Quantitative analysis of Spanish university scientific output in the area of Legal and Forensic Medicine: International exposure

We set out to analyse and quantify the papers published (for an international readership) by Spanish universities in the field of Legal and Forensic Medicine. For this, we used the MEDLINE data base, to analyse research articles in which a Spanish university teacher (whose sole employment was with a university, as registered by the Ministry of Education in July 2005, (n = 67), appeared as author or co-author in this field. The years covered are 1952 (First year that a Spanish author appears for an article on Legal and Forensic Medicine in this service) to July 2005. A total of 770 articles were counted; the productivity in this area was increasing substantially from the 1980’s onwards. English language scientific journals were the preferred channel of communication. Slightly more than 85% of the works can be classified into four themes, of which Genetics is the most prolific. The number of papers published in English journals represented 84% of the total and only 13% was published in Spanish journals. There was a close relationship between growth in the authority index and inter-institutional co-operation, which boosted the production of articles. When at least one of the authorship of a published paper was a Spanish university teacher, the research was led by a university in 62.4% of cases, and of this 85.6% were Spanish universities.     

The role of domestic journals in geographically-oriented disciplines: The case of Spanish journals on earth sciences

The role of domestic journals in disseminating research results in the filed of Earth Sciences in Spain is discussed. The analysis is based on bibliometric indicators of Spanish scientific production, as well as on the opinion of Spanish researchers in this field, obtained through a specially designed survey. A reasonable correspondence has been found between the results of bibliometric analysis and scientists' judgements. Results show that 69% of Spanish articles in Earth Sciences were published in Spanish journals during the period 1990–1994. Scientists use both national and international journals to communicate, their research results, although due to the nature of the discipline, geographically oriented and therefore mostly devoted to local problems, they use basically domestic journals. In terms of international visibility, although none of the Spanish journals in this field is covered by the SCI, most of them are covered by some of the most representative international databases in the field concerned. The study points out the importance of domestic journals in the field of Earth Sciences in Spain.     

Scholarly publishing in social sciences and humanities, associated probabilities of belonging and its spectrum: a quantitative approach for the Spanish case

In this study, differences between Spanish social sciences and humanities journals are examined using a quantitative approach. Firstly, using a set of 144 psychology journals and 69 philosophy journals, statistically significant differences have been identified in 11 characteristics/indicators. Secondly, a logistic regression was carried out on the dichotomous response variable “belonging to the social sciences” or “belonging to the humanities”, on 777 Spanish social sciences journals, 563 humanities journals that have been previously classified and 17 existing predictor variables. The regression model reached an overall correct classification of 78.8 %. The explanatory variables considered in the model are analyzed and interpreted taking into account the change in the odds ratio and the indication of their contribution to the correct classification rate in the two response values. Finally the average associated probability of belonging to the social sciences group is calculated for each discipline and reflected in a spectrum of the probability of belonging to the social sciences or the humanities.     

Current use of effect size or confidence interval analyses in clinical and biomedical research

The isolated use of the statistical hypothesis testing for two group comparison has limitations, and its combination with effect size or confidence interval analysis as complementary statistical tests is recommended. In the present work, we estimate the use of these complementary statistical tests (i.e. effect size or confidence interval) in recently published in research articles in clinical and biomedical areas. Methods: The ProQuest database was used to search published studies in academic journals between 2019 and 2020. The analysis was carried out using terms that represent five areas of clinical and biomedical research: “brain”, “liver”, “heart”, “dental”, and “covid-19”. A total of 119,558 published articles were retrieved. Results: The relative use of complementary statistical tests in clinical and biomedical publications was low. The highest frequency usage of complementary statistical tests was among articles that also used statistical hypothesis testing for two-sample comparison. Publications with the term “covid-19” showed the lowest usage rate of complementary statistical tests when all article were analyzed but presented the highest rate among articles that used hypothesis testing. Conclusion: The low use of effect size or confidence interval in two-sample comparison suggests that coordinate measures should be taken in order to increase the use of this analysis in clinical and biomedical research. Their use should be emphasized in statistical disciplines for college and graduate students, become a routine procedure in research laboratories, and recommended by reviewers and editors of scientific journals.

