Evolving collaboration networks in Scientometrics in 1978–2010: a micro–macro analysis

This paper reports first results on the interplay of different levels of the science system. Specifically, we would like to understand if and how collaborations at the author (micro) level impact collaboration patterns among institutions (meso) and countries (macro). All 2,541 papers (articles, proceedings papers, and reviews) published in the international journal Scientometrics from 1978–2010 are analyzed and visualized across the different levels and the evolving collaboration networks are animated over time. Studying the three levels in isolation we gain a number of insights: (1) USA, Belgium, and England dominated the publications in Scientometrics throughout the 33-year period, while the Netherlands and Spain were the subdominant countries; (2) the number of institutions and authors increased over time, yet the average number of papers per institution grew slowly and the average number of papers per author decreased in recent years; (3) a few key institutions, including Univ Sussex, KHBO, Katholieke Univ Leuven, Hungarian Acad Sci, and Leiden Univ, have a high centrality and betweenness, acting as gatekeepers in the collaboration network; (4) early key authors (Lancaster FW, Braun T, Courtial JP, Narin F, or VanRaan AFJ) have been replaced by current prolific authors (such as Rousseau R or Moed HF). Comparing results across the three levels reveals that results from one level might propagate to the next level, e.g., top rankings of a few key single authors can not only have a major impact on the ranking of their institution but also lead to a dominance of their country at the country level; movement of prolific authors among institutions can lead to major structural changes in the institution networks. To our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive and the only multi-level study of Scientometrics conducted to date.     

Contributing Institutions and Authors in International Business Research: A Quality-Based Assessment

We use a quality-based approach to assess contributing institutions and authors in international business (IB) research. Specifically, we use Google Scholar citations of individual articles to weigh the number of IB research articles in core IB and other non-IB elite journals. Our approach mitigates concerns about the quality difference among articles across different journals and within individual journals. We find evidence to suggest that IB research in the European and Asia-Pacific regions exhibits an upward trend over the 1995–2011 period. With respect to institutional research quality, we document that an IB program with faculty members working with their peers in foreign countries and the presence of a doctoral program can enhance an institution’s research quality. Prolific authors are very mobile and typically have global experience.     

Global nanotechnology research metrics

Text mining was used to extract technical intelligence from the open source global nanotechnology and nanoscience research literature. An extensive nanotechnology/nanoscience-focused query was applied to the Science Citation Index/Social Science Citation Index (SCI/SSCI) databases. The nanotechnology/nanoscience research literature infrastructure (prolific authors, key journals/institutions/countries, most cited authors/journals/documents) was obtained using bibliometrics. A novel addition was the use of institution and country auto-correlation maps to show co-publishing networks among institutions and among countries, and the use of institution-phrase and country-phrase cross-correlation maps to show institution networks and country networks based on use of common terminology (proxy for common interests). The use of factor matrices quantified further the strength of the linkages among institutions and among countries, and validated the co-publishing networks shown graphically on the maps. The views in this paper are solely those of the authors, and do not represent the views of the Department of the Navy or any of its components, or the Institute for Defense Analyses     

Scientometrics of a pandemic: HIV/AIDS research in South Africa and the World

The HIV/AIDS pandemic is of international interest with the 2008 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine having being awarded for the discovery of the virus that causes AIDS. South Africa has a particular interest in the field of HIV/AIDS research as it is the country with the largest number of HIV infections in the world and the issue has created a number of political and scientific debates. This investigation identifies the state of HIV/AIDS related research in South Africa vis-a-vis the rest of the world using evaluative scientometrics in order to inform relevant policy. South Africa is identified as producing an increasing number of HIV/AIDS related publications, making it one of the most prolific fields in the country. The rest of the world appears to have stabilized its research efforts after the development of highly active antiretroviral therapies. The USA is identified as the main producer of HIV/AIDS research while Europe appears to under-emphasise the issue. Comparison of the world??s most prolific universities with those in South Africa identifies that the latter has a fragmented system. A number of policy issues are discussed.     

