Current performance and future trends in health care sciences and services research

Health care sciences and services research (HCSSR) has come to the fore in recent years and related research literature increased rapidly over the last few decades. The main purpose of this study is to describe the global progress and to determine the current trends on HCSSR by using a scientometrics approach to survey related literature in the Web of Science database from 1900 to 2012. The document types, languages, publication patterns, subject categories, journals, geographic and institutional distributions, top cited articles, and the distribution of keywords were thoroughly examined. The results show that HCSSR has increased rapidly over the past 20 years, most notably in the last decade. In total, there are currently 128,728 research articles in 156 journals listed in 39 WoS subject categories. The top 20 most productive countries, and institutions were analyzed in detail, and 11 frequently cited papers and research foci were identified based on citation analysis. HCSSR spans many disciplines and focuses mainly on public, environmental & occupational health and education educational research. Medical Care, Academic Medicine, Health Affairs and Journal of School Health are the core journals with both high quantity and quality. High-income countries make up the leading nations, especially G7 countries. Meanwhile, “emerging economies” are also increasingly engaging this field. American and Canadian institutions have made greater advances in productions, citations, and cooperation, with stronger and better development prospects overall. The hot topics include internet use and decision making in health care, palliative care and end of life research, health status and quality of life, quality of healthcare and patient’s satisfaction, medical education, and health communication. Also, most researchers tend to study health care sciences based on the topics of quality-of-life assessment, and their interest in quality-of-life measures has increased. Increasing attention has been paid to the developing countries, especially “emerging economies” like China. Although health research has made much progress, many questions still remain unanswered and there are few assessments of how well research systems carry out their essential functions. Hence, there is currently an urgent need for timely establishment of an effective health research system.     

Guest Editorial

Andrew Keller was a founding member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Materials Science and he played a significant role in the Journal's success over most of its life. This Special Issue of the Journal has been prepared as a tribute to him.     

Global trends in sediment-related research in earth science during 1992–2011: a bibliometric analysis

An effective bibliometric analysis based on the Science Citation Index-Expanded database was conducted to evaluate earth science sediment-related research from different perspectives from 1992 to 2011. The geographical influences of the authors were subsequently visualized. Sediment-related research experienced notable growth in the past two decades. Multidisciplinary geosciences and environmental sciences were the two major categories, and Environmental Science and Technology was the most active journal. Damsté JSS and Schouten S were the two most prolific authors with the most high-quality articles and the greatest geographic influences. The major spatial clusters of authors overlapped quite well with regions with high economic growth in the USA, Western Europe, and Eastern Asia. The USA was the largest contributor in global sediment research with the most independent and collaborative papers, and the dominance of the USA was also confirmed in the national collaboration network. National academic output was positively associated with its economic capability. The Chinese Academy of Sciences, the US Geological Survey and the Russian Academy of Sciences were the three major contributing institutions. A keywords analysis determined that “evolution”, “water”, “soil(s)”, and “model” were consistent hotspots in sediment research. Several keywords such as “organic-matter”, “Holocene”, “dynamics”, “erosion”, “sediment transport”, “climate”, and “heavy-metal” received dramatically increased attention during the study period. Through co-word analysis, significant differences were observed between environmental and multidisciplinary geosciences in terms of the most frequently used keywords, and the prevalent research topic patterns were ascertained.     

International collaboration in science: Participation by the Asian giants

Science in the last few years has become increasingly global and collaborative. The number of internationally coauthored papers has been increasing steadily. We have counted internationally jointly authored papers involving authors from the advanced countries and the Third World countries, usingSCI 1991. We have looked at the number of papers resulting from collaboration among authors residing in the countries of the North (e.g. EC and OECD countries), authors residing in the South (e.g. India and Bangladesh, Mexico and Brazil, China and Pakistan) and papers resulting from collaboration between authors residing in the countries of the South and the North (e.g. India and UK, China and USA). Despite its late start, China has published many more collaborative papers with most Asian countries and the advanced countries of the West except the UK than India — confirming the effectiveness of the open door policy of post-Mao China. Both India and China collaborate with USA much more often in physics than in other areas, followed by clinical medicine. However, India collaborates more with USA in chemistry than China. In Indo-US and Sino-US collaborations, collaborating institutions are mostly universities and institutes of higher learning in India and USA, whereas in China several institutions under the Academies also take part. The percentage of collaborative papers involving authors from India is even smaller than the percentage of journal articles originating from India. In general, papers resulting from international collaboration appear in better journals and are cited more often than papers that are the outcome of local research.Paper presented at the Fourth International Conference on Bibliometrics, Informetrics and Scientometrics in Berlin (Germany), September 11–15, 1993.     

