A comparative study of interdisciplinary changes between information science and library science

This study employs the method of direct citation to analyze and compare the interdisciplinary characteristics of the two disciplines of library science and information science during the period of 1978–2007. Based on the research generated by five library science journals and five information science journals, library science researchers tend to cite publications from library and information science (LIS), education, business/management, sociology, and psychology, while researchers of information science tend to cite more publications from LIS, general science, computer science, technology, and medicine. This means that the disciplines with larger contributions to library science are almost entirely different from those contributing to information science. In addition, researchers of library science frequently cite publications from LIS; the rate is as high as 65.61%, which is much higher than the rate for information science, 49.50%. However, a decreasing trend in the percentage of LIS in library science indicates that library science researchers tend to cite more publications from non-LIS disciplines. A rising trend in the proportion of references to education sources is reported for library science articles, while a rising trend in the proportion of references to computer science sources has been found for information science articles. In addition, this study applies an interdisciplinary indicator, Brillouin’s Index, to measurement of the degree of interdisciplinarity. The results confirm that the trend toward interdisciplinarity in both information science and library science has risen over the years, although the degree of interdisciplinarity in information science is higher than that in library science.     

Research status and characteristics of library and information science in Taiwan: a bibliometric analysis

This study determines how library and information science (LIS) research in Taiwan has changed between 2001 and 2010. The major research questions address the research status of LIS in Taiwan, how the Taiwanese government supports the field, and the collaborative authorship of LIS journal articles in Taiwan. Bibliometric and content analysis methods were conducted to analyze 2,494 journal articles, 983 theses, and 191 research projects between 2001 and 2010. The results show LIS and Technology to be the most popular topics in journal articles. The most well-received thesis topics are LIS and Technology and User Services, accounting for more than 50?% of graduate theses. The same is true for research projects, with the subjects of LIS and Technology, LIS Theory and Foundation, and User Services having a ratio of more than 70?%. In government-sponsored research projects, the average amount of funding obtained had no significant differences or tendencies for various subjects over time. In authorship of journal articles, individual researchers conducted 66.11?% of articles in key LIS scholarly journals in Taiwan between 2001 and 2010.     

Biotechnology research profile of India

Summary The study explores the chronological growth of Indian Biotechnology. Applicability of Lotka's law has been examined for the authorship pattern. Productivity of authors is analyzed and a list of 35 authors publishing more than 10 publications is given. Bradford's law of scattering is used to identify the core journals which cover most of the research and development output of Indian Biotechnology. The study also shows the active authors, institutions and statewise distributions of Indian Biotechnology research output.     

Are articles in library and information science (LIS) journals primarily contributed to by LIS authors?

Scientometrics - This study measured the proportion of articles by authors affiliated with library and information science (LIS)-related institutions and proportion of LIS authors in each journal...     

Motivations for URL citations to open access library and information science articles

Summary We define the URL citations of a Web page to be the mentions of its URL in the text of other Web pages, whether hyperlinked or not. The proportions of formal and informal scholarly motivations for creating URL citations to Library and Information Science open access journal articles were identified. Five characteristics for each source of URL citations equivalent to formal citations were manually extracted and the relationship between Web and conventional citation counts at the e-journal level was examined. Results of Google searches showed that 282 research articles published in the year 2000 in 15 peer-reviewed LIS open access journals were invoked by 3,045 URL citations. Of these URL citations, 43% were created for formal scholarly reasons equivalent to traditional citations and 18% for informal scholarly reasons. Of the sources of URL citations, 82% were in English, 88% were full text papers and 58% were non-HTML documents. Of the URL citations, 60% were text URLs only and 40% were hyperlinked. About 50% of URL citations were created within one year after the publication of the cited e-article. A slight correlation was found between average numbers of URL citations and average numbers of ISI citations for the journals in 2000. Separating out the citing HTML and non-HTML documents showed that formal scholarly communication trends on the Web were mainly influenced by text URL citations from non-HTML documents.     

Applicability of selected probability distributions to the number of authors per article in theoretical population genetics

Recently scientists have investigated what statistical distributions can be used to describe the distribution of the number of authors per article.Ajiferuke has undertaken the most comprehensive study of this problem. He has found that by and large the Inverse Gaussian-Poisson distribution could describe most properly the observed authorship distributions. However, it is well known that this distribution is rather intricate, soRousseau tried to fit some simple one-parameter distributions to the number of authors of LIS articles. He has found that the geometric and the truncated Poisson distribution adequately describe these authorship data sets. The main purpose of the present paper is to continue these investigations and to analyse and test the viability of simple statistical distributions. As to (sub)fields where the single author dominates the results ofRousseau were corroborated: the truncated Poisson and the geometric distribution give often adequate fits to describe the number of authors. The Lotka distribution should be rejected. The truncated binomial distribution and the truncated negative binomial were investigated as well. However, it is not clear whether they are acceptable candidates.     

