The luminous intensity of regional ‘night-light’ output can predict the growing volume of published scientific research by ‘luminaries’ in developing countries

Scientometrics - Global scientific research output has experienced continuous and rapid growth during the last 20 years. The spatial and temporal variations of the international papers at...     

Comparison of independent research of China’s top universities using bibliometric indicators

The institutionally independent publications of Tsinghua University and Peking University were compared by two main indicators namely peak-year citations per publication and h-index, based on the data extracted from the Science Citation Index Expanded, Web of Science from 1974 to 2011. Analyzed aspects covered total publication outputs, annual production, impact, authorships, Web of Science categories, journals, and most cited articles. Results shows that the two universities were in the same scale based on the peak-year citations per publication, the h-index, and top cited articles with no less than 100 citations. Publication of the top three most productive Web of Science categories differed between these two universities. Tsinghua University published more articles in applied science and engineering fields, while Peking University had more basic science articles. In addition, article life was applied to compare the impact of the most cited articles and single author articles of the two universities.     

Indicators of research output in the sciences from 5 Central European countries, 1990–1994

Conclusions As usual, more questions are raised by the facts and figures presented in this report than answered. Some general features appear, nevertheless, unquestionable.Austria shows a rather stable, balanced picture either the distribution of research activities by major fields, or the main publication channels, or the extent of international cooperation, or the major cooperating partners are concerned.In the four ex-socialist countries great efforts are made not just to maintain the level of research activities of the previous years but also to conform to the European/world standards. Scientific communities of these countries have had to find some compensations mechanisms to counterbalance the detrimental effects of the countries economic problems. One possible with more developed countries increasing extent of international cooperation with more developed countries (predominantly with Germany and USA). Signs of exhaustion of this source of compensation can be observed in Hungary, and this can be a warning signal for other countries of the area, too.One of the most intriguing questions raised by the results of this study is about the demographic and migrational processes within the scientific community underlying the observed publication trends and patterns. Learning more about these factors may take us closer to find the proper policy implications of the observed phenomena.     

Usage metrics vs classical metrics: analysis of Russia’s research output

This paper discusses the results of a pilot project investigating Russian scholarly publications using the altmetric indicators “Usage Count Last 180 days” (U1) and “Usage Count Since 2013” (U2) introduced by Web of Science. We explored the relationship between citation impact and both types of usage counts. The data set consisted of 37,281 records (publications) indexed by SCI-E in 2015. Seven broad research areas were selected to observe citation patterns and usage counts. A significant difference was found between mean citations and mean usage counts (U2) in a few research areas. We discovered a significant Kendall rank correlation between the citation metrics and usage metrics at the article level. This correlation is particularly strong for the longer period usage metric (U2). We also analyzed the relationship between usage metrics and traditional journal-level citation metrics. Very weak correlation was observed.     

Totalized input–output assessment of research productivity of nations using multi-dimensional input and output

Research evaluation is a multi-dimensional problem as there are multiple input dimensions, multiple output dimensions and a country space of many dimensions. The data making the connections are usually available in matrix form. In this paper, we use matrix normalization and multiplication so that totalized input and output measures can be obtained. This facilitates comparative research evaluation. The US and Japan lead as the major players when patents and papers are jointly considered. Most of the countries considered register totalized output that is commensurate with totalized input. Three countries are seen to be falling short of this ideal: China, Russia and Mexico.

     

Mapping of dental science research in India: a scientometric analysis of India’s research output, 1999–2008

The study examines India’s performance based on its publication output in dental sciences during 1999–2008, based on several parameters, including the country annual average growth rate, global publication share & rank among 25 most productive countries of the world, national publication output and impact in terms of average citations per paper, international collaboration output and share and contribution of major collaborative partners, contribution and impact of select top 25 Indian institutions and select top 15 most productive authors, patterns of communication in national and international journals and characteristics of its 45 high cited papers. The study uses 10 years (1999–2008) publications data in dental sciences of India and other countries drawn from Scopus international multidisciplinary bibliographical database.     

