Funding acknowledgement analysis: an enhanced tool to investigate research sponsorship impacts: the case of nanotechnology

There is increasing interest in assessing how sponsored research funding influences the development and trajectory of science and technology. Traditionally, linkages between research funding and subsequent results are hard to track, often requiring access to separate funding or performance reports released by researchers or sponsors. Tracing research sponsorship and output linkages is even more challenging when researchers receive multiple funding awards and collaborate with a variety of differentially-sponsored research colleagues. This article presents a novel bibliometric approach to undertaking funding acknowledgement analysis which links research outputs with their funding sources. Using this approach in the context of nanotechnology research, the article probes the funding patterns of leading countries and agencies including patterns of cross-border research sponsorship. We identify more than 91,500 nanotechnology articles published worldwide during a 12-month period in 2008–2009. About 67% of these publications include funding acknowledgements information. We compare articles reporting funding with those that do not (for reasons that may include reliance on internal core-funding rather than external awards as well as omissions in reporting). While we find some country and field differences, we judge that the level of reporting of funding sources is sufficiently high to provide a basis for analysis. The funding acknowledgement data is used to compare nanotechnology funding policies and programs in selected countries and to examine their impacts on scientific output. We also examine the internationalization of research funding through the interplay of various funding sources at national and organizational levels. We find that while most nanotechnology funding is nationally-oriented, internationalization and knowledge exchange does occur as researchers collaborate across borders. Our method offers a new approach not only in identifying the funding sources of publications but also in feasibly undertaking large-scale analyses across scientific fields, institutions and countries.     

Collaboration patterns of Taiwanese scientific publications in various research areas

This paper employs bibliometric methods to observe collaboration patterns of scientific publications in biotechnology, information and computer technology, future energy, and nanotechnology among different institutions in Taiwan. The results show primary domestic and international collaborative patterns, the effect of collaborative papers on the world-wide average, collaborative networks, and the distribution of institutions on global map. The findings suggest that domestic collaboration in each area is higher in proportion than international collaboration. Biotechnology leads in both domestic and international collaborative percentage. Among cooperative benchmarking countries, the US and China are the main partners. Collaboration among research institutes and universities is the most frequent collaborative pattern in each area except biotechnology, which tends to occur between hospitals and universities. On average, international collaborative papers tend to have greater effect, except in nanotechnology. Academia Sinica collaborated frequently with foreign institutes in each research field. A further analysis on how each collaborative group forms is recommended, especially collaboration among the Triple-Helix relationships.     

15 Years of Small: Research Trends in Nanosafety

In the field of nano‐ and microscale science and technology, Small has become one of the worldwide leading journals since its initiation 15 years ago. Among all the topics covered in Small, “nanosafety” has received growing interest over the years, which accounts for a large proportion of the total publications of Small. Herein, inspired by its coming Special Issue “Rethinking Nanosafety,” a general bibliometric overview of the nanosafety studies that have been published in Small is presented. Using the data derived from the Web of Science Core Collection, the annual publication growth, most influential countries/institutions as well as the visualized collaborations between different countries and institutions based on CiteSpace software are presented. A special emphasis on the impact of the previous Special Issue from Small that is related to nanosafety research is given and the research trend from the most highly cited papers during last 15 years is analyzed. Lastly, future research directions are also proposed.     

Bibliometric spectroscopy of Russia’s nanotechnology: 2000–2014

The article investigates the scientific performance of Russia in the field of nanotechnology, focusing on production, impact and collaboration. An underlying multidisciplinary corpus of publications was extracted from the Science Citation Index Expanded database through relevant keywords. The various bibliometric findings are presented in a top-down sequence, starting with a comparative analysis of Russia and other selected countries, scrutinizing further a revitalization of science in universities and finally presenting some (possible) centers of excellence within the domestic scientific system. Focusing on the most highly-cited nano papers, I use the analysis not only in terms of percentages of world shares of publications, but also in terms of the proportions of top-1 and top-10% publications. It is shown that among the comparative countries, Russia maximally increases the citation impact depending on its internationalization efforts and that, for example, the co-authorship between Russia and Australia in the top-10% layer as well as between Russia and the UK in the top-1% layer is above expectation. Implementing the president’s initiative “Strategy of Nanoindustry Development” and the role of governmental university-centered policy are discussed in light of the performed bibliometric study.     

