Contribution of Turkish Researchers to the World's Biomedical Literature (1988–1997)

The contribution of Turkish researchers to positive sciences is increasing. Turkish scientists published more than 5100 articles in 1998 in scientific journals indexed by the Institute for Scientific Information's Science Citation Index, which elevated Turkey to the 25^th place in the world rankings in terms of total contribution to science. In this paper, we report the preliminary findings of the bibliometric characteristics (authors and affiliations, medical journals and their impact factors, among others) of a total of 8442 articles published between 1988 and 1997 by scientists affiliated with Turkish institutions and indexed in the MEDLINE database.     

Institutional change and scientific research: A preliminary bibliometric analysis of institutional influences on Turkey’s recent social science publications

This paper provides a detailed assessment of recent indexed journal publications by Turkish social scientists. We first present information on SCI, SSCI and AHCI indexed journal articles that were published by Turkish researchers over the past three decades. An inspection of publication statistics indicates a considerable improvement, especially during the last five years of the 1973–2005 period that we examine, in Turkey’s publication record in terms of number of articles authored or co-authored by Turkish researchers. In the next step, we scrutinize institutional sources of this improvement, emphasizing regulatory and organizational changes that have both forced researchers to publish in indexed journals and remunerated those who did so. Finally, we provide a qualitative assessment of recent improvement in publication performance of Turkish researchers by focusing on a particular behavioral consequence of institutional changes and its implications for impact that research from Turkey has on global research activity. Bibliometric analysis of articles published by Turkish researchers in SSCI-indexed journals during 2000–2005 shows that recent regulatory and organizational changes seem to have instituted a particular publication habit, publishing in journals with lower impact factor, which was earlier observed in other parts of the world where publication counts were used for performance evaluation, and that signs of improvement in our select indicators of impact are yet to be observed.     

Environmental sciences research in northern Australia, 2000–2011: a bibliometric analysis within the context of a national research assessment exercise

This paper reports on a bibliometric analysis of environmental sciences research in northern Australia between 2000 and 2011. It draws on publications data for Charles Darwin University (CDU) and James Cook University (JCU) researchers to present a bibliometric profile of the journals in which they publish, the citations to their research outputs, and the key research topics discussed in the publications. Framing this analysis, the study explored the relationship between the two universities’ publications and their ‘fit’ with the environmental sciences field as defined by the Australian research assessment model, Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA). The Scopus database retrieved more records than Web of Science, although only minor differences were seen in the journals in which researchers published most frequently and the most highly cited articles. Strong growth in publications is evident in the 12 year period, but the journals in which the researchers publish most frequently differ from the journals in which the most highly cited articles are published. Many of the articles by CDU and JCU affiliated researchers are published in journals outside of the environmental sciences category as defined by Scopus and Web of Science categories and the ERA, however, the research conducted at each university aligns closely with that institution’s research priorities.     

Co-authorship networks in social sciences: The case of Turkey

We analyse the co-authorship networks of researchers affiliated at universities in Turkey by using two databases: the international SSCI database and the Turkish ULAKBIM database. We find that co-authorship networks are composed largely of isolated groups and there is little intersection between the two databases, permitting little knowledge diffusion. There seems to be two disparate populations of researchers. While some scholars publish mostly in the international journals, others target the national audience, and there is very little intersection between the two populations. The same observation is valid for universities, among which there is very little collaboration. Our results point out that while Turkish social sciences and humanities publications have been growing impressively in the last decade, domestic networks to ensure the dissemination of knowledge and of research output are very weak and should be supported by domestic policies.     

