Comparison and evaluation of Chinese research performance in the field of bioinformatics

Bioinformatics is an emerging and rapidly evolving discipline. The bioinformatics literature is growing exponentially. This paper aims to provide an integrated bibliometric study of the knowledge base of Chinese research community, based on the bibliometric information in the field of bioinformatics from SCI-Expanded database during the period of 2000–2005. It is found that China is productive in bioinformatics as far as publication activity in international journals is concerned. For comparative purpose, the results are benchmarked against the findings from five other major nations in the field of bioinformatics: USA, UK, Germany, Japan and India. In terms of collaboration profile, the findings imply that the collaborative scope of China has gradually transcended boundaries of organizations, regions and nations as well. Finally, further analyses on the citation share and some surrogate scientometric indicators show that the publications of Chinese authors suffer from a lowest international visibility among the six countries. Strikingly, Japan has achieved most remarkable impact of publication when compared to research effort devoted to bioinformatics amongst the six countries. The policy implication of the findings lies in that Chinese scientific community needs much work on improving the research impact and pays more attention to strengthening the academic linkages between China and worldwide nations, particularly scientifically advanced countries.     

Bibliometric approach to research performance in the field of refractory materials used in iron and steelmaking processes

A bibliometric study based on worldwide scientific and technical publications on refractory materials used in iron and steelmaking processes during 1980–87, has been carried out. Six bibliographic databases were searched and from them 2464 references were retrieved. The highest percentage of published documents were journal articles (60%), followed by patents (33%). The core journals areOgneupory (USSR) andTaikabutsu (Japan). The USSR was by far the most productive country, both in number of published papers and in number of journal titles devoted to the subject. In The Soviet Union research work is mainly carried out in universities and institutes of the Academy of Sciences. On the other hand, Japan is the most productive country in patent registered, and research work is carried out there either in private refractory companies or in steelmaking enterprises. The trend in worldwide research points towards shaped refractories, particularly based in high alumina, magnesia, zircon carbides and mixtures containing oxides and carbon, which are largely used in converters, transport ladles and continuous casting processes.     

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.     

Scientometric profile of Indian agricultural research as seen through Science Citation Index Expanded

Summary An analysis of 16891 publications published by Indian scientists during 1993-2002 and indexed by Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science) indicates that the publication output in the agricultural sciences is on the decline since 1998 onwards. 'Dairy and animal sciences' followed by 'veterinary sciences' constitute the largest component of the Indian agricultural research output. Agricultural universities and institutes under the aegis of Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) are the major producers of research output. Most of the papers have been published in domestic journals and in low normalized impact factor journals with a low rate of citation per paper. Most of the highly productive institutions are either agricultural universities or the institutes under the aegis of ICAR. Most of the prolific authors are from the highly productive institutions. However, only a few highly cited authors are from highly productive institutions.     

Sources of atmospheric pollution: a bibliometric analysis

A bibliometric analysis based on Web of Science was carried out to provide a critical analysis of the literature on atmospheric pollution sources during 2006–2015. The result showed that particulate matter represented the core of this research field, and methods of source apportionment such as positive matrix factorization were the mainstream techniques. Five clusters were identified from the keywords network with central node of particulate matter, traffic, heavy metal, elemental carbon and renewable energy respectively. The hotspots and their relationships were illustrated to describe the characteristics of this research field. The USA and China took the leading position, however, their research emphasis were health effect and characteristics of pollutants respectively. International collaboration was mostly conducted within Asia–Pacific countries, and EU countries. For journals, Atmospheric Environment was most productive during the study period while Environmental Science and Technology had highest impact factor in 2015. This study provides an effective approach to obtain a general knowledge of the atmospheric pollution sources and supports a deeper understanding of research directions in the future.     

Scientometric analysis of geostatistics using multivariate methods

Multivariate methods were successfully employed in a comprehensive scientometric analysis of geostatistics research, and the publications data for this research came from the Science Citation Index and spanned the period from 1967 to 2005. Hierarchical cluster analysis (CA) was used in publication patterns based on different types of variables. A backward discriminant analysis (DA) with appropriate statistical tests was then conducted to confirm CA results and evaluate the variations of various patterns. For authorship pattern, the 50 most productive authors were classified by CA into 4 groups representing different levels, and DA produced 92.0% correct assignment with high reliability. The discriminant parameters were mean impact factor (MIF), annual citations per publication (ACPP), and the number of publications by the first author, for country/region pattern, CA divided the top 50 most productive countries/regions into 4 groups with 95.9% correct assignments, and the discriminant parameters were MIF, ACCP, and independent publication (IP); for institute pattern, 3 groups were identified from the top 50 most productive institutes with nearly 88.0% correct assignment, and the discriminant parameters were MIF, ACCP, IP, and international collaborative publication; last, for journal pattern, the top 50 most productive journals were classified into 3 groups with nearly 98.0% correct assignment, and its discriminant parameters were total citations, impact factor and ACCP. Moreover, we also analyzed general patterns for publication document type, language, subject category, and publication growth.     

