Brazil’s growing production of scientific articles—how are we doing with review articles and other qualitative indicators?

This article identifies scientific fields in Brazil that have been generating new knowledge, their evolution, tendencies and the relationship between scientific production and the National Postgraduate Program (Programa Nacional de Pós-Graduação—PNPG). It works with review articles and assesses: (a) articles published as reviews by international databases; (b) the growth of Brazilian participation in that context; (c) institutional participation; (d) the predominant fields of knowledge; (e) the most productive authors, and (f) periodicals that published the greatest number of review articles by Brazilian authors. The 5,348 review articles published between 2000 and 2009 were made available in 1,309 scientific publications, and the fields that published the most reviews were Pharmacology, Chemistry, Neurosciences, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Psychiatry, Neurology, Endocrinology and Internal Medicine. The reviews were produced by 27,096 authors under the auspices of 20 institutions which, together, answer for 95 % of the Brazilian production, and are public, excepting for the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUC-RS). In the international scenario, we find that 31 countries are responsible for 90.11 % of the total scientific production and 94.08 % of the review articles. To establish a comparison between Brazil and its closest competitors, these countries can be classified arbitrarily in three groups: (1) countries with a large number of review articles (>3100), an average number of citations above 18, and an h-index greater than 95; (2) countries with a significant production of articles (between 2,000 and 3,000), average number of citations between 12 and 17, and an h-index below 95. Brazil is in the third group, (3) formed by countries with a lower level of production and the two qualitative indicators at opposite poles: the average of citations on a par with the first group (>18) and h-indexes like those of the second group (<95).     

Correlations between bibliometrics and peer evaluation for all disciplines: the evaluation of Brazilian scientists

This paper correlates the peer evaluations performed in late 2009 by the disciplinary committees of CNPq (a Brazilian funding agency) with some standard bibliometric measures for 55 scientific areas. We compared the decisions to increase, maintain or decrease a scientist’s research scholarship funded by CNPq. We analyzed these decisions for 2,663 Brazilian scientists and computed their correlations (Spearman rho) with 21 different measures, among them: total production, production in the last 5 years, production indexed in Web of Science and Scopus, total citations received (according to WOS, Scopus, and Google Scholar), h-index and m-quotient (according to the three citation services). The highest correlations for each area range from 0.95 to 0.29, although there are areas with no significantly positive correlation with any of the metrics.     

Scientific publishing in West Africa: comparing Benin with Ghana and Senegal

We compared scientific indicators related to Benin, Senegal and Ghana. We collected data from Web of Science and used bibliometric indicators like annual production, language and type of publication, citable and cited documents, citations, h-index, field share, specialization index, and international collaboration rate. Results show that Benin performs well regarding the percentage of citable and cited documents, the share of production and the specialization index in the fields of Natural sciences and Agricultural sciences; it occupies the median position with respect to the production and the specialization index in the fields of Engineering and technology on the one hand and Medical and health sciences on the other hand, behind Ghana and ahead Senegal. It lays however behind Ghana and Senegal with respect to the total output, citations per citable or cited documents, h-index, the share of production and specialization index in the fields of Social science and Humanities; it has the highest international collaboration rate. The study revealed that the three countries cooperated less, and only if a third western country intervened. It pointed out the role of Western countries in driving collaboration among developing countries.     

Measuring co-authors’ contribution to an article’s visibility

The visibility of an article depends to a large extent on its authors. We study the question how each co-author’s relative contribution to the visibility of the article can be determined and quantified using an indicator, referring to such an indicator as a CAV-indicator. A two-step procedure is elaborated, whereby one first chooses an indicator (e.g. total number of citations, h-index …) and subsequently one of two possible approaches. The case where the indicator is an h-type index is elaborated in a Lotkaian framework. Different examples illustrate the procedure and the choices involved in determining a CAV-indicator.     

Growth of the number of indexed journals of Latin America and the Caribbean: the effect on the impact of each country

The number of LA–C indexed journals in WoS has increased from 69 to 248 titles in just a period of four years (2006–2009). This unprecedented growth is related to a change in the editorial policy of WoS rather than to a change in the LA–C scientific community. We find that in the LA–C region, Brazil had the largest increase in its WoS production that also corresponded to a large increase in its production in its indexed local journals. As a consequence, Portuguese has been promoted to the second scientific language, only after English, in the LA–C production in WoS. However, while the Brazilian production in its local journals represents about one quarter of its whole WoS production, it shows a rather little effect on the respective number of citations. The rest of the LA–C countries represented in WoS still show very low levels in production and impact. Scopus has also enlarged considerably the database’s coverage of LA–C journals but with a steady growth in the period considered in this study.     