Citation patterns of Korean physicists and mechanical engineers: Differences by type of publication source and type of authorship

By comparing the citation patterns of Korean researchers in physics and mechanical engineering, this study identifies the extent to which type of publication source (Korean non-SCI, Korean SCI, and international SCI) and type of authorship (purely Korean authors, Korean-foreign co-authors, and foreign-Korean co-authors) influence the choice of sources cited by Korean scientists. Koreans publishing physics or mechanical engineering papers in international SCI journals are more likely to cite articles published in journals of the science mainstream countries (the U.S., the U.K., the Netherlands, and Germany) than articles published in national journals, while Koreans publishing in Korean journals tend to cite articles published in national journals. In terms of authorship, articles published in mainstream journals are more highly cited by internationally co-authored papers than Korean-authored papers in both disciplines. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Effects of scholar’s gender and professional position on publishing productivity in different publication types. Analysis of a Finnish university

This paper examines the effects of a scholar’s position and gender on publishing productivity in several types of scientific publications: monographs, articles in journals, articles in edited books, and articles in conference proceedings. The data consist of 1,367 scholars who worked at the University of Helsinki, Finland, during the period 2002–2004. The analysis shows that professors are the most productive, PhDs publish more than non-PhDs, and men perform better than women, also when other scholarly characteristics are controlled for. These differences are greater for monographs and articles in edited books than for articles in journals. In terms of conference proceedings, no remarkable productivity differences were found.     

Open access uptake in Germany 2010–2018: adoption in a diverse research landscape

This study investigates the development of open access (OA) to journal articles from authors affiliated with German universities and non-university research institutions in the period 2010–2018. Beyond determining the overall share of openly available articles, a systematic classification of distinct categories of OA publishing allowed us to identify different patterns of adoption of OA. Taking into account the particularities of the German research landscape, variations in terms of productivity, OA uptake and approaches to OA are examined at the meso-level and possible explanations are discussed. The development of the OA uptake is analysed for the different research sectors in Germany (universities, non-university research institutes of the Helmholtz Association, Fraunhofer Society, Max Planck Society, Leibniz Association, and government research agencies). Combining several data sources (incl. Web of Science, Unpaywall, an authority file of standardised German affiliation information, the ISSN-Gold-OA 3.0 list, and OpenDOAR), the study confirms the growth of the OA share mirroring the international trend reported in related studies. We found that 45% of all considered articles during the observed period were openly available at the time of analysis. Our findings show that subject-specific repositories are the most prevalent type of OA. However, the percentages for publication in fully OA journals and OA via institutional repositories show similarly steep increases. Enabling data-driven decision-making regarding the implementation of OA in Germany at the institutional level, the results of this study furthermore can serve as a baseline to assess the impact recent transformative agreements with major publishers will likely have on scholarly communication.

     

Correction to: Indicator system for managing science,technology and innovation in universities

This study investigated the external contributors of library and information science (LIS) knowledge who were unaffiliated with LIS-related institutions but published their research results in LIS journals. Differences between the contributors to library science (LS) and contributors to information science (IS) were considered. Articles published in 39 strongly LIS-oriented journals indexed in the Web of Science database between 2005 and 2014 were analyzed. The results demonstrated that 46.5% of the LIS articles were written by at least one non-LIS author; authors’ backgrounds ranged across 29 disciplines. An increasing trend was observed in degrees of interdisciplinarity of LS and IS. An increase in proportion of articles by LIS and non-LIS authors was identified in LS and IS as well. Those with medical backgrounds were the primary non-LIS authors contributing to the LS field and collaborated the most frequently with LIS authors. Those with computer science backgrounds were the most prevalent non-LIS contributors to the IS field and preferred to publish individually. A critical difference was also identified in research topics between LS and IS. The foundations of LIS and scientometrics were the largest research topics in LS and IS, respectively.     

