The distribution of the uncitedness factor and its functional relation with the impact factor

The uncitedness factor of a journal is its fraction of uncited articles. Given a set of journals (e.g. in a field) we can determine the rank-order distribution of these uncitedness factors. Hereby we use the Central Limit Theorem which is valid for uncitedness factors since it are fractions, hence averages. A similar result was proved earlier for the impact factors of a set of journals. Here we combine the two rank-order distributions, hereby eliminating the rank, yielding the functional relation between the impact factor and the uncitedness factor. It is proved that the decreasing relation has an S-shape: first convex, then concave and that the inflection point is in the point (μ′, μ) where μ is the average of the impact factors and μ′ is the average of the uncitedness factors.     

Gaining scientific recognition by position: Does editorship increase citation rates?

We investigated three rival hypotheses concerning scientific communication and recognition: the performance hypothesis and two alternative assumptions, the reputation hypothesis and the resource hypothesis. The performance hypothesis reflects the norm of universalism in the sense given byMerton, the reputation hypothesis predicts a Matthew Effect (scientists receive communications and recognition on the basis of their reputation), and the resource hypothesis assumes that communication with other scientitis is used as a form of asset to defend one's own research results. Using bibliometric methods, we assessed whether assuming an important scientific position enhances scientific impact and prestige. Specifically, we explored whether a person's assumption of editorship responsibilities of a psychology journal increases the frequency with which that person is cited in theSocial Sciences Citation Index. The data base consisted of ten psychology journals, seven premier American and three German journals, covering the years 1981 to 1995. Citation rates for the years prior to, during, and following periods of editorship were compared for three groups: editors cited in the journal they edited, editors cited in a journal they did not edit, and non-editors. The results showed that during their editorship, editors showed an increased citation rate in the journal edited; this result was found for American journals, but not for German journals. These findings indicate that, for American journals, assuming editorship responsibilities for a major psychology journal increases one's scientific impact, at least as reflected by a measure of citation rate. A careful examination of ages of the non-editors' citations reveals that the post-editorship citation rates of editors and comparable non-editors do not differ significantly. The reputation hypothesis (Matthew Effect) is therefore preferred for interpreting the results, because it shows the cumulative nature of prestige-oriented citations. The results contradict the convention of using citation rates as pure performance measures.     

Competition in science and the Matthew core journals

Competition is one of the most essential features of science. A new journal indicator - the"number of Matthew citations in a journal" was found that reflects certain aspects of thiscompetition. The indicator mirrors the competition of countries in scientific journals forrecognition in terms of seemingly "redistributed" citations.The indicator shows, as do other journal indicators, an extreme skewed distribution over anensemble of 2712 SCI journals. Half of all Matthew citations are contained in 144 so-calledMatthew core journals.In this paper, a new typology of scientific journals, including the Matthew core journals, isintroduced. For a few selected journals, graphs are presented showing national impact factors aswell as the absolute number of Matthew citations gained or lost by the countries publishing in thejournal.Scientific competition among countries for recognition is strongest in the Matthew corejournals, they are the most competitive markets for scientific publications. Conclusions are drawnfor national science policy, for the journal acquisition policy of national libraries, and for thepublication behaviour of individual scientists.     

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.     

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.     

Transition to postmodern science—related scientometric data

A change in scientific developments in recent decades is widely proclaimed which may be associated with terms like postmodern science or steady state science. This change is usually discussed from a more epistemological viewpoint. In order to enhance the understanding of the underlying key factors, bibliometric, demographic and Nobel Prize recipient data spanning of the last hundred years are considered and analyzed. It is found that in general the considered data point to a quasi-steady state in bibliometric developments of highly developed countries. For emerging countries, such a steady state is not yet attained; therefore, the research output in scientific journal articles is still expected to rise considerably. Consequences and interpretations of an ever growing research output in relation to the increasing age of Nobel Prize recipients are discussed and conclusions are drawn from the considered data.     

