A scientometric assessment of research output in nanoscience and nanotechnology: Pakistan perspective

In this study we present an analysis of the research trends in Pakistan in the field of nanoscience and nanotechnology. Starting with just seven publications in the year 2000, this number has steadily increased to 542 for the year 2011. Among the top 15 institutions with publications in nanotechnology 13 are universities and only two are R&D organizations. Almost 35 % of the research publications are in the field of material sciences followed by chemistry and physics in that order. The growth in the publications for period 2000–2011 is studied through relative growth rate and doubling time. The authorship pattern is measured by different collaboration parameters, like collaborative index, degree of collaboration, collaboration coefficient and modified collaboration coefficient. Finally the quality of papers is assessed by means of the h-index, g-index, hg-index and p-index.     

Collaboration in Indian physics: A case study of the macro and micro parametrization of sub-disciplines (1800–1950)

The decade beginning 1920 is an important watershed in the history of physics in modern India. This is evident from the bibliometric data available on the publications in physics between 1800 and 1950. The paper studies the evolution of collaboration in four subdisciplines of physics during this period. In order to do so, two sets of measures of research collaboration have been employed. The collaboration index and collaboration coefficient have been calculated for the sub-disciplines. As far as the micro-parametrization of the discipline is concerned, collaboration measures developed by Egghe are obtained for the research careers of four leading Indian physicists, who were responsible for the institutionalization of physics research in India. In the present case the role of individuals responsible for the institutionalization of physics research is seen to be germane to the explosion of the number of publications in the 1920s. At the conjucture of the history of science and scientometrics, it is evident how the former can endow the latter with a modality of explanation; further, it is evident how scientometrics can inform the efforts of historians of science.     

Validation of bibliometric indicators in the field of mathematics

Bibliometric analyses of scientific publications provide quantitative information that enables evaluators to obtain a useful picture of a team's research visibility. In combination with peer judgements and other qualitative background knowledge, these analyses can serve as a basis for discussions about research performance quality. However, many mathematicians are not convinced that citation counts do in fact provide useful information in the field of mathematics. According to these mathematicians, citation and publication habits differ completely from scholarly fields such as chemistry or physics. Therefore, it is impossible to derive valid information regarding research performance from citation counts. The aim of this study is to obtain more insight into the significance of citation-based indicators in the field of mathematics. To which extent do citation-scores mirror to the opinions of experts concerning the quality of a paper or a journal? A survey was conducted to answer this question.Top journals, as qualified by experts, receive significantly higher citation rates thangood journals. Thesegood journals, in turn, have significantly higher scores than journals with the qualificationless good. Top publications, recorded in the ISI database, receive on the average 15 times more citations than the mean score within the field of mathematics as a whole. In conclusion, the experts' views on top publications or top journals correspond very well to bibliometric indicators based on citation counts.     

Deutschsprachige physikhistorische Literatur aus dem 19. Jahrhundert: Struktur, Diktion, Wandlung

The development of historical publications of physics in the 19th century in German language is considered. The structures of eight books are discussed. In detail we compare the structure, the possibilities of classification of periods and the designing of the contents. In the case of three books we analyse the contents with regard to changing to modern physics.     

Physics and Applications of Bismuth Ferrite

BiFeO₃ is perhaps the only material that is both magnetic and a strong ferroelectric at room temperature. As a result, it has had an impact on the field of multiferroics that is comparable to that of yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO) on superconductors, with hundreds of publications devoted to it in the past few years. In this Review, we try to summarize both the basic physics and unresolved aspects of BiFeO₃ (which are still being discovered with several new phase transitions reported in the past few months) and device applications, which center on spintronics and memory devices that can be addressed both electrically and magnetically.     

