Authorship patterns in life sciences,preclinical basic and clinical research papers

The present paper examines the multiple authorship in research papers in biomedical sciences from the more basic aspects to clinically oriented research. Seventeen journals were chosen for analysis — nine from the general and life sciences categories and eight from medical sciences group with clinical orientation. All these were high impact journals as per the Science Citation Index and come in the top ten journals in their respective desciplines. The average authors/paper was significantly higher (P<0.001) in medical journals –4.299 (range 3.21–5.35) as compared to general biomedical journals –3.298 (range 3.21–5.35). Data from highly cited papers (1961–78) also indicate that papers in clinical sciences have higher average authors (2.71) as compared to preclinical basic research (2.25: P<0.26) and more basic research areas like biochemistry and molecular biology (2.208; P<0.02). The team size in research in clinical subjects is therefore appreciably larger as compared to basic biomedical sciences. Also the general and biomedical sciences articles were relatively longer (average 7.75 pages; range 2.69–10.07) as compared to medical papers with a clinical orientation (avarage 4.24 pages; range 1.80–12.92; P<0.001).     

A bibliometric analysis of physics publications from Middle Eastern countries

I studied the publication efforts in physics in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey in terms of a total number of 2368 papers from these countries in international journals for 1990–1994. I looked for the national contributions, main subjects of activity, journal preferences of authors, and co-authorship patterns. Comparisons show that physicists from Egypt and Turkey combined, produced 75% of the total publication output. Half of the Egyptian papers went only to 16% of a set of 115 journals that publish papers from this country. Such a high concentration of papers in a few journals was not the case for the rest of the countries. Condensed matter physics was found to be among the three most active subjects for the countries except Iran. Iranian authors tended to be more active in astrosciences, and nuclear science and technology. I found a change in the publication patterns of the Middle Eastern physicists in the direction of decreasing isolation and increasing collaboration.     

A Comparison of Iranian Scientific Publications in the Science Citation Index: 1985–1989 and 1990–1994

Iranian scientific publications in the Science Citation Index for two five-year periods, 1985–1989 and 1990–1994, were compared. Distributions of various attributes of the publication output for the two periods were obtained primarily through the Rank command of the Dialog Online System. Results include: productivity by publication year and by ranked order of the most productive Iranian authors; influence or impact of the most productive Iranian authors by ranking them as cited authors; collaboration of Iranian scientists with scientists from other countries; and the journals Iranian scientists published in and the journals they cite in their papers. The subject areas of Iran's scientific publications were examined vis-à-vis the world's publication output and that of the Third World Countries (TWC).     

Bibliometric analysis of scientific productivity: A case study of an Indian physics laboratory

The paper analyses the output of the publication data of an Indian laboratory in the field of physics inSCI and nonSCI covered Indian and foreign journals, processes developed and Indian patents filed during the period 1965–82 to find out the pattern of productivity. Looks at the journals wherein the laboratory scientists publish. Also points out the sub-areas of physics in which the laboratory scientists have published maximum papers and also mentions about the pattern of scientific co-authorship in the research work. Correlation coefficients between input variable (manpower and budget) with output variables (number of papers published, processes developed and Indian patents accepted) have been calculated.     

Modeling multinational publication: Development of an on-line fractionation approach to measure national scientific output

This study of multinational publication (publications involving authors from more than one country) focuses on a viable method of fractionation, which can be used in on-line bibliometric research. Fractionation occurs when the credit for co-authored papers is added only partially to the total of publications of countries or authors. We attempted to find an empirical relation between the share of a country's papers in some field that is multinationally co-authored and the degree of fractionation which results. A linear regression analysis yielded a significant correlation of –0.95. The fractionation method is the first that can be applied to publication data collected on-line. A comparison is made with fractionation by first author (i.e., first address) counting. Application of the method to British scientific output for 1984–1989 suggests that British output was stable. The fractionation method can be applied to both natural and life sciences and to social and behavioral sciences. Findings suggest that similar processes of multinational publication are prevalent in both types of science. Implications of the model are discussed.     

The publication rate of scientific papers depends only on the number of scientists

In the fields of physics, astronomy, geophysics, mathematics, and chemistry, the numbers of American papers published depend only on the membership numbers of their scientific societies and not upon improved facilities or instrumental breakthroughs, although those improvements have caused the scientific contents of those papers to be far better in recent decades. In the past 30–35 years there have been no increases in the average annual number of published papers per scientist in those fields.     

Internationalization of academic journals: Is there still a gap between social and natural sciences?