Global trends of solid waste research from 1997 to 2011 by using bibliometric analysis

This study explores a bibliometric approach to quantitatively assessing current research trends on solid waste, by using the related literature published between 1997 and 2011 in journals of all the subject categories of the Science Citation Index. The articles acquired from such literature were concentrated on the general analysis by publication type and language, characteristics of articles outputs, country, subject categories and journals, and the frequency of title-words and keywords used. Over the past 15 years, there had been a notable growth trend in publication outputs, along with more participation of countries/territories. The seven major industrialized countries (G7) published the majority of the world articles, while their article share was being replacing by other countries represented by BRIC countries. An analysis of the title-words, author keywords and keywords plus showed that municipal solid waste and sludge were the major research types of solid wastes and “anaerobic digestion”, “wastewater” and “heavy metals” were recent major topics of solid waste research. Meanwhile, the analysis indicated the analysis technologies, represented by solid-phase extraction and tandem mass-spectrometry, were more and more widely used for solid waste research. Besides, life cycle assessment and health risk assessment were the most two frequently environmental assessment tools used for solid waste research in the 15-year research period.     

Mapping countries cooperation networks in photovoltaic technology development based on patent analysis

Research activities on solar energy has been growing and use of patents becomes an important innovation source for many types of studies. This paper aims to analyze solar photovoltaic (PV) patents and describes its assignees cooperation profile. PV patents based on IPC Green Inventory code were selected from 1990 to 2014, filtered out co-ownership patents and use social network analysis (SNA) to find PV technology development networks. Main findings are an increase of patents assignees over the years and a general concern for develop technologies “Devices adapted for the conversion radiation energy into electrical energy”, “Assemblies of a plurality of solar cells” and “Silicon; single-crystal growth”. SNA enabled to identify four countries clusters that presented cooperation behavior and shared similar concerns in PV technology development. The USA, China, Spain and Korea were main countries of each cluster. Furthermore, through network statistics, it implied that a country that had more patents was not the most important on that technology development. The USA, Germany and UK were the most relevant countries in PV technologies because they were the ones with more cooperation with other countries and with the most collaborative countries overall. Thus, these countries are the largest holders and influencers in PV technologies development. Based on the structure and interaction between country clusters, it is possible to understand who cooperates or competes with whom. So, this information allows establishing strategies of partnerships, or even of competition, between countries, firms and research centers.     

Current use of effect size or confidence interval analyses in clinical and biomedical research

The isolated use of the statistical hypothesis testing for two group comparison has limitations, and its combination with effect size or confidence interval analysis as complementary statistical tests is recommended. In the present work, we estimate the use of these complementary statistical tests (i.e. effect size or confidence interval) in recently published in research articles in clinical and biomedical areas. Methods: The ProQuest database was used to search published studies in academic journals between 2019 and 2020. The analysis was carried out using terms that represent five areas of clinical and biomedical research: “brain”, “liver”, “heart”, “dental”, and “covid-19”. A total of 119,558 published articles were retrieved. Results: The relative use of complementary statistical tests in clinical and biomedical publications was low. The highest frequency usage of complementary statistical tests was among articles that also used statistical hypothesis testing for two-sample comparison. Publications with the term “covid-19” showed the lowest usage rate of complementary statistical tests when all article were analyzed but presented the highest rate among articles that used hypothesis testing. Conclusion: The low use of effect size or confidence interval in two-sample comparison suggests that coordinate measures should be taken in order to increase the use of this analysis in clinical and biomedical research. Their use should be emphasized in statistical disciplines for college and graduate students, become a routine procedure in research laboratories, and recommended by reviewers and editors of scientific journals.

