An analysis and comparison of scientometric data between journals of physics,chemistry and engineering

By employing the Pearson correlation, Fisher-and t-tests, the present study analyzes and compares scientometric data including number of source items, number of citations, impact factor, immediacy index, citing half-life and cited half-life, for essential journals in physics, chemistry and engineering, from SCI JCR on the Web 2002. The results of the study reveal that for all the scientometric indicators, except the cited half-life, there is no significant mean difference between physics and chemistry subjects indicating similar citation behavior among the scientists. There is no significant mean difference in the citing half-life among the three subjects. Significant mean difference is generally observed for most of the scientometric indicators between engineering and physics (or chemistry) demonstrating the difference in citation behavior among engineering researchers and scientists in physics or chemistry. Significant correlations among number of source items, number of citations, impact factor, and immediacy index and between cited half-life and citing half-life generally prevail for each of the three subjects. On the contrary, in general, there is no significant correlation between the cited half-life and other scientometric indicators. The three subjects present the same strength of the correlations between number of source items and number of citations, between number of citations and impact factor, and between cited half-life and citing half-life.     

The nature and relationship between the productivity of journals and their citations in semiconductor literature

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between journals" productivity and their citations in the field of semiconductors. Journal samples were gathered from the INSPEC database, 1978 to 1997 while the data of citation frequency, impact factor, cited half-life and citing half-life were obtained from Science Citation Index, Journal Citation Reports 1997 CD-ROM edition. One thousand and eight hundred and seventy seven journals publishing articles on semiconductors were retrieved. The nature for the data of journal productivity, impact factor, cited half-life and citing half-life are explored. Among these journals, only 672 journals that were covered in JCR were compared. Moreover, statistical tests of more productive journals with cumulative publication in semiconductor >100 were also conducted on the basis of all articles they published annually (for 1997). The results of the study showed that there is a significant correlation between journal productivity and citation frequency and between journal productivity and impact factor. However, there are no associations between journal productivity and cited half-life and between journal productivity and citing half-life. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A citation report for Thai academic journals published during 1996-2000

This article aimed to report Journal Impact Factor (J-IF) and Journal Immediacy Index (J-II) of 68 Thai academic journals during the past five years (from 1996 to 2000) using the calculation method given by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). This was the first time that the citation indexes of Thai academic journals were established. With respect to the journal impact factor, the results showed that only six journals have been cited continuously during the past five years, this being 8.8% of the total journal number selected in this work. It was also noticeable that articles published in longer journal age tended to have greater opportunity to be cited and higher journal impact factor. The average impact factor of the 68 journals was relatively low, this being of 0.069, suggesting that the possibility of an article published in a national journal to be cited was only 6.9%. In terms of the immediacy index, it was found that the average immediacy index value was 0.063, which was again very low. No significant relationship between the journal age and the immediacy index could be observed. 47% of the journals have never been able to produce the immediacy index in the past five years, suggesting that articles in the Thai academic journals were hardly cited within the same years they were published. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The influence of publication delays on three ISI indicators

Summary Based on the transform function model of the observed citing process, the analytical expression of the age distribution of citations is deduced, and it is theoretically proved that the peak value of the citation distribution curve would fall and shift backward along with increasing the average publication delay and the peak age has a direct proportion relation with the pure delay and would be prolonged along with increasing the delay or decreasing the aging rate. The influence of the average publication delay on three ISI indicators impact factor, immediacy index and cited half-life are studied; in one subject discipline, the bigger the delay, the lower the three indicators of journals. Using the sensitivity theory, sensitivity formulae of the three indicators to publication delay parameters are deduced and it is found that responses of these indicators to changes of publication delays are different according to different time constant of the aging process; The faster the aging rate of a discipline literature is, the worse the influence of publication delays on the indicators of journals in the discipline.     

