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.     

Global knowledge management research: A bibliometric analysis

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

A bibliometric analysis of world volatile organic compounds research trends

This study explores a bibliometric approach to quantitatively assessing current research trends on volatile organic compounds, by using the related literature in the Science Citation Index (SCI) database from 1992 to 2007. The articles acquired from such literature were concentrated on the general analysis by scientific output, the research performances by countries, institutes, and collaborations, and the research trends by the frequency of author keywords, words in title, words in abstract, and keywords plus. Over the past years, there had been a notable growth trend in publication outputs, along with more participation and collaboration of countries and institutes. Research collaborative papers had shifted from the national inter-institutional to the international collaboration. Benzene, toluene, and formaldehyde were the three kinds of VOCs concerned mostly. Detection and removing, especially by adsorption and oxidation, of VOCs were to be the orientation of all VOCs research in the next few years.     

Global trend in aquatic ecosystem research from 1992 to 2011

Aquatic ecosystems are ecologically important, but continuously threatened by a growing number of human induced changes. This study evaluates the research trends of “aquatic ecosystem” between 1992 and 2011 in journals of all subject categories of the science citation index and social sciences citation index. The analyzed parameters include publication output, cited publication, document type, language, distributions of journal, author, country and institutes, and analysis of author keywords and keywords plus. The results showed that over the past two decades, there was a consistent growth in publication output with involvement of increasing number of countries and institutions, and North America was still the leading region in the subject. Classification of the top 30 author keywords indicated that more research attentions were paid to the study on aquatic organism, water environment and aquatic ecosystem condition. Aquatic ecosystem, water quality, and fish were the top three most frequently used author keywords. In addition, owing to its significant impact on aquatic ecosystems, climate change has been placed crucial emphasis recently. Aquatic ecosystem research trend was shifting from water environment to aquatic ecosystem wide issues.     

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.     

Technological trends in the area of fullerenes using bibliometric analysis of patents

Patents are a useful source of scientific and technological information. The bibliometrics analysis of patents has been made to identify technological trends in the area of fullerenes and study other parameters like growth of the patenting activity, active players in the field from industry, academia and government research institutions. It indicates that firms and R&D organisations in developing countries could undertake similar study on specific topics of their interests and obtain relevant insights.     

Grey system theory trends from 1991 to 2018: a bibliometric analysis and visualization

Scientometrics - Grey system theory has rapidly developed in recent years, and it has solved real-world problems in various scientific fields successfully. However, there is a lack of bibliometric...     

A bibliometric analysis of research related to ocean circulation

This study is a bibliometric analysis on ocean circulation-related research for the period 1991–2005. Selected documents included “ocean circulation, sea circulation, seas circulation, marine circulation, and circulation ocean” as a part of the title, abstract or keywords. Analyzed parameters included the document type, the article output, the article distribution in journals, the publication activity of countries, and institutes and the authorship. An indicator, citation per publication (CPP) was applied to evaluate the scientific impact of a publication. The relationship between cumulative articles and the year was modeled. Three dominant categories were picked out, and their output increase was modeled. The USA was found to be leading the research with 47% share of total articles, with a CPP up to 5.9. Woods Hole Oceanography Institute in the USA was the most productive institute with a CPP of 6.8. In the citation analysis, a 5th year citation mode was found. A paper life model was applied to compare the cumulative citations increasing rates of different years.     

Global stem cell research trend: Bibliometric analysis as a tool for mapping of trends from 1991 to 2006

In this study, we aim to evaluate the global scientific production of stem cell research for the past 16 years and provide insights into the characteristics of the stem cell research activities and identify patterns, tendencies, or regularities that may exist in the papers. Data are based on the online version of SCI, Web of Science from 1991 to 2006. Articles referring to stem cell were assessed by many aspects including exponential fitting the trend of publication outputs during 1991–2006, distribution of source title, author keyword, and keyword plus analysis. Based on the exponential fitting the yearly publicans of the last decade, it can also be calculated that, in 2,011, the number of scientific papers on the topic of stem-cell will be twice of the number of publications in 2006. Synthetically analyzing three kinds of keywords, it can be concluded that application of stem cell transplantation technology to human disease therapy, especially research related on “embryonic stem cell” and “mesenchymal stem cell” is the orientation of all the stem cell research in the 21^st century. This new bibliometric method can help relevant researchers realize the panorama of global stem cell research, and establish the further research direction.     

Research trends analysis by comparing data mining and customer relationship management through bibliometric methodology

There are few comprehensive studies and categorization schemes to discuss the characteristics for both data mining and customer relationship management (CRM) although they have already become more important recently. Using a bibliometric approach, this paper analyzes data mining and CRM research trends from 1989 to 2009 by locating headings “data mining” and “customer relationship management” or “CRM” in topics in the SSCI database. The bibliometric analytical technique was used to examine these two topics in SSCI journals from 1989 to 2009, we found 1181 articles with data mining and 1145 articles with CRM. This paper implemented and classified data mining and CRM articles using the following eight categories—publication year, citation, country/territory, document type, institute name, language, source title and subject area—for different distribution status in order to explore the differences and how data mining and CRM technologies have developed in this period and to analyze data mining and CRM technology tendencies under the above result. Also, the paper performs the K–S test to check whether the analysis follows Lotka’s law. The research findings can be extended to investigate author productivity by analyzing variables such as chronological and academic age, number and frequency of previous publications, access to research grants, job status, etc. In such a way characteristics of high, medium and low publishing activity of authors can be identified. Besides, these findings will also help to judge scientific research trends and understand the scale of development of research in data mining and CRM through comparing the increases of the article author. Based on the above information, governments and enterprises may infer collective tendencies and demands for scientific researcher in data mining and CRM to formulate appropriate training strategies and policies in the future. This analysis provides a roadmap for future research, abstracts technology trends and facilitates knowledge accumulations so that data mining and CRM researchers can save some time since core knowledge will be concentrated in core categories. This implies that the phenomenon “success breeds success” is more common in higher quality publications.     

Forecasting trends of development of psychology from a bibliometric perspective

Bibliometric data on psychology publications from 1977 through 2008 are modeled and forecasted for the 10 years following 2008. Data refer to the raw frequencies of the PsycINFO (94% English-language, mainly Anglo-American publications) and the English-language documents of PSYNDEX (publications from the German-speaking countries). The series were modelled by way of exponential smoothing. In contrast to Single Moving Average methods which do not weigh observations, exponential smoothing assigns differential weights to observations. Weights reflect the distance from the most recent data point. Results suggest strongly expanding publication activities which can be represented by exponential functions. In addition, forecasted publication activities, estimated based on psychology publication frequencies in the past, show positive bibliometric trends in the Anglo-American research community. These trends go in parallel the bibliometric trends for the English-language publications of German-speaking authors. However, while positive trends were forecasted for all psychological subdisciplines of the Anglo-American publication database PsycINFO, negative bibliometric trends were estimated for English-language publications from German-speaking authors in 6 out of 20 subdisciplines.     

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.     

A bibliometric analysis of publications in computer networking research

Scientometrics - Computer networking is a major research discipline in computer science, electrical engineering, and computer engineering. The field has been actively growing, in terms of both...