A snapshot of EU publications in sleep research: A scientometric survey

A bibliometric analysis of the literature covering a one-year period (2003) was performed to evaluate the number of scientific publications on sleep and its distribution among the European Union countries. 912 articles appearing in Life Sciences and Clinical Medicine journals indexed in the Institute for Scientific Information databases were downloaded. These articles were authored by EU researchers; Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy rank at the top of the EU countries. The output distribution of the most productive EU countries are also presented and discussed. Despite the limitations of the methods used, the present results give an interesting snapshot of the EU publishing behavior in sleep research.     

Scientometrics of Prolific and Non-Prolific Authors in Laser Science and Technology

An analysis of 766 publications by prolific authors in scientific journals indicate that prolific authors produce about 25% of the total scientific output in periodical literature in laser science and technology. The average productivity per author is about 2. Prolific authors from most of the countries belonged either to academic or research institutions except in USA and Japan. Prolific authors on average made more impact than non-prolific authors. However the situation varied from country to country.     

A scientometric analysis of social media research (2004–2011)

To better understand the rapidly growing social media research domain, this study presents the findings of a scientometric analysis of the corresponding literature. We conducted a research productivity analysis and citation analysis of individuals, institutions, and countries based on 610 peer-reviewed social media articles published in journals and conference proceedings between October 2004 and December 2011. Results indicate that research productivity is exploding and that several leading authors, institutions, countries, and a small set of foundational papers have emerged. Based on the results—indicating that the social media domain displays limited diversity and is still heavily influenced by practitioners—the paper raises two fundamental challenges facing the social media domain and its future advancement, namely the lack of academic maturity and the Matthew Effect.     

Does a country’s scientific ‘productivity’ depend critically on the number of country journals indexed?

In this paper, we examine the question whether it is meaningful to talk about the scientific productivity of nations based on indexes like the Science Citation Index or Scopus, when the journal set covered by them keeps changing with time. We hypothesize from the illustrative case of India’s declining productivity in the 1980s which correlated with a fall in its journals indexed, that an apparent increase/decrease in productivity for any country, based on observed change in its share of papers could, in fact, be an effect resulting from the inclusion of more/less journals from the country. To verify our hypothesis we have used SCIMAGO data. We found that for a set of 90 countries, the share of journals regressed on the share of papers gave a linear relationship that explained 80% of the variance. However, we also show that in the case of China’s unusual rise in world scientific productivity (to second rank crossing several other countries), there is yet another factor that needs to be taken into account. We define a new indicator—the JOURNAL PACKING DENSITY (JPD) or average number of papers in journals from a given country. We show that the packing density of Chinese journals has steadily increased over the last few years. Currently, Chinese journals have the highest ‘packing density’ in the world, almost twice the world average which is about 100 papers per journal per annum. The deviation of the JPD from the world average is another indicator which will affect so called ‘national productivities’ in addition to the number of national journals indexed. We conclude that in the context of a five fold increase in the number of journals indexed over 20 years, the simplistic notion of ‘scientific productivity’ as equivalent to papers indexed needs to be re-examined.     

Representation of journals from five neighboring European countries in the Journal Citation Reports

This study explores the representation of scientific journals from Italy, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia and Montenegro in the Thomson Scientific’s 2005 Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The number of journals covered by JCR was analyzed in relation to scientific productivity of selected countries and the size of their economies, and no apparent relationship between these factors was found. Our findings suggest that other factors, including the quality of individual journals, may influence how many journals a country will have in the JCR.     

Revisiting country research profiles: learning about the scientific cultures

In the present work we analyze the Country Profiles, open access data from ISI Thomson Reuter??s Science Watch. The country profiles are rankings of the output (indexed in Web of Science) in different knowledge fields during a determined time span for a given country. The analysis of these data permits defining a Country Profile Index, a tool for diagnosing the activity of the scientific community of a country and their possible strengths and weakness. Furthermore, such analysis also enables the search for identities among research patterns of different countries, time evolution of such patterns and the importance of the adherence to the database journals portfolio in evaluating the productivity in a given knowledge field.     

Intellectual structure of Antarctic science: A 25-years analysis

To delineate the intellectual structure of Antarctic science, the research outputs on Antarctic science have been analyzed for a period of 25 years (1980–2004) through a set of scientometrics and network analysis techniques. The study is based on 10,942 records (research articles, letters, reviews, etc.), published in 961 journals/documents, and retrieved from the Science Citation Index (SCI) database. Over the years interest in Antarctic science has increased, as is evident from the growing number of ratified countries and research stations. During the period under study, the productivity has increased 3-times and there is a 13-fold increase in collaborative articles. Attempt has been made to identify important players like scientists, organizations and countries working in the field and to identify frontier areas of research that is being conducted in this continent. The highest 41% scientific output is contributed by the USA and the UK, followed by Australia and Germany. British Antarctic Survey (BAS), UK and Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar & Marine Research, Germany are the most productive institutes in Antarctic science. Maximum number of research articles on Antarctic science, have been published in the journal Polar Biology, indicating substantial work being done on the biology of this continent. The journals — Nature and Science — are the highly-cited journals in Antarctic science. The paper written by J. C. Farman et al., published in Nature in 1985, reporting depletion of ozone layer, is the most-cited article. Semantic relationships between cited documents were measured through co-citation analysis. J. C. Farman and S. Solomon are co-cited most frequently.     

