A scientometric analysis of international LIS journals: Productivity and characteristics

This paper presents a quantitative study of productivity, characteristics and various aspects of global publication in the field of library and information science (LIS). A total of 894 contributions published in 56 LIS journals indexed in SSCI during the years of 2000-2004 were analyzed. A total of 1361 authors had contributed publications during the five years. The overwhelming majority (89.93%) of them wrote one paper. The average number of authors per paper is 1.52. All the studied papers were published in English. The sum of research output of the authors form USA and UK reaches 70% of the total productivity. Most papers received few citations. Each article received on an average 1.6 citations and the LIS researchers cite mostly latest articles. About 48% of citing authors had tendency of self-citation. The productive authors, their contribution and authorship position are listed to indicate their productivity and degree of involvement in their research publications.     

Information management or knowledge management? An informetric view of the dynamics of Academia

This study analyzes the similarities and differences of performance of information management (IM) and knowledge management (KM) research publication indexed by the SCI-EXPANDED, SSCI and A&HCI databases since 1994 with informetric methods in order to explore a developing tendency in the near future. The bibliographic search supplied 1199 IM and 1063 KM records. A very few of IM and KM authors contributed two or more articles. Four countries dominated global IM and KM research productivity, while a few institutions played remarkable roles in scholarly activity. IM journals distributed widespread and 84 per cent just published one or two articles; KM publications were rather concentrated to core and borderline periodicals, fitting Bradford's law of scattering and. The result of Pearson's correlation coefficients analysis indicates that the higher the journal impact factor, the more times the published article is cited. The author concludes that KM has been leading IM in both publication productivity and academic population and the tendency is overwhelmingly growing. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Citation patterns in the Kuwaiti journal Medical Principles and Practice: The first 12 years, 1989-2000

This study investigates the citation patterns in the journal, Medical Principles and Practice from its inception in 1989 through 2000 (volumes 1-9). The data set includes 4740 references appended to the 221 original research articles. All of the citations were entered into a ProCite database for analysis. Specifically, this study addresses: (1) bibliometric patterns of cited works in terms of publication format, subject scatter, authorship characteristics, age of citations, geographic distribution, and language distribution; (2) productivity of journal titles; (3) the role of self-citation; and (4) how selected bibliometric indicators apply. Some of the findings include: journal articles are most frequently cited; English language publications dominate the literature; there is a trend of multiple authorship; and the pattern of aging is below the norm for medical literature. The results of the study can provide a benchmark to measure the user behavior of a particular group of researchers as well as for the provision of collection development and management decisions. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Use of citation per publication as an indicator to evaluate pentachlorophenol research

The objective of the study was to perform a bibliometric analysis of all pentachlorophenolrelated publications in the Science Citation Index (SCI). Analyzed parameters included document type, language of publication, page count, publication output, authorship, keywords plus, publication pattern, citation and country of publication. The US produced 29% of the total single country publications where the seven major industrial countries accounted for the majority of the total production (66%). An indicator citation per publication was successfully applied in this study to evaluate the impact of number of authors, countries, and journals. The mean value of citation per publication of collaborative papers was higher than that of single country publications. In addition analysis of keywords plus in different period was applied to indicate a research trend.     

Characterizing a scientific elite (B): publication and citation patterns of the most highly cited scientists in environmental science and ecology

Science is principally driven by the efforts of a vanishingly small fraction of researchers publishing the majority of scientific research and garnering the majority of citations. Despite this well-established trend, knowledge of exactly how many articles these researchers publish, how highly they are cited, and how they achieved their distinctive accomplishments is meager. This article examines the publication and citation patterns of the world’s most highly cited environmental scientists and ecologists, inquiring into their levels of scientific productivity and visibility, examining relationships between scientific productivity and quality within their research programs, and considering how different publication strategies contribute to these distinctive successes. Generally speaking, highly cited researchers are also highly productive, publishing on average well over 100 articles each. Furthermore, articles published by this group are more highly cited on average than articles published in premier generalist journal like Nature and Science, and their citation to publication ratios are more equitably distributed than is typical. Research specialization and primacy of authorship are important determinants of citation frequency, while geographic differences and collaborative propensity matter less. The article closes with a set of suggestions for those wishing to increase the use of their research by the scientific community.     