     

Some indicators in Spanish scientific production

This is an analysis of the scientific production of the Spanish research community compiled by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) during the period 1983–1989 through indicators of publications (scientific output) that have been accepted, more and more frequently, as tools for decision-making. The percentages of the total number of articles per year are defined and the temporal evolution is shown of the orders of quality of the hypothetical journals that represent the whole production. A new indicator is used for comparisons between scientific subjects and thematic areas. Finally, mention is made of the spectacular growth of the Spanish scientific production in the period referred to, not only in quantity but also in quality through the indicators considered.     

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.     

Value of bibliometric analysis for research policy: A case study of Spanish research into innovation and technology management

The primary aim of this paper is to assess the contribution to the international literature of Spanish scientific production in the research stream of innovation and technology management. For this purpose 72 articles published in the last decade in the most prestigious international journals in this research stream have been evaluated. From this analysis we have concluded that there has been a positive evolution from 1995 to the present time, as much from a qualitative as from a quantitative point of view. Likewise, we have found that research in this research stream is concentrated fundamentally on a reduced group of universities. Nevertheless, these do not focus exclusively on one or a few research subjects, but on a wide range thereof.     

Publications resulting from Spanish radiology meeting abstracts: Which, Where and Who

Summary Many abstracts submitted to medical meetings never come to full publication in peer-reviewed journals. From the 2,992 abstracts presented at the 1994-1998 Spanish Congresses of Radiology, 464 (15%) were published as full articles in journals covered by the Medline and IME (índice Médico Espa?ol), the Spanish medical database. The publication rate of oral presentations was higher than that of posters (18% versus 13%). Collaboration between radiologists and clinicians and between radiologists from different institutions increased full publication (21% and 27%, respectively) compared to abstracts from just one institution (14%). Therefore, oral presentations, multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional collaboration in the abstract predicted full publication.     

The application of scientometric indicators to the Spanish Scientific Research Council

The assessment of the research performance of the Spanish Scientific Research Council using scientometric indicators was done. Number of scientists and budget involved in research projects were used as input measures while articles published in foreign journals, patent applications and citations received provided output figures. The time period studied was 1984–1987. Target of the analysis were wide research areas and the research Institutes included in them. The obtained results point out that very often costs, productivity and impact do not go in the same direction. Most likely, other activities no measurable by scientometric indicators may have played an important role in some Institutes. Besides, the presence of highly cited articles at Institutes with low productivity scores indicates not correspondence of quantity with impact. It is suggested that the research group level would be a more reliable unit for analysis than the aggregated level of Institute or research area.     

A new approach to measuring scientific production in JCR journals and its application to Spanish public universities

Scientific production has been evaluated from very different perspectives, the best known of which are essentially based on the impact factors of the journals included in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). This has been no impediment to the simultaneous issuing of warnings regarding the dangers of their indiscriminate use when making comparisons. This is because the biases incorporated in the elaboration of these impact factors produce significant distortions, which may invalidate the results obtained. Notable among such biases are those generated by the differences in the propensity to cite of the different areas, journals and/or authors, by variations in the period of materialisation of the impact and by the varying presence of knowledge areas in the sample of reviews contained in the JCR. While the traditional evaluation method consists of standardisation by subject categories, recent studies have criticised this approach and offered new possibilities for making inter-area comparisons. In view of such developments, the present study proposes a novel approach to the measurement of scientific activity, in an attempt to lessen the aforementioned biases. This approach consists of combining the employment of a new impact factor, calculated for each journal, with the grouping of the institutions under evaluation into homogeneous groups. An empirical application is undertaken to evaluate the scientific production of Spanish public universities in the year 2000. This application considers both the articles published in the multidisciplinary databases of the Web of Science (WoS) and the data concerning the journals contained in the Sciences and Social Sciences Editions of the Journal Citation Report (JCR). All this information is provided by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI), via its Web of Knowledge (WoK).     

