Bibliometric analysis of biological invasions research during the period of 1991 to 2007

The objective of this study is to conduct a bibliometric analysis of all biological invasions-related publications in the Science Citation Index (SCI) from 1991 to 2007. The indicator citation per publication (CPP) was used to evaluate the impact of articles, journals, and institutions. In the 3323 articles published in 521 journals, 7261 authors from 1905 institutions of 100 countries participated. As the most productive country of biological invasions research, the US will benefit from more collaboration between institutions, countries, and continents. In addition, analysis of keywords was applied to reveal research trends.     

Bibliometric analysis of tsunami research

The use of the bibilometric analytical technique for examining tsunami research does not exist in the literature. The objective of the study was to perform a bibliometric analysis of all tsunami-related publications in the Science Citation Index (SCI). Analyzed parameters included document type, language of publication, publication output, authorship, publication patterns, distribution of subject category, distribution of author keywords, country of publication, most-frequently cited article, and document distribution after the Indonesia tsunami. The US and Japan produced 53% of the total output where the seven major industrial countries accounted for the majority of the total production. English was the dominant language, comprising 95% of articles. A simulation model was applied to describe the relationship between the number of authors and the number of articles, the number of journals and the number of articles, and the percentage of total articles and the number of times a certain keyword was used. Moreover the tsunami publication patterns in the first 8 months after the Indonesia tsunami occurred on 26 December 2004 indicated a high percentage of non-article publications and more documents being published in journals with higher impact factors.     

Citation frequency: A biased measure of research impact significantly influenced by the geographical origin of research articles

Context. The use of citation frequency and impact factor as measures of research quality and journal prestige is being criticized. Citation frequency is augmented by self-citation and for most journals the majority of citations originate from a minority of papers. We hypothesized that citation frequency is also associated with the geographical origin of the research publication. Objective. We determined whether citations originate more frequently from institutes that are located in the same country as the authors of the cited publication than would be expected by chance. Design. We screened citations referring to 1200 cardiovascular publications in the 7 years following their publication. For the 1200 citation recipient publications we documented the country where the research originated (9 countries/regions) and the total number of received citations. For a selection of 8864 citation donor papers we registered the country/region where the citing paper originated. Results. Self-citation was common in cardiovascular journals (n = 1534, 17.8%). After exclusion of self-citation, however, the number of citations that originated from the same country as the author of the citation recipient was found to be on average 31.6% higher than would be expected by chance (p<0.01 for all countries/regions). In absolute numbers, nation oriented citation bias was most pronounced in the USA, the country with the largest research output (p<0.001). Conclusion. Citation frequency was significantly augmented by nation oriented citation bias. This nation oriented citation behaviour seems to mainly influence the cumulative citation number for papers originating from the countries with a larger research output.     

A bibliometric analysis of research related to ocean circulation

This study is a bibliometric analysis on ocean circulation-related research for the period 1991–2005. Selected documents included “ocean circulation, sea circulation, seas circulation, marine circulation, and circulation ocean” as a part of the title, abstract or keywords. Analyzed parameters included the document type, the article output, the article distribution in journals, the publication activity of countries, and institutes and the authorship. An indicator, citation per publication (CPP) was applied to evaluate the scientific impact of a publication. The relationship between cumulative articles and the year was modeled. Three dominant categories were picked out, and their output increase was modeled. The USA was found to be leading the research with 47% share of total articles, with a CPP up to 5.9. Woods Hole Oceanography Institute in the USA was the most productive institute with a CPP of 6.8. In the citation analysis, a 5th year citation mode was found. A paper life model was applied to compare the cumulative citations increasing rates of different years.     

