A decade of database conferences: a look inside the program committees

Database management technology has played a vital role in facilitating key advancements of the information technology field. Database researchers—and computer scientists in general—consider prestigious conferences as their favorite and effective tools for presenting their original research study and for getting good publicity. With the main aim of retaining the high quality and the prestige of these conference, program committee members plays the major role of evaluating the submitted articles and deciding which submissions are to be included in the conference programs. In this article, we study the program committees of four top-tier and prestigious database conferences (SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, EDBT) over a period of 10 years (2001–2010). We report about the growth in the number of program committee members in comparison to the size of the research community in the last decade. We also analyze the rate of change in the membership of the committees of the different editions of these conferences. Finally, we report about the major contributing scholars in the committees of these conferences as a mean of acknowledging their impact in the community.     

Redistributed random sampling method for categorizing materials research publications from SCI database: Metallurgy and polymer subfields

This article introduced two sampling methods, including Directly Random Sampling (DRS) and Redistributed Random Sampling (RRS) methods for categorization of a large number of research articles retrieved from metallurgy and polymer subfields from the Science Citation Index (SCI) database. The accuracy of the proposed sampling methods was considered in association by comparing with reference results previously obtained by Fully Retrieving Sampling (FRS) method, which involved analyzing the contents and categories of all articles from the database. The results suggested that RRS and DRS methods were appropriate, efficient and reasonably accurate for categorization of relatively large volume of research articles. RRS method was highly recommended, especially when the contents of sample articles was unevenly distributed. By DRS and RRS methods, only about 6.3% of total articles were required for obtaining similar results as those given by FRS method. The percentage Expected Worst Errors (EWE) from DRS and RRS methods were observed to range from 1.0 to 5.5%. The EWE value could be reduced by increasing the sample size.     

A snapshot of EU publications in sleep research: A scientometric survey

A bibliometric analysis of the literature covering a one-year period (2003) was performed to evaluate the number of scientific publications on sleep and its distribution among the European Union countries. 912 articles appearing in Life Sciences and Clinical Medicine journals indexed in the Institute for Scientific Information databases were downloaded. These articles were authored by EU researchers; Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy rank at the top of the EU countries. The output distribution of the most productive EU countries are also presented and discussed. Despite the limitations of the methods used, the present results give an interesting snapshot of the EU publishing behavior in sleep research.     

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...     

Environmental science research in India: An analysis of publications

Investigates the trends in environmental science research in India with regard to its various branches, channels of communication used, authorship pattern of the papers, institution-wise output, rank of journals, extent of collaboration and scholarship of papers basing the entries noticed in theParyavaran Abstracts. Major areas of interest of Indian environmentalists are given and prolific investigators have been listed. Journals used by Indian workers for publication of their work are studied. Subject areas with number of papers, number of authors, and average authorship are tabulated.     

Identifying research topics in marketing science along the past decade: a content analysis

In recent years, how marketing science is conceptualized has changed, as have the methods through which data are investigated. This reconceptualization is making a significant impact on the most important topics of this discipline. Here, a novel approach is used to analyse a collection of 1169 abstracts from articles published in the Journal of Marketing Research and the Journal of Marketing from 2005 to 2014. We apply statistical methods to answer the following questions: How is vocabulary commonly used in marketing science? What are the most relevant topics of these journals? Which articles are the most influential? What words do authors prefer? Is the consumer among the primary topics in marketing research? A set of easy-to-read visual representations are provided to answer these questions. We highlight two main findings: (i) consumers and customers are the main topics of these marketing research journals, which emphasizes the growing interest in consumers and consumer behaviour as the core of both brick-and-mortar and online businesses; and (ii) in contrast to previous periods, product has become an essential concept, perhaps due to the emergence of new product considerations and new and enhanced interrelations.     

