Scientometric analysis of the major Iranian medical universities

Nowadays, scientometrics has become an important field of study to monitor the progresses in scientific performance of a research group, a department, a university etc. A number of scientometrical studies have been done about Iranian scientific outcome in recent years. But there is no comparison between major Iranian medical universities. In this study, by using Scopus as search engine, the scientific outcomes of the Iran University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Mashhad University of Medical Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, and Tehran University of Medical Sciences have been compared with each other. These universities were compared by the number of published articles per year, number of citations received per year, number of citations received per year per article, total H-indices, top ten authors, and top ten journals. The results of this study show that the order of the studied universities in research performance is as follow: Tehran > Shiraz = Shahid Beheshti > Isfahan = Iran > Tabriz = Mashhad universities of medical sciences. In addition, the data of Tehran University of Medical Sciences as the top medical university of Iran was compared with some of top medical universities around the world.     

Scientometric indicators as a means to assess the performance of state supported universities in developing countries: The Chilean case

Chilean universities are responsible for more than 80% of the science produced in the country, which in the last 20 years with some periods of great difficulties, has grown more than 600%. One of the underlying problems of the governments of developing countries to delineate suitable strategies to allocate efficiently the few funds available, has been the absence of clarity to distinguish the individuals and centers committed with competitive scientific research. As a consequence, the state funds, which in part are scarce because the region invest to little in science, do not always reach to the right people and to the right places, amplifying the already existing problems for the good scientists that resist to emigrate. To evaluate the corresponding situation in Chile, and to follow the results of substantial actions to support the scientific activity in the country, we have examined the performance of state financed universities.     

Scientometric investigations in the USSR

The following is a review of scientometric investigations in the USSR. Scientometrics has been taken in the rigorous sense of the term, defined as an approach of the science of science which attempts to measure sciencereproducibly. The state of scientometric research in the Soviet Union is compared to that of other countries.     

Instructor perceptions of engineering ethics education at Chinese engineering universities: A cross-cultural approach

During the past decade, governmental agencies, universities and programs, policymakers, and educators in China have been striving for reforming and “globalizing” the engineering ethics curriculum. Chinese scholars have proposed strategies for improving the teaching effectiveness of engineering ethics that integrate “global forms” derived from the “American-style engineering ethics” into the Chinese context. Nevertheless, limited empirical research is available that examines the alignment of these strategies and the cultures of engineering education in China (e.g., instructor perceptions of engineering ethics education). We argue that understanding how Chinese instructors perceive engineering ethics instruction is critical for designing instructional strategies sensitive to the Chinese sociocultural context. In this study, we reviewed the literature on teaching engineering ethics (primarily after the 2000s) and teased out a set of most “contested” questions concerning American educators since the emergence of engineering ethics education as an academic discipline. By using these questions as a guideline, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 Chinese engineering ethics instructors trained in three different fields: STS and philosophy of science and technology, engineering, and Marxist studies and ethical theories. This paper also briefly discussed how the ways Chinese instructors perceived engineering ethics education are connected to and distinct from the views held by American educators discussed in the literature review section. This paper is expected to shed light on the cultures of engineering ethics education in China and provide insights into formulating effective policies and teaching strategies sensitive to the Chinese context.     

Scientometric study of laser patent literature

An analysis of the patents filed and scientific papers published and abstracted in theJournal of Current Laser Abstracts (JCLA) for the period 1967–95 indicates that innovative activity in laser science and technology was at its peak in the early 70s. However, scientific activity surpassed the innovative activity in the early 80s. There was a continuous shift in emphasis from “applications of lasers” to “experimental laser research” and to “theoretical laser research”. Further analysis of the 1840 patents field in 1970–71, 1975–76, and 1980–85 indicates that most of the firms filing patents were situated in USA and thus USA is the leading country filing patents in this area followed by Japan. “Spectroscopy of laser output” followed by “Communication applications of laser” got the maximum emphasis.     

Scientometric analysis of a scientific school

A procedure including scientometric methods combined with other techniques is described. This allows to define the membership and structure of a scientific school and to trace the dynamics of its development. Formation and evolution of a scientific school is presented as a purposeful scientific-information process involving changes in the nature and dynamics of the types of information links.     

高校飞行器制造工程专业的综合实验课程教学研究

针对高校飞行器制造工程专业的综合实验课程教学,论文提出了设置飞机数字化设计制造一体化技术实验、飞机钣金精密塑性热成形工艺教学实验、飞机数字化柔性装配教学实验及飞机复合材料构件设计制造一体化技术等四大实验系列共14个实验的教学设想。这些实验既涉及传统的飞机制造工艺,也包括最新的飞机研制信息化手段。完成上述实验可提高本专业学生的动手能力,加深对飞行器产品制造过程各项知识点的理解。     

Scientometric impact assessment of a research policy instrument: the case of rating researchers on scientific outputs in South Africa

The influence of the National Research Foundation’s (NRF) rating system on the productivity of the South African social science researchers is investigated scientometrically for the period from 1981 to 2006. Their output performance is mainly indicated by their research publications. Following international best practice in scientometrics as well as the behavioural reinforcement theory, we employed the “before/after control impact (BACI) method”, as well as the well known econometric breakpoint test as proposed by Chow. We use as control group the publications in the field of clinical medicine. The field is not supported by NRF and hence clinical medicine researchers are not affected by the evaluation and rating system. The findings show a positive impact of the NRF programme on the research outputs of social sciences researchers and the implementation of the programme has increased the relevant population of research articles by an average of 24.5% (during the first 5 years) over the expected number of publication without the programme. The results confirm the scientometric findings of other studies (e.g. that of Nederhof) that ratings promulgate research productivity.     