Two simple new bibliometric indexes to better evaluate research in disciplines where publications typically receive less citations

The paper proposes two simple new indexes—k and w—to assess a scientist’s publications record based on citations. The two indexes are superior to the widely used h index (Hirsch, 2005), as they preserve all its valuable characteristics and try to overcome one of its shortcomings, i.e. that it uses only a fraction of the information contained in a scientist’s citations profile and, as a result, it is defined over the set of positive integers and does not show a sufficiently fine ‘granularity’ to allow a fully satisfactory ranking of scientists. This problem is particularly acute in many areas of Social Sciences and Humanities, where scientific productivity and citation practices typically yield fewer citations per paper and, as a consequence, are characterized by ‘structurally’ lower values of the h index. Both the indexes proposed are defined over R⁺, their integer part is equal to the scientist’s h index and they fall in the right-open interval [h, h+1). While the h index is influenced only by part of the citations received by a scientist’s most-cited publications, the k index takes into account all the citations received by her most-cited publications and the w index accounts for the citations received by the entire set of her publications. Variants of the k and w indexes are proposed which consider co-authorship. To show the extent to which the h index and the new indexes proposed may yield different results, they are calculated for 332 professors of economics in Italian universities and the results obtained used to rank Italian university departments.     

Scientific and technological development in Brazil. The widening gap

This article examines the contrast between Brazil"s impressive scientific development over the last 25 years and its lagging innovative capacity. As the world"s eighth largest economy, an evaluation of this link offers insights, not only for Brazil, but also for parallel developments in other emerging countries. The growth rate of Brazilian scientific production has exceeded the international average, showing a six-fold increase in the last twenty-five years. However, Brazil"s innovation capability is still unsatisfactory and, in contrast to its scientific production, is failing to grow significantly. This hiatus between the generation of science and innovation is also typical of other emergent countries. A possible remedy is suggested: interaction with universities and research centers is particularly necessary for Brazilian companies - far more so than in industrialized countries. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A survey of Quality Engineering–Management journals by bibliometric indicators

This paper analyses some of the most popular scientific journals in the Quality field from the point of view of three bibliometric indicators: the Hirsch (h) index for journals, the total number of citations and the h‐spectrum. In particular, h‐spectrum is a novel tool based on h, making it possible to (i) identify a reference profile of the typical authors of a journal; (ii) compare different journals; and (iii) provide a rough indication of their ‘bibliometric positioning’ in the scientific community. Results of this analysis can be helpful for guiding potential authors and members of the scientific community in the Quality Engineering/Management area. A large amount of empirical data are presented and discussed. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Thirty years of Brazilian research in Antarctica: ups, downs and perspectives

The Antarctic continent is the most untouched region of the world but is also among the most vulnerable to global environmental change. Alterations to the Antarctic environment can have cascading effects many of which are unpredictable. Our objective was to investigate the contribution of Brazilian scientists to Antarctic research and to characterize the actions taken by the country to improve its scientific output and its international impact in this area. Scientific publications related to Antarctica, released from 1981 to 2011 were searched using three important science data bases. The data were used to determine the absolute increase and the relative growth rate of publications in order to characterize the contribution of Brazil to the world’s scientific understanding of Antarctica. The number of publications revealed an undersized contribution of the Brazilian science to the world’s publications about Antarctica. However, over the last 30 years there has been a substantial increase in the number of publications associated with governmental financial policies. As in other countries, Brazil’s most significant scientific contributions regarding the Antarctic continent are in the biological sciences. Therefore, public policies should maintain the current official support, while the research groups should pay attention to strategic scientific and technological areas still uncovered in the Antarctic research.     

Is there a correlation between journal impact factor and researchers’ performance? A study comprising the fields of clinical nephrology and neurosciences

Quantifying the scientific performance of investigators has become an integral part of decision-making in research policy. The aim of the present study was to evaluate if there is a correlation between journal impact factor (IF) and researchers’ influence among a selected group of Brazilian investigators in the fields of clinical nephrology and neurosciences. This study was based on 94 senior investigators (36 in clinical nephrology and 58 in clinical neurosciences) receiving productivity scholarships from the Brazilian Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) according to a list provided by the agency in February 2009. Scientific performance indicators included in the analysis were: number of papers indexed by the Web of Science and Scopus databases, number of citations, h- and m-index. IFs were analyzed as (1) cumulative IF (∑IF), (2) IF adjusted by time (IF/t), and (3) average IF. There was a moderate positive correlation only between ∑IF and two indicators: total number of citations (P < 0.001) and h-index (P < 0.001). There was also a positive correlation between IF/t and m-index (P < 0.001). There was an agreement in these correlations between both groups (clinical nephrology and neurosciences). No significant correlation between the average IF and any of the scientific indicators was detected. A cut-off of 10.53 for IF/t showed the best performance in predicting researchers with m-index equal to or greater than 1. According to our findings, other qualitative and quantitative instruments rather than IF are clearly needed for identifying researchers with outstanding scientific output.     