Women,peace and security state-of-art: a bibliometric analysis in social sciences based on SCOPUS database

To the best of our knowledge, there is no work that has focused on analysing the development of the scientific production on women, peace and security. The main objective of this paper is to cover this research gap through a bibliometric analysis, that covers 95 years (1918–2013), of articles published in peer-reviewed journals extracted from the SCOPUS database. Bibliometric indicators and laws have been applied to better understand the patterns that govern the scientific literature on this realm. A gender perspective has also been implemented in the analysis. The analysis provides quantitative results based on 321 articles published by 478 authors in 210 scientific journals. The data showed the high dispersion of the literature, both in terms of authors and journals focused on the topic, and a low level of collaboration among both authors and institutions. Regarding the research topic, half of the papers were related to the impact of conflict on civilians and civil society. The implementation of a gender perspective shows that most of the first, second and third authors of the papers are women. In terms of methodologies, qualitative methodologies are the most relevant and women are more prolific applying these methodology. In terms of geographical region of the research, most of the studies have been performed by authors from institutions in Anglo-Saxon countries, and most of the fieldwork has been focused on the United States and the main areas of conflict in the world throughout history. Finally, important research opportunities are identified.     

Database tomography for technical intelligence: Comparative roadmaps of the research impact assessment literature and the journal of the American Chemical Society

This paper shows how Database Tomgraphy can be used to derive technical intelligence from the published literature. Database Tomography is a patented system for analyzing large amounts of textual computerized material. It includes algorithms for extracting multi-word phrase frequencies and performing phrase proximity analyses. Phrase frequency analysis provides the pervasive themes of a database, and the phrase proximity analysis provides the relationships among the pervasive themes, and between the pervasive themes and sub-themes. One potential application of Database Tomography is to obtain the thrusts and interrelationships of a technical field from papers published in the literature within that field. This paper provides applications of Database Tomography to analyses of both the non-technical field of Research Impact Assessment (RIA) and the technical field of Chemistry. A database of relevant RIA articles was analyzed to produce characteristics and key features of the RIA field. The recent prolific RIA authors, the journals prolific in RIA papers, the prolific institutions in RIA, the prolific keywords specified by the authors, and the authors whose works are cited most prolifically as well as the particular papers/journals/institutions cited most prolifically, are identified. The pervasive themes of RIA are identified through multi-word phrase of the database. A phrase proximity analysis of the database shows the relationships among the pervasive themes, and the relationships between the pervasive themes and subthemes. A similar process was applied to Chemistry, with the exception that the database was limited to one year's issues of the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Wherever possible, the RIA and Chemistry results were compared. Finally, the conceptual use of Database Tomography to help identify promising research directions was discussed.     

Research evaluation. Part I: productivity and citedness of a German medical research institution

An evaluation exercise was performed involving 313 papers of research staff (66 persons) of the Deutsche Rheuma-Forschungszentrum (DRFZ) published in 2004?C2008. The records and citations to them were retrieved from the Web of Science (Thomson Reuters) in March 2010. The authors compared productivity and citedness of ??group leaders?? vs. ??regular scientists??, of ??male scientists?? vs. ??female scientists?? using citation-based indexes. It was found that ??group leaders?? are more prolific and cited more often than ??regular scientists??, the same is true considering ??male?? vs. ??female scientists??. The greatest contrast is observed between ??female leaders?? and ??female regular scientists??. The above mentioned differences are significant in indexes related to the number of papers, while values of indexes characterizing the quality of papers (average citation rate per paper and similar indexes) are not substantially different among the groups compared. The mean value of percentile rank index for all the 313 papers is 58.5, which is significantly higher than the global mean value of about 50. This fact is evidence of a higher citation status, on average, of the publications from the DRFZ.     

Scientific collaboration in Brazilian researches: a comparative study in the information science,mathematics and dentistry fields

This study attempts to describe, in a comparative way, scientific collaboration and co-authoring activities and understanding of Brazilian researchers of productivity level 1 at the National Counsel of Technological and Scientific Development (CNPq). In order to do so, a questionnaire was sent to the researchers of productivity level 1 at CNPq in the Mathematics, Dentistry and Information Science fields, with questions about scientific collaboration and co-authoring activities. We analyzed the scientific production of the researchers who answered the questionnaire and we have identified that 78% of the participants consider that scientific collaboration and co-authorship are different activities, and the potential and usual number of research collaborators is between 2 and 3 in Mathematics and Information Science, and between 5 and 6 collaborators in Dentistry. Differences among fields were pointed out by identifying main collaborators and co-authors. The reasons for collaborating vary according to the nature of the research, however, the percentages are high in these three areas: “training of researchers and students”, “desire to increase their own experience through the experience of others” and “increased productivity.” From the analysis of the scientific production declared in their Lattes Curriculum, we have found that the average number of authors per publication in the field of Information Science is 2.2 authors, in Mathematics is 2.8 authors per publication, and in Dentistry the average is 5.3 authors per publication. We have concluded that scientific collaboration and co-authorship are terms assigned to different activities for the analyzed fields.     