Scientometric estimation of present-day study on phosphides

A scientometric analysis of the publications and of the information flow on all phosphides shows that: the bulk of the publications on semiconducting phosphides relates to gallium phosphide. For non-semiconducting phosphides, most of the articles are connected with phosphides of transition metals. The bulk of the studies feature crystal structure, phase equilibria, diagrams of state and electrophysical and magnetic properties. Most of the articles on phosphides are published in English (53,4%) and in Russian (24.4%). There is a tendency for research to be carried out by groups of researchers of two, three, four or more persons. The present sceintometric analysis helps establish the trend of investigations on phosphides.     

Scientometric analysis of nature, the journal

300,000 reports inNature during the 1869–1998 period have been reviewed. The distribution of articles by subfields was determined. Additional sources of information were several journals on analytical chemistry and papers at the Pittsburg conference series during 1950–1999. The methodology used is based on the analysis of the average age of employed instruments. The agreement between scientometric data from various sources of information depends on the development stage of the field of science. Calculated and measured scientometric curves were compared. One of the key trends in the development of basic sciences, namely, the increase of articles dealing with instrumental analytical chemistry, inNature is revealed. The research was supported by the Russian Foundation of Basic Research (Project No. 97-06-80163a) and State Target Programme "Integracia" (Project No. 670).     

Scientometric analysis of geostatistics using multivariate methods

Multivariate methods were successfully employed in a comprehensive scientometric analysis of geostatistics research, and the publications data for this research came from the Science Citation Index and spanned the period from 1967 to 2005. Hierarchical cluster analysis (CA) was used in publication patterns based on different types of variables. A backward discriminant analysis (DA) with appropriate statistical tests was then conducted to confirm CA results and evaluate the variations of various patterns. For authorship pattern, the 50 most productive authors were classified by CA into 4 groups representing different levels, and DA produced 92.0% correct assignment with high reliability. The discriminant parameters were mean impact factor (MIF), annual citations per publication (ACPP), and the number of publications by the first author, for country/region pattern, CA divided the top 50 most productive countries/regions into 4 groups with 95.9% correct assignments, and the discriminant parameters were MIF, ACCP, and independent publication (IP); for institute pattern, 3 groups were identified from the top 50 most productive institutes with nearly 88.0% correct assignment, and the discriminant parameters were MIF, ACCP, IP, and international collaborative publication; last, for journal pattern, the top 50 most productive journals were classified into 3 groups with nearly 98.0% correct assignment, and its discriminant parameters were total citations, impact factor and ACCP. Moreover, we also analyzed general patterns for publication document type, language, subject category, and publication growth.     

Scientometric portrait of Prof. Peter John Wyllie

Summary Scientometrics is an application of quantitative methods to the history of Science. It is also one of the techniques for documenting, collecting works of eminent scientists and researcher's. In this paper, we present a concise sketch of Prof. Peter John Wyllie, stressing on his scientific achievements. His research has had a great impact in the fields dealing with terrestrial magmatic phenomena and geology.     

Scientometric Perspectives of the Analysis of Chemical Terminology

This paper is dedicated to the memory of Prof. Nalimov. The paper is to show some possibilities of bibliometric methods applied to Subject Index to “CHEMICAL ABSTRACT” (CA) and to Permuterm Subject Index to “SCIENCE CITATION INDEX”. 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.     

Scientometric research in South Africa and successful policy instruments

This document provides an analysis of scientometric research in South Africa and it discusses sources of growth in the country’s research literature in general. South Africa is identified to have limited expertise in the field revealed mainly during the last decade. However, the country is ranked 21st in the world among the countries publishing in the journal Scientometrics and it is the only African country with such a standing in the field. Identification of the forces affecting positively the growth in the number of research publications in the country indicates that the primary incentive fuelling the recent growth is the new funding formula in the country which subsidizes the universities by more than R100 000 for each publication that their staff produces. The increase in the number of journals indexed in the ISI Thomson Reuters database and the incorporation of social sciences at the NRF have also affected the growth of research publications, but to a lesser extent.     

Scientometric research assessment in the developing world: A tribute to Michael J. Moravcsik from the perspective of the twenty-first century

Scientometrics - Proceeding from Moravcsik’s paradigmatic ideas of how to build indigenous capability and sustainable science systems in developing countries, we attempted to further focus on...     

Evaluation and assessment in software engineering [Editorial]

Software engineers find that experiments are difficult to perform. Furthermore, no experiment can be considered flawless no matter how well conducted. In this Special Issue the authors have addressed this problem as well as emphasising the need to undertake more empirical studies with discussing practical and methodological issues associated with evaluation. As so, all the papers in this Special Issue address software engineering aspects and evaluate them through various types of empirical studies ranging from experiments, replications of empirical studies, case studies, surveys, observational studies, field studies, systematic reviews.     

Scientometric portrait of nobel laureate Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910–1994), the renowned crystallographer and the Nobel prize winner in Chemistry (1964) was responsible for developing the X-ray diffraction method of finding the exact structure of large and complicated molecules, such as Penicillin, Vitamin B-12, Insulin, etc. Her 180 publications during 1932–1988 were analyzed by domains, authorship pattern, publication productivity, scattering of publications and the keywords used in the titles of her papers.