Research output analysis of municipal solid waste: a case study of China

Municipal solid waste (MSW) management in China draws particular attention as China has become the largest MSW generator in the world. The paper analyzed the growth and development of MSW research productivity in China in terms of publication output as reflected in science citation index for the period 1997–2011. The study revealed that the output of MSW research in China has rapidly increased over the 15 years in contrast with USA. Chinese authors contributed 730 publications out of which 708 were journal articles, 17 reviews, 3 editorial materials, 1 correction and 1 meeting abstract, from 421 institutions. About 13.70 % of publications were contributed by Chinese Academy of Sciences, followed by Tongji University, Shanghai (13.15) and Tsinghua University, Beijing (11.10 %). That impact factors of the top 20 journals publishing most papers were between 0.30 and 4.63. Leading 20 authors in the area of MSW research published at least 13 articles per person. The annual share of publications varied from 0.27 to 20.96 % per year. The share was highest in the year 2009 at 20.96 %. An analysis of the title-words showed that “landfill”, “incineration” and “management” were recent major topics of municipal solid waste research in China. The results could help researchers understand the characteristics of research output and search hot spots of MSW field in China.     

Spanish scientific and technical journals. State of the art

This article analyses the current situation in the field of scientific and technical journals published in Spain, by determining the following scientific indicators for each: I: Specifications. II: Scientific production covered. III: Visibility and accessibility. The first section provides a qualitative and quantitative study of the journals, asking what subjects they cover, who publishes them, how often they are published, how up to data they are and whether the way they are presented meets international publishing standards. The second section analyses scientific production by research sectors and the percentage of articles collected in the ICYT database compared with the total number of papers published in the journals studied. It also studies the reference habits of the authors published therein to identify whether the literature referred to is of local origin or international. Finally, the third section deduces these journals' degree of visibility by analysing how they are distributed amongst the usual media, i.e. international periodicals directories and databases, and how efficiently they work as vehicles for the diffusion of research by foreign authors. The study covers 10 years (1980–1989), thus enabling to recognise past and current trends in Spanish scientific literature.     

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.     

Citedness and uncitedness of cancer articles

There is a rapid growth of cancer literature. Thousands of papers are being regularly published every year not only in speciality journals, but also in journals of other disciplines. Citation studies are nowadays considered a major basis of science indicators for ascertaining the importance of a scientific journal and that of the published articles on a particular subject. In oncological research the journalCancer is considered as one of the top most journals and is universally well known for its high standard and excellence. In this paper an attempt has been made to find out the importance of all the articles published in it for a particular year. Side by side bibliometric analysis was made to ascertain various other aspects like time lag between publication and first citation of articles, average citation time, subject scattering and identification of most important journals in the field etc. It is believed that this study would be of help to the working oncologists, librarians and information scientists to assess the importance of articles published in a top ranking journal of cancer and also that of different journals publishing oncological research results.     

Analysis of the influence of the two types of the journal articles; theoretical and empirical on the impact factor of a journal

The study discusses the necessity to analyze the influence of theoretical and empirical types of journal articles on the citation impact of Spanish psychology journals. Three of the most representative Spanish psychology journals were selected for the purposes of this study: Papeles del Psicólogo, Análisis y Modificación de Conducta and Psicothema. Twenty-three psychology journals in Spanish were used as source journals. Altogether, there were sixty-seven issues reviewed for the references and ninety-three issues for the articles. The bibliometricanalysis was conducted by six highly trained psychologists. The results demonstrated differences regarding the percentages of empirical and theoretical articles published in the three examined journals and the number of citations received by them based on the article type. When normalizing the results according to the number of theoretical and empirical articles that were published, it becomes evident that the theoretical articles receive on average twice as many references as the empirical ones. We discuss the importance of this effect on the comparison of journals based on their citation impact and show the evidence that it is only valid to compare journals which publish a similar percentage of theoretical and empirical articles.     

Changes on publishing behavior in response to research policy guidelines. The case of the Spanish Research Council in the field of agronomy

The aim of this study is to identify changes in publishing behavior of Spanish scientists belonging to the Area of Agronomy of the Spanish Research Council (CSIC), in response to scientific policy actions carried out in Spain. For this purpose, we analyze Spanish scientific output published in Spanish journals (covered by the ICYT database), as well as in international journals (covered by theScience Citation Index), during the period 1980–1995. Congress and conference publications, books and monographs, are also considered. The following changes in publication habits have been noticed: migration of works towards SCI journals and increased use of books and monographs as channel of publication of research works. A decreasing participation of Spanish researchers in scientific meetings has also been noticed, especially since 1989.     