Four aspects of the institutionalization of physics research in India (1990–1950): Substantiating the claims of histortical sociology through bibliometrics

This paper examines the process of the institutionalization of research in physics in India. In order to do so, it employs bibliometric data such as research publications in physics research journals between 1900 and 1950. This data is then analyzed to obtain certain indicators that are pointers of the aspects of the institutionalization of research in physics in India. The four aspects of institutionalization studied here are important for the researches of those adopting sociological approaches in the study of the history of sciences. Thus the bibliometric techniques employed complements the efforts of historians of science studying the professionalization of physics research in India, and in this case those dealing with disciplines like physics. Further, the bibliometric data helps substantiate the claims of historians of science that the years 1905 to 1935 were particularly important for the history of physics in India. The conclusions of historians are based on success stories of a few leading physicists of the time. Within an institutional framework, this paper argues that there was a larger ground swell indicative of the emergence of a phhsics research community in India.     

Knowledge mapping of the Iranian nanoscience and technology: a text mining approach

Nanoscience and technology (NST) is a relatively new interdisciplinary scientific domain, and scholars from a broad range of different disciplines are contributing to it. However, there is an ambiguity in its structure and in the extent of multidisciplinary scientific collaboration of NST. This paper investigates the multidisciplinary patterns of Iranian research in NST based on a selection of 1,120 ISI??indexed articles published during 1974?C2007. Using text mining techniques, 96 terms were identified as the main terms of the Iranian publications in NST. Then the scientific structure of the Iranian NST was mapped through multidimensional scaling, based upon the co-occurrence of the main terms in the academic publications. The results showed that the NST domain in Iranian publications has a multidisciplinary structure which is composed of different fields, such as pure physics, analytical chemistry, chemistry physics, material science and engineering, polymer science, biochemistry and new emerging topics.     

Scientometric analysis of relative performance in a key university in Romania

A scientometric analysis of the Babe?-Bolyai University in Romania is provided, highlighting the strong and the weak points with respect to a range of leading international universities and referencing to some extent to nation-wide data from several countries. Taken into account are such items as total number of publications, analyses per subject area or per research field, number of citations, types of publications, Hirsch indexes, and books. Internationally, chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer science, religion, area studies, geology, paleontology, and public administration are identified as the most active areas. Nationally, a number of additional strong points are identified, such as psychology, history, and environmental sciences. The percentage of researchers with reasonably high activity (e.g., at least ~ one publication per year as indexed in major databases) is relatively low (~10 %), and the percentage with reasonably high international competitiveness (based on citation counts, number of publications, books indexed in international libraries) is at only ~2 %. The decisive factor controlling an exponential increase in publications since ~2000–2004 appears to have been a conservatively managed exponential increase of the national GDP and implicitly of the research budgets.     

Citation expectations: are they realized? Study of the Matthew index for Russian papers published abroad

We consider the “Matthew effect” in the citation process which leads to reallocation (or misallocation) of the citations received by scientific papers within the same journals. The case when such reallocation correlates with a country where an author works is investigated. Russian papers in chemistry and physics published abroad were examined. We found that in both disciplines in about 60% of journals Russian papers are cited less than average ones. However, if we consider each discipline as a whole, citedness of a Russian paper in physics will be on the average level, while chemistry publications receive about 16% citations less than one may expect from the citedness of the journals where they appear. Moreover, Russian chemistry papers mostly become undercited in the leading journals of the field. Characteristics of a “Matthew index” indicator and its significance for scientometric studies are also discussed.     

Out of particles: Impact of CERN, DESY and SLAC research to fields other than physics

This paper presents the results of an exploratory bibliometric study aiming at an analysis of basic high energy physics (HEP) research impact on fields other than physics, and particularly on application-oriented R&D. After a general discussion of an extensive citation analysis of basic research publications from three HEP institutes—CERN, DESY, and SLAC—the paper focuses on the ‘knowledge flow’ from physics to non-physics, and more specifically the flow from basic physics research to the ‘applied world’. At this level, we report journal- as well as research field characteristics, and we identify the most frequently citing R&D groups. We conclude that DESY is most cited by the ‘applied world’, followed by SLAC and CERN. If the number of journals that institutes have in common—whether based on the source or the citing publication—is taken as an indicator of the resemblance of their research interests, we found that CERN and SLAC have the closest resemblance, followed by SLAC and DESY, with CERN and DESY having the least in common.     

