Scientific production and citation impact: a bibliometric analysis in acupuncture over three decades

Acupuncture, the most important nonpharmacological therapy in traditional Chinese medicine, has attracted significant attention since its introduction to the Western world. This study employs bibliometric analysis to examine the profile of publication activity related to it. The data are retrieved from the database of Science Citation Index Expanded during 1980–2009, and 7,592 papers are identified for analysis. This study finds that almost 20 % of papers are published in CAM journals, and the average cited times per acupuncture paper is 8.69. While the most cited article has been cited 2,109 times, however, 38.15 % of total publications have never been cited. Europe has the largest amount of authored papers with high h-index values; the USA has the largest number of publications on and citations of acupuncture based on country distribution, and this has continued as a significant rising trend. The proportion of collaborative papers shows this upward trend on the worldwide scale while the percentage shares of national collaborations are the highest. The USA produces the most international collaborative documents, although South Korea occupies the highest percentage figure for international collaborative papers. International collaborative papers are the most frequently cited. The average number of authors per paper is 3.69 in the top eight countries/regions. Papers contributed by South Korea are authored by the most people. International collaboration papers are authored by more people, except in Taiwan. South Korea’s Kyung Hee University is ranked first in terms of number of papers while Harvard University in the USA accounts for the largest proportion of citations. The University of Exeter, Harvard University and Karolinska Institute have the highest h-index values.     

Gender gaps in international research collaboration: a bibliometric approach

This paper addresses gender differences in international research collaboration measured through international co-authorship. The study is based on a dataset consisting of 5600 Norwegian researchers and their publication output during a 3-year period (44,000 publications). Two different indicators are calculated. First, the share of researchers that have been involved in international collaboration as measured by co-authorship, and second, the share of their publications with international co-authorship. The study shows that the field of research is by far the most important factor influencing the propensity to collaborate internationally. There are large differences from humanities on the one hand, where international collaboration in terms of co-authorship is less common, to the natural sciences on the other, where such collaboration is very frequent. On an overall level, we find distinct gender differences in international research collaboration in Norway in the favour of men. However, men and women are not equally distributed across fields and there are relatively more female researchers in fields where the international collaboration rates generally are lower. When the data are analysed by scientific field, academic position, and publication productivity of the researchers, the gender differences in the propensity to collaborate with colleagues in other countries are minor only, and not statistically significant. Concerning gender inequality in science, the main challenge seems to be the lower productivity level of female researchers, which obviously hinders their academic career development. Differences in international collaboration are unlikely to be an important factor in this respect, at least not in the Norwegian research context analysed in this study.

     

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.     

Propaganda as a research field: a bibliometric study

Scientometrics - In its efforts to direct thought and with the help of technological developments that allow it to spread more easily and quicker than ever before, propaganda has become a dominant...     

Evolution of three Nobel Prize themes and a Nobel snub theme in chemistry: a bibliometric study with focus on international collaboration

In this study, three chemistry research themes closely associated with the Nobel Prize are bibliometrically analyzed—Ribozyme, Ozone and Fullerene—as well as a research theme in chemistry not associated with the Nobel Prize (a Nobel snub theme): Brunauer–Emmett–Teller equation. We analyze, based on an algorithmically constructed publication-level classification system, the evolution of the four themes with respect to publication volume and international collaboration, using two datasets, one of them a subset of highly cited publications, for each considered time period. The focus of the study is on international collaboration, where co-occurrence of country names in publications is used as a proxy for international collaboration. For all four themes, especially for Brunauer–Emmett–Teller equation, the publication volumes increase considerably from the earliest period to the later periods. The international collaboration rate shows an increasing trend for each theme. For Ozone, Fullerene and Brunauer–Emmett–Teller equation, the international collaboration rate tend to be higher for the highly cited publications compared to full datasets. With regard to the evolution of number of countries per international publication and per highly cited international publication, a vast majority of the distributions are positively skewed, with a large share of publications with two countries. With respect to the last four periods of the study, the concentration to two countries per publication is more pronounced for the Brunauer–Emmett–Teller equation theme compared to the three Nobel Prize themes.     

Bibliographical research in the study of Hebrew printing: a bibliometric analysis

The study presents the state of bibliographical research in the discipline of Hebrew printing during a 30-year period, ranging from the latter quarter of the twentieth century until the beginning of the third millennium (1976–2006). Through bibliographical parameters it characterizes the publications dealing with Hebrew printing, examines whether the published material exhibits laws and systematic regularities that are consistent with Bibliometrics, and describes directions in which the field has developed.     

Mixed methods in international business research: A value-added perspective

The paper considers the use of mixed methods in international business research by reviewing empirical studies in four major journals. A total of 484 articles were reviewed, 68 of which had applied a mixed method strategy. In our analysis we categorize mixed methods according to their use in different stages of the research process and provide a range of alternative designs for mixing qualitative and quantitative methods.     

Process perspectives in international business research in CEE

Abstract

Internationalisation processes have been a core interest of international business research since the seminal contribution by Johanson and Vahlne (1977).

The unique context of economic transition in CEE directs the attention to dynamic aspects of these processes, and to the interaction with changing environmental conditions.

This introductory paper reviews the contributions of recent CEE research, and this special issue in particular, to advance our understanding of internationalisation processes.

