Mapping of nanoscience and nanotechnology research in India: a scientometric analysis, 1990–2009

This paper analyses the growth pattern of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology literature in India during 1990–2009 (20 years). The Scopus international multidisciplinary bibliographical database has been used to identify the Indian contributions on the field of nanoscience and nanotechnology. The study measures the performance based on several parameters, country annual growth rate, authorship pattern, collaborative index, collaborative coefficient, modified collaborative coefficient, subject profile, etc. Further the study examines national publication output and impact in terms of average citations per paper, international collaboration output and share, contribution and impact of Indian Institutions and impact of Indian journals.     

Condensed matter physics: An analysis of India’s research output, 1993–2001

The study analyses 27018 research papers published by India in condensed matter physics as seen from Science Citation Index-Extended Version (SCIE) (Web of Science) database for the period 1993–1995, 1996–1998 and 1999–2001. The study reports that condensed matter physics is the most sought after branch in physics research in India, accounting for 20% share of the country output in physics. The University & College sector as well as R&D sector are the major contributors to condensed matter physics. However, the country growth in this field, computed on six yearly basis, has still been negative (−1%) compared to 17.4% country growth in overall physics during the same period, 1993–1995 to 1999–2001. The study also maps condensed matter physics research on other dimensions such as institutional productivity, nature of collaboration in research, and institutional specialization. It examines highly cited papers, and lists prominent and productive scientists in this field. It also provides suggestions for accelerating condensed matter research in India.     

Fish science research in China: How does it compare with fish research in India?

Fish and aquaculture research in the People's Republic of China over the six years 1994-1999 has been mapped using data from six databases– three abstracting services and three citation indexes. The results are compared with fish science research in India. During the six years China has published 2035 papers (roughly 4.5 –5% of the world output) and India 2454. More than 95% of China's papers are journal articles, compared to 82.8% of Indian papers. About 78% of China's journal paper output has appeared in 143 domestic journals compared to 70% from India in 113 Indian journals. Less than one-eighth of the journal articles published by Chinese researchers are published in journals indexed in SCI, compared to 30% of journal articles by Indian researchers. Less than a dozen papers from each of these countries have appeared in journals of impact factor greater than 3.0. Fish research institutes and fishery colleges are the major contributors of the Chinese research output in this area. In India academic institutions are the leading contributors (61%), followed by central government institutions (>25%). Qingdao, Wuhan, Beijing and Shanghai are the cities and Shandong, Hubei and Fujian are the provinces contributing a large number of papers. As we do not have addresses of all authors in most of the papers, we are unable to estimate the extent of international collaboration. Although China's research output and its citation impact are less than those of India, China's fish production and export earnings are far higher than those of India. Probably China is better at bridging the gap between knowhow (research) and do-how (technology and creation of employment and wealth). China is pretty strong in extension. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Are the strategic research agendas of researchers in the social sciences determinants of research productivity?

Scientometrics - This study analyzes the association between the strategic research agendas of researchers in the social sciences and their research performance. Based on a worldwide sample of 604...     

Electronics in nuclear power programme of India—An overview

This paper presents an overview of state-of-the art developments in electronics for nuclear power programme of India. Indigenous activities in instrumentation and control (I&C) in the areas of detector development, nuclear instrumentation, monitoring and control electronics and special sensors paved the way to self-reliance in nuclear industry. Notable among the recent I&C systems developed for 540 MWe reactors are Liquid Zone Control System (LZCS), flux mapping system and advance reactor regulating system. In a nuclear plant, apart from ensuring functional requirements, design of electronics needs to meet high level of reliability, safety and security standards. Therefore, a lot of importance is attached to activities such as design review, testing, operation, maintenance and qualifications of I&C systems. Induction of computer based I&C systems mandated a rigorous verification process commensurate with the safety class of the system as specified in Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) safety guides. Software reliability is assured by following strict development life cycle combined with zero-defect policy and is verified through verification and validation (V&V) process. Development of new techniques in data transmissions with optical fibres as transmission medium and wireless networks in control systems is being pursued. With new I&C systems, efforts were made to utilize the same hardware and software platforms for various plant applications, i.e., for standardization. Thrust was given to use Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) and Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) in order to improve the reliability of system by reducing component count. It has become imperative to develop modern contemporary solutions like ASICs, HMCs, System on Chip (SOC) and detector mounted electronics and towards that various ASICs and HMCs have been developed in-house to meet the challenges.     