Trends and performance of oxidative stress research from 1991 to 2010

A bibliometric analysis was performed in this work to determine research trends of oxidative stress publications published between 1991 and 2010 in journals of all the subject categories of the Science citation index. Publication trends were analyzed by the retrieved results in publication type and language, characteristics of articles outputs, country, subject categories and journals, and the frequency of title-words and keywords used. Over the years, there was a significant growth in article outputs, with more countries participating and collaborating. The seven major industrialized countries (G7) published the majority of the world articles while the USA contributed about one-third of the total. Chinese and Indian outputs grew much faster than those of other countries in the past 5 years. Oxidative stress research in food and environmental related fields gradually became the mainstream of the research. An analysis of the title-words, author keywords and keywords plus showed that antioxidants in human or rat cells were the hot topic in the field. In addition, “reaction oxygen species”, “apoptosis”, and “nitric-oxide” were major topics of oxidative stress research recently. More articles dealt with diseases that had a strong relationship with oxidative stress, such as inflammation, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, and atherosclerosis.     

Bibliometric analysis of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-related research in the beginning stage

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) has become the major of health issues since its outbreak early 2003. No analyses by bibliometric technique that have examined this topic exist in the literature. The objective of this study is to conduct a bibliometric analysis of all SARS-related publications in Science Citation Index (SCI) in the early stage. A systematic search was performed using the SCI for publications since SARS outbreak early 2003. Selected documents included 'severe acute respiratory syndrome' or 'SARS' as a part of its title, abstract, or keyword from the beginning stage of SARS outbreak, March till July 8, 2003. Analysis parameters included authorship, patterns of international collaboration, journals, language, document type, research institutional address, times cited, and reprint address. Citation analysis was mainly based on impact factor as defined by Journal Citation Reports(JCR) issued in 2002 and on the actual citation impact (ACI), which has been used to assess the impact relative to the whole field and has been defined as the ratio between individual citation per publication value and the total citation per publication value. Thirty-two percent of total share was published as news features, 25% as editorial materials, 22% as articles, 13% as letters, and the remaining being biographic items, corrections, meeting abstracts, and reprints. The US dominated the production by 30% of the total share followed closely by Hong Kong with 24%. Sixty-three percent of publication was published by the mainstream countries. The SARS publication pattern in the past few months suggests immediate citation, low collaboration rate, and English and mainstream country domination in production. We observed no associations of research indexes with the number of cases. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Bibliometric analysis of homeopathy research during the period of 1991 to 2003

Summary Homeopathy has been applied to clinical use since it was first presented 200 years ago. The use of the bibilometric analysis technique for examining this topic does not exist in the literature. The objective of this study is to conduct a bibliometric analysis of all homeopathy-related publications in Science Citation Index (SCI). A systematic search was performed using the SCI for publications during the period of 1991 to 2003. Selected documents included Homoeopathy, Homoeopathic, Homeopathy, or Homeopathic as a part of the title, abstract, or keywords. Analyzed parameters included authorship, patterns of international collaboration, journal, language, document type, research address, number of times cited, and reprint authors address. Citation analysis was mainly based on the impact factor as defined by the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and on citations per publications (CPP), which is used to assess the impact relative to the entire field and is defined as the ratio between the average numbers of citations per publications in a certain period. Of total articles, 49% had a single author. The UK, the US, and Germany produced 71% of the total output, while European countries as a whole also contributed 65% of the total share of independent publications. English remains the dominant language, it comprised only 76%, while German contributed 18%, and the remaining where distributed among 8 European languages. More document types and languages, and fewer pages have appeared in homeopathy research. 3.5% of papers were cited more than 10 times in three years after publication, and 60% were never cited. Small-group collaboration was a popular method as co-authorship. The top 3 ranking countries of publication were the UK, the US, and Germany. The US dominated citation followed by the UK, and then Germany. In addition, a simulation model was applied to describe the relationship between the cumulative number of citations and the paper life.     

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.     

A bibliometric analysis of the performance of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Water Research</Emphasis>

This paper presents a detailed chronological survey of papers published in the journal titled Water Research which started publication since 1967. This current investigation reviews publication patterns between 1967 and 2008. An analysis of the research performance according to publication output, distribution of words in article title, author keywords, and keywords plus. Performances of countries, institutes, and authors, including total, single, collaborative, first author, and corresponding author publications were analyzed. The most-frequently cited articles each year and the articles of the highest impact in 2008 were also reported. Results showed that “activated sludge” was the most frequently used author keyword, followed by “adsorption,” and “drinking water.” Authors from 114 different countries/territories published in the journal, with the most articles submitted by authors from the USA.     