Capturing new developments in an emerging technology: an updated search strategy for identifying nanotechnology research outputs

Bibliometric analysis of publication metadata is an important tool for investigating emerging fields of technology. However, the application of field definitions to define an emerging technology is complicated by ongoing and at times rapid change in the underlying technology itself. There is limited prior work on adapting the bibliometric definitions of emerging technologies as these technologies change over time. The paper addresses this gap. We draw on the example of the modular keyword nanotechnology search strategy developed at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2006. This search approach has seen extensive use in analyzing emerging trends in nanotechnology research and innovation. Yet with the growth of the nanotechnology field, novel materials, particles, technologies, and tools have appeared. We report on the process and results of reviewing and updating this nanotechnology search strategy. By employing structured text-mining software to profile keyword terms, and by soliciting input from domain experts, we identify new nanotechnology-related keywords. We retroactively apply the revised evolutionary lexical query to 20 years of publication data and analyze the results. Our findings indicate that the updated search approach offers an incremental improvement over the original strategy in terms of recall and precision. Additionally, the updated strategy reveals the importance for nanotechnology of several emerging cited-subject categories, particularly in the biomedical sciences, suggesting a further extension of the nanotechnology knowledge domain. The implications of the work for applying bibliometric definitions to emerging technologies are discussed.     

Four decades of fuzzy sets theory in operations management: application of life-cycle,bibliometrics and content analysis

The blockchain is a technology which accumulates and compiles data into a chain of multiple blocks. Many blockchain researchers are adopting it in multiple areas. However, there are still lacks bibliometric reports exhibiting the exploration of an in-depth research pattern in blockchain. This paper aims to address that gap by analyzing the widespread of blockchain research activities conducted thus far. This study analyzed the Scopus database by using bibliometric analysis in a pool of more than 1000 articles that were published between 2013 and 2018. In particular, this paper discusses various aspects of blockchain research conducted by researchers globally. This study also focuses on the utilization of blockchain and its consensus algorithms. This bibliometric analysis discovered the following: (1) Blockchain able to solve security issues in internet of things (IoT) and would be an increasing trend in the future; (2) Researchers begin to adopt blockchain in healthcare area; (3) The most active country in blockchain publication is United States, followed by China and Germany; (4) Switzerland and Singapore are two small size countries that published few publications, however receives many citations. (5) Research collaborations between countries increased the research publications except for Canada, India, and Brazil. (6) Keyword analysis revealed that researchers are adopting blockchain to solve problems in multiple categories of the data research area (data privacy, digital storage, the security of data, big data, and distributed database). This study also highlighted the utilization and consensus of the algorithm in blockchain research.

     

China and India: The two new players in the nanotechnology race

Nanotechnology is promising to be the ??transformative?? technology of the 21st century with its boundless potential to revolutionize a wide range of industries. Stakes are high as projected estimate of market value and economic and social benefits are immense for countries that can attain competency in this technology. This has stimulated OECD countries as well as emerging economies to channel huge resources for developing core capabilities in this technology. Unlike, other key technologies, recent influential reports highlight China in particular and to some extent India, Brazil and other emerging economies competing with advanced OECD countries in ??nanotechnology??. The present paper investigates through bibliometric and innovation indicators to what extent China and India have been able to assert their position in the global stage. The paper also underscores the importance of capturing indications from standards and products/processes along with publications and patents to capture more accurately the latent variable ??performance??. Study shows that China??s progress is remarkable; it has already attained leading position in publications and standard development. India is making its presence more visible particularly in publications. China??s research is more sophisticated and addresses nano-materials and its applications whereas India??s research shows healthy trend towards addressing developmental problems.     