The citation impact of social sciences and humanities upon patentable technology

This paper examines the citation impact of papers published in scientific-scholarly journals upon patentable technology, as reflected in examiner- or inventor-given references in granted patents. It analyses data created by SCImago Research Group, linking PATSTAT’s scientific non-patent references (SNPRs) to source documents indexed in Scopus. The frequency of patent citations to journal papers is calculated per discipline, year, institutional sector, journal subject category, and for “top” journals. PATSTAT/Scopus-based statistics are compared to those derived from Web of Science/USPTO linkage. A detailed assessment is presented of the technological impact of research publications in social sciences and humanities (SSH). Several subject fields perform well in terms of the number of citations from patents, especially Library and Information Science, Language and Linguistics, Education, and Law, but many of the most cited journals find themselves in the interface between SSH and biomedical or natural sciences. Analyses of the titles of citing patents and cited papers are presented that shed light upon the cognitive content of patent citations. It is proposed to develop more advanced indicators of citation impact of papers upon patents, and ways to combine citation counts with citation content and context analysis.

     

Citation mechanics in Journals covered by the journal citation reports

Citations from 1980 to 1988, obtained from fifty biomedical journals covered by theJournal Citation Reports (JCR) are studied. In purely numerical terms, the evolution of each citation (journal citation), including its impact factor (IF), would depend essentially on three variables for each journal: (i) the yearly rate of increase of items that could be cited (citable items), (ii) the relative yearly increment of the citing journals, (iii) the relative yearly increment of citations. The mechanics of this give rise to the three standard patterns for journal citations, namely: (i) annual impact factors increase each year (ascending evolution), (ii) annual impact factors remain the same each year (constant evolution), (iii) annual impact factors decrease each year (descending evolution). The reason why some journal citation profiles do not fit into the standard patterns is presumably that forces are at work able to alter the numerical mechanics described. The concepts of saturation/unsaturation of the demand for scientific information are introduced, showing how they are reflected in the impact factor figures for the journals cited.     

Exploring the analytical potential of comparing citing and cited source items

Summary Comparing properties of citing and cited source items opens a wide variety of analytical possibilities. In a study of citations among papers in the journal Scientometrics a number of analytical themes are identified. The analysis shows: the way in which a citation graph can be decomposed into different subparts; country specific citation patterns; the effects of self-citations and domestic citations; the mapping of cited author relationships using direct citation and co-citation links; and time slicing effects on impact ranking of countries and papers.     

A comparison of citation contexts between natural sciences and social sciences and humanities

This study uses the method of citation context analysis to compare differences in citation contexts, including cited concepts and citation functions, between natural sciences (NS) and social sciences and humanities (SSH), based on articles citing Little Science, Big Science (LSBS) published between 1963 and 2010. The findings indicate that NS and SSH researchers frequently cite LSBS as a source that is related to a specific topic and as evidence to support a claim. No significant differences were identified in the distribution of cited concepts included in LSBS, but significant differences were observed in the reasons for citing LSBS between NS and SSH citing articles. However, reverse trends were observed in the percentage of some cited concepts and citation functions between NS and SSH, which implies that subtle differences in citation behavior exist between NS and SSH researchers. In addition, each concept category has a different half-life. Concepts related to characteristics of big science and scientific collaboration have the longest half-lives.     

Extending citer analysis to journal impact evaluation

The concept of citer analysis investigated earlier by Ajiferuke and Wolfram (In: B. Larsen, J. Leta (eds.) Proceedings of the 12th international conference of the international society for scientometrics and informetrics (ISSI) pp. 798–808, 2009, Scientometrics 83:623–638, 2010) is extended to journals where different citing units (citers, citing articles, citing journals) are compared with the journal impact factor and each other to determine if differences in ranking arise from different measures. The citer measures for the 31 high impact journals studied from information science and library science are significantly correlated, even more so than the earlier citer analysis findings, indicating that there is a close relationship among the different units of measure. Still, notable differences in rankings for the journals examined were evident for the different measures used, especially from either 5-year impact factor or number of citing articles per publication to the number of citing journals per publication. The journals that are adversely affected seem to be those whose citations are concentrated in a few journals. This informed the need to develop a journal citation concentration index, which can serve as a complementary measure to the existing journal impact indices.     