Evolution of the publications in clinical neurology: scientific impact of different countries during the 2000–2009 period

We analyzed the productivity and visibility of publications on the subject category of Clinical Neurology by countries in the period 2000–2009. We used the Science Citation Index Expanded database of the ISI Web of Knowledge. The analysis was restricted to the citable documents. Bibliometric indicators included the number of publications, the number of citations, the median and interquartile range of the citations, and the h-index. We identified 170,483 publications (84.9 % original articles) with a relative increase of 28.5 % throughout the decade. Fourteen countries published over 2,000 documents in the decade and received more than 50,000 citations. The average of citations received per publication was 8 (interquartile range: 3–20) and the h-index was 261. USA was the country with the highest number of publications, followed by Germany, Japan, the UK and Italy. Moreover, USA publications had the largest number of citations received (44.5 % of total), followed by the UK, Germany, Canada, and Italy. On the other hand, Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK had the highest median citations for their total publications. During the period 2000–2009 there was a significant increase in Clinical Neurology publications. Most of the publications and citations comprised 14 countries, with the USA in the first position. Interestingly, most of the publications and citations originated from only 14 countries, with European countries with relatively low population, such as Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Belgium, and the Netherlands, in this top group.     

Brazilian scientific production in science education

In the present study we analyzed the Brazilian scientific production in the area of science education. The study was structured on: data by research groups registered in Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico; analysis of the post-graduate strictu sensu programs; analysis of theses and dissertations linked to post-graduate programs; and papers in international databases. Our research was conducted strictly via world wide web, from December 2009 to September 2010. It was found that both number of research groups, researchers, post-graduate programs, thesis, dissertations and papers presented a marked increase, especially in the last decade (from 2000 onwards). The major research centers were found to be located in public universities from Brazilian southeast and south regions. However, it was observed a tendency of decentralization, due to a recent investment in new public universities in the other Brazilian regions. So, this study sought to present an overview of the scientific production about science education and we expect that this information can help to expand the vision about the development of this research area in Brazil.     

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.     

Analysis of the ch-index: an indicator to evaluate the diffusion of scientific research output by citers

This paper focuses the attention on the ch-index, a recent bibliometric indicator similar to the Hirsch (h) index, to evaluate the published research output of a scientist (Ajiferuke and Wolfram, Proceedings of the 12th international conference of the international society for scientometrics and informetrics. Rio de Janeiro, pp. 798–808, 2009). Ch-index is defined as the number such that, for a general group of scientific publications, ch publications are cited by at least ch different citers while the other publications are cited by no more than ch different citers. The basic difference from the classical h is that, according to ch, the diffusion of one author’s publication is evaluated on the basis of the number of different citing authors (or citers), rather than the number of received citations. The goal of this work is to discuss the pros and cons of ch and identify its connection with h. A large sample of scientists in the Quality Engineering/Management field are analyzed so as to investigate the novel indicator’s characteristics. Then, the analysis is preliminarily extended to other scientific disciplines. The most important result is that ch is almost insensitive to self-citations and/or citations made by recurrent citers, and it can be profitably used for complementing h.     

Positive and negative aspects of citation indices and journal impact factors

The Hirsch citation index h is nowadays the most frequently used numerical indicator for the performance of scientists as reflected in their output and in the reaction of the scientific community reflected in citations of individual contributions. A few of the possible improvements of h are briefly reviewed. Garfield??s journal impact factor (IF) characterizes the reaction of the scientific community to publications in journals, reflected in citations of all papers published in any given journal during the preceding 2?years, and normalized against all citable articles during the same period. Again, a few of the possible improvements or supplements of IF are briefly reviewed, including the journal-h index proposed by Braun, Gl?nzel, and Schubert. Ascribing higher weighting factors to citations of individual papers proportionally to IF is considered to be a misuse of useful numerical indices based on citations. At most, one could turn this argument on its head and one can find reasons to ascribe an inverse proportionality relative to IF for individual citations: if a paper is considered worthy to be cited even if it was published in a low-IF journal, that citation ought to be worth more than if the citation would have been from a higher-impact journal. A weight factor reflecting the prestige of the citing author(s) may also be considered.     