     

Institutionalization and internationalization of research on the applications of the geographical information systems in health planning

Recently, geographical information systems have been very intensively applied in social life and in public health in particular. A retrospective problem-oriented search on their use in health planning was performed in Web of Science of Web of Knowledge, three versions of MEDLINE, Scopus, EMBASE, and ProQuest Medical in 1990–2010. The annual dynamics of a set of scientometric parameters characterizing several aspects of the abstracted publications, authors’ scientific institutions, journals, authors, citations, and languages was comparatively analyzed. It was established that world publication output on such a relatively narrow topic was reflected to a different extent in these data-bases. MEDLINE (PubMed) presented with 484 papers published in 243 journals followed by MEDLINE (WoK) with 360 papers in 215 journals. The abstracted publications were mainly in English, but 14 other languages were present in significant numbers. Publications by authors from 44 countries were abstracted in WoS but from 29 countries in MEDLINE (Ebsco). The most productive authors and institutions as well as the ‘core’ journals were identified. The International Journal of Health Geography occupied the leading position. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (USA) was one of the most productive research institutions in WoS and in Scopus. Scientific institutions and journals belonged to problem-oriented and to mono-, two- and three-disciplinary thematic profiles as well. Some essential peculiarities of the dynamics of research institutionalization and internationalization in this interdisciplinary field were illustrated. The constellation of specific semantically-loaded indicators could be applied for the purposes of problem-oriented analyses as it could timely identify the essential patterns of scientific advances in rapidly expanding interdisciplinary topics.     

Knowledge Bases in Worlds of Production: The Case of the Food Industry

This paper aims to contribute to research on the knowledge dimension of industrial innovation and competitive advantage by combining two conceptual constructs that are applied in growing but separate bodies of research. One, the so-called “SAS model”, regards knowledge bases of firms and distinguishes between Synthetic, Analytical and Symbolic knowledge. The second, the “Worlds of Production” construct, classifies firms according to differences in technologies and markets and outlines four possible action frameworks within which companies operate and innovate. Combining these conceptualizations seems to enrich analyses within both perspectives and provide a useful framework for studies on knowledge dynamics in different economic contexts. Empirical evidence regarding knowledge dynamics of two “alternative food” producers is presented, indicating that symbolic knowledge which in current literature is mainly delimited and described within cultural industries, may also be relevant for other industries such as the alternative food sub-sector.     

Analysis of the First Ten Years of the Journal of Engineering Education

The analysis of the Journal of Engineering Education (JEE) is extended to the ten year period from 1993 through 2002. The most common keywords remain teaching, computers and design although “assessment” and “ABET” became popular from 1998 to 2002. The most cited reference and author are ABET Criterion 2000 and Richard Felder, respectively. The median number of JEE citations of articles published in JEE during 1993 and 1994 is one. The number of papers with financial support increased by over 80 percent. NSF is the dominant source of support. Comparing the second five‐year period to the first five‐year period, there were increases in the percentages of papers reporting data, doing assessment, and using educational or learning theories. These results are consistent with a journal that is becoming more research oriented.     

IIE Transactions Special Issue on Planning and Coordination of Supply Chains with Outsourcing

Introduction

IIE Transactions Special Issue on Planning and Coordination of Supply Chains with Outsourcing     

Relative indicators and relational charts for comparative assessment of publication output and citation impact

Cross-field comparison ofscientometric indicators ¹ is severely hindered by the differences in publication and citation habits of science fields. However, relating publication and citation indicators to proper field-specific reference standards,relative indicators can be built, which may prove rather useful in the comparative assessment of scientists, groups, institutions or countries. The use ofrelational charts in displaying the indicators broadens the scope of such assessments. Relative indicators of chemistry research in 25 countries are presented as an illustrative example.     

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.     

Bibliometric analysis of publications of Spanish pharmacologists in the SCI (1984–89). Part II

During the period 1984–89 Spanish pharmacologists published 344 papers (44.3% of their total scientific production) (Science Citation Index, CD-Edition) in journals classified by theSCI in subfields different from Pharmacology & Pharmacy. Distribution by institutions, geographical regions, journals, subfields and research levels are presented. The Normalized Journal Position (NJP) is introduced as indicator of the expected impact in each subfield. Results are compared with those of the analysis of the production of Spanish pharmacologists in the Pharmacology & Pharmacy subfield, presented in a previous paper. Some of the features detected are common to both areas, such as: increasing trend in the productivity over years, irregular geographical distribution with three regions as major producers, or university as main producer institution. Special features of the extra-Pharmacology area are also pointed out: irregular growth of publication number over years, high dispersion of publications in journals and subfields, high collaboration rate, and low percentage of authors with at least 1 paper/year, among others. Attending to journal of publication, cross-disciplinarity research of Spanish pharmacologists is analysed, being Neurosciences, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and Physiology, the main border fields involved.     