Citation patterns of Korean physicists and mechanical engineers: Differences by type of publication source and type of authorship

By comparing the citation patterns of Korean researchers in physics and mechanical engineering, this study identifies the extent to which type of publication source (Korean non-SCI, Korean SCI, and international SCI) and type of authorship (purely Korean authors, Korean-foreign co-authors, and foreign-Korean co-authors) influence the choice of sources cited by Korean scientists. Koreans publishing physics or mechanical engineering papers in international SCI journals are more likely to cite articles published in journals of the science mainstream countries (the U.S., the U.K., the Netherlands, and Germany) than articles published in national journals, while Koreans publishing in Korean journals tend to cite articles published in national journals. In terms of authorship, articles published in mainstream journals are more highly cited by internationally co-authored papers than Korean-authored papers in both disciplines. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Bibliometric analysis of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-related research in the beginning stage

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) has become the major of health issues since its outbreak early 2003. No analyses by bibliometric technique that have examined this topic exist in the literature. The objective of this study is to conduct a bibliometric analysis of all SARS-related publications in Science Citation Index (SCI) in the early stage. A systematic search was performed using the SCI for publications since SARS outbreak early 2003. Selected documents included 'severe acute respiratory syndrome' or 'SARS' as a part of its title, abstract, or keyword from the beginning stage of SARS outbreak, March till July 8, 2003. Analysis parameters included authorship, patterns of international collaboration, journals, language, document type, research institutional address, times cited, and reprint address. Citation analysis was mainly based on impact factor as defined by Journal Citation Reports(JCR) issued in 2002 and on the actual citation impact (ACI), which has been used to assess the impact relative to the whole field and has been defined as the ratio between individual citation per publication value and the total citation per publication value. Thirty-two percent of total share was published as news features, 25% as editorial materials, 22% as articles, 13% as letters, and the remaining being biographic items, corrections, meeting abstracts, and reprints. The US dominated the production by 30% of the total share followed closely by Hong Kong with 24%. Sixty-three percent of publication was published by the mainstream countries. The SARS publication pattern in the past few months suggests immediate citation, low collaboration rate, and English and mainstream country domination in production. We observed no associations of research indexes with the number of cases. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Bibliometric analysis of tsunami research

The use of the bibilometric analytical technique for examining tsunami research does not exist in the literature. The objective of the study was to perform a bibliometric analysis of all tsunami-related publications in the Science Citation Index (SCI). Analyzed parameters included document type, language of publication, publication output, authorship, publication patterns, distribution of subject category, distribution of author keywords, country of publication, most-frequently cited article, and document distribution after the Indonesia tsunami. The US and Japan produced 53% of the total output where the seven major industrial countries accounted for the majority of the total production. English was the dominant language, comprising 95% of articles. A simulation model was applied to describe the relationship between the number of authors and the number of articles, the number of journals and the number of articles, and the percentage of total articles and the number of times a certain keyword was used. Moreover the tsunami publication patterns in the first 8 months after the Indonesia tsunami occurred on 26 December 2004 indicated a high percentage of non-article publications and more documents being published in journals with higher impact factors.     

National research contributions: A case study on Finnish biomedical research

The long-term influence and contribution of research can be evaluated relatively reliably by bibliometric citation analysis. Previously, productivity of nations has been estimated by using either the number of published articles or journal impact factors and/or citation data. These studies show certain trends, but detailed analysis is not possible due to the assumption that all articles in a journal were equally cited. Here we describe the first comprehensive, longterm, nationwide analysis of scientific performance. We studied the lifetime research output of 748 Finnish principal investigators in biomedicine during the years 1966–2000, analysed national trends, and made a comparison with international research production. Our results indicate that analyses of the scientific contribution of persons, disciplines, or nations should be based on actual publication and citation counts rather than on derived information like impact factors. 51% of the principal investigators have published altogether 75% of the articles; however, the whole scientific community has contributed to the growth of biomedical research in Finland since the Second World War.     

Does scholarly impact decline with age?

Relationships between age and scholarly impact were assessed by determining the number of times single-author articles (N=227) published inPsychological Review between 1965 and 1980 were cited in the fifth year following publication. There were substantial individual differences in citation rates, but this measure of scholarly impact did not correlate with either the chronological age of authors or their professional age (years since PhD award). Although the majority of articles inPsychological Review were published by authors under the age of 40, such a bias is to be expected in terms of the age distribution of American psychologists. When allowance was made for the number of authors in different age ranges, older authors were no less likely than younger authors to have generated a high-impact article (an article cited 10 or more times in the fifth year after publication). The data offer no support to claims that publications by young scientists have greater impact.     