Ophthalmology and optics: An informetric study of Australia's contribution to fields in the Vision Science domain, 1991–95

The paper provides data from a first exploration of the literature of Vision Science as seen bibliometrically through the ISI's three citation indexes, SCI, SSCI, & AHCI. The main focus of analysis is on the major fields of Ophthalmology and Optics (SC=OPTICS and SC=OPHTHALMOLOGY) with a focus on Australia's contribution to those literatures. Australia's publication frequency vis-á-vis the world, its collaboration with authors from other nations, and the journals in which Australians most frequently publish are shown. Comparison of productivity is made for countries of similar scientific stature, or of language and Commonwealth status.     

Research productivity of scientists in consolidated vs. non-consolidated teams: The case of Spanish university geologists

We present some results of an evaluation of research performance of Spanish senior university researchers in Geology. We analyse to what extent productivity of individual researchers is influenced by the level of consolidation of the team they belong to. Methodology is based on the combination of a mail survey carried out among a defined set of researchers, and a bibliometric study of their scientific output. Differences among researchers have been investigated with regard to team size and composition, patterns of publication in domestic and foreign journals, productivity, co-authorship of papers, and impact of publications. Results indicate that not belonging to a research team represents a handicap at the time of publishing in top international journals. Researchers belonging to consolidated teams are more productive than their colleagues in non-consolidated teams, and these in turn more than individuals without team. Team size does not appear to be as important for scientific productivity as the number of researchers within the team that reached a stable job position. Analysis of the impact factor of journals has not revealed differences among researchers with regard to the visibility of their papers. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Dermatological scientific production from European Union authors (1987–2000)

To evaluate the contribution to international dermatological literature made by authors from European Union (EU) countries. Using MedLine, a selection was made of articles by EU authors published between 1987 and 2000 in 32 dermatological journals, classified as such by the Institute for Scientific Information. Overall 19,225 documents were published by European authors in the selected dermatological journals from 1987 to 2000. The leading countries in terms of output were the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and France. The leading countries in number of articles after taking into account the gross domestic product and the population were Denmark, Finland and Sweden. The main journals were the British Journal of Dermatology(14.5% of articles from European authors), Contact Dermatitis (13.7%), Journal of Investigative Dermatology (7.3%),Journal of American Academy of Dermatology (6.4%), andActa Dermato-Venereologica (6.1%). The country with the highest output of papers by journal was the United Kingdom (11 journals) followed by Germany (9 journals), Italy (6 journals), France (3 journals), Spain (2 journals) and Sweden (1 journal). In conclusions: the scientific production of European Union research on dermatology is highest in northern countries. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Meta-analysis in psychology: a bibliometric study

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

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.     

Nanotechnology as a field of science: Its delineation in terms of journals and patents

The Journal Citation Reports of the Science Citation Index 2004 were used to delineate a core set of nanotechnology journals and a nanotechnology-relevant set. In comparison with 2003, the core set has grown and the relevant set has decreased. This suggests a higher degree of codification in the field of nanotechnology: the field has become more focused in terms of citation practices. Using the citing patterns among journals at the aggregate level, a core group of ten nanotechnology journals in the vector space can be delineated on the criterion of betweenness centrality. National contributions to this core group of journals are evaluated for the years 2003, 2004, and 2005. Additionally, the specific class of nanotechnology patents in the database of the U. S. Patent and Trade Office (USPTO) is analyzed to determine if non-patent literature references can be used as a source for the delineation of the knowledge base in terms of scientific journals. The references are primarily to general science journals and letters, and therefore not specific enough for the purpose of delineating a journal set.     

The Impact Factor in non-English-speaking countries

The representativeness of the ISI-Thomson Impact Factor rankings and the existing relationship between countries?? national languages and the diffusion of scientific publications is analyzed. We discuss literature on the Impact Factor related to language use, publication strategies for authors and editors from non-English-speaking countries, the effects of the inclusion of a new journal in the ISI-Thomson databases and the scientific policies articulated in some non-English-speaking countries. The adoption of the Impact Factor as the valuation criterion for scientific activities has favoured the consolidation of English language journals in the diffusion of scientific knowledge. The vernacular languages only conserve part of their importance in certain disciplines, such as Clinical Medicine or Social Sciences and Humanities. The Impact Factor, invented over 50?years ago now, could be a limitation for non-English authors and scientific journals, and does not consider some widely used practices among the scientific community concerning the development of Internet as a means for the diffusion of knowledge.     

