The use of bibliometric indicators in the study of insecticide research

This paper reports part of a historical study of insecticide development. We analysed accumulated references to specific insecticide groups in text books, and index references to a large number of specific insecticides in theReview of Applied Entomology (Ser. A) over the period 1916–70. The paper describes our techniques for analysing the resulting research publication growth curves for these compounds. Our data did not fit the classical S-curves, and possible explanations for this are discussed. Bibliometric time series data may exhibit various inconsistencies, and we describe an approach to handling such dirty data. We concluded that; our quantitative approach produces a picture of the development of insecticides that fits the accepted view derived by qualitative historiography, is very sensitive to trends in pesticide research, and might be a useful adjunct to technology forecasting as well as to historical studies.     

The evaluation of plant biomass research: A case study of the problems inherent in bibliometric indicators

The aim of this project was to evaluate research groups working in the broad field of plant biomass in the areas outside the USA and the EC. The assessment had two key elements: the measurement of scientific productivity and the investigation of factors affecting research performance. Research groups were identified from a range of information sources. Data on funding, information access, staffing, publication policy and degree of awareness of other research groups in the field were collected during the course of interviews. Two approaches —bibliometric analysis and peer review — were examined as a means of constructing indicators for assessing research output.Following a critical review of the use of bibliometric indicators in peripheral countries, the results from a study of eight countries are presented. Neither of two indicators employed proved to be a particularly successful method of evaluating research, and this finding is discussed in relation to publication patterns, the nature of the research community and the research field under study. Finally, the use of a peripatetic expert was found to have some value as a means of assessment.Paper presented at the International Conference on Science Indicators for Developing Countries, Paris, 15–19 October, 1990.     

New bibliometric techniques for the evaluation of medical schools

Bibliometrics have been used in novel ways to assist with the evaluation of two medical schools, one in England and one in Sweden. The first evaluation was intended to allow the relative strengths in 26 subfields of five component campuses to be estimated. Selective filters for each subfield were defined, many of them with the help of the school's reserrch staff, so that relevant papers could be retrieved from a database on the basis of their title keywords and specialist journals. The campus outputs were then analysed by the research level of the journals (clinical/basic) and their influence. In the second evaluation, nine different indicators of research output were produced so that the school could be compared with four others in Scandinavia. The indicators included measures of output, co-authorship, journal esteem and citations by papers and by patents.     

A three-dimensional bibliometric evaluation of recent research in India

In this paper a three-dimensional framework to see how Indian universities and research-focused institutions fare in the world of high end research in terms of excellence and diversity of its research base is proposed. At the country level scholarly performance is broken down into three components—size, excellence and balance or evenness. A web application available in the public domain which visualizes scientific excellence worldwide in several subject areas is used. India has a presence in fifteen of twenty-two subject areas in which there are at least 50 institutes globally that have published more than 500 papers. It has no institution which can be counted at this level of size and excellence in seven areas: Arts and Humanities; Business, Management and Accounting; Health Professions; Neuroscience; Nursing; Psychology; and Social Sciences. India’s research base is completely skewed towards the Physical Sciences and Engineering with very little for Biological Sciences and Medicine and virtually none in Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities when excellence at the highest level is considered. Its performance is also benchmarked against three nations, namely Australia, The Netherlands and Taiwan which are of similar size in terms of GDP and scientific output. It is seen that although India has the highest GDP among the four countries, its performance lags considerably behind. Even in terms of diversity, its performance is poor compared to the three comparator countries.     

A bibliometric study of psychological research on tourism

The psychology of tourism is a new, multidisciplinary research field. However, no systematic analyses of the scientific production in this field have been carried out to date. This study presents a bibliometric analysis of the area of psychology of tourism between 1990 and 2005. The evolution of scientific production during this period, Price’s, Lotka’s and Bradford’s laws and citation patterns were studied. The results show a significant growth in the literature on the subject, as well as an increase in coauthorship and institutional collaboration. Bibliometric laws and empiric regularities observed in other disciplines are also present in this new research field.     