A re-examination of Andrews’ research on impact resistance of railway axles

The early railway companies laid down stringent acceptance requirements for the resistance of railway axles to impact. Suppliers were required to submit axles to specified drop weight tests in the absence, at the time, of any theoretical framework by which the impact resistance could be related to readily assessed materials properties. As a result, an enormous amount of full-scale data was generated but these data seem to have been overlooked in the development of modern theories of dynamic plasticity. One such body of data, carefully accumulated by Andrews, has been re-examined and found to be in remarkably good agreement with the predictions of modern theory.     

Scientists’ perceptions of the social and political implications of their research

We explore an empirical approach to studying the social and political implications of science by gathering scientists’ perceptions of the social impacts of their research. It was found that 78 percent of surveyed scientists from a variety of fields responding to a survey indicated that the research performed in connection with a recent highly cited paper had such implications. Health related implications were the most common, but other types of implications encountered were technological spin-offs, public understanding, economic and policy benefits. Surprisingly many scientists considered the advancement of science itself to be a social implication of their research. The relations of these implications to the field and topics of research are examined, and a mapping of implications gives an overview of the major dimensions of the social impacts of science.     

A scientometric analysis of the effectiveness of Taiwan’s educational research projects

The seeking of evidence for revealing the research performance of Education in Taiwan, in response to the stimulus by the national research projects, is presented and interpreted. More than 70,000 publication records over the years 1990–2011 from Web of Science were downloaded and analyzed. The overview analysis by data aggregation and country ranking shows that Taiwan has significantly improved its publication productivity and citation impact over the last decade. The drill-down analysis based on journal bibliographic coupling, information visualization, and diversity and trend indexes, reveals that e-Learning and Science Education are two fast growing subfields that attract global interests and that Taiwan is among the top-ranked countries in these two fields in terms of research productivity. Implications of the analysis are discussed with an emphasis on the subfield characteristics from which more insightful interpretations can be obtained, such as the regional or cultural characteristics that may affect the performance ranking.     

Comparison of independent research of China’s top universities using bibliometric indicators

The institutionally independent publications of Tsinghua University and Peking University were compared by two main indicators namely peak-year citations per publication and h-index, based on the data extracted from the Science Citation Index Expanded, Web of Science from 1974 to 2011. Analyzed aspects covered total publication outputs, annual production, impact, authorships, Web of Science categories, journals, and most cited articles. Results shows that the two universities were in the same scale based on the peak-year citations per publication, the h-index, and top cited articles with no less than 100 citations. Publication of the top three most productive Web of Science categories differed between these two universities. Tsinghua University published more articles in applied science and engineering fields, while Peking University had more basic science articles. In addition, article life was applied to compare the impact of the most cited articles and single author articles of the two universities.     

The evolution of research article titles: the case of Journal of Pragmatics 1978–2018

Scientometrics - Previous studies seldom investigated the evolution of research article titles in pragmatics. Based on qualitative and quantitative analysis of 650 research article titles, this...     