Use of citation per publication as an indicator to evaluate contingent valuation research

This is the first article using bibliometrics to study the field of contingent valuation research. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the contingent valuation research performance based on all the related articles in SCI and SSCI databases from 1991 to 2005. An indicator named citation per publication (CPP) was presented in this study to assess the impact of article output per year, different countries, institutes, and authors from the worldwide. Publication per institute (PPI) in a country was used to be an indicator to compare institute’s research performance by country. Citation analysis was made to select the most frequently cited articles since publication to 2005 of each year. A citation model was applied to describe the relationship between the cumulative number of citations and article life. The results indicate that with the increase article output per year, the CPP decreased slightly since 1997. The USA produced 55% of all pertinent articles. Institutes from the UK had a higher PPI. The most prolific institutes and authors, and the most frequently cited articles per year were all listed. In addition, a citation model was successfully applied to evaluate performance of each year, and the most frequently cited articles of each year were also compared by the model.     

Does a country’s scientific ‘productivity’ depend critically on the number of country journals indexed?

In this paper, we examine the question whether it is meaningful to talk about the scientific productivity of nations based on indexes like the Science Citation Index or Scopus, when the journal set covered by them keeps changing with time. We hypothesize from the illustrative case of India’s declining productivity in the 1980s which correlated with a fall in its journals indexed, that an apparent increase/decrease in productivity for any country, based on observed change in its share of papers could, in fact, be an effect resulting from the inclusion of more/less journals from the country. To verify our hypothesis we have used SCIMAGO data. We found that for a set of 90 countries, the share of journals regressed on the share of papers gave a linear relationship that explained 80% of the variance. However, we also show that in the case of China’s unusual rise in world scientific productivity (to second rank crossing several other countries), there is yet another factor that needs to be taken into account. We define a new indicator—the JOURNAL PACKING DENSITY (JPD) or average number of papers in journals from a given country. We show that the packing density of Chinese journals has steadily increased over the last few years. Currently, Chinese journals have the highest ‘packing density’ in the world, almost twice the world average which is about 100 papers per journal per annum. The deviation of the JPD from the world average is another indicator which will affect so called ‘national productivities’ in addition to the number of national journals indexed. We conclude that in the context of a five fold increase in the number of journals indexed over 20 years, the simplistic notion of ‘scientific productivity’ as equivalent to papers indexed needs to be re-examined.     

Heterogeneity of collaboration and its relationship with research impact in a biomedical field

This paper analyses existing trends in the collaborative structure of the Pharmacology and Pharmacy field in Spain and explores its relationship with research impact. The evolution in terms of size of the research community, the typology of collaborative links (national, international) and the scope of the collaboration (size of links, type of partners) are studied by means of different measures based on co-authorship. Growing heterogeneity of collaboration and impact of research are observed over the years. Average journal impact (MNJS) and citation score (MNCS) normalised to world average tend to grow with the number of authors, the number of institutions and collaboration type. Both national and international collaboration show MNJS values above the country’s average, but only internationally co-authored publications attain citation rates above the world’s average. This holds at country and institutional sector levels, although not all institutional sectors obtain the same benefit from collaboration. Multilateral collaboration with high-level R&D countries yields the highest values of research impact, although the impact of collaboration with low-level R&D countries has been optimised over the years. Although scientific collaboration is frequently based on individual initiative, policy actions are required to promote the more heterogeneous types of collaboration.     

Environmental science research in India: An analysis of publications

Investigates the trends in environmental science research in India with regard to its various branches, channels of communication used, authorship pattern of the papers, institution-wise output, rank of journals, extent of collaboration and scholarship of papers basing the entries noticed in theParyavaran Abstracts. Major areas of interest of Indian environmentalists are given and prolific investigators have been listed. Journals used by Indian workers for publication of their work are studied. Subject areas with number of papers, number of authors, and average authorship are tabulated.     