A bibliometric analysis of research on proteomics in Science Citation Index Expanded

A bibliometric analysis was conducted to evaluate the global scientific output of proteomics research in the Science Citation Index Expanded from 1995 to 2010. The document types, languages, journals, categories, countries, and institutions were analyzed to obtain publication patterns. Research focuses and trends were revealed by a word cluster method related to author keywords, title, abstract, and KeyWords Plus. Bradford’s Law and the correlation between keywords and institutions were identified to look deeper into the nature works. Proteomics and Journal of Proteome Research published the most articles in proteomics research. The researchers focused on the categories of biochemical research methods, and biochemistry and molecular biology. The USA and Harvard University were the most productive country and institution, respectively, while China was the fastest-growing country due to the support by Chinese government. The distribution of author keywords provided the important clues of hot issues. Results showed that mass spectrometry and two-dimensional gel electrophoresis had been the most frequently used research methods in the past 16 years; and cancer proteomics had a strong potential in the near future. Furthermore, biologists contributed significantly to proteomics research, and were more likely to co-operate with medical scientists.     

A bibliometric analysis of research on upflow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) from 1983 to 2012

Upflow anaerobic sludge blanket/bed (UASB) has been recognized as a robust technology arousing wide concern in wastewater treatment research recently. In this study, a bibliometric analysis was performed to evaluate the publications on UASB research from 1983 to 2012, based on the Science Citation Index databases. It was identified that a total of 2363 UASB-related outputs were published in 220 journals over the past 30 years. Results showed that China and Indian Institute of Technology in India came as the most productive country and institute publishing most articles on UASB, respectively. The most productive field of “wastewater treatment” would still maintain the leading role as to provide a good reference on the UASB research in the future. Besides, the performance improving approaches and practical applications of the UASB would probably continue as the two main developing orientations. This study is to serve as an alternative and innovative way of revealing the research trends in UASB.     

Detecting the knowledge structure of bioinformatics by mining full-text collections

Bioinformatics is a fast-growing, diverse research field that has recently gained much public attention. Even though there are several attempts to understand the field of bioinformatics by bibliometric analysis, the proposed approach in this paper is the first attempt at applying text mining techniques to a large set of full-text articles to detect the knowledge structure of the field. To this end, we use PubMed Central full-text articles for bibliometric analysis instead of relying on citation data provided in Web of Science. In particular, we develop text mining routines to build a custom-made citation database as a result of mining full-text. We present several interesting findings in this study. First, the majority of the papers published in the field of bioinformatics are not cited by others (63 % of papers received less than two citations). Second, there is a linear, consistent increase in the number of publications. Particularly year 2003 is the turning point in terms of publication growth. Third, most researches of bioinformatics are driven by USA-based institutes followed by European institutes. Fourth, the results of topic modeling and word co-occurrence analysis reveal that major topics focus more on biological aspects than on computational aspects of bioinformatics. However, the top 10 ranked articles identified by PageRank are more related to computational aspects. Fifth, visualization of author co-citation analysis indicates that researchers in molecular biology or genomics play a key role in connecting sub-disciplines of bioinformatics.     

Evolving importance of anticancer research using herbal medicine: a scientometric analysis

Phytocompounds and herbal extracts have been utilized in Ayurveda, Siddha and Unani medicine since thousands of years for treatment of various ailments. Success behind herbal medicine strongly suggests the interaction between bio-active phytocompounds with crucial biochemical pathways in a human body without causing adverse effects. The increasing incidence of diseases like cancer instigated the scientific world to focus intently on their pathophysiology and prevention, leading to accelerated research activity in past three decades. This study aims at understanding the evolving global importance of herbal medicine and quality of research against various cancers through scientometric analyses by studying the output from research publications, followed by the contribution from various countries, research institutes, authors, scientific journals and areas of research. To visualize the research structure and dynamics, more than 5000 publications with Science Citation Index that appeared from 1984 to 2013 have been studied and compared for a trend in its growth of publication along with the contributions from various bibliometric parameters stated above. After using the ‘Web of Science’ database it became well evident that the concerned bibliometric parameters contributed substantially in projecting the overall scientific output in the field of herbal anticancer research as reflected from the citation analysis and h-index data. It has been observed that the number of publications increased with compound annual growth rate of 10.39% during the studied periods. Evolving trend of the research topics was visualised by drawing the keyword co-occurrence map in this field.     

