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.     

The nature and relationship between the productivity of journals and their citations in semiconductor literature

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between journals" productivity and their citations in the field of semiconductors. Journal samples were gathered from the INSPEC database, 1978 to 1997 while the data of citation frequency, impact factor, cited half-life and citing half-life were obtained from Science Citation Index, Journal Citation Reports 1997 CD-ROM edition. One thousand and eight hundred and seventy seven journals publishing articles on semiconductors were retrieved. The nature for the data of journal productivity, impact factor, cited half-life and citing half-life are explored. Among these journals, only 672 journals that were covered in JCR were compared. Moreover, statistical tests of more productive journals with cumulative publication in semiconductor >100 were also conducted on the basis of all articles they published annually (for 1997). The results of the study showed that there is a significant correlation between journal productivity and citation frequency and between journal productivity and impact factor. However, there are no associations between journal productivity and cited half-life and between journal productivity and citing half-life. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

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.     

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 on rural studies in human geography and related disciplines

Although the world has experienced rapid urbanization, rural areas have always been and are still an important research field in human geography. This paper performed a bibliometric analysis on rural geography studies based on the peer-reviewed articles concerning rural geography published in the SSCI-listed journals from 1990 to 2012. Our analysis examines publication patterns (document types and publishing languages, article outputs and their categories, major journals and their publication, most productive authors, geographic distribution and international collaboration) and demonstrates the evolution of intellectual development of rural geography by studying highly cited papers and their citation networks and temporal evolution of keywords. Our research findings include: The article number has been increasing since the 1900s, and went through three phases, and the rural geography research is dominated in size by UK and USA. The USA is the most productive in rural geography, but the UK had more impact than other countries in the terms of the average citation of articles. Three distinct but loosely linked research streams of rural geography were identified and predominated by the UK rural geographers. The keywords frequencies evolved according to contexts of rural development and academic advances of human geography, but they were loosely and scattered since the rural researches in different regions or different systems faced with different problems.     

Understanding the impact change of a highly cited article: a content-based citation analysis

Researchers tend to cite highly cited articles, but how these highly cited articles influence the citing articles has been underexplored. This paper investigates how one highly cited essay, Hirsch’s “h-index” article (H-article) published in 2005, has been cited by other articles. Content-based citation analysis is applied to trace the dynamics of the article’s impact changes from 2006 to 2014. The findings confirm that citation context captures the changing impact of the H-article over time in several ways. In the first two years, average citation mention of H-article increased, yet continued to decline with fluctuation until 2014. In contrast with citation mention, average citation count stayed the same. The distribution of citation location over time also indicates three phases of the H-article “Discussion,” “Reputation,” and “Adoption” we propose in this study. Based on their locations in the citing articles and their roles in different periods, topics of citation context shifted gradually when an increasing number of other articles were co-mentioned with the H-article in the same sentences. These outcomes show that the impact of the H-article manifests in various ways within the content of these citing articles that continued to shift in nine years, data that is not captured by traditional means of citation analysis that do not weigh citation impacts over time.     

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.     

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.     

Selecting scientific excellence through committee peer review - A citation analysis of publications previously published to approval or rejection of post-doctoral research fellowship applicants

Summary We investigated committee peer review for awarding long-term fellowships to post-doctoral researchers as practiced by the Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds (B.I.F.) - a foundation for the promotion of basic research in biomedicine. Assessing the validity of selection decisions requires a generally accepted criterion for research impact. A widely used approach is to use citation counts as a proxy for the impact of scientific research. Therefore, a citation analysis for articles published previous to the applicants' approval or rejection for a B.I.F. fellowship was conducted. Based on our model estimation (negative binomial regression model), journal articles that had been published by applicants approved for a fellowship award (n = 64) prior to applying for the B.I.F. fellowship award can be expected to have 37% (straight counts of citations) and 49% (complete counts of citations) more citations than articles that had been published by rejected applicants (n = 333). Furthermore, comparison with international scientific reference values revealed (a) that articles published by successful and non-successful applicants are cited considerably more often than the “average” publication and (b) that excellent research performance can be expected more of successful than non-successful applicants. The findings confirm that the foundation is not only achieving its goal of selecting the best junior scientists for fellowship awards, but also successfully attracting highly talented young scientists to apply for B.I.F. fellowships.     

Knowledge integrators or weak links? An exploratory comparison of patenting researchers with their non-inventing peers in nano-science and technology

Summary Policy-makers in many countries emphasize the importance of non-publication output of university research. Increasingly, policies are pursued that attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in universities and public research institutes. Apart from generating spin-out companies, technology licensing, and collaborative research, attention is focused on patenting activities of researchers. Some analysts suggest that there is a trade-off between scholarly publication and patenting activity. This paper explores this relationship drawing on a data set of nanoscience publications and nanotechnology patents in three European countries. In particular, this study examines whether researchers who both publish and patent are more productive and more highly cited than their peers who concentrate on scholarly publication in communicating their research results. Furthermore, this study investigates the collaborative activity of inventor-authors and their position in their respective networks of scientific communication. The findings suggest that overall there seems to be no adverse relationship between publication and patenting activity, at least not in this area of science and technology. Patenting scientists appear to outperform their solely publishing, non-inventing peers in terms of publication counts and citation frequency. However, while they are considerably over-represented in the top performance class, the data indicates that inventor-authors may not occupy top positions within that group. An analysis of co-authorship links indicates that patenting authors can also play a prominent role within networks of scientific communication. The network maps also point to groups where inventor-authors occur frequently and others where this is not the case, which possibly reflects cognitive differences between sub-fields. Finally, the data indicates that inventor-authors account only for a marginal share of publishing scholars while they play a substantial role amongst inventors.     