In this study we compare internationalization of academic journals in six fields of science. Internationalization was investigated through journals’ concentration on publishing papers from particular countries, relationship between the geographical distributions of editors and authors, and relationship between language of publication and the geographical distribution of papers. Having analyzed more than 1,000 journals we can state that social sciences literature in the fields considered is still nationally and linguistically fragmented more than natural sciences literature, but in some cases the gap is not so big. One of the consequences concerning research output assessment is that usefulness of international databases having national disparity in coverage is still limited in social sciences.     

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.     

Structure and evolution of Indian physics co-authorship networks

We trace the evolution of Indian physics community from 1919 to 2013 by analyzing the co-authorship network constructed from papers published by authors in India in American Physical Society (APS) journals. We make inferences on India’s contribution to different branches of Physics and identify the most influential Indian physicists at different time periods. The relative contribution of India to global physics publication (research) and its variation across subfields of physics is assessed. We extract the changing collaboration pattern of authors between Indian physicists through various network measures. We study the evolution of Indian physics communities and trace the mean life and stationarity of communities by size in different APS journals. We map the transition of authors between communities of different sizes from 1970 to 2013, capturing their birth, growth, merger and collapse. We find that Indian–Foreign collaborations are increasing at a faster pace compared to the Indian–Indian. We observe that the degree distribution of Indian collaboration networks follows the power law, with distinct patterns between Physical Review A, B and E, and high energy physics journals Physical Review C and D, and Physical Review Letters. In almost every measure, we observe strong structural differences between low-energy and high-energy physics journals.

     

Some scientometric measures of publishing performance for 85 Hungarian research institutes

A sample comprising the three years publication output (1976–1978) of 85 Hungarian research institutes was subjected to scientometric analysis. Values of and correlations between some measures of publishing performance, scientific manpower, and citation impact were compared across the following research fields: mathematical and physical sciences, chemical sciences, biological and medical sciences, agricultural sciences, and engineering. A new quality measure of publishing performance, thetotal impact of the journal papers of individual institutes has been suggested.     

Mapping of dental science research in India: a scientometric analysis of India’s research output, 1999–2008

The study examines India’s performance based on its publication output in dental sciences during 1999–2008, based on several parameters, including the country annual average growth rate, global publication share & rank among 25 most productive countries of the world, national publication output and impact in terms of average citations per paper, international collaboration output and share and contribution of major collaborative partners, contribution and impact of select top 25 Indian institutions and select top 15 most productive authors, patterns of communication in national and international journals and characteristics of its 45 high cited papers. The study uses 10 years (1999–2008) publications data in dental sciences of India and other countries drawn from Scopus international multidisciplinary bibliographical database.     

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.     

Effects of international collaboration and status of journal on impact of papers

This study examines the effect of international collaboration of Slovenian authors and the status of journals where papers are published (as determined by their impact factors) on the impact of papers as measured by the number of citations papers receive. Research programme groups working in Slovenia in the 2004–2008 period in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, biotechnology, and medical science were used for analyses. The results of the analyses show that the effects of the two factors differ among the fields. We discuss possible reasons for this, including the possibility that differences are the result of Slovenia’s science policy.     

On the behaviour of information flows in multicomponent polymer systems research

The behaviour of information flows in multicomponent polymer systems over the 1979–1983 period is analyzed. It has been found that this field of science obeys general relationships valid for other established sciences. Its special features are a high concentration of information (only 9 journals) and a wide scatter of papers among a great number of peripheral journals. The doubling times for papers and journals as well as the doubling period for papers in a single journal have been determined, they are 3.2, 4.6 and 5.6 years respectively.     

Non-English journals and papers in physics and chemistry: bias in citations?

This study investigates, at the journal as well as the article level, if there is a difference in citations between English-language and non-English publications. The Web of Knowledge is used as data source. The investigation focuses on the fields of physics and chemistry. Using a precise definition of a “non-English journal”, we filter out nine physics and thirty-four chemistry non-English journals, scattered over six physics and seven chemistry subfields. Average received citations per paper (CpP) of the non-English journal(s) are compared with the CpP of pure English journals, and this in the same subfield. We clearly observe that non-English journals are inferior—in number of citations received—to pure English journals and this in all physics and chemistry subfields studied. Further, twelve physics journals and ten chemistry journals were chosen as sample journals to compare the CpP of non-English papers with that of English language papers in the same journal. The result of this comparison is that for the majority of these journals and for most of the publication years the CpP of non-English papers is lower than that of the English language papers. Finally, analyzing linguistic characteristics of the citing literature confirms the own-language preference in non-English physics and chemistry journals.     