Study of the distribution of ²²⁶Ra in ground water near the uranium industry of Jharkhand, India

Ground water is the principal source of drinking water in the rural areas of India. With the aim of determining, the contribution of (226)Ra to natural background radiation through drinking water exposure pathway near an operating uranium mining industry at Jaduguda, Jharkhand state of eastern India, the (226)Ra activity concentrations were measured in potable ground water. The water analysed, both tube well and well water, was collected in areas near the uranium industry and away. The (226)Ra concentration was measured by emanometric technique. The (226)Ra level in ground water was ranging between minimum detection limit of 3.5 mBq l(-1) and a maximum of 208 mBq l(-1). The analysis of variance reveals that there is insignificant statistical variation in the median (226)Ra concentration up to a distance of >10 km from the mining complex. Variation in concentration of (226)Ra in sources is attributed to the local geochemistry and environmental factors. The (226)Ra concentration was significantly elevated in natural artesian wells in the vicinity of uranium mineralised hill and it varies from 53.4 to 754 mBq l(-1). The WHO [Guidelines for Drinking Water Quality. Third Edition, Vol. 1, Recommendation (2004)] guideline value of 1000 mBq l(-1) has not been exceeded in any of the sources investigated.     

Wind power research in Wikipedia: Does Wikipedia demonstrate direct influence of research publications and can it be used as adequate source in research evaluation?

Comparing 5 publications from China that described knockdowns of the human TPD52L2 gene in human cancer cell lines identified unexpected similarities between these publications, flaws in experimental design, and mis-matches between some described experiments and the reported results. Following communications with journal editors, two of these TPD52L2 publications have been retracted. One retraction notice stated that while the authors claimed that the data were original, the experiments had been out-sourced to a biotechnology company. Using search engine queries, automatic text-analysis, different similarity measures, and further visual inspection, we identified 48 examples of highly similar papers describing single gene knockdowns in 1–2 human cancer cell lines that were all published by investigators from China. The incorrect use of a particular TPD52L2 shRNA sequence as a negative or non-targeting control was identified in 30/48 (63%) of these publications, using a combination of Google Scholar searches and visual inspection. Overall, these results suggest that some publications describing the effects of single gene knockdowns in human cancer cell lines may include the results of experiments that were not performed by the authors. This has serious implications for the validity of such results, and for their application in future research.     

Research culture and New Zealand’s performance-based research fund: some insights from bibliographic compilations of research outputs

Year-on-year trends in research outputs show increases in research activity as the date of the research assessment exercise—in New Zealand the Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF)—looms. Moreover, changes with time in the number and types of conference presentation indicate that the vehicle of publication is also being influenced by the PBRF. Within New Zealand business schools, relating the published journal articles to the Australian Business Deans Council rankings list shows a trend towards more publications of lower rank, raising doubts about whether the rhetoric about the PBRF raising the quality of research is really justified. This ‘drive’ towards increasing numbers of research outputs is also fostered by an increasing trend towards co-authorship in publishing across all disciplines.     

A bibliometric analysis of research on Antarctica during 1993–2012

A bibliometric analysis was applied in this work to evaluate Antarctic research from 1993 to 2012 based on the Science Citation Index database. According to samples of 30,024 articles related to Antarctica, this study reveals the evolution of the scientific outputs on Antarctic research from the aspects of subject categories, major journals, international collaboration, and temporal trends in keywords focus. Antarctic research has developed rapidly in the past two decades, with an increasing amount of article output, references and citations. Geosciences multidisciplinary, oceanography, ecology, meteorology and atmospheric sciences and geography physical were the most popular subject categories. Among the 20 major journals related to Antarctic research, Polar Biology, Geophysical Research Letters and Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres ranked as the top three. With the largest quantity of articles and high citations, USA was the leading contributor to global Antarctic research and had a dominant position in collaborative networks. In addition, a keywords analysis determined that climate change, sea ice and krill were the topics that generated the most interest and concern. Because this paper reveals underlying patterns in scientific outputs, research subjects and academic collaboration, it may serve as a summary of global research history on Antarctica and a potential basis for future research.     

Are international co-publications an indicator for quality of scientific research?