     

Facebook in educational research: a bibliometric analysis

Facebook has become the object of research in different areas. The present study presents a bibliometric analysis of the scientific literature related to the use of this social network in educational research. To this end, bibliometric techniques were applied in the analysis of scientific articles indexed at the Web of Science Core Collection, from Thomson Reuters, and linked to the research areas of Education/Educational Research. This resulted in the identification of, among others, developments in scientific production, the most important journals that publish papers on the topic, the main authors and the main articles published in the area. The results indicate the growth of scientific production in the area from 2008 onwards, pointing to Computers and Education as the most relevant journal by number of publications (22) and impact factor and indicate that authors from the United States, Australia, Taiwan, United Kingdom and South Africa stand out in the construction of knowledge on educational research applying Facebook. Moreover, the ego-network of the Educational Research area shows that this area coexists with other areas of knowledge in the use of social networking, such as Computer Science, Linguistics and Health Sciences, indicating an interdisciplinary and transversal nature in different areas of research.     

Meta-analysis in psychology: a bibliometric study

Meta-analysis refers to the statistical methods used in research synthesis for combining and integrating results from individual studies. The present study draws on the strengths of bibliometric methods in order to offer an overview of meta-analytic research activity in psychology, as well as to characterize its most important aspects and their evolution over time. A total of 2,874 articles published in scientific journals were identified and standard bibliometric indicators (e.g., number of articles, productivity by country, and national and international collaborations) and laws (e.g., Price’s and Lotka’s law) were applied to these data. The results suggest a clear upward trend not only in the number of articles published since the 1970s (with a peak of productivity in 2010), but also in both the number of authors by article ( $ \bar{x} = 2. 7 5 $ , SD = 1.53) and internationalization, especially since the 1990s. The interest in meta-analysis extends to many authors (n = 5,445), countries (n = 44) and scientific journals (n = 394), as well as to several areas of psychology that mostly fit a growing exponential model. In future studies it would be interesting to explore the citing behaviour and patterns in the meta-analysis literature.     

The use of bibliometric indicators in the study of insecticide research

This paper reports part of a historical study of insecticide development. We analysed accumulated references to specific insecticide groups in text books, and index references to a large number of specific insecticides in theReview of Applied Entomology (Ser. A) over the period 1916–70. The paper describes our techniques for analysing the resulting research publication growth curves for these compounds. Our data did not fit the classical S-curves, and possible explanations for this are discussed. Bibliometric time series data may exhibit various inconsistencies, and we describe an approach to handling such dirty data. We concluded that; our quantitative approach produces a picture of the development of insecticides that fits the accepted view derived by qualitative historiography, is very sensitive to trends in pesticide research, and might be a useful adjunct to technology forecasting as well as to historical studies.     

Marshall-Olkin distributions: a bibliometric study

Scientometrics - Recently, there has been a growing interest among statistical researchers to develop new probability distributions, adding one or more parameters to previously existing ones. In...     

Innovation,competition and change in international business: Emergent research trajectories

Abstract and Key Results

The use of bibliometric techniques for institutional research evaluation: A study of avian virology research

A bibliometric analysis was made of an area of veterinary research, avian virology, in the context of seeking quantitative indicators to assist research evaluation for the UK Agricultural and Food Research Council (AFRC). In one approach, a list was made of world publications in avian virology using the CAB database which is the most appropriate literature source in terms of subject specificity and breadth of coverage. Means were sought to minimise the labour input required for citation studies of this kind; results based on peak-year citations only were similar to those from the more widely used four-year count, in terms of country-ranking and time trends. In the second method, the publication outputs of several avian virology research groups were assessed in terms of expected citations i.e. the average number of citations per paper received by the journals in which the groups published, as compared to the actual citations received. The rankings of the groups were the same in both methods. This second approach, while giving only approximate citation rates, has the advantage of requiring only in-house data. It seems more appropriate for the ex-post evaluation of the output of research groups in the context of agricultural and food research, and it is suggested that further studies on journal-based indicators are warranted.     

The impact of qualitative methods on article citation: an international business research perspective

Scientometrics - Qualitative methods have traditionally been underused in international business, and their research potential in this area has not been widely investigated. The main objective of...     

A bibliometric study of bioinformatics research in South Africa

This paper reports on the practises of bioinformatics research in South Africa using bibliometric techniques. The search strategy was designed to cover the common concepts in biological data organisation, retrieval and analysis; the development and application of tools and methodologies in biological computation; and related subjects in genomics and structural bioinformatics. The South African literature in bioinformatics has grown by 66.5% between 2001 and 2006. However, its share of world production is not on par with comparator countries, Brazil, India and Australia.     

Progress in global parallel computing research: a bibliometric approach

This study adopts a bibliometric approach to analyze the progress in global parallel computing research from the related literature in the Science Citation Index Expanded database from 1958 to 2011. By investigating the characteristics of annual publication outputs, we find that parallel computing has recently experienced increasing attention again after its first rapid development in the 1990s, and the research in this field is entering into a new phase. The distribution of publications indicates that the seven major industrial countries (G7), with USA ranking top, are identified as the most productive and influential countries in this domain. Author keywords were analyzed by comparison, and we conclude that the study focus of parallel computing has shifted from hardware to software, with parallel application and programming based on MPI, GPUs and multicores being the research tendencies; grid computing and cloud computing dominate the distributed computing area due to their heterogeneous and scalable structures; and, furthermore, the processors of parallel machines are heading for a diverse development. The citing-cited matrix brings into light the intense interactions among the disciplines of computer science, engineering, mathematics and physics. The mutual interactions between the four disciplines have increased gradually and reflect the subject characteristics in influence content.