S&T knowledge production from 2000 to 2009 in two periphery countries: Brazil and South Korea

This paper investigates the dynamic evolution profiles of science and technology knowledge production in Brazil and the Republic of Korea from 2000 to 2009. The two countries have followed different models of publication profiles, bioenvironmental model and Japanese model, and they currently belong to periphery countries in terms of the center-periphery framework. Brazil and the Republic of Korea have established a few core disciplines successfully and increased their share in the world publication of scientific papers over the last decade. Notwithstanding the fact that the two countries have recorded sustained growth in the percentage of published scientific papers, South Korea has evolved into a more balanced science and technology knowledge production system, whereas Brazil into the more unbalanced knowledge production system. Core-lagging or periphery-lagging patterns of science production have been revealed in Brazil and indirectly imply that the existing science base has not been fully stimulated or utilized.     

Scientific production in Computer Science: A comparative study of Brazil and other countries

In this paper we present a study about scientific production in Computer Science in Brazil and several other countries, as measured by the number of articles in journals and conference proceedings indexed by ISI and by Scopus. We compare the Brazilian production from 2001 to 2005 with some Latin American, Latin European, BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China), and other relevant countries (South Korea, Australia and USA). We also classify and compare these countries according to the ratio of publications in journals and conferences (the ones indexed by the two services). The results show that Brazil has by far the largest production among Latin American countries, has a production about one third of Spain’s, one fourth of Italy’s, and about the same as India and Russia. The growth in Brazilian publications during the period places the country in the mid-range group and the distribution of Brazilian production according to impact factor is similar to most countries.     

The changing dynamics in citation index publication position China in a race with the USA for global leadership

Along with China’s economic emergence is a controversy over the quality and international visibility of citation index publications. This study uses bibliometric statistics to shed further light on the global landscape of citation index publications with special focus on China and the USA. The analysis explores 31 years of the TRS (Thomson Reuters Scientific) database, spanning the 1980–2010 period. Based on this study, the USA maintains global dominance for both WOK (Web of Knowledge) and WOS (Web of Science) TRS publications. Although China ranks a distant second for WOK, it lags behind five other nations for WOS publications. China’s scientific base needs further restructuring for greater global visibility. Emerging economies such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa are fast rising in the global ranks for WOK/WOS publications. China may already be leading the world in some publication attributes, although it could take several more decades to catch up with the USA in others. Normalizations of the publications with population, PTE (population with tertiary education) and GDP (gross domestic product) put small/low-population countries in the global lead. However, countries such as Canada, Greenland, Iceland and Sweden still rank high for most of these publication attributes. Furthermore, WOS per WOK analysis shows that small and/or economically weak countries place greater emphasis on WOS publications. This is particularly visible for countries in Africa and South America. Despite the addition of a large number of indigenous Chinese journals to the TRS database, prediction analysis suggests that China’s desire to surpass the USA could be delayed for several decades. In the race for the next-generation scientific superpower, however, China not only needs to sustain substantial investments in research and development, but also requires restructuring of its research industry. This is especially critical for data readiness, availability and accessibility to the scientific community, and radical implementations of research recommendations.     

Brazilian scientific production in areas of biological sciences: a comparative study on the modalities of full doctorate in Brazil or abroad

Know and compare the Brazilian scientific production of researchers that did full PhD in Brazil or abroad may be important to evaluate the development of science in the country. In this context, the current study was planned to verify the evolution of scientific production of researchers that concluded PhD in Brazil or abroad between 1997 and 2002. The evaluation included specifically the scientific production of PhDs in the areas of biochemistry, physiology and pharmacology during the period of 9 years after the PhD conclusion. The data were obtained from the database of CAPES (Foundation for Higher Education Development in Brazil), CNPq (National Council of Technological and Scientific Development), Lattes, Web of Science (Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and Scival—Scopus). In terms of quantity, researchers that did full PhD in Brazil published more articles than the researchers that did it abroad. However, articles from researchers that did the PhD in Brazil were published in journals with lower impact factor and received less citation than the articles published by researchers that did PhD abroad. The results indicate that the qualitative performance of researchers that did PhD abroad was better than those who did PhD in Brazil. Consequently, the policies of Brazilian government need to be devoted to enhance the relevance of Brazilian articles in terms of scientific quality and international insertion.