Bibliometric features of some scientific subfields and the scientometric consequences therefrom

In the present work an attempt is made to select journal bases for some subfields in chemistry. Through the modification of the Hirst's discioline impact factor concept, theprimary information base for the selected subfields is detenained. Relating impact factors of citing and cited journals,citation strategy indicators are suggested. Determination of the mean impact factors for subfields enables the introduction ofsubfields factors that bring the impact factors of journals of various subfields on a comparavle level.     

The SCI Journal Citation Reports: A potential tool for studying journals?

In this paper, we analysed six indicators of the SCI Journal Citation Reports (JCR) over a 19-year period: number of total citations, number of citations to the two previous years, number of source items, impact factor, immediacy index and cited half-life. The JCR seems to have become more or less an authority for evaluating scientific and technical journals, essentially through its impact factor. However it is difficult to find one's way about in the impressive mass of quantitative data that JCR provides each year. We proposed the box plot method to aggregate the values of each indicator so as to obtain, at a glance, portrayals of the JCR population from 1974 to 1993. These images reflected the distribution of the journals into 4 groups designated low, central, high and extreme. The limits of the groups became a reference system with which, for example, it was rapidly possible to situate visually a given journal within the overall JCR population. Moreover, the box plot method, which gives a zoom effect, made it possible to visualize a large sub-population of the JCR usually overshadowed by the journals at the top of the rankings. These top level journals implicitly play the role of reference in evaluation processes. This often incites categorical judgements when the journals to be evaluated are not part of the top level. Our «rereading» of the JCR, which presented the JCR product differently, made it possible to qualify these judgements and bring a new light on journals.     

Reception of integrative and complementary medicine (ICM) in scientific journals: a citation and co-word analysis

Even if integrative and complementary medicine (ICM) is a growing scientific field, it is also a highly contested area in terms of scientific legitimacy. The aim of this article is to analyze the reception of ICM research in scientific journals. Is this kind of research acknowledged outside the ICM context, for example, in general or specialized medicine? What is the impact of ICM research? and Is it possible to identify any shift in content, from the original ICM research to the documents where it is acknowledged? The material consisted of two sets: documents published in 12 ICM journals in 2007; and all documents citing these documents during the years 2007–2012. These sets were analyzed with help from citation and co-word analysis. When analyzing the citation pattern, it was clear that a majority of the cited documents were acknowledged in journals and documents that could be related to research areas outside the ICM context, such as pharmacology & pharmacy and plant science—even if the most frequent singular journals and subject categories were connected to ICM. However, after analyzing the content of cited and citing documents, it was striking how similar the content was. It was also evident that much of this research was related to basic preclinical research, in fields such as cell biology, plant pharmacology, and animal experiments.     

Some methodological problems in ranking scientists by citation analysis

A sample of 80 Hungarian scientists, authors or co-authors of a total number of 6273 papers—published between 1930–1976—has been analysed. Citation data to eachpaper were collected form the 1964–76 SCI's by manual search. Citation counts were distinguished with respect to the following categories: (I) the set of cited authors has element(s) common with the set of citing authors (self citation), (II) condition I is not satisfied, but the cited author under study and at least one of the citing authors were co-authors prior to the publication of the cited paper, (III) none of the former criteria is satisfied. The yearly average citation frequency of a paper was not corrected for obsolescence, since there is no evidence that the decay of citation frequency with time is independent of the absolute citedness of the paper. Individual performance has been measured (a) by the sum of the vearly average typeIII fractional citation frequencies over all of the author's papers, (b) by the sum of the yearly average citation frequency normalized to one single-authored paper per year over the period of the author's activity, (c) by the same as ina, but summed up only over the most highly cited papers scattering upwards from the individual's own average, (d) by the fractional authorship, and (e) by the number of items in the author's publication list. The first three parameters seem to be applicable in measuring the utility of the individual's scientific contribution with slightly different emphasis on different aspects. These parameters are uncorrelated with those measuring the output of individuals.     