The scientific economy of attention: A novel approach to the collective rationality of science

Science is the core sector of present-day knowledge production. Yet, the mechanisms of science as an industry are poorly understood. The economic theory of science is still in its infancy, and philosophy of science has only sparsely addressed the issue of economic rationality. Research, however, is costly. Inefficient use of resources consumed by the scientific industry is as detrimental to the collective advancement of knowledge as are deficiencies in method. Economic inefficiency encompasses methodological inadequacy. Methods are inadequate if they tend to misallocate time and effort. If one omits the question of how inputs are transformed into outputs in self-organised knowledge production, this means neglecting an essential aspect of the collective rationality of science. A self-organised tendency towards efficiency comes to the fore as soon as science is described as an economy in which researchers invest their own attention in order to obtain the attention of others. Viewed like this, scientific communication appears to be a market where information is exchanged for attention. Scientific information is measured in terms of the attention it earns. Since scientists demand scientific information as a means of production, the attention that a theory attracts is a measure of its value as a capital good. On the other hand, the attention a scientist earns is capitalised into the asset called reputation. Elaborating the ideas introduced in Franck (1998) and (1999), the paper describes science as a highly developed market economy. Science conceived as capital market covers the specific conditions under which scientists, while maximising their reputation, optimise output in the eyes of those competent to judge. Attention is not just any resource. It is the resource whose efficient use is called intelligence. Science, as an industry transforming attention into cognitive output, is bound to miss the hallmark of rationality if it does not pass a test of collective intelligence. The paper closes with considering the prospective outcome of such a test. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Turning journals into encyclopaedias: Medical editorship and reprinting in the Low Countries (1815–1860)

This paper scrutinizes the attempts of 19th-century Belgian and Dutch physician-editors to convey foreign knowledge in new ways. By analysing their editorial practices and strategies—including the duplication (reprinting in full), reduction, modification, and translation of texts—it shows that the introduction of periodical publishing in medicine involved experimentation not only with the style of professional debate, but also with the format of medical knowledge. My analysis of reprinting reveals how editors, in cooperation with publishers, succeeded in broadening the readership of scientific medical texts by including private practitioners. The model for these publishing experiments was not so much the (polemical) newspaper, as was the case in the natural sciences, but rather the encyclopaedia and the handbook. If science was to interest practicing doctors, medical journals had to present scientific texts in a useful and easily consultable form. The core idea of the “reprint journal” was to continuously assemble and render insightful a growing body of international knowledge. This exercise, however, was fraught with tensions: reprint journals were reproached for not having a sufficiently international selection of articles, but at the same time for not being sufficiently “national.” As the framework of the nation-state gained strength around 1850 and an awareness of authors' rights took a stronger hold, reprinting in medical journals lost its popularity.     

Mapping the backbone of science

Summary This paper presents a new map representing the structure of all of science, based on journal articles, including both the natural and social sciences. Similar to cartographic maps of our world, the map of science provides a bird’s eye view of today’s scientific landscape. It can be used to visually identify major areas of science, their size, similarity, and interconnectedness. In order to be useful, the map needs to be accurate on a local and on a global scale. While our recent work has focused on the former aspect,1 this paper summarizes results on how to achieve structural accuracy. Eight alternative measures of journal similarity were applied to a data set of 7,121 journals covering over 1 million documents in the combined Science Citation and Social Science Citation Indexes. For each journal similarity measure we generated two-dimensional spatial layouts using the force-directed graph layout tool, VxOrd. Next, mutual information values were calculated for each graph at different clustering levels to give a measure of structural accuracy for each map. The best co-citation and inter-citation maps according to local and structural accuracy were selected and are presented and characterized. These two maps are compared to establish robustness. The inter-citation map is then used to examine linkages between disciplines. Biochemistry appears as the most interdisciplinary discipline in science.     