A three-dimensional bibliometric evaluation of research in polymer solar cells

The science of polymer solar cells and the technology based on it is now pursued as a very exciting and promising area of research at leading universities, national laboratories, and companies throughout the world. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive and in-depth bibliometric analysis of this area that breaks down scholarly performance into three components—quantity, quality and consistency. The citation data is retrieved from the Web of Science. We identify the most productive organisations, countries, authors and also the most influential journals in which this newly emerging area is published using these criteria.     

A bibliometric study of bioinformatics research in South Africa

This paper reports on the practises of bioinformatics research in South Africa using bibliometric techniques. The search strategy was designed to cover the common concepts in biological data organisation, retrieval and analysis; the development and application of tools and methodologies in biological computation; and related subjects in genomics and structural bioinformatics. The South African literature in bioinformatics has grown by 66.5% between 2001 and 2006. However, its share of world production is not on par with comparator countries, Brazil, India and Australia.     

Scholarly research in LIS open access electronic journals: A bibliometric study

Using 17 fully open access electronic journals published uninterruptedly during 2000–2004 in the field of Library and Information Science the present study investigated the trend of LIS Open Access e-journals’ literature by analysing articles, authors, institutions, countries, subjects, & references. Quantitative content analysis was carried out on the data, data were analysed in order to project literature growth, authorship pattern, gender pattern, cited references pattern and related bibliometric phenomena. The analysis indicates that there were as many as 1636 articles published during 2000–2004 with an average increment of 23.75 articles per year. The authorship pattern indicates that team research has not been very common in LIS OA publishing and male authors were keener than female authors. Authors from academic institutions were paid more interest in OA publishing and most of them were from developed nations. The subject coverage of these OA e-journals was very vast and almost all facets of information and library science were covered in these articles. There were 90.10% of articles of these e-journals contained references and on an average an article contained 24 references. Of these, 38.53% of references were hyperlinked and 87.35% of hyperlinked references were live during investigation. The analysis of data clearly indicates that OA e-journals in LIS are rapidly establishing themselves as a most viable media for scholarly communication.     

Value of bibliometric analysis for research policy: A case study of Spanish research into innovation and technology management

The primary aim of this paper is to assess the contribution to the international literature of Spanish scientific production in the research stream of innovation and technology management. For this purpose 72 articles published in the last decade in the most prestigious international journals in this research stream have been evaluated. From this analysis we have concluded that there has been a positive evolution from 1995 to the present time, as much from a qualitative as from a quantitative point of view. Likewise, we have found that research in this research stream is concentrated fundamentally on a reduced group of universities. Nevertheless, these do not focus exclusively on one or a few research subjects, but on a wide range thereof.     

Propaganda as a research field: a bibliometric study

Scientometrics - In its efforts to direct thought and with the help of technological developments that allow it to spread more easily and quicker than ever before, propaganda has become a dominant...     

A bibliometric study of service innovation research: based on complex network analysis

In the paper, we apply small world complex network theory to analyze scientific research in the field of service innovation, and discover its research focuses. Our study considers the key words and subject categories of the publications as actors to map keyword co-occurrence network and subject category co-occurrence network, and compare them with their corresponding random binary networks to judge whether these complex networks have the characteristics of small world network, in order to find the hot issues in the field by the small world network analysis. We discuss the knowledge structure in the field through analyzing 437 papers that were searched from Web of Science database over the period 1992–2011. We find that case study, service industry, service quality, market orientation, new product development, and knowledge management were the most popular keywords of the field, and also show the dynamic development of the research focuses in recent 10 years. The researchers who made most contribution in a certain field are also found out. It is concluded that there were more researchers who did investigation about service innovation in the category of Business and Economics, Engineering, Public Administration, Operations Research and Management Science, and Computer Science than those in other categories. The study suggests a quantitative method to analyze trends of scientific research in a certain field, and presents some directions of research mainstream to the researchers who may be interested in the service innovation.     

