International contribution to library and information science in Poland: A bibliometric analysis

This article reports findings from the study of the international contribution to the system of library and information science communication in Poland in the years 2003–2005. The sample consists of articles published both in selected journals and collective works. Two important dimensions determining the internationalization of local scholarly communication are considered: direct contribution (foreign authors’ articles and papers and their translations published in Poland) and indirect contribution (citedness of foreign authors’ documents in articles and papers published in Poland). Bibliographic data about the geographical distribution and affiliation of foreign authors are gathered and analyzed. Furthermore, the findings of citation analysis are presented to determine the percentage share of citations received by foreign documents as well as to find out what is the structure of such citations regarding the language and form, which thematic areas are most replete with such citations and which foreign journals are most cited in Poland.     

The evolution of the sleep science literature over 30 years: A bibliometric analysis

During the 1974–2004 period, the sleep literature had quadrupled (2384 publications in 1974, and 9721 in 2004) while overall scientific productivity had only doubled. The set of the seven most productive countries (USA, Japan, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada and Italy) in sleep research, and the geographical region distribution remained stable over the three decades. On the other hand several indicators appeared in the sleep research literature during the 1990s: the increasing productivity of sleep researchers; the growing number of countries publishing on sleep; the continuous creation of sleep-focused journals; the scattering of sleep publication among increasingly more scientific journals; the turnover among the leading journals; and the emergence of new entities such as China, Turkey, and the European Union.     

The global institutionalization of nanotechnology research: A bibliometric approach to the assessment of science policy

Based on bibliometric methods, this paper describes the global institutionalization of nanotechnology research from the mid-1980s to 2006. Owing to an extremely strong dynamics, the institutionalization of nanotechnology is likely to surpass those of major disciplines in only a few years. A breakdown of the relative institutionalizations strengths by the main geographical regions, countries, research sectors, disciplines, and institutional types provides a very diverse picture over the time period because of different national science policies. The results allow a critical assessment of the different science policies based on the relative institutionalizations strengths as well as the conclusion that the institutionalization process has run out of control of individual governments who once induced the development.     

The frequencies of multinational papers in various sciences

Multinational papers are defined here as ones written by authors who reside in different countries during the course of research. For each of 16 fields of science, I scanned the first 200 papers in 2005 in four major journals publishing original research papers. Those journals produced 40% of all the citations among those journals with Impact Factors greater than 1.0. The frequencies of multinational papers ranged from 13% in surgery to 55% in astronomy. Although one can list a dozen factors which might contribute toward multinational papers, I lack the data to test most of those. There are only minor correlations with team sizes and Impact Factors, inadequate to explain the range. There is a larger, but not convincing, dependence upon the fractions of single-author papers and its cause, if real, is unclear. However, the most prominent factor seems to be the nature of the objects studied; if they are usually local (e.g. in one hospital or in one laboratory), the papers tend to be domestic but if most of the objects are available simultaneously to scientists in many countries (e.g. the sky in astronomy or the oceans and the Earth’s atmosphere in geosciences or widespread diseases in the area of infectious diseases or plants and animals widely distributed in biology), the papers are often international. Auxiliary results for 2005 are an average of 5.5 ± 0.3 authors per paper and 6.6 ± 1.0% one-author papers.     

Innovation assessment in traditional industries. A proposal of aesthetic innovation indicators

Innovative activities are fundamental to the competitiveness strategies of the firms in a globalized market. Their assessment, using indicators such as those utilized in the Community Innovation Survey (CIS), shows significant sectoral dispersion. Traditional industries are in a weak position because the innovation they are involved in is mainly aesthetic, which is not really addressed in innovation surveys. In this work, we review the various criticisms levelled at existing indicators and propose some new indicators that would capture the types of innovations that are conducted by the traditional industries. This work is based on a study of the features of traditional industries and the concept of aesthetic novelty. The proposed indicators are tested in the Spanish footwear industry.     