Bibliometric analysis of diabetes mellitus research output from Middle Eastern Arab countries during the period (1996–2012)

The main objective of this study was to analyze research productivity originating from Middle East Arab (MEA) countries in the field of diabetes mellitus (DM). Data from January 1, 1996 till December 31, 2012 were searched for documents with specific words in diabetes as a “source title” and a list of 13 MEA countries as affiliation country. Research productivity was evaluated based on number of publications, citation analysis, indexing in Institute for Scientific Information and impact factor (IF). The 13 MEA countries published a total of 479 documents in 41 diabetes journals. This number represents 0.75 % of the total documents produced globally in the field of DM. The number of published documents increased by around fivefold from early 2000 to 2012. Of the 41 journal titles retrieved, 24 (58.5 %) had their IF listed in the journal citation reports 2012. Forty-two documents (14.5 %) were published in journals that had no official IF. The total number of citations for documents published from MEA countries in the field of DM, at the time of data analysis, was 5,565 with an h index of 35. The median (inter-quartile range) citation for documents from the 13 MEA countries was 4 (1–11). The top productive institution in the field of DM was United Arab Emirates University with 51 documents (10.6 %). Authors from MEA countries collaborated mostly with authors in countries like United Kingdom, USA, and Germany. The present data show promising and relatively good diabetes research productivity in MEA countries especially after 2008.     

Condensed matter physics: An analysis of India’s research output, 1993–2001

The study analyses 27018 research papers published by India in condensed matter physics as seen from Science Citation Index-Extended Version (SCIE) (Web of Science) database for the period 1993–1995, 1996–1998 and 1999–2001. The study reports that condensed matter physics is the most sought after branch in physics research in India, accounting for 20% share of the country output in physics. The University & College sector as well as R&D sector are the major contributors to condensed matter physics. However, the country growth in this field, computed on six yearly basis, has still been negative (−1%) compared to 17.4% country growth in overall physics during the same period, 1993–1995 to 1999–2001. The study also maps condensed matter physics research on other dimensions such as institutional productivity, nature of collaboration in research, and institutional specialization. It examines highly cited papers, and lists prominent and productive scientists in this field. It also provides suggestions for accelerating condensed matter research in India.     

Multi machining output—multi independent variable turning research by response surface methodology

A finish turning case is presented where an increase in tool Life was obtained without sacrificing surface finish. This was obtained by developing mathematical models for tool life and surface roughness in terms of the cutting speed, feed and depth of cut. Their contours were obtained utilizing PL 1 language and an IBM 360/50 computer, then the contours were superimposed in order to select the proper combination of cutting conditions.     

Patents as indicators of the technological position of countries on a global level?

Scientometrics - The technological capabilities of a country play a key role in identifying paths to economic growth and development. Policymakers have a special interest in understanding the...     

Mapping of Indian computer science research output, 1999�C2008

The research output of India in computer science during 1999?C2008 is analyzed in this paper on several parameters including total research output, its growth, rank and global publication share, citation impact, share of international collaborative papers and major collaborative partner countries and patterns of research communication in most productive journals. It also analyses the characteristics of most productive institutions, authors and high-cited papers. The publications output and impact of India is also compared with China, South Korea, Taiwan and Brazil.     

Identification of important citations by exploiting research articles’ metadata and cue-terms from content

Citations play a pivotal role in indicating various aspects of scientific literature. Quantitative citation analysis approaches have been used over the decades to measure the impact factor of journals, to rank researchers or institutions, to discover evolving research topics etc. Researchers doubted the pure quantitative citation analysis approaches and argued that all citations are not equally important; citation reasons must be considered while counting. In the recent past, researchers have focused on identifying important citation reasons by classifying them into important and non-important classes rather than individually classifying each reason. Most of contemporary citation classification techniques either rely on full content of articles, or they are dominated by content based features. However, most of the time content is not freely available as various journal publishers do not provide open access to articles. This paper presents a binary citation classification scheme, which is dominated by metadata based parameters. The study demonstrates the significance of metadata and content based parameters in varying scenarios. The experiments are performed on two annotated data sets, which are evaluated by employing SVM, KLR, Random Forest machine learning classifiers. The results are compared with the contemporary study that has performed similar classification employing rich list of content-based features. The results of comparisons revealed that the proposed model has attained improved value of precision (i.e., 0.68) just by relying on freely available metadata. We claim that the proposed approach can serve as the best alternative in the scenarios wherein content in unavailable.

     

Knowledge production through collaborative research in sub-Saharan Africa: how much do countries contribute to each other’s knowledge output and citation impact?