Life sciences research in Venezuela

The development, current status and dynamics of research in biology related domains in Venezuela is examined through the study of demographic, academic distribution, scientific output and productivity, for two sets of investigators that fit a profile outlined for life sciences researchers or scientists. The first group corresponds to biologists extracted from the ranks of the official Program for the Promotion of Researchers (PPI), the other, pulled out from those that publish in biologically oriented journals, indexed by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI). Both sets of biology scientists, PPI researchers or Web of Science/ISI scientists, show similar characteristics. The number (absolute and relative) of PPI member that are supposedly dedicated to biological research but do not publish in ISI indexed journals was found to be very similar to the number of supposedly non biologist members of the PPI Program that do publish biological articles in ISI indexed journals. There is also an ongoing feminization process, of academic hierarchies. Female biologists predominate in lower academic ranks and in research cadres, as many as 70% in some areas of biology. This contrasts with the pattern of male predominance observed during the second half of twentieth century in the country. Productivity of Venezuelan biologists seems to depend on gender; men are more productive that their female counterparts. From the bibliometric standpoint, it is found that, on average, 30% of all publications produced in the country are related to biology (or life sciences). The Venezuelan biologists network qualifies neither as a ‘Small World’ nor it follows the ‘Scale Free’ model. Finally, in a country rich in renewable natural resources, it seems that the Venezuelan community of researchers in biology is in decline, despite the fact that they constitute its most productive group of investigators.     

Turkey's output in social science publications: 1970-1999

Publications originating from Turkey in SSCI were analyzed for changes in the thirty-year span between 1970 and 1999. There has been a high rate of increase in the number of publications and most of these publications were in the form of articles and review papers. The rate of increase was lower than the increase in science publications but the rankings among other countries in sciences and social sciences were comparable. The analysis of impact factors and citations received by published work showed a decline across years. Many of the high-impact publications were joint work with foreign authors. The low level of impact was attributed in part by the difficulty of international scholars in belonging to research networks. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The evaluation of scientific productivity in Brazil: An assessment of the mental health field

Brazilian scientific production has increased significantly over the last decade, and mental health has been a leading research field in the country, with a growing number of articles published in high quality international journals. This article analyses the scientific output of mental health research between 2004 and 2006 and estimates individual research performance based on four different strategies. A total of 106 mental health scientists were included in the analysis; together they published 1,209 articles indexed in Medline or ISI, with over 65% of the production in journals with impact factor ≥1. Median impact factor of publications was 2. Spearman correlation coefficient showed a large positive correlation between all four different measures used to estimate individual research output. Ten investigators were together responsible for almost 30% of the articles published in the period, whereas 65% of the sample contributed with less than 10 articles.     

A surname-based bibliometric indicator: publications in biomedical journal

Surnames have been used as a proxy in studies on health care for various ethnic groups and also applied to ascribe ethnicity in studies on the genetic structure of a population. The aim of this study was to use a surname-based bibliometric indicator to assess the representation of Jewish authors in US biomedical journals. The other aim was to test the hypothesis that the representation of Jewish authors in US biomedical journals corresponds to their representation among US Nobel Prize winners in Medicine, 1960–2009. From among articles published 1960–2009 in all journals covered by Medline (>5,000), and in the top 10 US biomedical journals we counted articles by authors from the following three groups: Kohenic–Levitic surnames, other common Jewish surnames, and the most frequent non-Jewish surnames in the USA. The frequency of a surname in the US population (1990 US Census) was used to calculate the expected number of scientific publications: the total number of published articles multiplied by a surname’s frequency. The actual number of articles with that surname was also determined. The ratio of actual to expected number of articles was used as a measure of representation proportionality. It was found that the ratio of actual to expected number of articles in both Jewish groups is close to 10 among all (>5,000) journals, and close to 20 in the top 10 journals. The ratio of actual to expected numbers of Jewish Nobel Laureates in the USA is also close to 20. In conclusion, the representation of Jewish authors in top 10 US biomedical journals corresponds to the representation of Jewish Nobel Laureates among US laureates. We hypothesize that disproportional representation of Jewish scientists as authors in top biomedical journals and among Nobel Prize laureates in Medicine is mostly due to their overrepresentation as research participants, not because of the increased chances for reward for a Jewish researcher per se.     