Physics 1800–1900: A quantitative outline

The authors utilize the index of theCatalogue of Scientific Papers of theRoyal Society of London dealing with the physics journal literature of the 19th century. Graphs of the publication activity of the entire 19th-century physics and of a bout 50 of its most important subareas are displayed; both the number of active contributors in each area, the number of papers and its share of publications of the entire 19th century physics are exhibited. Typical scientometric regularities such as “Lotka’s law” (with regard to the number of papers and the number of areas treated by physicists) are confirmed. In addition, the shares of the leading countries of important physical discoveries in the 19th century are studied.     

Scientometric analysis of the development of nuclear physics during the last 50 years

A new method for author groups formation and decay processes is proposed. With the help of a special mathematical model time distribution of authors and their publications was established and group productivity, composition and stability, annual change of the total number of short-term and long-term authors, their renovation etc. as well as the time dependence of these quantities was determined. Particularities of activity of authors working in nuclear physics are investigated. It is shown that the most rapid development in this field took place in the pre-war years, it was at high level up to 1960 and then began to decrease. The method used permits to forecast the development of science and to analyse the activity of author units in particular scientific centers.     

Zwischen Wärmestoff und kinetischer Gastheorie—Die Behandlung der Physik der Wärme durch Hermann Helmholtz

In spite of the fact that Helmholtz made a decisive contribution to the first principle of thermodynamics by his Erhaltung der Kraft of 1847 he did not participate actively in the following debates about the nature of heat. Probably he was cautious in some way as he did not yet belong to the community of university physicists. His research concentrated on physiology at that time. On the other hand he was rather influential by his public speeches and his comprehensive reviews on problems of heat even without further publications. Insofar the discussion of Helmholtz's activities on heat of the time before he became chairholder of physics in 1871 will help to understand his special relation to physics in this early period.      

Solid-State Properties of Fullerenes and Their Compounds

In this article, we present a resume of experimental activities performed at the Research Center Karlsruhe in the field of fullerene solid-state physics. Central issues are the rotational order-disorder phase transitions in pure fullerene crystals and the electronic properties of undoped and doped fullerenes. The major part deals with C₆₀ but selected results for solid C70 and C₈₄ are also given. The experimental methods comprise X-ray diffraction, inelastic neutron scattering, dilatometry, magnetometry and photo-electron spectroscopy.     

Growth of world and Indian physics literature

The paper deals with the nature of growth models currently used in the literature for modeling the growth of publications. It introduces briefly three growth models and explores the applicability of these models in the growth of world and Indian physics literature. The analysis suggests that the growth of Indian physics literature follows a logistic model, while the growth of world physics literature is explained by a combination of logistic and power models. The criteria for selection of growth models based on the new growth rate functions suggested by Egghe and Ravichandra Rao are given. The methodology suggested by Egghe and Ravichandra Rao is shown to work satisfactorily, except for longer time series growth data, when we may have to restore to data splitting approach, if suggested by the plots of new growth rate functions. This approach helped us to use a combination of two growth models instead of one, to explain the growth of world physics literature.     

Investigating different types of research collaboration and citation impact: a case study of Harvard University’s publications

This study aims to investigate the influence of different patterns of collaboration on the citation impact of Harvard University’s publications. Those documents published by researchers affiliated with Harvard University in WoS from 2000–2009, constituted the population of the research which was counted for 124,937 records. Based on the results, only 12% of Harvard publications were single author publications. Different patterns of collaboration were investigated in different subject fields. In all 22 examined fields, the number of co-authored publications is much higher than single author publications. In fact, more than 60% of all publications in each field are multi-author publications. Also, the normalized citation per paper for co-authored publications is higher than that of single author publications in all fields. In addition, the largest number of publications in all 22 fields were also published through inter-institutional collaboration and were as a result of collaboration among domestic researchers and not international ones. In general, the results of the study showed that there was a significant positive correlation between the number of authors and the number of citations in Harvard publications. In addition, publications with more number of institutions have received more number of citations, whereas publications with more number of foreign collaborators were not much highly cited.     

