Is the science citation index US-biased?

The Western European science policy establishment often claims that US articles are more frequently cited than articles of the European Union's scientists because they are published in journals with a large number of US publications and that these journals are forming the ‘core’ of the SCI. For the disciplines covered by the SCI, no significant correlation has been found between the ratio of the average number of citations per publication for publications with at least one EU address and at least one US address, respectively, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the ratio of the corresponding number of publications per journal.     

Can applied science be ‘good science’? Exploring the relationship between patent citations and citation impact in nanoscience

There is a rich literature on how science and technology are related to each other. Patent citation analysis is amongst the most frequently used to tool to track the strengths of links. In this paper we explore the relationship between patent citations and citation impact in nanoscience. Our observations indicate that patent-cited papers perform better in terms of standard bibliometric indicators than comparable publications that are not linked to technology in this way. More specifically, we found that articles cited in patents are more likely to be cited also by other papers. The share of highly cited papers is the most striking result. Instead of the average of 4% of all papers, 13.8% of the papers cited once or twice in patents fall into this category and even 23.5% of the papers more frequently cited in patents receive citation rates far above the standard. Our analyses further demonstrate the presence and the relevance of bandwagon effects driving the development of science and technology.     

Are citation-based quantitative techniques adequate for measuring science on the periphery?

The inadequacies of citation analysis-based quatitative techniques in the context of developing countries owe their origins to the rather small size of most peripheral country scientific enterprises, the poor coverage of Third World journals in bibliographic databases, (and in particularSCI), the cognitive limitations of citation analysis pointed out by microsociologists, and the non-normative nature of the scientific enterprise in these countries. Much of peripheral science is derivative and imitative of science done in the centre, rather than original or path-breaking, and there is hardly any indigenous scientific community. And yet, citation analysis-based quantitative measures can be applied to characterise different aspects of peripheral science. These techniques assume great importance, especially in view of the massive inadequacies of the peer review process prevailing in these countries. The application of such citation-based quantification to units of different levels of aggregation such as a journal, an institution and a country as a whole has been demonstrated taking India as the example. Our results show that levels of funding have no correlation with the quality or international citation impact of the literature output resulting from a project. Almost all Indian journals have a very low impact on world literature, and the relatively better performance ofJournal of Astrophysics and Astronomy (and Indian astronomical research in general) owes it to favourable factors, both social and cognitive.     

Are predatory journals undermining the credibility of science? A bibliometric analysis of citers

Warnings against publishing in predatory journals are plentiful and so are the suggested solutions to the problem. The existing studies all confirm that authors of articles published in potential predatory journals are typically young, inexperienced and from Asia or Africa. To what extend we can consider the problem negligible is determined by the impact they are having on the scholarly communication in terms of publications and citations. The existing literature can provide more information about the former than the latter. This paper is an analysis of potential predatory journals as well as potential poor scientific standards journals. Citations to 124 potential predatory journals and poor scientific standards journals are looked up in Scopus and the citing authors analysed in regards to geographic location, publications and citations. The results show that the characteristics of the citing author indeed resemble those of the publishing author. Implications for recommendations and future research are discussed.     

The increasing dominance of science in the economy: Which nations are successful?

Scientometrics - We analyzed breakthrough patents that serve as the basis of emerging technological trajectories and paradigm over 25-years. The results showed that although technological fields...     

Is there a gender-based fragmentation of communication science? An investigation of the reasons for the apparent gender homophily in citations

Multiple studies report that male scholars cite publications of male authors more often than their female colleagues do—and vice versa. This gender homophily in citations points to a fragmentation of science along gender boundaries. However, it is not yet clear whether it is actually (perceived) gender characteristics or structural conditions related to gender that are causing the heightened citation frequency of same-sex authors. A bibliometric study on the two leading German communication science journals Publizistik and Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft was employed to further analyze the causes of the phenomenon. As scholars tend to primarily cite sources from their own area of research, differences among male and female scholars regarding their engagement in certain research fields become relevant. It was thus hypothesized that the research subject might mediate the relationship between the citing and cited authors’ genders. A first analysis based on n = 917 papers published in the period from 1970 to 2009 confirmed the expected gender-differences regarding research-activity in certain fields. Subsequently, structural equation modeling was employed to test the suggested mediation model. Results show the expected mediation to be a complementary one indicating that gender homophily in citations is partly due to topical boundaries. While there are alternative explanations for the remaining direct effect, it may suggest that a fragmentation of science along gender boundaries is indeed an issue that communication science must face.     