Standardization problem of author affiliations in citation indexes

Academic effectiveness of universities is measured with the number of publications and citations. However, accessing all the publications of a university reveals a challenge related to the mistakes and standardization problems in citation indexes. The main aim of this study is to seek a solution for the unstandardized addresses and publication loss of universities with regard to this problem. To achieve this, all Turkey-addressed publications published between 1928 and 2009 were analyzed and evaluated deeply. The results show that the main mistakes are based on character or spelling, indexing and translation errors. Mentioned errors effect international visibility of universities negatively, make bibliometric studies based on affiliations unreliable and reveal incorrect university rankings. To inhibit these negative effects, an algorithm was created with finite state technique by using Nooj Transducer. Frequently used 47 different affiliation variations for Hacettepe University apart from “Hacettepe Univ” and “Univ Hacettepe” were determined by the help of finite state grammar graphs. In conclusion, this study presents some reasons of the inconsistencies for university rankings. It is suggested that, mistakes and standardization issues should be considered by librarians, authors, editors, policy makers and managers to be able to solve these problems.     

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.     

Central international visibility of Brazilian psychiatric publications from 1981 to 1995

In this study, we examine the scientific output of Brazilian psychiatry, based on the databaseof the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), publications in the 10 most important psychiatricjournals, and publications in major Brazilian journals. The number of Brazilian publications (i.e.,those carrying at least one Brazilian address) in psychiatry in the ISI database increased by 168%during the 15-year period under study (1981-1995) . Despite this growth, the relative contributionof publications in psychiatry to the country's publications in medical sciences did not change overthe 15-year period. This fraction, around 2%, remained at less than one-third of the averagecontribution of psychiatry journals to publications in medicine worldwide. The impact inferredfrom number of citations (1981-1992) shows that Brazilian articles in psychiatry were cited lessthan the world average in this field. In the 10 psychiatry journals with the highest impact,Brazilian authors published only 48 articles in the 1981-1995 period, representing only 0.2% ofthe articles in those journals. Like their American and British counterparts, Brazilian psychiatristsalso published primarily in domestic journals: 87.1% of the publications by Brazilians appeared inthe two major Brazilian psychiatric journals, compared with only 12.9% in foreign journals.Among publications in psychiatry in the ISI database, the number of articles co-authored byBrazilians with scientists from other countries increased 12.3 fold from 1981-1985 to 1991-1995,representing at the end 50% of all publications by Brazilian psychiatrists in international journals.Despite all cuts in funding for Brazilian science during the last decades, all of the articles in oursample originated in public universities, and only 10 universities were responsible for 70% of thepublications by Brazilian psychiatrists in our survey period. We conclude that Brazilianpsychiatric research is a subject worthy of particular concern, especially if we take into accountthe country's modest scientific performance and the socio-economic consequences of mentaldisorders in the Brazilian population.     

Publication types,citation rates and evaluation

In order to resolve questions frequently raised in the context of research evaluation about the citation rates of journal publications in relation to other types of publications, the total research output of substantial institutions or systems has to be brought under bibliographic control. That precondition has rarely been met: there are few published studies of the total range of publications of major research institutions, including books, book chapters, technical reports and published conference proceedings. The Research Evaluation and Policy Project (REPP) at the Australian National University (ANU) has established a database covering all the publications from the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS), a fulltime research institution at the ANU, and has examined in detail citations in the journal literature accruing to all types of publications. The database contains a significant number of publications, nearly 30 000 items, and covers the sciences and the social sciences and humanities. This data enables us to examine whether the citation record of research publications appearing in journals indexed by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) is a useable surrogate for the citation record within ISI journals of all model of publication. We contend that, if certain preconditions are met, the choice of citation rate is not critical.     