This article deals with the role of internationally co-authored papers (co-publications). Specifically, we compare, within a data-set of German research units, citation and co-publication indicators as a proxy for the unobserved quality dimension of scientific research. In that course we will also deal with the question whether both citations and co-publications are considerably related. Our results suggest that, although there is a strong partial correlation between citations and co-publications within a multivariate setting, we cannot use reasonably normalised co-publication indicators as an alternative proxy for quality. Thus, concerning quality assessment, there remains a primer on citation analysis.     

Research or management? An investigation of the impact of leadership roles on the research performance of academic administrators

This study quantitatively investigated whether the research performance of academic administrators (leaders) was affected by their administrative services. We sampled 111 academic administrators, including 90 department deans and 21 university presidents, from 26 universities. These leaders’ research performance was determined by the number of their publications and citations in the Web of Science databases. To compare the effect on their research performance by their administrative roles, we proposed four periods: the pre-position period, the latest position period, the reference period, and the in-position period. Statistical methods were applied to compare the research performance of the sampled administrators before and after they accepted the current administrative roles. The results suggest that 80% of academic leaders’ productivity and citation have fallen by 42 and 62% averagely. The extent of such impact varied in different disciplines. Leaders’ performance in medicine fields has declined the most (60%). The impact on research productivity appeared to be stronger for administrators serving in higher-ranking universities. In addition, the research performance of both university presidents and department deans were substantially influenced by their administrative services.     

Characteristics of the research on reverse logistics (1995–2005)

This paper aims to describe and analyse the main characteristics of articles on reverse logistics published in the production and operations management field, in order to determine the evolution of this current research over recent years and improve our understanding of this issue. We built up a database with the articles on reverse logistics published in the most relevant journals within the period 1995–2005, and we have explored the topic, the methodology and the techniques of analysis, as well as other relevant aspects of the research. We have evaluated the first decade of research on reverse logistics, observing what has been done and how, where and by whom it has been carried out. The result is an extensive review of the research works that have created and developed the reverse logistics concept, outlining some directions of research for the near future and offering practical help to those who begin to research on this topic.     

Effectiveness of strategic environmental assessment in Germany? – meta-review of SEA research in the light of effectiveness dimensions

SEA practice in Germany has been growing since its introduction and so has the number of SEA research projects and publications. This paper provides a meta-review of German SEA effectiveness research published between 2004 and 2018. In this context, we discuss: (1) What is the status quo of SEA application in Germany? (2) What dimensions of SEA effectiveness have been addressed in research to date? and (3) How effective is SEA in Germany? Our findings indicate that there is room and need for SEA improvement, for example, with regards to the practice of screening, transparency, and quality management. With a focus of previous SEA research on the dimension of procedural effectiveness, future research should aim at other dimensions and their interactions (substantive, transactive, knowledge and learning, legitimacy).     

International research collaborations of ASEAN Nations in economics, 1979–2010

This study examines the research performance and international research collaborations (IRC) of ASEAN nations in the area of economics. Over the last 3 decades international collaborated papers have increased in the region, while locally-co-authored papers have declined. Singapore towered among ASEAN nations in research efficiency based on geographical area, population and GDP. Vietnam performed relatively better in research efficiency than research productivity (number of papers produced), while Indonesia performed poorly. Overall, internationally co-authored papers were cited twice as often as locally authored papers except that both The Philippines and Indonesia exhibited almost no difference in how their local and internationally co-authored papers were cited. The study also examined IRC from the perspective of social networks. Centrality had a strong correlation with research performance; however, vertex tie-strength (a result of repeat collaboration) showed maximum correlation with research performance. While Malaysia emerged as the nation with the highest betweenness centrality or ‘bridging’ power, the US emerged as the most favoured international partner of ASEAN nations. However, collaboration between ASEAN countries accounted for just 4 % of all international collaborations. Increased academic mobility and more joint scientific works are suggestions to consider to boost educational co-operation among the ASEAN nations.