Introduction—Up,down, round and round: Verticalities in the history of science

History of science's spatial turn has focused on the horizontal dimension, leaving the role of the vertical mostly unexplored as both a condition and object of scientific knowledge production. This special issue seeks to contribute to a burgeoning discussion on the role of verticality in modern sciences, building upon a wider interdisciplinary debate about the importance of the vertical and the volumetric in the making of modern lifeworlds. In this essay and in the contributions that follow, verticality appears as a condition of knowledge production—a set of movements and mobilities, technical challenges, political negotiations, and bodily hardships—and an object of scientific inquiry, requiring new techniques of mapping and visualisation and generative of new insights into physical processes and temporal change. By foregrounding the vertical, historians of science can gain new insights and tell new stories about how science is done in the field, the observatory, and the laboratory, and about how those sciences have helped build a modern, three-dimensional world.     

Patent research in the field of library and information science: Less useful or difficult to explore?

Patents and relevant topics are gaining momentum in economic analysis and scientific research with the rapid global intellectual property filings growth. However, a corresponding increase seems to be unspectacular in patent research publications, especially under the category of information science and library science. This paper provided a retrospect to the existing studies on patents collected from web of science and emphatically characterized the current situation through performing a series of bibliometric analysis. Prominent authors and institutions from mainland China, Taiwan and Belgium have carried out various studies on patent separately or jointly. Topics involved in 884 journal papers are reclassified from perspectives of the development, application and analysis of patents based on the results of keyword co-occurrence and typical publications in each stage. The final, but the novel part of this study was a sentence-by-sentence analysis of conclusive and citing ideas of recent publications, for tracing problems and potential researchable topics and indicating that patent research still has more spaces to move up.     

Mapping the evolution of library and information science (1978–2014) using topic modeling on LISA

This paper offers an overview of the bibliometric study of the domain of library and information science (LIS), with the aim of giving a multidisciplinary perspective of the topical boundaries and the main areas and research tendencies. Based on a retrospective and selective search, we have obtained the bibliographical references (title and abstract) of academic production on LIS in the database LISA in the period 1978–2014, which runs to 92,705 documents. In the context of the statistical technique of topic modeling, we apply latent Dirichlet allocation, in order to identify the main topics and categories in the corpus of documents analyzed. The quantitative results reveal the existence of 19 important topics, which can be grouped together into four main areas: processes, information technology, library and specific areas of information application.     

On the “scientometric decline” of British science. One additional graph in reply to Ben Martin

With respect to the issue of whether the scientometric measurement of the decline of British science is an artifact of the specific database and underlying assumptions in methods, I argue that there are fewer analytical objections against measurement by usingSciSearch Online than against other methods (based on the fixed journal set and fractional counting). The measurement of international co-authorship, i.e. a network indicator, should not be confounded with measurement of performance of a single nation. The time series for the different subsets of UK-publications, which have been proposed, are given. None of the indicators can be shown to exhibit a trend (in contrast to a drift). The hypothesis of a decline has therefore to be rejected.     

Trends in research foci in life science fields over the last 30 years monitored by emerging topics

We report here a simple method to identify the ‘emerging topics’ in life sciences. First, the keywords selected from MeSH terms on PubMed by filtering the terms based on their increment rate of the appearance, and, then, were sorted into groups dealing with the same topics by ‘co-word’ analysis. These topics were defined as ‘emerging topics’. The survey of the emerging keywords with high increment rates of appearance between 1972 to 2006 showed that emerging topics changed dramatically year by year, and that the major shift of the topics occurred in the late 90s; the topics that cover technical and conceptual aspects in molecular biology to the more systematic ‘-omics’-related and nanoscience-related aspects. We further investigated trends in emerging topics within various sub-fields in the life sciences.     

Which role do non-source items play in the social sciences? A case study in political science in Germany

Publications that are not indexed by citation indices such as Web of Science (WoS) or Scopus are called “non-source items”. These have so far been neglected by most bibliometric analyses. The central issue of this study is to investigate the characteristics of non-source items and the effect of their inclusion in bibliometric evaluations in the social sciences, specifically German political science publications. The results of this study show that non-source items significantly increase the number of publications (+1,350 %) and to a lesser extent the number of citations from SCIE, SSCI, and A&HCI (+150 %) for evaluated political scientists. 42 % of non-source items are published as book chapters. Edited books and books are cited the most among non-source items. About 40 % of non-source items are in English, while 80 % of source items are in English. The citation rates of researchers taking non-source items into account are lower than those from source items, partially as a result of the limited coverage of WoS. In contrast, the H-indices of researchers taking only non-source items into account are higher than those from source items. In short, the results of this study show that non-source items should be included in bibliometric evaluations, regardless of their impact or the citations from them. The demand for a more comprehensive coverage of bibliometric database in the social sciences for a higher quality of evaluations is shown.