Comparison and evaluation of domestic and international outputs in Information Science &; Technology research of China

Summary The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the basic research performance of key projects in the field of information science & technology funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) from both international and national perspectives during the period 1994-2001, based upon the Science Citation Index (SCI) and China Scientific and Technical Papers and Citations (CSTPC) databases. We compare the international and domestic outputs of the key projects by applying various scientometric indicators and techniques. The findings indicate that, as a whole, the research performances of the key projects have, to different degrees, increased in both international and domestic papers during the period of study. Semiconductor is the internationally most productive sub-discipline and Automatization is the domestically most productive sub-discipline, measured on average per project. The Combination Impact Factor (CIF), which integrates the CSTPC-IF and the SCI-IF into the evaluation process, is further proposed for the combined evaluation of domestic and international outputs of the key projects. In terms of ratio of CIF relative to the funds in each sub-discipline, results also show that Semiconductor is the most productive sub-discipline and Computer is the least productive one. Using correlation analysis a significant and positive relationship between the SCI-IF and the CIF has been found for the evaluated projects.     

A scientometric study of global electric vehicle research

A scientometric analysis was applied in this work to evaluate the status and trends of electric vehicle papers published between 1993 and 2012 in any journal of all the subject categories of the Web of Science. Electric vehicle was used as a keyword to search parts of titles, abstracts, or keywords. Publication trends were analyzed by the retrieved results in publication outputs, subject categories and publication pattern, international productivity. The document co-citation analysis was done in CitespaceII to find out the intellectual base and research fronts of electric vehicle. The articles about electric vehicle increased fast in the last 20 years. 11 document types were found in all electric vehicle-related papers and proceedings paper was the most frequently used document type. Language analysis showed that English was the most dominating language. “Engineering electrical electronic”, “Energy fuels” and “Transportation science technology” were the top three most popular subject categories. Journal of Power Sources, IEEE Transaction on Vehicular Technology and IEEE Transaction on Industrial Electronics were the representative journals in the field of electric vehicle. The USA, China and Japan were the most productive countries. University of Michigan, Harbin Institute of Technology and Ohio State University were the most productive countries. Vehicle-to-grid technology, control strategy, combination of power management and traffic information from GPS, plug-in electric vehicle, architectures and modeling, battery and policy about electric vehicle are the research fronts of electric vehicle.     

Use of citation per publication as an indicator to evaluate contingent valuation research

This is the first article using bibliometrics to study the field of contingent valuation research. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the contingent valuation research performance based on all the related articles in SCI and SSCI databases from 1991 to 2005. An indicator named citation per publication (CPP) was presented in this study to assess the impact of article output per year, different countries, institutes, and authors from the worldwide. Publication per institute (PPI) in a country was used to be an indicator to compare institute’s research performance by country. Citation analysis was made to select the most frequently cited articles since publication to 2005 of each year. A citation model was applied to describe the relationship between the cumulative number of citations and article life. The results indicate that with the increase article output per year, the CPP decreased slightly since 1997. The USA produced 55% of all pertinent articles. Institutes from the UK had a higher PPI. The most prolific institutes and authors, and the most frequently cited articles per year were all listed. In addition, a citation model was successfully applied to evaluate performance of each year, and the most frequently cited articles of each year were also compared by the model.     

Assessment of world aerosol research trends by bibliometric analysis

This study was to explore a bibliometric approach to quantitatively assessing current research trends on atmospheric aerosol, using the related literature in the Science Citation Index (SCI) database from 1991 to 2006. Articles were concentrated on the analysis by scientific output, research performances by individuals, institutes and countries, and trends by the frequency of keywords used. Over the years, there had been a notably growth trend in research outputs, along with more participation and collaboration of institutes and countries. Research collaborative papers shifted from national inter-institutional to international collaboration. The decreasing share of world total and independent articles by the seven major industrialized countries (G7) was examined. Aerosol research in environmental and chemical related fields other than in medical fields was the mainstream of current years. Finally, author keywords, words in title and keywords plus were analyzed contrastively, with research trends and recent hotspots provided.     