Structure and infrastructure of infectious agent research literature: SARS

Text mining was used to extract technical intelligence from the open source global SARS research literature. A SARS-focused query was applied to the Science Citation Index (SCI) (SCI 2008) database for the period 1998?Cearly 2008. The SARS research literature infrastructure (prolific authors, key journals/institutions/countries, most cited authors/journals/documents) was obtained using bibliometrics, and the SARS research literature technical structure (hierarchical taxonomy) was obtained using computational linguistics/document clustering.     

Scientific output in the third world

Although such indicators exhibit only certain aspects of the contribution of science to a country, the number of scientific authors in a given year is plotted for every year between 1971 and 1976, inclusive, and the number of scientific authors divided by the population of the country is also given for those years. The number of scientific authors is the number of scientists who published at least one article in a journal in that given year. The data were taken from a survey which, although it covers only about 4000 scientific journals, includes a large fraction of all articles published.The results are given in 43 graphs, the first 17 of which show the number of authors and the second 16 the authors per capita. The graphs are divided according to geographical areas: Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, and within each region countries with roughly comparable output or output per capita are grouped together.The last ten graphs show the growth rates of authors and of authors per capita, compared to the 1971 values, for groups of countries aggregated according to various parameters with which correlation is being investigated. Continent, size of population literacy rate about 25 years before, the percentage of gross national product spent on military expenditures, and colonial past.This article was first suggested by and submitted toInterciencia, but upon its completion Interciencia was hesitant to publish it because of the coverage by the ISI compilations of Latin American scientific journals. It was felt by Interciencia that the coverage was so skimpy as to fail to do adequate justice to the scientific output of Latin American countries. By implication, the same may be said about the coverage of other parts of the Third World.On the one hand, as explained in the article, this criticism does not invalidate the findings of this article if they are formulated in a sufficiently careful language. On the other hand, the criticism has merit since there is a great need for a much more complete coverage of the scientific publications, authors publications, and citations in the Third World. For reasons which are quite legitimate in their own right, it is unlikely that an organization like ISI can undertake a coverage of the thousands of journals published in the Third World. I have therefore been suggesting for some time to various appropriate people in the developing countries that these countries, singly or in groups, initiate their own computerized compilation of journals, authors, publications and perhaps even citations. Such a program would be of great value not only in an international context, but also in terms of national and regional science policies, in terms of studies in the science of science of efforts in the developing countries, in terms of evaluative, and assessing efforts in those countries, etc. I hope that this article and the reaction it may produce will accelerate the beginning of such an effort.     

Changes in PubMed affiliation indexing improved publication identification by country

Publications are often used to estimate the biomedical scientific production of an institution or country. Through its “affiliation” filter PubMed is a useful open-access tool for this purpose. In 2013 this filter was modified, beginning to include all authors. To estimate the impact of this modification we carried out the same search strategy before and after the change took place. We evaluated publications in PubMed from the 2010–2012 and 2014–2016 periods. Using the “affiliation” filter, we identified publications from three countries from different continents, with similar income level and number of scientific publications: Argentina, Thailand, and South Africa. We compared the slopes of both periods for each country and for the total references in PubMed. Regarding the number of publications, Argentina, Thailand and South Africa showed a significantly steeper slope in the 2014–2016 period versus 2010–2012 period, while the slopes of the total number of publications in PubMed showed no difference between periods. The inclusion of all authors in affiliation indexing by PubMed significantly impacts the evaluation of the scientific production of countries, reducing under-registration.     

The significance of the number of highly cited papers as an indicator of scientific prolificacy

After presenting arguments that the number of highly cited papers (HCPs, 25 or more citations) has some advantages as an indicator of an author's scientific impact, the paper discusses citation data of 338 university professors in departments of medicine in the Netherlands. An analysis of the distribution of HCPs over the years provides support for the following conclusions: (1) prolific researchers with a large number of HCPs usually manifest themselves already in their Ph.D. work, apparently almost independent of the scientific setting; (2) it cannot be taken for granted that a successful Ph.D. student with some HCPs connected with his/her doctoral thesis will become a prolific successful researcher; (3) it is unlikely that an unsuccessful Ph.D. student without HCPs connected with his/her doctoral thesis will turn out to be a prolific successful researcher; and (4) for researchers, just as for artists, sportsmen, etc., talent is the most decisive factor in being successful.     