A bibliometric analysis of publications by the School of Biological Sciences, Seoul National University, South Korea

This study presents an in-depth survey of research and citation performance of the School of Biological Sciences (SBS) 39-member faculty at Seoul National University (SNU), the most prestigious university in South Korea, for the years 2004–2009. Thirty-nine faculty members published a total of 640 publications during the period, representing an average of 16.4 publications per scientist. Among the 640 publications, 521 (81.4 %) were cited 9,204 times, an average of 14.4 citations per publication. More publications co-authored by the SBS faculty with foreign researchers (mostly from the U.S.A.) were published in mainstream journals than publications by three other co-authorship types. Accordingly, publications by international co-authorships received more citations compared to citation levels of three other co-authorship types in terms of the average citations per publication. The study has found a concentration effect, whereby quite a small number of publications received approximately one-third of the citation performance generated by the SBS faculty at SNU. The results demonstrate that the citation performance of the SBS at SNU can be influenced considerably by the presence and productivity of ‘star’ scientists.     

Global trend in aquatic ecosystem research from 1992 to 2011

Aquatic ecosystems are ecologically important, but continuously threatened by a growing number of human induced changes. This study evaluates the research trends of “aquatic ecosystem” between 1992 and 2011 in journals of all subject categories of the science citation index and social sciences citation index. The analyzed parameters include publication output, cited publication, document type, language, distributions of journal, author, country and institutes, and analysis of author keywords and keywords plus. The results showed that over the past two decades, there was a consistent growth in publication output with involvement of increasing number of countries and institutions, and North America was still the leading region in the subject. Classification of the top 30 author keywords indicated that more research attentions were paid to the study on aquatic organism, water environment and aquatic ecosystem condition. Aquatic ecosystem, water quality, and fish were the top three most frequently used author keywords. In addition, owing to its significant impact on aquatic ecosystems, climate change has been placed crucial emphasis recently. Aquatic ecosystem research trend was shifting from water environment to aquatic ecosystem wide issues.     

A study on the citation situation within the citing paper: citation distribution of references according to mention frequency

Citation impact indicators play a significant role in evaluating the scientific research activity. Most of citation impact indicators are based on the citation count that the publication is cited as a reference in the other publications, but the difference between each citation situation was not considered. Normally, the number of citations that a publication is cited in the other publications may represent the formal quality of the publication. Similarly, the number of times that a publication is really mentioned within the citing publication, it may also represent the formal quality of the citation. We have examined about how many times each reference was really mentioned within the citing publications and studied about the citation situation within the citing publications. We verified that the citation distribution of references according to the mention frequency follows the Generalized Pareto distribution. The results showed that about 20% of total references were mentioned three and more times, and the number of citation mentions for the about 50% of total references were from about 20% of the total references in the citing publications.     

Science in Scandinavia: A Bibliometric Approach

The development of publication activity and citation impact in Scandinavian countries is studied for the 1980–1997 period. Besides the analysis of trends in publication and citation patterns and of national publication profiles, an attempt is made to find statistical evidences of the relation between international co-authorship and both research profile and citation impact in the Nordic countries. A coherent Scandinavian cluster has been found, and the Nordic countries have strong co-authorship links with highly developed countries in West Europe and North America. It was found that international co-authorship, in general, results in publications with higher citation rates than purely domestic papers. International collaboration has, however, not the same influence on publication profiles and citation impact of each analysed countries.     