A bibliometric and citation analysis of stroke-related research in Taiwan

As the population ages in Taiwan, stroke research has received greater attention in recent years. Strokes have significant impacts on the health and well-being of the elderly. To formulate future research policy, information on stroke publications should be collected. In this research, we studied stroke-related research articles published by Taiwan researchers which were indexed in the Science Citation Index from 1991 to 2005. We found that the quantity of publications has increased at a quicker pace than the worldwide trend. Over the years, there has been an increase in international collaboration, mainly with researchers in the U.S. Article visibility, measured as the frequency of being cited, also increased during the period. It appears that stroke research in Taiwan has become more globally connected and has also improved in quality. The publication output was concentrated in a few institutes, but there was a wide variation among these institutes in the ability to independently conduct research. A wide array of keywords indicated a probable lack of continuity in research. Nevertheless, there was an inverse relationship between stroke mortality and number of published articles in Taiwan. To improve the quality and efficiency of stroke research, continuity in research focuses needs to be maintained, and thus funding should be allocated on a long-term basis to institutes with a proven record of success.     

Scientific publications by anesthesia departments in East Asia

The rapid economic growth in East Asia might have an impact on the development of research output. Because previous bibliometric analysis about anesthesiology in this region had been limited to research within anesthesiology journals or anesthesia-related research, the total publications from anesthesia departments might not be well displayed. In this study, the databases of Web of Science and PubMed were used to assess the academic productivity and distribution of research diversity of anesthesia departments from four major countries in East Asia and compared those with the USA. From 2001 to 2010 the volume of scientific research from anesthesia departments in East Asia has stably increased. Although Japan was the most productive contributor in East Asia, its share declined annually. China increased most rapidly and exceeded Japan in 2010 in terms of annual number of papers. Research attributed to anesthesia departments in East Asia was diverse and present in a wide range of non-anesthesia field journals. Notably the annual number of randomized controlled trials in East Asia also had a strong growth.     

Visualizing the research on pervasive and ubiquitous computing

The aim of this paper is to identify the research status quo on pervasive and ubiquitous computing via scientometric analysis. Information visualization and knowledge domain visualization techniques were adopted to determine how the study of pervasive and ubiquitous computing has evolved. A total of 5,914 papers published between 1995 and 2009 were retrieved from the Web of Science with a topic search of pervasive or ubiquitous computing. CiteSpace is a java application for analyzing and visualizing a wide range of networks from bibliographic data. By use of it, we generated the subject category network to identify the leading research fields, the research power network to find out the most productive countries and institutes, the journal co-citation map to identify the distribution of core journals, the author co-citation map to identify key scholars and their co-citation patterns, the document co-citation network to reveal the ground-breaking literature and detect the co-citation clusters on pervasive and ubiquitous computing, and depicted the hybrid network of keywords and noun phrases to explore research foci on pervasive and ubiquitous computing over the entire span 1995–2009.     

Mapping past,current and future energy research trend in Pakistan: a scientometric assessment

This work describes the contribution of researchers in the field of the energy from Pakistan in the period 1990–2016. A scientometric approach was applied to analyze the scientific publications in the field using the Scopus Elsevier database. Different aspects of the publications were analyzed, such as publication type, major research areas, journals, citations, authorship pattern, affiliations as well as the keyword occurrence frequency. The present research trends are analyzed and future research directions are outlined. The impact factor, h-index and number of citations were used to investigate the strength of active institutes, authors, and journals in the field of the energy in Pakistan. From 1990 to 2016, 991 articles have been published by 2139 authors from 213 research institutes. The total number of citations and impact factor are 10,287 and 2301 respectively, corresponding to 10 citations per paper and an impact factor of 2.32 per publication. The research articles originate primarily from COMSATS, NUST, PIEAS, and PINSTECH. Pakistan has published 60% of publication with the collaboration of the foreign institutes, mainly from the United States, the United Kingdom, China and Malaysia. The core research activities in the field are mainly focused on resource assessment, energy policy, energy efficiency, feasibility study, energy economics, and performance assessment. The most productive journal, author, institution, are renewable & sustainable energy review, Shahbaz M., and COMSATS, respectively.     

An overview of selective laser sintering and melting research using bibliometric indicators

The aim of this paper is to present an overview of published research in selective laser sintering/melting (SLS/M), by using bibliometric indicators. Bibliometrics is the quantitative statistical analysis of written publications, such as articles or books. It is useful for displaying and classifying information according to selected variables, such as authors, journals, citations, countries, and institutions. This type of review provides a clear picture of research in a targeted area, such as the most cited research, author with most publications, journal with most published papers, and universities and countries producing the largest amount of research in the target area. The Web of Science database was used to collect data on the topic of interest. The results reveal that the Rapid Prototyping journal is the most productive journal in this field, where the Huazhong University Science Technology is the most effective institution. Also China is the most productive country, whereas USA is the most influential country.