A bibliometric analysis of solar power research from 1991 to 2010

A bibliometric analysis was performed on solar power-related research between 1991 and 2010 in journals of all the subject categories of the Science Citation Index. “Solar cell”, “solar energy”, “solar power”, “solar radiation” and “solar thermal” were selected as keywords to search in a part of the title, abstract or keywords. The trends were analyzed with the retrieved results in the publication type and language, characters of scientific output, publication distribution by countries, subject categories and journals, and the frequency of title-words and keywords used. Articles on solar power showed a significant growth along with more participation of countries, while the percentage of international papers reduced. The USA was the country with the most related articles and the most-frequent partner among all the international collaborative articles. Articles of Mainland China and South Korea grew much faster than other countries in the latest 5 years. Chemistry and material fields gradually became the mainstream of the solar power research. Synthetically analyzing three kinds of keywords, it showed that thin film solar photovoltaic technology was a hot spot of the solar power research in the past 20 years. “Dye-sensitized solar cell” and “organic” had extremely high increasing rates, which indicated that more attention was paid to kinds of organic solar cells. It could be concluded that the materials of solar cells would be the emphasis of solar power research in the twenty-first century.     

IIE Transactions Special Issue of Operations Engineering: Advances in Large-scale Optimization for Logistics,Production and Manufacturing Systems

Preface

IIE Transactions Special Issue of Operations Engineering: Advances in Large-scale Optimization for Logistics, Production and Manufacturing Systems     

The 100 most prolific economists using the <Emphasis Type="Italic">p</Emphasis>-index

The h-index has captured the imagination of scientometricians and bibliometricians to such an extent that one can now divide the history of the subject virtually into a pre-Hirsch and a post-Hirsch period. Beyond its academic value, it is now used as a tool for research assessment of individuals, research faculties and institutions and even for comparing performance of journals and countries. Since its introduction, many Hirsch-type variants have been proposed to overcome perceived limitations of the original index. In this paper, using ideas from mathematical modeling, another mock h-index is proposed which may complement the h-index and give it better resolving power.     

Propagation of “small fatigue crack” initiated from notch-root

Recently, early stage of initiated fatigue crack propagation, so-called, “small crack” propagation behavior from notch-root is becoming more and more important for the developement of improved prediction of fatigue life of structural components. In the present paper, fine-grid-method which was already presented in the previous paper was applied to this problem. Special attention was given to the crack-tip strain changes of “small crack” engulfed in the plastic field of the notch. The relationship between fatigue crack propagation rate, $\text{da}\text{dN}$, and stress intensity factor range, ΔK, as well as local crack-tip strain range, Δ?^T, which was previously proposed by the authors were investigated.     

The Gaseous Electronics Conference RF Reference Cell—An Introduction

This paper provides an introduction to the Gaseous Electronics Conference (GEC) RF Reference Cell, and to the articles published in this Special Issue of the Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. A brief summary of the history and purpose of the Reference Cell concept is presented, and recent changes to the GEC Cell design are documented. The paper concludes with highlights of research performed on GEC Cells, and with an appendix of all known publications that present research performed on GEC Cells.     

Geographical knowledge diffusion and spatial diversity citation rank

This paper proposes a citation rank based on spatial diversity (SDCR) in terms of cities and countries, focusing on the measurement of the “spatial” aspect in citation networks. Our main goal is to solve the citation bias caused by different geographical locations of citations. We empirically investigate spatial properties of citing distances, citation patterns and spatial diversity to understand geographical knowledge diffusion, based on the data from “Transportation Science and Technology” subject category in the Web of Science (1966–2009). We also compare the proposed ranking method with other bibliometric measures, and conduct a case study to figure out the recent ranks of the well-established authors in Transportation research. It is found that the SDCR of a focal author is highly correlated with the sum of spatial diversity weights (“strength”) of all his in-links, and it is better to set the damping factors smaller than 0.75 when ranking authors with various initial academic years by SDCR. The cases show that Hong Kong is becoming a cluster in Transportation research.