Neophilia ranking of scientific journals

The ranking of scientific journals is important because of the signal it sends to scientists about what is considered most vital for scientific progress. Existing ranking systems focus on measuring the influence of a scientific paper (citations)—these rankings do not reward journals for publishing innovative work that builds on new ideas. We propose an alternative ranking based on the proclivity of journals to publish papers that build on new ideas, and we implement this ranking via a text-based analysis of all published biomedical papers dating back to 1946. In addition, we compare our neophilia ranking to citation-based (impact factor) rankings; this comparison shows that the two ranking approaches are distinct. Prior theoretical work suggests an active role for our neophilia index in science policy. Absent an explicit incentive to pursue novel science, scientists underinvest in innovative work because of a coordination problem: for work on a new idea to flourish, many scientists must decide to adopt it in their work. Rankings that are based purely on influence thus do not provide sufficient incentives for publishing innovative work. By contrast, adoption of the neophilia index as part of journal-ranking procedures by funding agencies and university administrators would provide an explicit incentive for journals to publish innovative work and thus help solve the coordination problem by increasing scientists’ incentives to pursue innovative work.     

Brazilian immunology: One hundred years later

Brazilian immunology dates from the end of the 19^th century. The aim of the present paperwas to analyze the impact of this field in contemporary Brazilian biomedical research. For this, a15 years period (1981-1995) was studied. Production of immunological articles in Brazilrepresented in 1995 a percentage of 8.66 of total papers in biomedical sciences in this country.This level was achieved by an exponential increase in 1991 in the number of papers inimmunology followed by a steady increase in the subsequent years. This growth was onlyobserved in articles published in international immunology journals listed by ISI, a similarincrease did not occur when the most representative Brazilian journal in biomedical sciences wasanalyzed. The production in immunology in the last five years (1991-1995) represented 60.69% oftotal articles in this field published in the whole 15 years period. When quality was assessed basedon impact factor of the journals were the articles appeared, 52.71% of total immunology papershad been published in journals with impact factors varying between 7.29 and 3.24. A higherdegree of international co-authorship was seen both in articles published in international journalsand presentations at international congresses compared to national ones. The main countriescollaborating with Brazil were: EUA, England and France. Within Brazil, immunology researchwas not equally distributed. Around 80% of the articles were produced by four states (São Paulo,Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and Bahia), São Paulo being responsible for more than half of thosearticles. This geographic distribution closely resembles the distribution of the Brazilian Society ofImmunology (SBI) membership. The main field of study throughout the period wasimmunoparasitology.     

Scientometric profile of Indian agricultural research as seen through Science Citation Index Expanded

Summary An analysis of 16891 publications published by Indian scientists during 1993-2002 and indexed by Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science) indicates that the publication output in the agricultural sciences is on the decline since 1998 onwards. 'Dairy and animal sciences' followed by 'veterinary sciences' constitute the largest component of the Indian agricultural research output. Agricultural universities and institutes under the aegis of Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) are the major producers of research output. Most of the papers have been published in domestic journals and in low normalized impact factor journals with a low rate of citation per paper. Most of the highly productive institutions are either agricultural universities or the institutes under the aegis of ICAR. Most of the prolific authors are from the highly productive institutions. However, only a few highly cited authors are from highly productive institutions.     

Independent publications from Serbia in the Science Citation Index Expanded: a bibliometric analysis

This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of articles from the Republic of Serbia in the period 2006–2012 that are indexed in the Thomson Reuters SCI-EXPANDED database. The Republic of Serbia is a small country in Europe with about seven million citizens that became an independent country in 2006. Since 2006, Serbian science has achieved some recognition. Analysis included 14,293 articles with authors all from Serbia. Distribution of published articles in the Web of Science categories, journals, scientific-research institutions and researchers were analysed. Most cited independent research articles from Serbia were also analysed. The Y-index indicator for rating the productivity of researchers and institutions was used. This indicator takes into account the contribution of the researcher to the published results. The results showed that the productivity of articles from Serbia is significant compared to neighbouring Serbian countries, taking into account the number of researchers in these countries, their GDPs and the percentages of GDPs spent on research.     