This paper examines co-authorship of research articles in Thomson Reuters citation indexes in order to assess knowledge co-production in selected sub-Saharan African countries. Two indicators, namely publications and citations, were analysed to establish the patterns of knowledge co-production and its scientific impact, respectively. The study found that knowledge production through collaborative research among sub-Saharan African countries is minimal and contributes only a small percentage when compared to collaboration between sub-Saharan African countries and their foreign counterparts. Similarly, the scientific impact of international collaboration was higher than that of continental collaboration. Countries belonging to the same geographic region contributed to each other’s knowledge production more frequently than they did to the countries outside their region. It is recommended that, for knowledge co-production in sub-Saharan Africa to improve, various measures such as encouraging student and staff exchange, hosting more regional conferences and encouraging research networks need to be put in place.     

Mapping knowledge domains of Chinese digital library research output, 1994–2010

The aim of this paper is to identify the research paradigms on digital libraries in China while compared with that of international digital libraries research via scientometric analysis. Co-word network constructed by keywords in documents and their co-occurrence relationships is a kind of mapping knowledge domains, which represents the cognitive and intellectual structure of science. A total of 6068 and 1250 papers published between 1994 and 2010 were, respectively retrieved from the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and ScienceDirect databases with a topic search of digital libraries or digital library in abstracts of papers. This paper uses methods of co-word analysis, social network analysis and mapping knowledge domains as theory basis, with assistance of softwares of UCINET and Netdraw, to construct the co-word network of digital libraries/library research in China, present the study status quo and evolution on digital libraries/library in China and analyze the research paradigm structure of digital libraries/library in China.     

New exploratory work of evaluating a researcher’s output

SCI has been popular all over the world since it was published by Garfield in 1963. Researches on evaluating a researcher’s output with SCI have always been continuous. In recent years, a great breakthrough has been made since the h-index was put forward in 2005. In this paper, we also advance a new method — Paper Quality Index (PQI) to evaluate the output of a researcher. The main purpose of our method is to solve two problems that consist in the method of h-index: one is that the h-index can’t compare the outputs of researchers in different fields; the other is that it is unsuitable for evaluating the outputs of young researchers. A simple mathematical expression is constructed to eliminate the difference of citation among different fields and makes the evaluation of short-term outputs of researchers possible.     

Arab Spring’s effect on scientific productivity and research performance in Arab countries

This study focuses on the Arab literature published by researchers from all 22 members of the Arab League during the last 5 years before Arab Spring (2006–2010) and the 5 years after Arab Spring (2011–2015), in order to identify effects of the Arab Spring on research in the Arab world both performance and Productivity, based on bibliometrics analysis of the data extracted from Web of Science and InCites Essential Science Indicators provided by Thomson Reuters, and by using the statistical software package SPSS. The total productivity of Arab researchers before the Arab Spring was (103,917) document. Countries that witnessed revolution and government overthrown produced the largest productivity (42.5%). The Arab countries’ production doubled after the Arab Spring (214,864 document). Countries that witnessed Minor protests advanced to second place (30%) as a result of the leap that occurred in Saudi Arabia publications. The extent of collaboration among Arab countries before the Arab Spring was twice the number of publications in which they collaborated with the rest of the world. The number of citations was positive after the Arab Spring for 12 countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, Egypt and United Arab Emirates, while it was negative for 10 countries such as Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan, Kuwait and Lebanon. There is no significant difference between Arab countries exposed to different levels of protests of Arab Spring, and between Counties’ performance after and before Arab Spring. However, counties’ productivity after Arab Spring has increased higher than before Arab Spring.     

An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output that takes into account the effect of multiple coauthorship

I propose the index $\hbar$ (“hbar”), defined as the number of papers of an individual that have citation count larger than or equal to the $\hbar$ of all coauthors of each paper, as a useful index to characterize the scientific output of a researcher that takes into account the effect of multiple authorship. The bar is higher for $\hbar.$      

The relationship between scientists’ research performance and the degree of internationalization of their research

Policy makers, at various levels of governance, generally encourage the development of research collaboration. However the underlying determinants of collaboration are not completely clear. In particular, the literature lacks studies that, taking the individual researcher as the unit of analysis, attempt to understand if and to what extent the researcher’s scientific performance might impact on his/her degree of collaboration with foreign colleagues. The current work examines the international collaborations of Italian university researchers for the period 2001–2005, and puts them in relation to each individual’s research performance. The results of the investigation, which assumes co-authorship as proxy of research collaboration, show that both research productivity and average quality of output have positive effects on the degree of international collaboration achieved by a scientist.