Zero impact: a large-scale study of uncitedness

This paper presents a large-scale study of the phenomenon ‘uncitedness’. A literature review indicates that uncitedness is related to at least three factors: Field, document type, and time. To explore these factors and their mutual influence further, and at much larger scale than previous studies, the paper focuses on seven subject areas (arts and humanities; social sciences; computer science; mathematics; engineering; medicine; physics and astronomy), seven document types (articles; reviews; notes; letters; conference papers; books; book chapters), and a 20-year publication window (1996–2015). Documents are searched in Scopus, and retrieved year-by-year, discipline-by-discipline, and for each individual document type (total: 29,472,184 documents; 7,508,741 uncited documents). The results show great variance in uncitedness ratios between subject areas and document types. This is probably caused by a somewhat tacitly agreed upon genre hierarchy existing in all subject areas, yet with important local traits and differences. The importance of the time-dimension is documented. Time to first citation varies a great deal between subject areas, and the uncitedness ratio is consequently shown to be quite sensitive to the length of citation windows.

     

Assessing internationality of scholarly journals through foreign authorship patterns: the case of major journals in information science,and scientometrics

This article reports findings from a study of patterns of foreign authorship of articles, and international composition of journal editorial boards in five leading journals in the field of information science, and scientometrics. The study covers an American journal and four European journals. Bibliographic data about foreign authors and their national affiliation from five selected years of publication were analyzed for all journals. The foreign input of articles were extremely high in Information Processing & Management, and Scientometrics, and were relatively low in the other three journals. The number of foreign countries contributing in all journals have increased rapidly since 1996. Canada, England, Belgium, Netherlands, China, and Spain were the countries with high contributions in JASIST. The authors from the USA have dominated the foreign-authored articles in all European journals. A simple linear regression analysis showed that 60% of variation in the proportion of foreign-authored articles in the set of five journals over the selected years could be explained by the percentage of foreign members on the editorial boards of the journals. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Peer review delay and selectivity in ecology journals

Peer review is fundamental to science as we know it, but is also a source of delay in getting discoveries communicated to the world. Researchers have investigated the effectiveness and bias of various forms of peer review, but little attention has been paid to the relationships among journal reputation, rejection rate, number of submissions received and time from submission to acceptance. In 22 ecology/interdisciplinary journals for which data could be retrieved, higher impact factor is positively associated with the number of submissions. However, higher impact factor journals tend to be significantly quicker in moving from submission to acceptance so that journals which receive more submissions are not those which take longer to get them through the peer review and revision processes. Rejection rates are remarkably high throughout the journals analyzed, but tend to increase with increasing impact factor and with number of submissions. Plausible causes and consequences of these relationships for journals, authors and peer reviewers are discussed.     

Comparative indicators of interdisciplinarity in modern science

A set of scientometric indicators of interdisciplinary links between advancing fields of biomedicine is suggested. Twenty jounals listed in theJCR of theSCI for 1988 are analyzed. An index of interdisciplinarity for a given journal is calculated as the sum of ratios between the numbers of journals from all other disciplines (except for general-scientific and miscellaneous journals) and from the same discipline cited by that journal or citing it, and of ratios between the numbers of citations to and by these journals. Some interdisciplinary patterns of 20 andrology journal articles are scientometrically assessed, too. The combined usage of this method with co-classification and co-citation methodology can optimize interdisciplinarity evaluation and promotion.     

Characteristics of journal impact factors: The effects of uncitedness and citation distribution on the understanding of journal impact factors

Summary In this study, journal impact factors play a central role. In addition to this important bibliometric indicator, which evolves around the average impact of a journal in a two-year timeframe, related aspects of journal impact measurement are studied. Aspects like the output volume, the percentage of publications not cited, and the citation frequency distribution within a set timeframe are researched, and put in perspective with the 'classical' journal Impact Factor. In this study it is shown that these aspects of journal impact measurement play a significant role, and are strongly inter-related. Especially the separation between journals on the basis of the differences in output volume seems to be relevant, as can be concluded from the different results in the analysis of journal impact factors, the degree of uncitedness, and the share of a journal its contents above or below the impact factor value.     