Stocktaking scientific publication on bi-regional collaboration between Europe 28 and Latin America and the Caribbean

Mapping bi-regional scientific collaboration demands multiple approaches to obtain a picture as complete as possible. Usually, the first approach is the measuring of the number and typology of scientific co-publications in the most visible indexes of journals and publications covered by databases like Web of Science or Scopus, among others. This paper analyzes scientific publications listed by Web of Science (WoS), which comprises authors from the 28 EU countries and Latin American and Caribbean countries (EULAC) between 2005 and 2016. The following questions have been addressed: How are bi-regional scientific relations between EULAC countries reflected by international collaboration? What effects does this scientific collaboration have in smaller or emerging countries? Which area of knowledge has more international collaborations? The study highlights the existence of a growing global network of researchers from several countries that collaborate on their research. EULAC scientific collaboration cannot be understood in isolation from this global network.

     

Global nanotechnology research metrics

Text mining was used to extract technical intelligence from the open source global nanotechnology and nanoscience research literature. An extensive nanotechnology/nanoscience-focused query was applied to the Science Citation Index/Social Science Citation Index (SCI/SSCI) databases. The nanotechnology/nanoscience research literature infrastructure (prolific authors, key journals/institutions/countries, most cited authors/journals/documents) was obtained using bibliometrics. A novel addition was the use of institution and country auto-correlation maps to show co-publishing networks among institutions and among countries, and the use of institution-phrase and country-phrase cross-correlation maps to show institution networks and country networks based on use of common terminology (proxy for common interests). The use of factor matrices quantified further the strength of the linkages among institutions and among countries, and validated the co-publishing networks shown graphically on the maps. The views in this paper are solely those of the authors, and do not represent the views of the Department of the Navy or any of its components, or the Institute for Defense Analyses     

Scientific publications by anesthesia departments in East Asia

The rapid economic growth in East Asia might have an impact on the development of research output. Because previous bibliometric analysis about anesthesiology in this region had been limited to research within anesthesiology journals or anesthesia-related research, the total publications from anesthesia departments might not be well displayed. In this study, the databases of Web of Science and PubMed were used to assess the academic productivity and distribution of research diversity of anesthesia departments from four major countries in East Asia and compared those with the USA. From 2001 to 2010 the volume of scientific research from anesthesia departments in East Asia has stably increased. Although Japan was the most productive contributor in East Asia, its share declined annually. China increased most rapidly and exceeded Japan in 2010 in terms of annual number of papers. Research attributed to anesthesia departments in East Asia was diverse and present in a wide range of non-anesthesia field journals. Notably the annual number of randomized controlled trials in East Asia also had a strong growth.     

Changes of scientific knowledge production and research productivity in a transitional society

The main objective of this paper is to provide an empirical insight into the changes in the basic characteristics of the knowledge production mode and of scientific productivity in the Croatian research system in the transitional period. Empirical analysis is based on the results of two comparable questionnaire studies. The first survey was conducted in 1990 and the sample covered 921 respondents, while the second survey was conducted in 2004 with a sample of 915 respondents. The central characteristics of the knowledge production mode and of productivity confirm an expected duality: the features that accompany the introduction of a competitive system of research funding and evaluation on the one hand, and the anachronistic and newly acquired peculiarity of the research system on the other. Thus, the gap between the improved scientific performance of the researchers and the conditions in which they work has deepened. Scientific productivity still lags behind the productivity of the (developed) countries. Though Croatian researchers publish less, they follow basic global trends in the structure of publications, especially the rise in foreign and co-authored works.     

Bibliometric analysis of articles published in ISI dental journals, 2007–2011

In recent years there have been few bibliometric evaluations in dental sciences with an international approach. The aim of this study is to describe the scientific production of original and review articles published in ISI dental journals for the period 2007–2011, considering qualitative and quantitative measures across countries. In this study documents indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded of Web of Science were reviewed between January 2007 and December 2011. All “Article” and “Review” document types in the “Dentistry, Oral Medicine and Surgery” category were included. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed. A total of 37,571 documents were found for the entire period, growing 24.3 % annually from 2007 to 2011. The publication language was mostly English (98.6 %), and 54.5 % of productivity was concentrated in five countries. A total of 44 countries had at least 100 documents and were included in the analysis, representing 36,532 (97.23 %) documents. It was concluded that increasing productivity in some countries, such as Brazil, China, India, and Turkey, was observed. High levels and stability in terms of impact was determined in the Nordic countries. The USA continues to lead in terms of overall productivity.