Classic articles on social work field in Social Science Citation Index: a bibliometric analysis

This study aimed to identify and analyze characteristics of classic articles published in the Web of Science social work subject category from 1856 to 2011. Articles that have been cited at least 50 times were assessed regarding publication outputs, distribution of outputs in journals, publications of authors, institutions, countries as well as citation life cycles of articles with the highest total citations since its publication up to 2011 and the highest citations in 2011. Five bibliometric indicators were used to evaluate source countries, institutions, and authors. Results showed that 721 of the most highly referenced articles, published between 1957 and 2008, had been cited at least 50 times. Child Abuse & Neglect and American Journal of Community Psychology published the most classic articles. USA produced 89 % of classic articles and also published the most number of single, internationally collaborative, first author, and corresponding author classic articles. The top 38 productive institutions were all located in the US. The University of Illinois was the most productive institution for the total classic articles while University of California, Los Angeles produced the most inter-institutionally collaborative articles and Arizona State University published the most single institution articles. Furthermore, a new indicator, Y-index was successfully applied to evaluate publication characteristics of authors and institutions. High percentage of authors had the same numbers of first author and corresponding author status of classic articles in social work field.     

Difficulties and challenges of Chinese scientific journals: Statistical analysis of Chinese literatures using Chinese Science Bulletin as example

Using statistical method, the author analyzed the citation rate of articles published in Chinese Science Bulletin (CSB) between 1995 and 1999 in Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) databases. Results indicated that: 1. Majority of authors who published in CSB were Chinese; 2. The articles were basically cited by the authors themselves in the first year after publication; 3. The peak of total citation rate appeared in the third year after publication and the peak of non-self-citation rate was further delayed. There are relatively high self-citation rates of articles from CSB and most of these citations are from Chinese scientific journals. This indicates that our citation environment is limited to a closed circle. The author, therefore, proposed a strategy for changing the current conditions of Chinese scientific journals to raise their influence. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Citedness and uncitedness of cancer articles

There is a rapid growth of cancer literature. Thousands of papers are being regularly published every year not only in speciality journals, but also in journals of other disciplines. Citation studies are nowadays considered a major basis of science indicators for ascertaining the importance of a scientific journal and that of the published articles on a particular subject. In oncological research the journalCancer is considered as one of the top most journals and is universally well known for its high standard and excellence. In this paper an attempt has been made to find out the importance of all the articles published in it for a particular year. Side by side bibliometric analysis was made to ascertain various other aspects like time lag between publication and first citation of articles, average citation time, subject scattering and identification of most important journals in the field etc. It is believed that this study would be of help to the working oncologists, librarians and information scientists to assess the importance of articles published in a top ranking journal of cancer and also that of different journals publishing oncological research results.     

The impact of publications from mainland China on the trends in alphabetical authorship

This paper investigates the impact of burgeoning Chinese publication on academic alphabetical authorship in the 25 subject categories that have the highest percentage of intentionally alphabetical publications. The use of alphabetical authorship is common in the social sciences and humanities, mathematics, and in some physical disciplines. Chinese academic publication has increased rapidly in recent decades (Hong Kong and Macau were excluded from the study because Hong Kong and Macau are much more internationalized than mainland China). However, authors from mainland China do not prefer alphabetical authorship. The increase in publications from mainland China lowers the probability of intentional alphabetical authorship in the natural science and technology subject categories that we examined. In some natural science and technology categories, the influence is strong. But for the social sciences and humanities, the influence is weak, due to the lower share of world publications from mainland China. Yet, in some social science and humanities subject categories such as ‘Economics’, the relative share of publications from mainland China is increasing rapidly, and the results on alphabetical authorship trends will be felt in the near future.     