Theoretical high energy physcis in Latin America from 1990 to 2012: a statistical study

We present a statistical overview of the publications in theoretical high energy physics (HEP), which emerged in Latin America (LA) in the period from 1990 to 2012. Our study captures the eight Latin American nations, which are dominant in this field of research: Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, Uruguay and Cuba. As an intercontinental benchmark, we compare them with India, Canada, South Korea, Belgium and South Africa. We consider the productivity of research papers in specialized high-impact journals, and the corresponding numbers of citations. The goal is to document the efforts in LA to catch up with the most wealthy countries, in a field of research without direct practical benefits. The restriction to theoretical HEP excludes large international collaborations, which enables a fair evaluation of national achievements. We further investigate how these records are correlated with three socio-economic indices: the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the Human Development Index (HDI) and the Education Index (EI). Despite some progress, there remains a backlog of LA compared to the dominant countries, which cannot be explained solely by economic deficiency. In general, a detailed correlation between the socio-economic and scientific evolution is not obvious.     

Comparative study of physics research in India and China based onINSPEC-Physics for 1990 and 1995

The status of physics research in India and China has been examined by using bibliometric indicators. The study is based on publication data drawn fromINSPEC-Physics for 1990 and 1995. China is ahead of India in terms of publication output. It ranks 7th in the world, whereas India is placed at 10th position. China is also ahead of India in terms of growth in its publications appearing particularly in the SCI (Science Citation Index) indexed journals. Despite its second position in publication count, India leads China in terms of average impact per paper computed using data on impact factor of the citing journals. It maintains this leading position both in 1990 and 1995. In addition, the study suggests a strategy for identifying leading areas of research in physics.     

Non-English journals and papers in physics and chemistry: bias in citations?

This study investigates, at the journal as well as the article level, if there is a difference in citations between English-language and non-English publications. The Web of Knowledge is used as data source. The investigation focuses on the fields of physics and chemistry. Using a precise definition of a “non-English journal”, we filter out nine physics and thirty-four chemistry non-English journals, scattered over six physics and seven chemistry subfields. Average received citations per paper (CpP) of the non-English journal(s) are compared with the CpP of pure English journals, and this in the same subfield. We clearly observe that non-English journals are inferior—in number of citations received—to pure English journals and this in all physics and chemistry subfields studied. Further, twelve physics journals and ten chemistry journals were chosen as sample journals to compare the CpP of non-English papers with that of English language papers in the same journal. The result of this comparison is that for the majority of these journals and for most of the publication years the CpP of non-English papers is lower than that of the English language papers. Finally, analyzing linguistic characteristics of the citing literature confirms the own-language preference in non-English physics and chemistry journals.     

Designing of Halbach cylinder based magnetic assembly for a rotating magnetic refrigerator. Part 1: Designing procedure

Generation of the alternating strong and almost zero homogeneous magnetic field that the magnetocaloric material has to be exposed to is a major challenge in magnetic refrigeration. With this paper we start a series of publications considering designing of Halbach cylinder based magnet assemblies for non simultaneous cycles. In present, for the first part we define a designing procedure which, applied to the Halbach cylinder, allows creation of two or higher pole number magnet assemblies. We consider here two and four pole cases in great details. Each designing procedure step is accompanied by 3D finite element simulation. The achieved final magnet designs fulfill the predefined requirements of particular field distribution in the air gap, maximized ratio of high field volume to the permanent magnet volume, best utilization of magnets and magnetocaloric materials and constructional simplicity. A short comparison of two and four pole arrangements is given.