Towards a European economics of economics: Monitoring a decade of top research and providing some explanation

Summary This study documents a decade of mainstream research output by European economics institutions. In contrast to previous European economics departmental rankings, we investigate the changing pattern of the ranking over two subperiods and a total decade. The validity of our bibliometric approach is demonstrated by a comparison with gradings of UK economic departments in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). We also provide some explanation of the ranking based on regional factors and institutional features. Strong evidence for the 'institutional oligopoly' of editors and authors hypothesis is found. However, in a dynamic context this departmental concentration of authorship and editorial board membership does not represent a 'closed shop'. We find several departments entering the centre stage of economic mainstream for the first time towards the end of the 1990s.     

Third World Countries (TWC) research publications by disciplines: A country-by-country citation analysis

This paper discusses the publications of Third World Countries (TWC) in theScience Citation Index by disciplines. TWC documents which were nationally cross-linked at least 20 times were identified and their citing documents categorised into seven disciplines. The top 12 TWC are discussed vis-à-vis their population, Gross National Product, and the extent of participation usingobserved rates of contribution in each discipline andexpected rates based on numbers of citations received. Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Chile, appeared most frequently in the top five ranks in each of the seven disciplines; however, none of these countries had neither the largest population nor the highest GNP per capita. Overall observed rates exceeded expected rates in all but two disciplines: Biomedicine and Agriculture. Physics & Engineering had the highest overall observed rate with the top five TWC exceeding the overall and their individual expected rates. Brazil and Venezuela led by exceeding their expected rates in four of the seven disciplines.     

On the relationship of funding and research publications

The impact of 17 year period of funding in schistosomiasis research on publication outcome was examined. Two productivity and three quality indicators were used to compare the output from the entire population of schistosomiasis in this period with those associated with 351 funded researchers. A substantially higher productivity and citation impact were found. This consistency of direction points to the positive effect of a period of sustained funding commitment.Dedicated to the memory of Michael J. MoravcsikThis publication is supported in part by a NIH grant RO1-LM-04680 from the National Library of Medicine.     

Nanoscience and nanotechnology research publications: a comparison between Australia and the rest of the world

Nanoscience and nanotechnology are research areas of a multidisciplinary nature. Having a good knowledge of the rapidly evolving nature of these research areas is important to understand the research paths, as well as national and global developments in these areas. Accordingly, in this reported study nanoscience and nanotechnology research undertaken globally was compared with that of Australia by way of analyzing research publications. Initially, four different bibliometric Boolean-based search methodologies were used to analyze publications in the Web of Science database (Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Knowledge). These methodologies were (a) lexical query, (b) search in nanoscience and nanotechnology journals, (c) combination of lexical query and journal search and (d) search in the ten nano-journals with the highest impact factors. Based on results obtained, the third methodology was found to be the most comprehensive approach. Consequently, this search methodology was used to compare global and Australian nanoscience and nanotechnology publications for the period 1988–2000. Results demonstrated that depending on the search technique used, Australia ranks fourteenth to seventeenth internationally with a higher than world average number of nanoscience and nanotechnology publications. Over the last decade, Australia showed a relative growth rate in nanoscience and nanotechnology publications of 16 % compared to 12 % for the rest of the world. Researchers from China, the USA and the UK are from the main countries that collaborate with Australian researchers in nanoscience and nanotechnology publications.     

Electricity: a sideways look

From ancient times electricity in its various manifestations has been a subject of myth, mysticism and misunderstanding. Now comprehended by science, controlled and applied by engineers (if sometimes misused), its emergence in literature as a metaphor for vital attributes continues.     

Composite scientometric indicators for evaluating publications of research institutes

Summary Both quantitative and qualitative evaluation of publications of research teams or institutes requires several scientometric indicators. In this paper a new composite indicator is introduced for the assessment of publications of research institutes working in different fields of science. The composite indicator consists of three part-indicators (Journal Paper Productivity, Relative Publication Strategy and Relative Paper Citedness). The different methods of calculating the composite index have only a slight effect on the value, whereas application of diverse weights for the individual part-indicators results in significant changes.     

Bibliometric analysis of corporate governance research in German-speaking countries: applying bibliometrics to business research using a custom-made database

Scientometrics - The objective of the present study on corporate governance research in German-speaking countries is to portray the networks in this field, identify the central sources and actors,...