The representative works of scientists

Nowadays identifying the personal representative works is becoming increasingly important and necessary for scientists in many cases, such as faculty hiring and promotion applications. There are already a few methods based on different criteria for selecting the representative works of a scientist, like citation count. In addition, we can observe that some researchers always produce many similar quality scientific papers and some researchers have several highly cited papers compared with his or her other papers. In this context, we propose to use the maximum gap in a histogram of a scientist’s sorted papers’ citation counts to classify his or her papers into two groups, i.e. representative papers and regular papers. Based on the maximum gap, we then design an indicator \(D_{r}\) to quantify the impact difference between scientist’s representative works and regular works. We apply this selection method and \(D_{r}\) index into the data of American Physical Society (APS) journals. The results indicate that the selection method can better identify the representative works of Nobel laureates in Physics compared with using the most cited paper. We also find that the number of representative works selected by our method is related to \(D_{r}\). A larger number of selected papers would appear when the value of \(D_{r}\) index is relatively smaller. Meanwhile, we also observe that \(D_{r}\) is weakly correlated with the h index and total citation.     

Comparison of citation and usage indicators: the case of oncology journals

It is the objective of this article to examine in which aspects journal usage data differ from citation data. This comparison is conducted both at journal level and on a paper by paper basis. At journal level, we define a so-called usage impact factor and a usage half-life in analogy to the corresponding Thomson’s citation indicators. The usage data were provided from Science Direct, subject category “oncology”. Citation indicators were obtained from JCR, article citations were retrieved from SCI and Scopus. Our study shows that downloads and citations have different obsolescence patterns. While the average cited half-life was 5.6 years, we computed a mean usage half-life of 1.7 years for the year 2006. We identified a strong correlation between the citation frequencies and the number of downloads for our journal sample. The relationship was lower when performing the analysis on a paper by paper basis because of existing variances in the citation-download-ratio among articles. Also the correlation between the usage impact factor and Thomson’s journal impact factor was “only” moderate because of different obsolescence patterns between downloads and citations.     

Article-count impact factor of materials science journals in SCI database

This article proposed a new index, so-called “Article-Count Impact Factor” (ACIF) for evaluating journal quality in light of citation behaviour in comparison with the ISI journal impact factors. The ACIF index was the ratio of the number of articles that were cited in the current year to the source items published in that journal during the previous two years. In this work, we used 171 journal titles in materials categories published in the years of 2001–2004 in international journals indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI) database as data source. It was found that ACIF index could be used as an alternative tool in assessing the journal quality, particularly in the case where the assessed journals had the same (equal or similar) JIF values. The experimental results suggested that the higher the ACIF value, the more the number of articles being cited. The changes in ACIF values were more dependent on the JIF values rather than the total number of articles. Polymer Science had the greatest ACIF values, suggesting that the articles in Polymer Science had greater “citation per article” than those in Metallurgical Engineering and Ceramics. It was also suggested that in order to increase a JIF value of 1.000, Ceramics category required more articles to be cited as compared to Metallurgical Engineering and Polymer Science categories.     

