Scientometrics of laser research in India and China

An analysis of 1223 papers published by India (347papers) and China (876papers) at conferences and in journals during 1993 and 1997 in the field of laser S&T indicates that China"s output was twice to that of India. However, Activity Indices for both the countries in 1993 and 1997 were almost the same. Chinese scientists preferred to publish in domestic journals, while Indian scientists published in foreign journals. The number of papers by Indian scientists in SCI covered journals and journals with high-Normalized Impact Factors was more than for China, and, thus India was better connected to the mainstream science compared to China. The impact made by Indian papers was more than for Chinese papers, as reflected by normalized impact per paper, proportion of papers in high quality journals, and publication effective index. Indian papers also got more citations per paper than Chinese papers. Team research appears to be better in China than in India, as reflected by the number of mega-authored papers produced by the two countries. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Publication practices in various sciences

From a study of Papers published in 1990 in major journals in eight sciences (astrophysics, biology, chemistry, geophysics, mathematics, physics, psychiatry, and radiology) we learn the following. The median numbers of authors per paper range from 1.0 (in mathematics) to 3.7 (in the medical fields). Only a few percent (0–5%) of the papers have more than eight authors. Nearly half (30–55%) of the papers in American journals are partly or totally from abroad, except in the medicinal fields (10%). The fractions of papers with authors from two or more countries are as high as 26% (in astrophysics and geophysics). Mean paper lengths range from 4.6 1000-word pages in the medical fields to 8–13 pages in the observational sciences (astrophysics, biology, geophysics) and mathematics. The fraction of papers revised range from 8% in mathematics to 100% in geophysics. The mean publication times (submission to publication) range from 200 days in physics to 600 days in mathematics.     

Statistical analysis of astronomical papers of China during 1986–1990

We present the distribution of astronomical papers published by Chinese authors in 1986–1990 across the various subfields of astronomy, the total number of papers produced by each observatory or university during the five years, and the ranking of the observatories by productivity. Our main data base includes 24 journals: 9 foreign ones published in English, 10 Chinese national ones, and 5 Chinese observatory publications. About 70 journals published by Chinese universities have also been consulted. This data base covers up to 90% of all astronomical papers published during this period.     

A comparison of astronomy in fifteen member countries of the organisation for economic co-operation and development

Various data are collected for 15 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that have to do with the practising of astronomy: (1) using the report of the Astronomy expert meeting of the Megascience Forum of the OECD, the level of astronomy funding, size of the research communities, relative commitment to ground-based versus space-based astronomy, etc.; (2) from other sources the size of the population, Gross National Product and size of the total research community; (3) from the paper ofSchubert et al. (1989) data on publication and citation scores of these countries in astronomy and the total research effort (excluding social and economic sciences). Using these data the 15 countries have been ranked on: (1) the relative level of astronomy funding; (2) the relative level of performance in astronomy; (3) the correspondence between funding and performance in astronomy; (4) the relative level of performance of the total science effort; and (5) the performance in astronomy relative to that in all sciences.The results of this study have been summarized in table 10 below. Other interesting results that can be inferred from the data collected in this paper are: (1) one out of every 75,000 inhabitants of these OECD countries is an astronomical researcher; (2) each citizen of these countries spends on average 2.5 $ per year on astronomical research (either from the ground or in space); (3) the average budget per researcher amounts to roughly 200,000 $ per annum; (4) the average budget for astronomy amounts to 0.016% of the Gross National Product and of order 1% of the total budget for civilian R & D; (5) an astronomical researcher from these countries produces on average 1.7 papers each year and these papers receive on average ten citations in the first five years; (6) researchers in science (excluding economic and social sciences) make up 0.08% of the population in these countries and one in about 65 of these researchers works in astronomy or astrophysics; (7) most countries spend about one-third of their astronomy budget on salaries, one-sixth on basic support and half on observing facilities (in a ratio one to two for ground-based versus space).     

Journal self-citation rates in ecological sciences

Impact factors are a widely accepted means for the assessment of journal quality. However, journal editors have possibilities to influence the impact factor of their journals, for example, by requesting authors to cite additional papers published recently in that journal thus increasing the self-citation rate. I calculated self-citation rates of journals ranked in the Journal Citation Reports of ISI in the subject category “Ecology” (n = 107). On average, self citation was responsible for 16.2 ± 1.3% (mean ± SE) of the impact factor in 2004. The self-citation rates decrease with increasing journal impact, but even high impact journals show large variation. Six journals suspected to request for additional citations showed high self-citation rates, which increased over the last seven years. To avoid further deliberate increases in self-citation rates, I suggest to take journal-specific self-citation rates into account for journal rankings.     