A comparison of citation contexts between natural sciences and social sciences and humanities

This study uses the method of citation context analysis to compare differences in citation contexts, including cited concepts and citation functions, between natural sciences (NS) and social sciences and humanities (SSH), based on articles citing Little Science, Big Science (LSBS) published between 1963 and 2010. The findings indicate that NS and SSH researchers frequently cite LSBS as a source that is related to a specific topic and as evidence to support a claim. No significant differences were identified in the distribution of cited concepts included in LSBS, but significant differences were observed in the reasons for citing LSBS between NS and SSH citing articles. However, reverse trends were observed in the percentage of some cited concepts and citation functions between NS and SSH, which implies that subtle differences in citation behavior exist between NS and SSH researchers. In addition, each concept category has a different half-life. Concepts related to characteristics of big science and scientific collaboration have the longest half-lives.     

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.     

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.     

Influence of a performance indicator on Danish research production and citation impact 2000–12

This paper analyses the patterns of Danish research productivity, citation impact and (inter)national collaboration across document types 2000–2012, prior to and after the introduction of the Norwegian publication point-based performance indicator in 2008. Document types analysed are: research articles; conference proceedings papers excluding meeting abstracts; and review articles. The Danish Research & Innovation Agency’s basic statistics combined with Web of Science (WoS) are used for data collection and analyses. Findings demonstrate that the research article productivity increases steeply (37 %) after the start of the performance indicator and the citation impact progresses linearly over the entire period, regardless the introduction of the performance indicator. Academic staff progression is only 24 % during the same time period. The collaboration ratio between purely Danish and internationally cooperated research articles remains stable during the period, the number of collaborative countries increases while the ratio declines significantly for proceedings papers. The citation impact of internationally cooperated research articles increases since 2009 but drops for proceedings papers; also their productivity declines slightly from 2009 according to Research Agency statistics. Since 2006 the WoS indexing of proceedings papers is fast declining; as a consequence the ratio between Danish proceedings papers and research articles declines in WoS. According to Research Agency statistics a decline likewise takes place, starting from 2009. The positive growth in research articles mainly derives from the Science and Technology fields published in prestigious Level 2 journals; the development of articles published in less prestigious Level 1 journals derives from all fields. Three of the eight Danish universities have significantly altered their research publication profiles since 2009. The publication performance model is regarded as the significant accelerator of these processes in recent years.     

Interdisciplinarity and insularity in the diffusion of knowledge: an analysis of disciplinary boundaries between philosophy of science and the sciences

Two fundamentally different perspectives on knowledge diffusion dominate debates about academic disciplines. On the one hand, critics of disciplinary research and education have argued that disciplines are isolated silos, within which specialists pursue inward-looking and increasingly narrow research agendas. On the other hand, critics of the silo argument have demonstrated that researchers constantly import and export ideas across disciplinary boundaries. These perspectives have different implications for how knowledge diffuses, how intellectuals gain and lose status within their disciplines, and how intellectual reputations evolve within and across disciplines. We argue that highly general claims about the nature of disciplinary boundaries are counterproductive, and that research on the nature of specific disciplinary boundaries is more useful. To that end, this paper uses a novel publication and citation network dataset and statistical models of citation networks to test hypotheses about the boundaries between philosophy of science and 11 disciplinary clusters. Specifically, we test hypotheses about whether engaging with and being cited by scientific communities outside philosophy of science has an impact on one’s position within philosophy of science. Our results suggest that philosophers of science produce interdisciplinary scholarship, but they tend not to cite work by other philosophers when it is published in journals outside of their discipline. Furthermore, net of other factors, receiving citations from other disciplines has no meaningful impact—positive or negative—on citations within philosophy of science. We conclude by considering this evidence for simultaneous interdisciplinarity and insularity in terms of scientific trading theory and other work on disciplinary boundaries and communication.     

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.     

Patterns of annual citation of highly cited articles and the prediction of their citation ranking: A comparison across subjects

High citation is associated with research quality and consequently findings on highly cited articles are useful to increase understanding of the factors that produce high quality research. This study explores highly cited articles in six subjects, focusing on late citation and peak citation years. Longitudinal citation patterns were found to be highly varied and, on average, different from the remaining articles in each subject. For four of the six subjects, there is a correlation of over 0.42 between the percentage of early citations and total citation ranking but more highly ranked articles had a lower percentage of early citations. Surprisingly, for highly cited articles in all six subjects the prediction of citation ranking of from the sum of citations during their first six years was less accurate than prediction using the sum of the citations for only the fifth and sixth year.     

A bibliometric analysis of publications by the School of Biological Sciences, Seoul National University, South Korea

This study presents an in-depth survey of research and citation performance of the School of Biological Sciences (SBS) 39-member faculty at Seoul National University (SNU), the most prestigious university in South Korea, for the years 2004–2009. Thirty-nine faculty members published a total of 640 publications during the period, representing an average of 16.4 publications per scientist. Among the 640 publications, 521 (81.4 %) were cited 9,204 times, an average of 14.4 citations per publication. More publications co-authored by the SBS faculty with foreign researchers (mostly from the U.S.A.) were published in mainstream journals than publications by three other co-authorship types. Accordingly, publications by international co-authorships received more citations compared to citation levels of three other co-authorship types in terms of the average citations per publication. The study has found a concentration effect, whereby quite a small number of publications received approximately one-third of the citation performance generated by the SBS faculty at SNU. The results demonstrate that the citation performance of the SBS at SNU can be influenced considerably by the presence and productivity of ‘star’ scientists.