The evolution of the sleep science literature over 30 years: A bibliometric analysis

During the 1974–2004 period, the sleep literature had quadrupled (2384 publications in 1974, and 9721 in 2004) while overall scientific productivity had only doubled. The set of the seven most productive countries (USA, Japan, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada and Italy) in sleep research, and the geographical region distribution remained stable over the three decades. On the other hand several indicators appeared in the sleep research literature during the 1990s: the increasing productivity of sleep researchers; the growing number of countries publishing on sleep; the continuous creation of sleep-focused journals; the scattering of sleep publication among increasingly more scientific journals; the turnover among the leading journals; and the emergence of new entities such as China, Turkey, and the European Union.     

Modeling the growth of world social science literature

The main objectives of this study are: (a) to find the applicability of selected growth models to the growth of publications in six sub-disciplines of social sciences, namely anthropology, economics, history, political science, psychology, and sociology in the world; and (b) to verify the criteria for selecting the most appropriate growth model suggested by Eggheand Rao (1992).     

Applied versus basic science in the literature of plant biology: A bibliometric perspective

Applied and basic approaches to scientific inquiry were compared through a bibliometric analysis of two Canadian journals in plant biology. No differences were found between the journals in the distribution of citations across different sections of research articles (that is, Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion). Moreover, no contrasts were found in the frequency of multiple authorships or in the age distribution of cited works. However, the journals differed significantly on three other bibliometric measures: author affiliation, number of references per article, and publication format of cited works.     

The growth of science and database coverage

Recently there has been huge growth in the number of articles displayed on the Web of Science (WoS), but it is unclear whether this is linked to a growth of science or simply additional coverage of already existing journals by the database provider. An analysis of the category of journals in the period of 2000?C2008 shows that the number of basic journals covered by Web of Science (WoS) steadily decreased, whereas the number of new, recently established journals increased. A rising number of older journals is also covered. These developments imply a crescive number of articles, but a more significant effect is the enlargement of traditional, basic journals in terms of annual articles. All in all it becomes obvious that the data set is quite instable due to high fluctuation caused by the annual selection criteria, the impact factor. In any case, it is important to look at the structures at the level of specific fields in order to differentiate between ??real?? and ??artificial?? growth. Our findings suggest that even-though a growth of about 34?% can be measured in article numbers in the period of 2000?C2008, 17?% of this growth stems from the inclusion of old journals that have been published for a longer time but were simply not included in the database so far.     

Improving the functionality of interactive bibliometric science maps

The use of a map as a metaphor of a scientific field is an established idea and using it as aninterface to bibliometric data seems to have great potential. Nevertheless, our own implementationof such an interface came up with some limits inhibiting the user to comprehend as to what hewas looking at. As a result, the map was not used to its fullest potential. The implementationdescribed in this paper as a high-level (conceptual) design, addresses the problems noted by users.It combines both top-down and bottom-up access to the bibliometric data, something we see asvital to mapping internal knowledge onto the external depiction and vice versa. And as such, itbecomes a more complete tool to explore the mapped scientific field and to find and retrieverelevant information.     

Classifications of science and their effects on bibliometric evaluations

Scientometrics - Disciplinary classification of science is essential to bibliometric analyses. Given the conceptual and technical difficulties in classifying individual papers into disciplines and...     

The application of bibliometric analyses in the evaluation of social science research. Who benefits from it, and why it is still feasible

Summary The paper discusses an application of bibliometric techniques in the social sciences. While the interest of policy makers is growing, the topic is getting more and more attention from bibliometricians. However, many efforts are put into developing tools to measure scientific output and impact outside the world of the Social Sciences Citation Index, while the use of the SSCI for bibliometric applications is covered with obscurity and myths. This study attempts to clarify some of the topics mentioned against the application of the SSCI for evaluation purposes. The study will cover topics like the existing publication and citation culture within the social sciences, the effect of variable citation windows, and the (geographical) origin of citation flows.     

Measuring impact by a full option method and the notion of bibliometric spectra

A full option method for determining impact takes into account citations to all cited publications, instead of limiting the analysis to ISI-publications only, as usually done in the standard method. The method was tested for the 258 early Ghent professors, teaching in 6 different faculties. The impact of monographs is, in general, much larger than the impact of articles (whether of ISI-type or not). This result remains valid for all six faculties separately. Limiting the bibliometric visibility to ISI-publications reduces the number of citations to only 16%. Bibliometric spectra are presented, in which citations, cited publications and their impact are shown in function of the year of publication. The number of cited publications is always important to expose the influence of activity (production) upon bibliometric scores. For the faculty of Arts, the citations to early professors are compared with those obtained for the presentday generation: the bibliometric spectrum for the former group is rather discontinuous (showing a large erosion in the number of citations by year), whereas that of the latter is continuous. The Ghent citation data are also compared with those given internationally in the same period.     

The evolution of data science and big data research: A bibliometric analysis

Scientometrics - In this study the evolution of Big Data (BD) and Data Science (DS) literatures and the relationship between the two are analyzed by bibliometric indicators that help establish the...     