How the European Union writes about ophthalmology

This study evaluates the distribution of papers published by European Union (EU) authors in ophthalmological journals from 1995 to 1997. The impact of ophthalmological research in the EU is compared with that produced in other countries and trends of research are highlighted through the keywords analysis. Data of articles published in ophthalmological journals (ISI Subject Category) were downloaded. Mean Impact Factor, source country population and gross domestic product were analyzed. A special purpose software for keyword elaboration was utilized. 11,219 papers were published in the world in the ophthalmological journals: 34.8% came from the EU (UK, Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands ranking at the top) and 40.7% from the US. The mean Impact Factor of EU papers was 0.8 in comparison with 1.5 in the US. Despite the limitations of the existing methods, bibliometric findings are useful for the monitoring of research trends. The keywords analysis shows that the leading fields of research were retinal pathologies for diseases and keratoplasty for surgical procedures. It also suggests that keywords are overused, and urges minimization of this as well as standardization among journal editors. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A generation of astronomical telescopes,their users,and publications

Research astronomers and the telescopes they use each have typical life spans of about 40 years. Most of their journals live a good deal longer, though the second most important one today is only 40 years old. This paper looks at numbers for productivity and impact of specific astronomical facilities, changes in equality of opportunities and achievements in observational astronomy, and some aspects of national contributions. The focus is on optical astronomy, though something is also said about radio telescopes and astronomy from space. In summary, nothing stays “best of class” for very long; the fraction of the community with access to the most valuable facilities has increased with time (more equality of opportunity); but the fraction of citations earned by the few super-star papers has also increased (less equality of achievement); and the USA remains the host of the most-cited journals and the most productive telescopes, though Europe (meaning in this context the member nations of the European Southern Observatory, the European Space Agency, and the supporters of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics) are fast closing the gap, with the UK retaining its own journal and some observing facilities not shared with either the USA or other European countries. Detailed examination of specific facilities indicates that size (of telescope, community, and budget) are all of great importance, but that the most significant “focal plane instrument” is still the astronomer at the virtual eyepiece. The changes have happened against a background of enormous increases in numbers of astronomers, sizes of available facilities (but not total number), numbers of papers (but not of journals), and numbers of citations per paper. A significant subset of the conclusions on turnover of people and facilities accompanying major growth: opportunity versus achievement; Europe versus the USA; and the trade-off between community size and the influence of individual scientists undoubtedly apply in many other fields.     

Croatian scholarly productivity 1991–2005 measured by journals indexed in Web of Science

The purpose of the research was to establish and inform about the features of productivity across all scholarly fields measured through journals indexed in WoS in which Croatian authors working in Croatian institutions published since independence (1991) to 2005. Total 19,929 papers in 2,946 journals were found. Of these, 17,875 papers were published in 2,690 science, technology and medicine (STM) journals, 1,869 papers were published in 178 social science journals, and 185 were published in 78 A&H journals according to custom classification used in the research. Special attention was given to publishing features of specific scholarly fields. The number of different journals in which the papers were published per year has doubled in the period (from 404 in 1991 to 894 in 2005). To support additional insight, a distinction between national and international journals was made and top 10% journals according to JCR 2005 categories were identified by IF. National journals accounted for 15.9% of STM papers, 77.6% of social science papers and 25.9% of A&H papers. Top 10% journals accounted for a total of 368 journals and 2,336 papers with significant variations across the subfields.     

A bibliometric analysis of physics publications from Middle Eastern countries

I studied the publication efforts in physics in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey in terms of a total number of 2368 papers from these countries in international journals for 1990–1994. I looked for the national contributions, main subjects of activity, journal preferences of authors, and co-authorship patterns. Comparisons show that physicists from Egypt and Turkey combined, produced 75% of the total publication output. Half of the Egyptian papers went only to 16% of a set of 115 journals that publish papers from this country. Such a high concentration of papers in a few journals was not the case for the rest of the countries. Condensed matter physics was found to be among the three most active subjects for the countries except Iran. Iranian authors tended to be more active in astrosciences, and nuclear science and technology. I found a change in the publication patterns of the Middle Eastern physicists in the direction of decreasing isolation and increasing collaboration.     

Collaboration Patterns in Indian and Bulgarian Epidemiology of Neoplasms in Medline for 1966–1999

The publication output of India and Bulgaria on epidemiology of neoplasms as reflected in Medline on CD-ROM for 1966–1999 was scientometrically analyzed. Indians have published 347 papers in 24 domestic journals but 444 papers in169 journals from 21 countries. Bulgarians have published 88 papers in 6 Bulgarian journals but 63 papers in 39 journals from 13 countries. Some 17 journals from 8 countries contained papers by Indian and Bulgarian authors both. Oncology dominated with 46 different journals. Indians have published papers in foreign journals of 30 thematic profiles but Bulgarians - of 12 ones. The collaboration of Indians and Bulgarians resulted from joint bilateral projects and/or postgraduate studies abroad. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The authorship and country spread of Operation Research journals

This paper surveys 56 internationally renowned OR journals published in 1996–2005 with regard to authorship. Our findings show that the USA was the country that contributed the largest amount, approximately one-third, of research results to OR journals. Authors tend to publish papers in their home-country journals. Journal of the Operations Research Society of Japan has the highest author concentration, with more than 85% of the authors from Japan and European Journal of Operational Research, on the contrary, has the widest country spread of its authors. The entropy measure provides a whole picture of the share of all countries, based on which the editorial policy of a journal can be adjusted.     

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.     