Globalization and de-globalization in nanotechnology research: the role of China

The share of nanotechnology publications involving authors from more than one country more than doubled in the 1990s, but then fell again until 2004, before recovering somewhat during the latter years of the decade. Meanwhile, the share of nanotechnology papers involving at least one Chinese author increased substantially over the last two decades. Papers involving Chinese authors are far less likely to be internationally co-authored than papers involving authors from other countries. Nonetheless, this appears to be changing as Chinese nanotechnology research becomes more advanced. An arithmetic decomposition confirms that China??s growing share of such research accounts, in large part, for the observed stagnation of international collaboration. Thus two aspects of the globalization of science can work in opposing directions: diffusion to initially less scientifically advanced countries can depress international collaboration rates, while at the same time scientific advances in such countries can reverse this trend. We find that the growth of China??s scientific community explains some, but not all of the dynamics of China??s international collaboration rate. We therefore provide an institutional account of these dynamics, drawing on Stichweh??s [Social Science information 35(2):327?C340, 1996] original paper on international scientific collaboration, which, in examining the interrelated development of national and international scientific networks, predicts a transitional phase during which science becomes a more national enterprise, followed by a phase marked by accelerating international collaboration. Validating the application of this approach, we show that Stichweh??s predictions, based on European scientific communities in the 18th and 19th centuries, seem to apply to the Chinese scientific community in the 21st century.     

Dentistry scientometric analysis: a comparative study between Brazil and other most productive countries in the area

This research aims at performing a comparative study between the Brazilian scientific production in Dentistry, from 2000 to 2009 and countries that contribute with at least 2 % of the world’s scientific production indexed in the Scopus database. More specifically, we intend to assess the annual Brazilian scientific production by comparing it to the other countries’, analyze the Brazilian and other countries’ publications in journals with higher impact factors, as well as to highlight the scientific production from these countries and its international visibility, measured by its total and by its average of citations and normalized citation index per year, by comparing the countries, and to compare the index h of such countries. As work procedure, the SCImago Journal and Country Rank was used as source, identifying the group of producing countries in the Dentistry area from 1996 to 2009. From a total of 136 countries, 13 were highlighted as the most productive, each one of them accounting for at least 2 % the worldwide scientific production in the area. The following indicators were raised for each country: number of produced documents, total of citations, self-citations, average of citations per document and index h. We verified that Brazil is the only country in Latin America that is pictured among the most productive ones in the Dentistry area. We observed that Brazil presents a growing visibility and impact in the international scenery, what suggests that its production is constantly consolidating, with Brazilian scientific recognition in the main vehicles of dissemination in the area.     

Transient and continuant authors in a research field: The case of terrorism

The issue of research continuance in a scientific discipline was analyzed and applied to the field of terrorism. The growing amount of literature in this field is produced mostly by one-timers who “visit” the field, contribute one or two articles, and then move to another subject area. This research pattern does not contribute to the regularity and constancy of publication by which a scientific discipline is formed and theories and paradigms of the field are created. This study observed the research continuance and transience of scientific publications in terrorism by using obtainable “most prolific terrorism authors” lists at different points in time. These lists designed by several terrorism researchers, presented a few researchers who contributed to the field continuously and many others whose main research interest lay in another discipline. The four lists observed included authors who were continuants, transients, new-comers, and terminators (who left the field). The lack of continuous, full-time research in a research field is typical of many disciplines, but the influence of this research pattern on a field’s growth and stability is different for older, established disciplines than for new and formative fields of study. With in the former, intellectual mobility could contribute to the rise of new topics and probably enrich the particular scientific field; with the latter, by contrast, it could hamper the formation and growth of the field.     

Citation expectations: are they realized? Study of the Matthew index for Russian papers published abroad

We consider the “Matthew effect” in the citation process which leads to reallocation (or misallocation) of the citations received by scientific papers within the same journals. The case when such reallocation correlates with a country where an author works is investigated. Russian papers in chemistry and physics published abroad were examined. We found that in both disciplines in about 60% of journals Russian papers are cited less than average ones. However, if we consider each discipline as a whole, citedness of a Russian paper in physics will be on the average level, while chemistry publications receive about 16% citations less than one may expect from the citedness of the journals where they appear. Moreover, Russian chemistry papers mostly become undercited in the leading journals of the field. Characteristics of a “Matthew index” indicator and its significance for scientometric studies are also discussed.