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.     

The frequencies of occurrence of scientific papers with authors of each initial letter and their variation with nationality

This paper introduces alphabet spectra which are the 26 frequencies of occurrence of scientific papers in a given sample with at least one author of each initial, A, B,...Z. The sum of these frequencies exceeds unity because of multiple authorships. Formulae are given relating this sum to the mean number of authors per paper in the sample. The method is applied to show the increase in this number over the last 15 years in different fields of science and for different countries. The alphabet spectra vary greatly depending on the nationality of the scientists concerned and can be compared to frequency absorption spectra for chemical elements or molecules. The spectra can be used to determine the national composition of a country's scientific authors and how this has changed with time.     

James Bond and citations to his books

This paper investigates two bibliometric problems: the listing of books in a specialist area (ornithology) and the determination of the citation pattern to individual authors, who often re-issue their books in later editions. James Bond, a Philadelphia ornithologist, who specialised in the birds of the West Indies, is used as an example of a naturalist whose long career led to many journal articles and enduring scientific fame through a well-known book. He also attained some unexpected notoriety through the use of his name by a popular novelist. Methods for the evaluation of his book and associated bird checklists in comparison with other similar works are presented on the basis of their citations. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The sex and ethnicity or national origins of researchers in astronomy and oncology in four countries, 2006–2007 and 2011–2012

This paper uses two large databases, one of given names and one of family names, to categorise the names of researchers from Italy, Sweden, the UK and the USA whose papers in astronomy and oncology were published in 2006–2007 and in 2011–2012 by sex (gender) and ethnicity or national origin. For all the countries, there were relatively many more females publishing papers in oncology than in astronomy, but their share of contributions was lower than the percentage of researchers. Sweden and the UK had much higher percentages of both other European and Rest of the World researchers than Italy did. US researchers with non-European names were categorised in six main country groups. The ones with the greatest presence were Chinese (mainly Mandarin) and South Asians (mainly Indians). The method could be adapted to investigate the progress of women in research in many other countries, and the role played by non-national researchers in their scientific output.     

Researchers" and users" perceptions of the relative standing of biomedical papers in different journals

Journal citation impact factors, which are frequently used as a surrogate measure of research quality, do not correlate well with UK researchers" subjective views of the relative importance of journals as media for communicating important biomedical research results. The correlation varies with the sub-field: it is almost zero in nursing research but is moderate in more “scientific” sub-fields such as multiple sclerosis research, characterised by many authors per paper and appreciable foreign co-authorship. If research evaluation is to be based on journal-specific indicators, then these must cover different aspects of the process whereby research impacts on other researchers and on healthcare improvement. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Yogoslav politics, “ethnic cleansing” and co-authorship in science

Scientific outputs from Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia, and the patterns of co-authorship between them and five western countries and with each other have been determined from theScience Citation Index. They reflect accurately the political situation underlying the recent break-up of the former Yugoslavia, and long-term international alliances and friendships, but also take account of geographical proximity, which assists scientific co-operation. There is no evidence of changes in the ethnic composition of Serbian and Croatian scientists overall, as revealed by the names of their researchers before and after the civil war. However some changes appear to have taken place in Serbia outwith Belgrade, which are consistent with the reports of the expulsion of Croats living in Vojvodina.     

The internal migration of Indian scientists, 1981–2003, from an analysis of surnames

Although many Indian surnames are common across the whole country, some are specifically associated with just one or a few of the 35 states and union territories that comprise India today. For example, Reddy comes from Andhra Pradesh and Das, Ghosh and Roy from West Bengal. We investigated the extent to which researchers with names associated with some of the larger states were writing scientific papers in those states, and in other ones, and to see how these concentrations (relative to the whole of India) had changed since the early 1980s. We found that West Bengalis, for example, were now significantly less concentrated in their home state than formerly, and that their concentrations elsewhere were strongly influenced by the state’s geographical distance from West Bengal and, to a lesser extent, by the correlation between the scientific profile of their host state and their own preferences (which favoured physics and engineering over biology and mathematics). Thus they were strongly represented in nearby Bihar, Assam and Orissa, and much less so in Tamil Nadu and Kerala.     

Co-author inclusion: A novel recursive algorithmic method for dealingwith homonyms in bibliometric analysis

Summary Large scale bibliometric analysis is often hindered by the presence of homonyms, or namesakes, of the researchers of interest in literature databases. This makes it difficult to build up a true picture of a researcher's publication record, as publications by another researcher with the same name will be included in search results. Using additional information such as title and author addresses, an expert in the field can generally tell if a paper is by a researcher or a namesake; however, manual checking is not practical in large scale studies. Previously various methods have been used to address this problem, chiefly based on filtering by subject, funding acknowledgement or author address. Co-author inclusion is a novel algorithmic method based on co-authorship for dealing with problems of homonyms in large bibliometric surveys. We compared co-author inclusion and subject and funding based filter against the manual assignment of papers by a subject expert (which we assumed to be correct). The subject and funding based filtering identifies only 75% as many papers as assigned by manual scoring. By using co-author inclusion once we increase this to 95%, two further rounds produces 99% as many papers as manual filtering. Although the number of papers identified that were not assigned to the PIs manually also increases, the absolute number is low: rising from 0.2% papers with subject and funding filtering, to 3% papers for three rounds of co-author inclusion.     

The effect of funding on the outputs of biomedical research

The Research Outputs Database (ROD) has been used to investigate the effects of different input variables, including the numbers of funding bodies, on the impact of research papers in a biomedical subfield (gastroenterology). This was determined by the medium-term impact of the journals in which they were published. It was shown that, when account was taken of the effects of the other input factors, the mean impact for a group of papers increased with the number of authors, the type of research (basic more than clinical), and with the number and identity of the funding bodies. However itdecreased slightly if there were more addresses; whether the paper was multinational had no significant effect. Previous work showing that multi-institution or multi-country papers are more highly cited reached this conclusion because it did not take into account the confounding effect of multiple funding sources, and possibly other factors.