The effect of funding on the outputs of biomedical research

The Research Outputs Database (ROD) has been used to investigate the effects of different input variables, including the numbers of funding bodies, on the impact of research papers in a biomedical subfield (gastroenterology). This was determined by the medium-term impact of the journals in which they were published. It was shown that, when account was taken of the effects of the other input factors, the mean impact for a group of papers increased with the number of authors, the type of research (basic more than clinical), and with the number and identity of the funding bodies. However itdecreased slightly if there were more addresses; whether the paper was multinational had no significant effect. Previous work showing that multi-institution or multi-country papers are more highly cited reached this conclusion because it did not take into account the confounding effect of multiple funding sources, and possibly other factors.     

The fruits of collaboration in a multidisciplinary field

Collaboration between researchers and between research organizations is generally considered a desirable course of action, in particular by some funding bodies. However, collaboration within a multidisciplinary community, such as the Computer–Human Interaction (CHI) community, can be challenging. We performed a bibliometric analysis of the CHI conference proceedings to determine if papers that have authors from different organization or countries receive more citations than papers that are authored by members of the same organization. There was no significant difference between these three groups, indicating that there is no advantage for collaboration in terms of citation frequency. Furthermore, we tested if papers written by authors from different organizations or countries receive more best paper awards or at least award nominations. Papers from only one organization received significantly fewer nominations than collaborative papers.     

Modeling multinational publication: Development of an on-line fractionation approach to measure national scientific output

This study of multinational publication (publications involving authors from more than one country) focuses on a viable method of fractionation, which can be used in on-line bibliometric research. Fractionation occurs when the credit for co-authored papers is added only partially to the total of publications of countries or authors. We attempted to find an empirical relation between the share of a country's papers in some field that is multinationally co-authored and the degree of fractionation which results. A linear regression analysis yielded a significant correlation of –0.95. The fractionation method is the first that can be applied to publication data collected on-line. A comparison is made with fractionation by first author (i.e., first address) counting. Application of the method to British scientific output for 1984–1989 suggests that British output was stable. The fractionation method can be applied to both natural and life sciences and to social and behavioral sciences. Findings suggest that similar processes of multinational publication are prevalent in both types of science. Implications of the model are discussed.     

Subfield problems in applying the Garfield (Impact) Factors in practice

The assessment of the publications of research teams working on different subfields raises concerns because of the different scientometric features of the subfields. For equalizing the differences in the Garfield (Impact) Factors of journals, several methods applied in practice have been described. A new indicator – Specific Impact Contribution (SIC) relating the citation share of a respective team (or journal) in the total citations of the teams (or journals) evaluated to its share in publications – was introduced. It has been realized that the normalized Garfield Factors and the normalized SIC values are identical measures within any selected set of journals. Consequently, the Garfield Factor of a journal should be assumed as an indicator characterizing the contribution of the information channel as a whole, appropriately. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A comparative study of research performance in computer science

The paper compares the research performance in computer science of four major Western countries, India and China, based on the data abstracted from INSPEC database during the period 1993–2002. A total of 9,632 computer science papers recorded in INSPEC database were used for the comparison. The findings indicate that, on the one hand, the number of papers produced in China has considerably increased in the past few years. Particularly, in recent years, China occupies a remarkable high position in terms of counts of papers indexed by the INSPEC database. On the other hand, Chinese scientists preferred to publish in domestic journals and proceedings and shares of SCI-papers to the total journal papers for China have still remained the lowest. This indicates that the research activities of Chinese scientists in computer science are still rather “local” and suffer from a low international visibility. Various scientometric indicators, such as Normalized Impact Factor, ratio of papers in high quality journals are further adopted to analyze research performance and diverse finding are obtained. Nevertheless, for these surrogate indicators, China has optimistically achieved great progress, characterized with “low level of beginning and high speed of developing”. The policy implication of the findings lies in that China, as well as other less developed countries in science, can earn relative competitive advantages in some new emerging or younger disciplines such as computer science by properly using catch-up strategy. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Contribution of Chinese publications in computer science: A case study on LNCS

Conference proceedings are one of the key communication channels in computer science. This paper aims to analyze the Chinese outputs in the context of conference papers in computer science through an exploration of the conference proceedings series book-Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) in the period of 1997–2005. Results indicate that: 1. The number of Chinese papers in LNCS keeps growing in the studied period; the share of Chinese papers in LNCS in recent years is much higher than that of Chinese SCI papers in the world; In sharp contrast with remarkable growth of the share of Chinese papers in LNCS, the share of SCI articles in top journals of computer science published by the scientists of mainland China is negligible during the same period. 2. Chinese researchers are more likely to collaborate with domestic fellows; 3. In spite of the increasing amounts of Chinese papers in LNCS, they receive only a few citations; 4. The articles are strikingly more cited by authors themselves and international authors’ citations are more than Chinese authors’ non-self-citations in the first three years after publication; 5. Based on the new indicator Impact Index (II) the authors proposed, the relative impact of Chinese articles in LNCS is increasing although the average impact of Chinese papers in LNCS is obviously less than that of the publications in LNCS in each year during the studied period.