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

The present study is a bibliometric analysis, of publications of Spanish pharmacologists, referenced in the journals of the Pharmacology & Pharmacy subfield of the Science Citation Index- CD Edition from 1984 to 1989. During this time the scientific output of Spanish pharmacologists has been growing at an impressive rate being almost doubled. This rate being notably greater than that corresponding to publications of Spain in all science fields. This increase in scientific output was accompanied by a time-dependent decrease on year by year step basis in the expected impact factor (EIF) of publications (Articles plus Notes), from 1.71 in 1984 to 1.28 in 1989, in close correlation with an increase of mean number of authors per paper, from 3.67 to 4.16 authors/paper, respectively. Moreover, the larger the number of authors/paper, the smaller the EIF. Only 8 journals cumulated more than 50% of the papers. The scientific production was geographically localized at a high extent (Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia accounted for the 63.7% of all the papers) in governmental institutions (University, 75.2%, Hospitals, 14.1%; CSIC, 10.5%) with one large geographical area lacking any productivity.     

Trends in and contributions to entrepreneurship research: a broad review of literature from 1996 to June 2012

This article, which began as an effort to gauge trends in and contributions to the broad field of “entrepreneur/entrepreneurship,” reviews 5,476 academic articles on entrepreneurship that were published in 522 Social Sciences Citation Index and Science Citation Index journals from 1996 to June 2012. This survey identifies keywords and conducts a review to search for and identify related articles in the Institute for Scientific Information Web of Science database. We then present our findings, including the number of publications by year, categorization of article types, main academic journals, authors, and most-cited articles. The citation counts for authors, journals, and articles are also analyzed. This study indicates that the number of articles related to the keyword entrepreneur increased from 1996 to the end of 2011, which is a sign of an upward trend in the influence of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur research fascinated numerous scholars during the study period covering 16.5 years. In particular, researchers from the USA, England, Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands have made the most contributions to this field. This literature review provides evidence that the concept of entrepreneur attracted academic researchers, resulting in significant contributions to the field of entrepreneur research.     

Understanding the impact change of a highly cited article: a content-based citation analysis

Researchers tend to cite highly cited articles, but how these highly cited articles influence the citing articles has been underexplored. This paper investigates how one highly cited essay, Hirsch’s “h-index” article (H-article) published in 2005, has been cited by other articles. Content-based citation analysis is applied to trace the dynamics of the article’s impact changes from 2006 to 2014. The findings confirm that citation context captures the changing impact of the H-article over time in several ways. In the first two years, average citation mention of H-article increased, yet continued to decline with fluctuation until 2014. In contrast with citation mention, average citation count stayed the same. The distribution of citation location over time also indicates three phases of the H-article “Discussion,” “Reputation,” and “Adoption” we propose in this study. Based on their locations in the citing articles and their roles in different periods, topics of citation context shifted gradually when an increasing number of other articles were co-mentioned with the H-article in the same sentences. These outcomes show that the impact of the H-article manifests in various ways within the content of these citing articles that continued to shift in nine years, data that is not captured by traditional means of citation analysis that do not weigh citation impacts over time.     

A quantitative analysis of Antarctic related articles in humanities and social sciences appearing in the world core journals

To demonstrate the importance and the actual research situation of Antarctic studies in the humanities and social sciences, we collected data from the SSCI and A&HCI covering a period of over 100 years and focused on the number of articles published each year, major journals, types of document, authors and their countries publishing the most articles, collaboration, the major research subjects covered, and citations. Comparisons were also made with the Arctic studies to show some similarities and differences. The results suggest that the research in the fields of humanities and social sciences has been in the long-run developing without interruption over 100 years. With regard to the number of articles in high-capacity journals, Geographical Journal performs best, followed by the Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen and Scottish Geographical Magazine. The documentation is rather scattered without a strong cohesion, while book review and article are the two most common types of document. There haven’t many stable collaborated teams on Antarctic topics. Joyner, Savours, and Beck are the three authors having the highest number of publications. USA is the most active country while the most active research institute is University of Tasmania in Australia. The Antarctic expedition has been the main theme lasted for centuries. In addition, the research in the fields of humanities and social sciences has generated a lot of high-impact articles, among which the article entitled “Chemical concentrations of pollutant lead aerosols, terrestrial dusts and sea salts in Greenland and Antarctic snow strata” enjoys the highest citation counts.