Mathematics 1868�C2008: a bibliometric analysis

This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of the literature published in the field of mathematics from 1868 to date. The data originate from the Zentralblatt MATH database. The increase rate of publications per year reflects the growth of the mathematics community and both can well be represented by exponential or linear functions, the latter especially after the Second World War. The distribution of publications follows Bradford??s law but in contrast to many other disciplines there is no strong domination of a small number of journals. The productivity of authors follows two inverse power laws of the Lotka form with different parameters, one in the range of low productivity and the other in the range of high productivity. The average productivity has changed only slightly since the year 1870. As far as multiple authorship is concerned the distribution of the number of authors per publication can be described quite well by a Gamma Distribution. The average number of authors per publication has been increasing steadily; while it was close to 1 up to the first quarter of the last century it has now reached a value of 2 in the last few years. This means that the percentage of single-authored papers has fallen from over 95% in the years before 1930 to about 30% today.     

Does the multi-authorship trend influence the quality of an article?

In the last few decades, multi-authored articles have increased in different disciplines with increasing instances of authorship abuse although multi-authorship is not always due to undeserving authorship (McDonald et al. in Mayo Clin Proc 85(10):920–927, 2010). It may be necessitated by interdisciplinary research, the evolution of a discipline, or the intention of quality improvement. This article studies the relationship between the authorship and the quality of articles (publications in better impact factor journals or core journals) in the field of Oceanography. The result shows ~75 % increase in the number of authors per article from 1990 to 2009 in the discipline. The increase in authorship correlates not only with the percentage of articles in core journals but also with the mean impact factor (IF) of journals (where the articles were published). The ANOVA study shows that though multi-authorship has no influence on the preference to publish in core journals during the 1990s or 2000s, it does have a significant influence on the preference to publish in high IF journals in both the decades. So these findings establish that in the field of Oceanography, the increase in collaboration would have resulted in more publications in core journals (without any influence of authorship increase) and in better impact factor journals (due to the influence of authorship increase).     

Gender bias in journals of gender studies

The causes of gender bias favoring men in scientific and scholarly systems are complex and related to overall gender relationships in most of the countries of the world. An as yet unanswered question is whether in research publication gender bias is equally distributed over scientific disciplines and fields or if that bias reflects a closer relation to the subject matter. We expected less gender bias with respect to subject matter, and so analysed 14 journals of gender studies using several methods and indicators. The results confirm our expectation: the very high position of women in co-operation is striking; female scientists are relatively overrepresented as first authors in articles. Collaboration behaviour in gender studies differs from that of authors in PNAS. The pattern of gender studies reflects associations between authors of different productivity, or ??masters?? and ??apprentices?? but the PNAS pattern reflects associations between authors of roughly the same productivity, or ??peers??. It would be interesting to extend the analysis of these three-dimensional collaboration patterns further, to see whether a similar characterization holds, what it might imply about the patterns of authorship in different areas, what those patterns might imply about the role of collaboration, and whether there are differences between females and males in collaboration patterns.     

The most highly cited Library and Information Science articles: Interdisciplinarity,first authors and citation patterns

Highly cited articles are interesting because of the potential association between high citation counts and high quality research. This study investigates the 82 most highly cited Information Science and Library Science’ (IS&LS) articles (the top 0.1%) in the Web of Science from the perspectives of disciplinarity, annual citation patterns, and first author citation profiles. First, the relative frequency of these 82 articles was much lower for articles solely in IS&LS than for those in IS&LS and at least one other subject, suggesting that that the promotion of interdisciplinary research in IS&LS may be conducive to improving research quality. Second, two thirds of the first authors had an h-index in IS&LS of less than eight, show that much significant research is produced by researchers without a high overall IS&LS research productivity. Third, there is a moderate correlation (0.46) between citation ranking and the number of years between peak year and year of publication. This indicates that high quality ideas and methods in IS&LS often are deployed many years after being published.     

A Comparison of Iranian Scientific Publications in the Science Citation Index: 1985–1989 and 1990–1994

Iranian scientific publications in the Science Citation Index for two five-year periods, 1985–1989 and 1990–1994, were compared. Distributions of various attributes of the publication output for the two periods were obtained primarily through the Rank command of the Dialog Online System. Results include: productivity by publication year and by ranked order of the most productive Iranian authors; influence or impact of the most productive Iranian authors by ranking them as cited authors; collaboration of Iranian scientists with scientists from other countries; and the journals Iranian scientists published in and the journals they cite in their papers. The subject areas of Iran's scientific publications were examined vis-à-vis the world's publication output and that of the Third World Countries (TWC).     

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.