Exploiting Structural Similarities to Classify Citations

Citations play an important role in the scientific community by assisting in measuring multifarious policies like the impact of journals, researchers, institutions, and countries. Authors cite papers for different reasons, such as extending previous work, comparing their study with the state-of-the-art, providing background of the field, etc. In recent years, researchers have tried to conceptualize all citations into two broad categories, important and incidental. Such a categorization is very important to enhance scientific output in multiple ways, for instance, (1) Helping a researcher in identifying meaningful citations from a list of 100 to 1000 citations (2) Enhancing the impact factor calculation mechanism by more strongly weighting important citations, and (3) Improving researcher, institutional, and university rankings by only considering important citations. All of these uses depend upon correctly identifying the important citations from the list of all citations in a paper. To date, researchers have utilized many features to classify citations into these broad categories: cue phrases, in-text citation counts, and metadata features, etc. However, contemporary approaches are based on identification of in-text citation counts, mapping sections onto the Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion (IMRAD) structure, identifying cue phrases, etc. Identifying such features accurately is a challenging task and is normally conducted manually, with the accuracy of citation classification demonstrated in terms of these manually extracted features. This research proposes to examine the content of the cited and citing pair to identify important citing papers for each cited paper. This content similarity approach was adopted from research paper recommendation approaches. Furthermore, a novel section-based content similarity approach is also proposed. The results show that solely using the abstract of the cited and citing papers can achieve similar accuracy as the state-of-the-art approaches. This makes the proposed approach a viable technique that does not depend on manual identification of complex features.     

Influence of proceedings papers on citation impact in seven sub-fields of sustainable energy research 2005–2011

This paper analyses the following seven sub-fields of Sustainable Energy Research with respect to the influence of proceedings papers on citation patterns across citing and cited document types, overall sub-field and document type impacts and citedness: the Wind Power, Renewable Energy, Solar and Wave Energy, Geo-thermal, Bio-fuel and Bio-mass energy sub-fields. The analyses cover peer reviewed research and review articles as well as two kinds of proceeding papers from conferences published 2005–2009 in (a) book series or volumes and (b) special journal issues excluding meeting abstracts cited 2005–2011 through Web of Science. Central findings are: The distribution across document types of cited versus citing documents is highly asymmetric. Predominantly proceedings papers from both proceeding volumes as well as published in journals cite research articles (60–76 %). Largely, journal-based proceedings papers are cited rather than papers published in book series or volumes and have field impacts corresponding to research articles. With decreasing proceedings paper dominance in research fields the ratio of proceeding paper volumes over journal-based proceedings papers decreases significantly and the percentage of proceedings papers in journals citing journal-based proceedings papers over all publications citing journal-based proceedings papers decreases significantly (from 26.3 % in Wind Power to 4 % in Bio Fuel). Further, the segment of all kinds of proceedings papers (the combined proceedings paper types) citing all proceedings papers over all publications citing all kinds of proceedings papers decreases significantly (from 36.1 % in Wind Power to 11.3 % in Bio Fuel). Simultaneously the field citedness increases across the seven research fields. The distribution of citations from review articles shows that novel knowledge essentially derives directly from research articles (53–72 %)—to a much less extent from proceedings publications published in journals (9–13 %).     

A bibliometric analysis of plagiarism and self-plagiarism through Déjà vu

Plagiarism is one of the most important current debates among scientific stakeholders. A separate but related issue is the use of authors’ own ideas in different papers (i.e., self-plagiarism). Opinions on this issue are mixed, and there is a lack of consensus. Our goal was to gain deeper insight into plagiarism and self-plagiarism through a citation analysis of documents involved in these situations. The Déjà vu database, which comprises around 80,000 duplicate records, was used to select 247 pairs of documents that had been examined by curators on a full text basis following a stringent protocol. We then used the Scopus database to perform a citation analysis of the selected documents. For each document pair, we used specific bibliometric indicators, such as the number of authors, full text similarity, journal impact factor, the Eigenfactor, and article influence. Our results confirm that cases of plagiarism are published in journals with lower visibility and thus tend to receive fewer citations. Moreover, full text similarity was significantly higher in cases of plagiarism than in cases of self-plagiarism. Among pairs of documents with shared authors, duplicates not citing the original document showed higher full text similarity than those citing the original document, and also showed greater overlap in the references cited in the two documents.