Two-phase edge outlier detection method for technology opportunity discovery

It has been observed that Southeast Asian countries and universities have ranked poorly in global research productivity and impact. The same is true for the field of language and linguistics. Some studies revealed that productivity and citation patterns in this field are lower compared to other fields of study. Thus, this study sought to examine the research performance of SEA countries and universities in the field of language and linguistics for efficient policy-making. The research performance of each SEA country and university was assessed through Scopus database using the following bibliometric indicators: total number of publications (P), total number of citations excluding self-citations (C), citations per publication (CPP), percent of non-cited articles (%PNC), and h-index. Findings revealed that SEA countries have only produced almost 2 % of all published articles in language and linguistics and around 1 % share in overall worldwide field citations. Interestingly, both the SEA countries and universities exhibit a trend toward increasing their yearly research productivity and citations. However, research productivity and citations in the field of language and linguistics are dominated by selected universities in each country particularly in Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines. This study has implications for research policy-making and future studies.     

The changing dynamics in citation index publication position China in a race with the USA for global leadership

Along with China’s economic emergence is a controversy over the quality and international visibility of citation index publications. This study uses bibliometric statistics to shed further light on the global landscape of citation index publications with special focus on China and the USA. The analysis explores 31 years of the TRS (Thomson Reuters Scientific) database, spanning the 1980–2010 period. Based on this study, the USA maintains global dominance for both WOK (Web of Knowledge) and WOS (Web of Science) TRS publications. Although China ranks a distant second for WOK, it lags behind five other nations for WOS publications. China’s scientific base needs further restructuring for greater global visibility. Emerging economies such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa are fast rising in the global ranks for WOK/WOS publications. China may already be leading the world in some publication attributes, although it could take several more decades to catch up with the USA in others. Normalizations of the publications with population, PTE (population with tertiary education) and GDP (gross domestic product) put small/low-population countries in the global lead. However, countries such as Canada, Greenland, Iceland and Sweden still rank high for most of these publication attributes. Furthermore, WOS per WOK analysis shows that small and/or economically weak countries place greater emphasis on WOS publications. This is particularly visible for countries in Africa and South America. Despite the addition of a large number of indigenous Chinese journals to the TRS database, prediction analysis suggests that China’s desire to surpass the USA could be delayed for several decades. In the race for the next-generation scientific superpower, however, China not only needs to sustain substantial investments in research and development, but also requires restructuring of its research industry. This is especially critical for data readiness, availability and accessibility to the scientific community, and radical implementations of research recommendations.     

Global trends of solid waste research from 1997 to 2011 by using bibliometric analysis

This study explores a bibliometric approach to quantitatively assessing current research trends on solid waste, by using the related literature published between 1997 and 2011 in journals of all the subject categories of the Science Citation Index. The articles acquired from such literature were concentrated on the general analysis by publication type and language, characteristics of articles outputs, country, subject categories and journals, and the frequency of title-words and keywords used. Over the past 15 years, there had been a notable growth trend in publication outputs, along with more participation of countries/territories. The seven major industrialized countries (G7) published the majority of the world articles, while their article share was being replacing by other countries represented by BRIC countries. An analysis of the title-words, author keywords and keywords plus showed that municipal solid waste and sludge were the major research types of solid wastes and “anaerobic digestion”, “wastewater” and “heavy metals” were recent major topics of solid waste research. Meanwhile, the analysis indicated the analysis technologies, represented by solid-phase extraction and tandem mass-spectrometry, were more and more widely used for solid waste research. Besides, life cycle assessment and health risk assessment were the most two frequently environmental assessment tools used for solid waste research in the 15-year research period.     

Bibliometric analysis of diabetes mellitus research output from Middle Eastern Arab countries during the period (1996–2012)

The main objective of this study was to analyze research productivity originating from Middle East Arab (MEA) countries in the field of diabetes mellitus (DM). Data from January 1, 1996 till December 31, 2012 were searched for documents with specific words in diabetes as a “source title” and a list of 13 MEA countries as affiliation country. Research productivity was evaluated based on number of publications, citation analysis, indexing in Institute for Scientific Information and impact factor (IF). The 13 MEA countries published a total of 479 documents in 41 diabetes journals. This number represents 0.75 % of the total documents produced globally in the field of DM. The number of published documents increased by around fivefold from early 2000 to 2012. Of the 41 journal titles retrieved, 24 (58.5 %) had their IF listed in the journal citation reports 2012. Forty-two documents (14.5 %) were published in journals that had no official IF. The total number of citations for documents published from MEA countries in the field of DM, at the time of data analysis, was 5,565 with an h index of 35. The median (inter-quartile range) citation for documents from the 13 MEA countries was 4 (1–11). The top productive institution in the field of DM was United Arab Emirates University with 51 documents (10.6 %). Authors from MEA countries collaborated mostly with authors in countries like United Kingdom, USA, and Germany. The present data show promising and relatively good diabetes research productivity in MEA countries especially after 2008.     