On the validity of citation counting in science evaluation: Content analyses of references and citations in psychological publications

In reference to the increasing significance of citation counting in evaluations of scientists and science institutes as well as in science historiography, it is analyzed empirically what is cited in which frequency and what types of citations in scientific texts are used. Content analyses refer to numbers of references, self-references, publication language of references cited, publication types of references cited, and type of citation within the texts. Validity of citation counting is empirically analyzed with reference to random samples of English and German journal articles as well as German textbooks, encyclopedias, and test-manuals from psychology. Results show that 25% of all citations are perfunctory, more than 50% of references are journal articles and up to 40% are books and book-chapters, 10% are self-references. Differences between publications from various psychological sub-disciplines, publication languages, and types of publication are weak. Thus, validity of evaluative citation counting is limited because at least one quarter refers to perfunctory citations exhibiting a very low information utility level and by the fact that existing citation-databases refer to journal articles only.     

The impact of internet resources on scholarly communication: A citation analysis

The quality and credibility of Internet resources has been a concern in scholarly communication. This paper reports a quantitative analysis of the use of Internet resources in journal articles and addresses the concerns for the use of Internet resources scholarly journals articles. We collected the references listed in 35,698 articles from 14 journals published during 1996 to 2005, which resulted in 1,000,724 citations. The citation data was divided into two groups: traditional citations and Web citations, and examined based on frequencies of occurrences by domain and type of Web citation sources. The findings included: (1) The number of Web citations in the journals investigated had been increasing steadily, though the quantity was too small to draw an inclusive conclusion on the data about their impact on scientific research; (2) A great disparity existed among different disciplines in terms of using information on the Web. Applied disciplines and interdisciplinary sciences tended to cite more information on the Web, while classical and experimental disciplines cited little of Web information; (3) The frequency of citations was related to the reputation of the author or the institution issuing the information, and not to the domain or webpage types; and (4) The researchers seemed to lack confidence in Internet resources, and Web information was not as frequently cited as reported in some publications before. The paper also discusses the need for developing a guideline system to evaluate Web resources regarding their authority and quality that lies in the core of credibility of Web information.     

Open access in ethics research: an analysis of open access availability and author self-archiving behaviour in light of journal copyright restrictions

The current state of open access to journal publications within research areas belonging to the humanities has received relatively little research attention. This study provides a detailed mapping of the bibliometric state of open access to journal publications among ethicists, taking into account not only open access publishing in journals directly, but also where and in what form ethicists make their journal articles available elsewhere on the web. As part of the study 297 ethicists affiliated with top-ranking philosophy departments were identified and their journal publication information for the years 2010–2015 were recorded (1682 unique articles). The journal articles were then queried for through Google Scholar in order to establish open access status (web locations, document versions) of each publication record. Publication records belonging to the 20 most frequently used journal outlets (subset of 597 unique articles) were put under closer inspection with regards to alignment with publisher copyright restrictions as well as measuring unused potential to share articles. The results show that slightly over half of recent journal publications are available to read for free. PhilPapers and academic social networks (Academia.edu and ResearchGate) were found to be key platforms for research dissemination in ethics research. The representation of institutional repositories as providers of access was found to be weak, receiving the second lowest frequency rating among the eight discrete web location categories. Further, the study reveals that ethicists are at the same time prone to copyright infringement and undersharing their scholarly work.     

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.     

Bibliometric analysis of the journal literature on women’s studies

This study uses bibliometric techniques to investigate the characteristics and implications of women’s studies literature over the period from 1900 to 2013. Using computer analysis for bibliometric techniques, the results of the present study demonstrate that the journal literature on women’s studies has grown exponentially, with an annual growth rate of 10.6% for over one century. Most of the document types in the area of women’s studies are in the form of research articles, review articles and book reviews. The United States of America and the United Kingdom contribute the largest number of articles. One hundred and seventeen core journals containing 33% of the women’s studies journal articles have been identified through the application of Bradford’s law on journal distribution. More than half of the 117 core journals began publishing from 1970 to 1990, and most of these core journals deal with the humanities (including literature, history and philosophy), women’s studies, medical science, psychology, political science and sociology. The highly productive journals associated with highly cited times are Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Women’s Studies International Forum, Sex Roles, Feminism and Psychology, Gender and Society, European Journal of Women’s Studies, American Historical Review, Psychology of Women Quarterly and Feminist Studies.     

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.