What do we know about innovation in nanotechnology? Some propositions about an emerging field between hype and path-dependency

This contribution formulates a number of propositions about the emergence of novel nanoscience and nanotechnology (N&N). Seeking to complement recent work that aims to define a research agenda and draws on general insights from the innovation literature, this paper aims to synthesize knowledge from innovation-related studies of the N&N field. More specifically, it is suggested that N&N is often misconstrued as either a field of technology or an area of (broadly) converging technologies while evidence to date suggests rather that N&N be considered a set of inter-related and overlapping about not necessarily merging technologies. The role of instrumentation in connecting the various N&N fields is underlined. Finally, the question is raised whether change in N&N tends to be incremental rather than discontinuous, being the result of technological path-dependencies and lock-ins in industry-typical search regimes that are only slowly giving way to more boundary-crossing activities.     

A bibliometric study of China’s semiconductor literature compared with other major asian countries

In this paper we compare the scientific research in the semiconductor-related field in China with some other major nations in Asia. It is based on the bibliometric information from SCI-Expanded database during the time period of 1995–2004. We show that China has been developing fast in semiconductor research, and become the second productive country in Asia as reflected by the publication profile. The evidences indicate a significant increasing trend in the research efforts and readership among Asian countries. Similar to the scientists in Japan and South Korea, Chinese scientists were more inclined to work in larger groups, typically 4 or more authors. The assessment of research quality is further conducted based on citation-based measures. As benchmarks, two western countries, namely USA and Germany, have been compared in the citation analysis. It is revealed that the impacts of research outputs in the Asian countries, except for Japan, have been badly incommensurate with their devoted research efforts compared with USA and Germany. Like most of other Asian countries the research results of Chinese scientists in semiconductor have a low international visibility despite their strong research efforts and increasingly large domestic readership. The application of Leimkuhler curve illustrates vividly the inequality of citation times among the compared countries. Furthermore, the Gini Indices of each country and each pair of countries are calculated which illustrates again the inequality of informetric productivities.     

The reporting of the risks from genetically modified organisms in the mass media, 2002–2004

This paper describes an analysis of coverage of the risks from agricultural and food genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) from April 2002 to April 2004 in 14 news media from six countries (Canada, France, Germany, Spain, the UK and the USA) which was conducted as part of a review for the European Commission of the management of risk communication. A total of 597 relevant news articles were found and coded for their presentational tone, the types of risk (environmental, financial, health and political, in that order), the organisms described (mainly maize, rape and beet crops), and the documents, people and organisations cited. UK news media tended to be the most “scary” and Spanish ones the most “robust”. Articles quoting public perceptions, non-governmental environmental organisations and politicians tended to emphasize the risks of GMOs; those quoting scientists tended to downplay the risks and describe their potential benefits. Some suggestions for possible action by the European Commission are put forward, such as the facilitation of contact between journalists and scientists, but it is recognized that for some newspapers, their editorial wish to campaign will inevitably over-ride their reporters’ wish to present the truth.     

Scientific and technological performance evaluation of the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) in the field of Biotechnology

An evaluation of the Spanish CSIC performance in Biotechnology, as compared with those of the French CNRS and the Italian CNR, has been carried out to determine the balance between the generation of scientific knowledge and the transfer of technology. This study shows a high scientific productivity mostly in journals with moderate impact factor, a low generation of patents and an insufficient transfer of knowledge to the Spanish companies. Other indicators confirm the existence of competitive human resources in biotechnological research producing scientific knowledge of interest for the development of patents and that cooperates successfully at European level.     

Why are Websites co-linked? The case of Canadian universities

This study examined why Websites were co-linked using Canadian university Websites as the test set. Pages that co-linked to these university Websites were located using Yahool. A random sample of 859 co-linking pages (the page that initiated the co-link) was retrieved and the contents of the page, as well as the context of the link, were manually examined to record the following variables: language, country, type of Website, and the reasons for co-linking. The study found that in over 94% of cases, the two co-linked universities were related academically; many of these cases (38%) showed a relationship specifically in teaching or research. This confirms results, from previous quantitative studies, that Web co-links can be a measure of the similarity or relatedness of sites being co-linked and that Web co-link analysis can thus be used to study relationships among linked Websites.