Institutional change and scientific research: A preliminary bibliometric analysis of institutional influences on Turkey’s recent social science publications

This paper provides a detailed assessment of recent indexed journal publications by Turkish social scientists. We first present information on SCI, SSCI and AHCI indexed journal articles that were published by Turkish researchers over the past three decades. An inspection of publication statistics indicates a considerable improvement, especially during the last five years of the 1973–2005 period that we examine, in Turkey’s publication record in terms of number of articles authored or co-authored by Turkish researchers. In the next step, we scrutinize institutional sources of this improvement, emphasizing regulatory and organizational changes that have both forced researchers to publish in indexed journals and remunerated those who did so. Finally, we provide a qualitative assessment of recent improvement in publication performance of Turkish researchers by focusing on a particular behavioral consequence of institutional changes and its implications for impact that research from Turkey has on global research activity. Bibliometric analysis of articles published by Turkish researchers in SSCI-indexed journals during 2000–2005 shows that recent regulatory and organizational changes seem to have instituted a particular publication habit, publishing in journals with lower impact factor, which was earlier observed in other parts of the world where publication counts were used for performance evaluation, and that signs of improvement in our select indicators of impact are yet to be observed.     

Sadhana – Academy Proceedings in Engineering Sciences: A scientometric analysis

This study presents a scientometric analysis of 253 articles published in Sadhana during the year 2005–2009. Five volumes of the journal are taken up to observe the distribution of contribution, authorship pattern, institution-wise distribution, geographical distribution of contribution, average length of paper, tables and illustrations used and citation pattern in each volume. Results indicate that highest number of papers have been written by two authors. The contributions received in this journal are more from India than from the other countries. Foreign documents show their more representation in references cited. Journals are referred more frequently than other documents.The average number of references per article is 23.72 and 200.602 per volume.     

Does the multi-authorship trend influence the quality of an article?

In the last few decades, multi-authored articles have increased in different disciplines with increasing instances of authorship abuse although multi-authorship is not always due to undeserving authorship (McDonald et al. in Mayo Clin Proc 85(10):920–927, 2010). It may be necessitated by interdisciplinary research, the evolution of a discipline, or the intention of quality improvement. This article studies the relationship between the authorship and the quality of articles (publications in better impact factor journals or core journals) in the field of Oceanography. The result shows ~75 % increase in the number of authors per article from 1990 to 2009 in the discipline. The increase in authorship correlates not only with the percentage of articles in core journals but also with the mean impact factor (IF) of journals (where the articles were published). The ANOVA study shows that though multi-authorship has no influence on the preference to publish in core journals during the 1990s or 2000s, it does have a significant influence on the preference to publish in high IF journals in both the decades. So these findings establish that in the field of Oceanography, the increase in collaboration would have resulted in more publications in core journals (without any influence of authorship increase) and in better impact factor journals (due to the influence of authorship increase).     

Citation patterns in the Kuwaiti journal Medical Principles and Practice: The first 12 years, 1989-2000

This study investigates the citation patterns in the journal, Medical Principles and Practice from its inception in 1989 through 2000 (volumes 1-9). The data set includes 4740 references appended to the 221 original research articles. All of the citations were entered into a ProCite database for analysis. Specifically, this study addresses: (1) bibliometric patterns of cited works in terms of publication format, subject scatter, authorship characteristics, age of citations, geographic distribution, and language distribution; (2) productivity of journal titles; (3) the role of self-citation; and (4) how selected bibliometric indicators apply. Some of the findings include: journal articles are most frequently cited; English language publications dominate the literature; there is a trend of multiple authorship; and the pattern of aging is below the norm for medical literature. The results of the study can provide a benchmark to measure the user behavior of a particular group of researchers as well as for the provision of collection development and management decisions. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Bibliometric analysis of AIDS literature in Central Africa

The purpose of this paper is to present the preliminary results of a bibliometric analysis of AIDS documents as produced on Sub-Saharan Africa. AIDSLINE 1980-2000 was used to conduct the literature search. In this paper, an analysis was made only of the records retrieved under "Central Africa". Bibexcel (version 2001) and Microsoft Excel (2000) were used as software tools to conduct the analysis of the records. Seven countries and 1052 records were identified. Main participating countries were Democratic Republic of the Congo (527 documents), and Cameroon (271). Results indicated a high pattern of collaboration through multiple authorship. Most documents were published in English (84.50%) and French (14.73%). Over 57% corresponded to journal articles. The subject content of the documents was mainly focused on epidemiological, complications, and prevention & control issues on ‘HIV Infections’ and ‘Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome’. Countries behind this productivity were Cameroon, USA, Democratic Republic of the Congo, France, and Belgium. Comparison of results among Central African countries and among other developing countries is made by the authors. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.