Classic articles on social work field in Social Science Citation Index: a bibliometric analysis

This study aimed to identify and analyze characteristics of classic articles published in the Web of Science social work subject category from 1856 to 2011. Articles that have been cited at least 50 times were assessed regarding publication outputs, distribution of outputs in journals, publications of authors, institutions, countries as well as citation life cycles of articles with the highest total citations since its publication up to 2011 and the highest citations in 2011. Five bibliometric indicators were used to evaluate source countries, institutions, and authors. Results showed that 721 of the most highly referenced articles, published between 1957 and 2008, had been cited at least 50 times. Child Abuse & Neglect and American Journal of Community Psychology published the most classic articles. USA produced 89 % of classic articles and also published the most number of single, internationally collaborative, first author, and corresponding author classic articles. The top 38 productive institutions were all located in the US. The University of Illinois was the most productive institution for the total classic articles while University of California, Los Angeles produced the most inter-institutionally collaborative articles and Arizona State University published the most single institution articles. Furthermore, a new indicator, Y-index was successfully applied to evaluate publication characteristics of authors and institutions. High percentage of authors had the same numbers of first author and corresponding author status of classic articles in social work field.     

Scientometric analysis of relative performance in a key university in Romania

A scientometric analysis of the Babe?-Bolyai University in Romania is provided, highlighting the strong and the weak points with respect to a range of leading international universities and referencing to some extent to nation-wide data from several countries. Taken into account are such items as total number of publications, analyses per subject area or per research field, number of citations, types of publications, Hirsch indexes, and books. Internationally, chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer science, religion, area studies, geology, paleontology, and public administration are identified as the most active areas. Nationally, a number of additional strong points are identified, such as psychology, history, and environmental sciences. The percentage of researchers with reasonably high activity (e.g., at least ~ one publication per year as indexed in major databases) is relatively low (~10 %), and the percentage with reasonably high international competitiveness (based on citation counts, number of publications, books indexed in international libraries) is at only ~2 %. The decisive factor controlling an exponential increase in publications since ~2000–2004 appears to have been a conservatively managed exponential increase of the national GDP and implicitly of the research budgets.     

Nitrogen research at watershed scale: a bibliometric analysis during 1959–2011

Because of enhanced anthropogenic nitrogen input, eutrophication, hypoxia, and acidification threaten the health of aquatic ecosystems. To better understand the current state of research and emerging trends in this area, a bibliometric approach was applied to quantitatively evaluate global nitrogen research at the watershed scale. Using 9,748 articles selected from among 10,163 returned by a search in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-Expanded) database from 1900 to 2011, spatial and temporal characteristics of the articles, authors, institutions, countries, and keywords are presented, and focal research areas are derived. Compared with the annual increase in all articles in the SCI-Expanded (4.5 %), the studies on nitrogen in watersheds increased more quickly (11.2 %), indicating an increasing interest in this area. The relationship between authors and their output was evaluated by a two-step function, in which 6,074 authors (26.8 %) publishing on this topic were key scientists who contributed 56.4 % of the total articles. Based on the number of authors, first authors, international collaborators, and citations, four types of authors were analyzed using cluster methods. The influence of the authors, institutions and countries was also analyzed in terms of publication and citation, and a co-occurrence analysis was used to assess cooperation among countries and research hotpots. The keywords were compared among countries to assist our understanding of interests of research and modes. From the analysis of the primary subjects and the co-occurrence of keywords, studies involving nitrogen’s environmental effects, the nitrogen process and models are increasing, which indicates that they are likely to become a primary research focus in the near future.