The decline of Swedish neuroscience: Decomposing a bibliometric national science indicator

Recent studies have reported on a steady decline of Sweden's relative citation impact in almost all science fields, above all in the life sciences. The authors attempt to shed light on the observed decline in Swedish neuroscience through a detailed citation analysis at different level of aggregations. Thus national citation data are decomposed to the institutional, departmental and individual level. Both, the decomposition of national science indicators and changing collaboration patterns in Swedish neuroscience reveal interesting details on the 'anatomy' of a decline. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The detection of extra-terrestrial life and the consequences for science and society

Astronomers are now able to detect planets orbiting stars other than the Sun where life may exist, and living generations could see the signatures of extra-terrestrial life being detected. Should it turn out that we are not alone in the Universe, it will fundamentally affect how humanity understands itself--and we need to be prepared for the consequences. A Discussion Meeting held at the Royal Society in London, 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, on 25-26 January 2010, addressed not only the scientific but also the societal agenda, with presentations covering a large diversity of topics.     

The popularization of science II: Patterns of topical coverage

Topical coverage by major scientific discipline on the part of six popular monthly magazines is compared to expected values based on the number of doctoral graduates per discipline. A major discrepancy is found in the relatively sparse coverage of chemistry. A case study of advances in catalysis is used to demonstrate that there are newsworthy developments in chemistry that could provide copious source materials. Speculative explanations for the relatively scant attention given to chemistry are advanced. The neglect of chemistry by the popular media is seen as a possible problem area for science educators who may depend on supplementary readings at all levels of instruction including informal adult education.     

Analysis of the structure of international scientific cooperation networks through bibliometric indicators

International scientific cooperation of Latin American countries amongst themselves, with the USA and with the European Union in the period 1991–1995 was studied. The analysis deepens in the differences per subject area and the influence of the regional axis involved. Collaboration patterns differ according to the scientific size of the latin American countries, the thematic areas and whether a bilateral collaboration or a participation in a multilateral network takes place. Some special characteristics of multi-regional cooperation networks are presented.     

Smart bibliometrics: an integrated method of science mapping and bibliometric analysis

Bibliometric techniques and science mapping are widely employed in the research environment to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art of scientific knowledge on a given topic. These techniques are essential to assist the researcher's work by guiding the compilation of the bibliography to support the theory discussion. To this objective, the Smart Bibliometrics was developed to facilitate bibliometric analysis and selection of theoretical references, embodied by a system that brings intelligence, dynamism, and agility to the scientific writing process. The innovation of this methodology is the fusion of two relevant criteria applied during the bibliometric analysis process: the application of a representative metric of classification of scientific papers and dynamic visuals strategically developed. The methodology differs for providing the user with dynamic navigation and interaction experience with the data collected, innovating the approach to reaching insights within the universe of discussions of the scientific community. In addition, as an innovation factor, the method is presented in a scalable Business Intelligence (BI) system that features blunt visuals, extensive analysis repertoire, intuitive navigation, and automated updating. The development was carried out in a cutting-edge technological platform to attend information and sharing intents by employing cloud computing resources, another feature that enables interaction among researcher groups also from different institutions. Additionally, it is not necessary to install any software. The output will be available for consultation, at any time and place, just by using one device with an internet connection.

     

The global institutionalization of nanotechnology research: A bibliometric approach to the assessment of science policy

Based on bibliometric methods, this paper describes the global institutionalization of nanotechnology research from the mid-1980s to 2006. Owing to an extremely strong dynamics, the institutionalization of nanotechnology is likely to surpass those of major disciplines in only a few years. A breakdown of the relative institutionalizations strengths by the main geographical regions, countries, research sectors, disciplines, and institutional types provides a very diverse picture over the time period because of different national science policies. The results allow a critical assessment of the different science policies based on the relative institutionalizations strengths as well as the conclusion that the institutionalization process has run out of control of individual governments who once induced the development.     

#Psychology: a bibliometric analysis of psychological literature in the online media

Online media and especially social media are becoming more and more relevant to our everyday life. Reflecting this tendency in the scientific community, alternative metrics for measuring scholarly impact on the web are increasingly proposed, extending (or even replacing) traditional metrics (e.g., citations, journal impact factor, etc.). This paper explores the relationship between traditional metrics and alternative metrics for psychological research in the years from 2010 to 2012. Traditional publication metrics (e.g., number of citations, impact factor) and alternative metrics (collected from Altmetric, a website that collects and counts references as they appear in Wikipedia, public policy documents, research blogs, mainstream media, or social networks) were extracted and compared, using a dataset of over 245,000 publications from the Web of Science. Results show positive, small to medium, correlations on the level of individual publications, and frequently medium to high correlations on the level of research fields of Psychology. The more accumulated the level of analysis, the higher the correlations. These findings are fairly robust over time and comparable to findings from research areas other than Psychology. Additionally, a new metric, the Score Factor, is proposed as a useful alternative metric to assess a journal’s impact in the online media.     

The emergence of social science research on nanotechnology

This article examines the development of social science literature focused on the emerging area of nanotechnology. It is guided by the exploratory proposition that early social science work on emerging technologies will draw on science and engineering literature on the technology in question to frame its investigative activities, but as the technologies and societal investments in them progress, social scientists will increasingly develop and draw on their own body of literature. To address this proposition the authors create a database of nanotechnology-social science literature by merging articles from the Web of Science’s Social Science Citation Index and Arts and Humanities Citation Index with articles from Scopus. The resulting database comprises 308 records. The findings suggest that there are multiple dimensions of cited literature and that social science citations of other social scientists’ works have increased since 2005.