The dangers of performance-based research funding in non-competitive higher education systems

An increasing number of nations allocate public funds to research institutions on the basis of rankings obtained from national evaluation exercises. Therefore, in non-competitive higher education systems where top scientists are dispersed among all the universities, rather than concentrated among a few, there is a high risk of penalizing those top scientists who work in lower-performance universities. Using a 5 year bibliometric analysis conducted on all Italian universities active in the hard sciences from 2004 to 2008, this work analyzes the distribution of publications and relevant citations by scientists within the universities, measures the research performance of individual scientists, quantifies the intensity of concentration of top scientists at each university, provides performance rankings for the universities, and indicates the effects of selective funding on the top scientists of low-ranked universities.     

The citation impact of social sciences and humanities upon patentable technology

This paper examines the citation impact of papers published in scientific-scholarly journals upon patentable technology, as reflected in examiner- or inventor-given references in granted patents. It analyses data created by SCImago Research Group, linking PATSTAT’s scientific non-patent references (SNPRs) to source documents indexed in Scopus. The frequency of patent citations to journal papers is calculated per discipline, year, institutional sector, journal subject category, and for “top” journals. PATSTAT/Scopus-based statistics are compared to those derived from Web of Science/USPTO linkage. A detailed assessment is presented of the technological impact of research publications in social sciences and humanities (SSH). Several subject fields perform well in terms of the number of citations from patents, especially Library and Information Science, Language and Linguistics, Education, and Law, but many of the most cited journals find themselves in the interface between SSH and biomedical or natural sciences. Analyses of the titles of citing patents and cited papers are presented that shed light upon the cognitive content of patent citations. It is proposed to develop more advanced indicators of citation impact of papers upon patents, and ways to combine citation counts with citation content and context analysis.

     

Intellectual contribution of Indian periodontists to world literature: a bibliometric evaluation of Pubmed database till 1st March, 2012

Scientifically liberated and developed countries produce huge amounts of cutting-edge publications in peer-reviewed impact-creating journals. These publications may become basis for various policies/other blueprints. There is no reported study regarding the publication trends of Periodontists from India. The aim of this study was to assess the trends of Indian Periodontist’s publications in Pubmed database till 1st March, 2012 by taking quantitative bibliometric approach. Studies were identified by running select search phrases on Pubmed search engine. Search inputs included, ‘dental’, ‘oral’, ‘periodontal’, ‘gingiva’, ‘gingival’, ‘periodontology’, ‘periodontics’, ‘periodontia’, ‘periodontitis’, ‘gingivitis’, and ‘dental implant’. A parallel search with above phrases along with ‘India’ also done to assess India-specific publications. All publications with or without available abstracts were analyzed for selected parameters. Analysis was performed to determine name of the journal, number of authors, year of publication, type of institute, statewide distribution, type of study etc. The approximate contribution of Indian Dental/Periodontal literature to Pubmed database is 1.45 % till 1st March 2012. The number of articles published by Indian Periodontists is 764 across 107 journals and starting from 1960. The number of original articles published were 510 (66.75 %) as opposed to 127 (16.62 %) each for review articles and case reports/case series. The average contribution of an Indian Periodontist to Pubmed database is 0.53 articles. The contribution of Indian Periodontists to world literature through Pubmed database is not voluminous but, the publications are multiplying every passing year almost in an exponential way. There is also an increasing trend towards original articles to be published.     

Scientific publishing in Benin as seen from Scopus

2,215 publications covering the period going from 1959 to 2011, with at least one author affiliated to Benin, were searched from Scopus and analyzed. These publications were co-authored by 10,225 scientists that correspond to 5,122 single authors in several disciplines of which the most prolific are Agricultural and biological science, and Medicine. None of the Benin-based journals were indexed in Scopus; approximately 5 % of the publications appeared in African reviews covered by Scopus. Researchers’ home institutions are mainly the University of Abomey-Calavi, its laboratories and some international organizations or cooperation agencies. The private universities were not mentioned in the affiliations list. The yearly percentage of international collaboration is over 80 %; France, the former colonial power is the main research partner whereas the West African region is the main partner at the African continent level; others partners are from Europe and America continents. This study suggests the setting up of a national database to index the domestic scientific literature; it should contribute to the improvement of the national research output.