The Transtheoretical Model and obesity: A bibliometric study

The Transtheoretical Model of behaviour change is currently one of the most promising models in terms of understanding and promoting behaviour change related to the acquisition of healthy living habits. By means of a bibliographic search of papers adopting a TTM approach to obesity, the present bibliometric study enables the scientific output in this field to be evaluated. The results obtained reveal a growing interest in applying this model to both the treatment of obesity and its prevention. Otherwise, author and journal outputs fit the models proposed by Lotka and Bradford, respectively.     

Global knowledge management research: A bibliometric analysis

The present study characterizes the dynamic publication activity of global knowledge management (KM) by data collected through a search restricted to articles in ISI Web of Science.A total of 2727 unique authors had contributed 1407 publications since 1975. The overwhelming majority (2349 or 86%) of them wrote one publication. The productive authors, their contribution and authorship position are listed to indicate their productivity and degree of involvement in their research publications. The sum of research output of the first or responsible authors from USA, UK and Germany reaches 57% of the total productivity. The distribution of articles is rather widespread - they published in 462 titles of serials, spanning 110 Journal Citation Reports subject categories. The higher quality journals make publication of findings more visible. A Pearson's correlation coefficient is statistically found to be significant between citation frequency of article and impact factor of journal, instead of authorship pattern. The results also indicate that R&D expenditures were actually not proportional to research productivity or citation counts. As the subject highly interacts with other disciplines, the field of KM has not yet developed its own body of literature. KM might have been evolving an interdisciplinary theory that is developing at the boundaries of scientific disciplines. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

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...     

A bibliometric evaluation of the research performance of British university politics departments: Publications in leading journals

The research performance of 41 British university politics departments was evaluated through an analysis of articles published between 1987 and 1992 in nine European politics journals with the highest citation impact factors. Annual performance scores were obtained by dividing each department's number of publications in these journals in each year (departmental productivity) by the corresponding departmental size. These scores were summed to obtain a research performance score for each department over the period of assessment. They correlate significantly with research performance scores from two previous studies using different methodologies: Crewe's per capita simple publication count for the years 1978 to 1984, and the Universities Funding Council's research selectivity ratings covering the years 1989 to 1992.     

Canadian research activity in aquaculture: A bibliometric analysis

Analysis of the Canadian publications in the field of aquaculture reveals that Canada is one of the word's major contributors in this area. This confirms that Canada's expertise in science and technology often finds its stimulus in its resource-based industries. Several bibliometric indicators were used to enlighten the peculiar features of the Canadian research system. These include the channels of communication used by scientists, the authorship pattern, the level of collaboration, the identification of the institutions in which the research is performed and the uneven research effort distribution inside the country. The relevance of such quantitative measures for science policy-making is emphasized. The present study shows how bibliometric analysis, by describing the actual strengths and weaknesses of Canadian research and identifying the agents of this research activity, might foster a better understanding of the Canadian research enterprise as a whole.     

Research and research impact of a technical university—A bibliometric study

The research output of the Danish Technical University (DTU^a) has been studied as an aspect of the organization's research policy and visibility in its international context. Papers published in the three-year period (1992–94) were grouped according to 20 clusters of research areas. Using citation analysis techniques, the dynamics of citation frequencies, and a number of other features of the research system, like self-citation, research collaborations, relative impact on the international literature, etc., could be studied. The methods can be used to analyze institutional and national research efforts and to monitor effects of changing policies.     

The need for standards in bibliometric research and technology

The need for standardisation in bibliometric research and technology is discussed in the context of failing communication within the scientific community, the unsatisfactory impact of bibliometric research outside the community and the observed incompatibility of bibliometric indicators produced by different institutes. The development of bibliometric standards is necessary to improve the reliability of bibliometric results, to guarantee the validity of bibliometric methods and to make bibliometric data compatible. Both conceptual and technical questions are raised. Consequences of lacking standards are illustrated by typical examples. Finally, particular topics of standardisation are proposed based on experiences made at ISSRU.