Relation of the title length of a journal article to the length of the article

The great importance of titles being highly informative is almost unanimously accepted in literature, assuming that the more informative titles are, the more effectively they serve their functions. The most common measure of title “informativeness” has been the number of “significant” (i.e., non-trivial) words included in it, and one of the factors which might be associated with it is the length of the paper, measured by its number of pages. The present study attempted to test, in a large group of journals from different areas and over six decades, the hypothesis that a paper with more pages will have more “significant” words in its title. Large samples of original research papers were drawn from each decade year of twenty-four leading journals selected from the sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. For each paper, the number of “significant” words in the title was correlated with the number of pages. Findings indicate a difference between the scientific journals on the one hand, and the social sciences and humanities journals on the other. A moderate positive correlation was found in most scientific journals for many periods. In the social sciences journals, and to a greater extent, in the humanities journals, a significant positive correlation was limited to only a few periods, while the rest showed a very low correlation, or even a negative one. The different findings for the sciences are perhaps attributable to their unique inherent features. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Bibliometric analysis of publications of Spanish pharmacologists in the SCI (1984–89). Part II

During the period 1984–89 Spanish pharmacologists published 344 papers (44.3% of their total scientific production) (Science Citation Index, CD-Edition) in journals classified by theSCI in subfields different from Pharmacology & Pharmacy. Distribution by institutions, geographical regions, journals, subfields and research levels are presented. The Normalized Journal Position (NJP) is introduced as indicator of the expected impact in each subfield. Results are compared with those of the analysis of the production of Spanish pharmacologists in the Pharmacology & Pharmacy subfield, presented in a previous paper. Some of the features detected are common to both areas, such as: increasing trend in the productivity over years, irregular geographical distribution with three regions as major producers, or university as main producer institution. Special features of the extra-Pharmacology area are also pointed out: irregular growth of publication number over years, high dispersion of publications in journals and subfields, high collaboration rate, and low percentage of authors with at least 1 paper/year, among others. Attending to journal of publication, cross-disciplinarity research of Spanish pharmacologists is analysed, being Neurosciences, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and Physiology, the main border fields involved.     

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.     

Influence of a performance indicator on Danish research production and citation impact 2000–12

This paper analyses the patterns of Danish research productivity, citation impact and (inter)national collaboration across document types 2000–2012, prior to and after the introduction of the Norwegian publication point-based performance indicator in 2008. Document types analysed are: research articles; conference proceedings papers excluding meeting abstracts; and review articles. The Danish Research & Innovation Agency’s basic statistics combined with Web of Science (WoS) are used for data collection and analyses. Findings demonstrate that the research article productivity increases steeply (37 %) after the start of the performance indicator and the citation impact progresses linearly over the entire period, regardless the introduction of the performance indicator. Academic staff progression is only 24 % during the same time period. The collaboration ratio between purely Danish and internationally cooperated research articles remains stable during the period, the number of collaborative countries increases while the ratio declines significantly for proceedings papers. The citation impact of internationally cooperated research articles increases since 2009 but drops for proceedings papers; also their productivity declines slightly from 2009 according to Research Agency statistics. Since 2006 the WoS indexing of proceedings papers is fast declining; as a consequence the ratio between Danish proceedings papers and research articles declines in WoS. According to Research Agency statistics a decline likewise takes place, starting from 2009. The positive growth in research articles mainly derives from the Science and Technology fields published in prestigious Level 2 journals; the development of articles published in less prestigious Level 1 journals derives from all fields. Three of the eight Danish universities have significantly altered their research publication profiles since 2009. The publication performance model is regarded as the significant accelerator of these processes in recent years.     

Female researchers in Russia: have they become more visible?

This study is based on the fact that the surnames of many Russian scientists have gender endings, with “a” denoting a female, so that the sex of most of them can be readily determined from the listing of authors in the Web of Science (WoS). A comparison was made between the proportion of females in 1985, 1995, and 2005, with a corresponding analysis of the major fields in which they worked, their propensity to co-author papers internationally (which often necessitates having the opportunity to travel to conferences abroad to meet possible colleagues), and their citation records. We found, as expected, that women had a higher presence in the biological sciences and a very low presence in engineering, mathematics, and physics. Their citation scores, on a fractionated basis, were lower than those for men in almost all fields and years, and were not explained by their writing of fewer reviews and papers in English (both of which lead to higher citations), or their lower amount of international collaboration in 1995 and 2005 after Russia had become a more open society.