The application of bibliometric analysis: disciplinary and user aspects

Bibliometric analysis has been used increasingly as a tool within the scientific community. Interplay is vital between those involved in refining bibliometric methods and the recipients of this type of analysis. Production as well as citations patterns reflect working methodologies in different disciplines within the specialized Library and Information Science (LIS) field, as well as in the non-specialist (non-LIS) professional field. We extract the literature on bibliometric analyses from Web of Science in all fields of science and analyze clustering of co-occurring keywords at an aggregate level. It reveals areas of interconnected literature with different impact on the LIS and the non-LIS community.We classify and categorize bibliometric articles that obtain the most citations in accordance with a modified version of Derrick’s, Jonker’s and Lewison’s method (Derrick et al. in Proceedings, 17th international conference on science and technology indicators. STI, Montreal, 2012). The data demonstrates that cross-referencing between the LIS and the non-LIS field is modest in publications outside their main categories of interest, i.e. discussions of various bibliometric issues or strict analyses of various topics. We identify some fields as less well-covered bibliometrically.     

Nanoscience and nanotechnology research publications: a comparison between Australia and the rest of the world

Nanoscience and nanotechnology are research areas of a multidisciplinary nature. Having a good knowledge of the rapidly evolving nature of these research areas is important to understand the research paths, as well as national and global developments in these areas. Accordingly, in this reported study nanoscience and nanotechnology research undertaken globally was compared with that of Australia by way of analyzing research publications. Initially, four different bibliometric Boolean-based search methodologies were used to analyze publications in the Web of Science database (Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Knowledge). These methodologies were (a) lexical query, (b) search in nanoscience and nanotechnology journals, (c) combination of lexical query and journal search and (d) search in the ten nano-journals with the highest impact factors. Based on results obtained, the third methodology was found to be the most comprehensive approach. Consequently, this search methodology was used to compare global and Australian nanoscience and nanotechnology publications for the period 1988–2000. Results demonstrated that depending on the search technique used, Australia ranks fourteenth to seventeenth internationally with a higher than world average number of nanoscience and nanotechnology publications. Over the last decade, Australia showed a relative growth rate in nanoscience and nanotechnology publications of 16 % compared to 12 % for the rest of the world. Researchers from China, the USA and the UK are from the main countries that collaborate with Australian researchers in nanoscience and nanotechnology publications.     

A new parameter for (normalized) evaluation of H-index: countries as a case study

It is known that the H-indexes of individuals, research groups, institutions, scientific journals, and countries strongly depend on the field of study, slowly increase with the number of publications, N, and can be described by empirical power-law functions of the type H?=?C?×?N^a (C and a are constants and depend on the specific field being analyzed). In this paper, we use this function and propose a new index [Montazerian–Zanotto–Eckert (MZE)], which is normalized by the number of publications and typically varies from ??1 to +?1, to characterize the relative standing of a research group, institution, or author to those of his/her peer groups. Due to the rich statistics available, as an example, here we analyzed and tested the new parameter against the citation-related performance (H-index) of countries. We found that the MZE index readily distinguishes between countries that stand above or below the average (for any given number of publications). Generally, publications of countries with a positive MZE index are more interesting or visible than the average. Analyzing publication output in this manner instead of the H-index allows for a less biased comparison between researchers, journals, universities, or countries for any particular combination of H-index and publication output.

     

A distributional approach to multinationality measures of international scientific collaboration

In a recent study, de Lange and Glänzel introduced a model for the bibliometric analysis of the extent of multinational co-authorship links. They showed that this model can be considered a generalisation of the "fractionation approach" by Nederhof and Moed. The authors analysed international collaboration links (the Multilateral Collaboration Index) as a function of the share of internationally co-authored papers. The measurement of the deviation of individual countries from (sub-)field peculiarities proved, however, complicated. The intensifying international collaboration and, in several fields, the substantial growth of number of multinational papers (involving three or more countries) in the 90s necessitates a detailed analysis of co-publication distributions, that is, of the distributions of partner countries in a given country"s publication output. The main objective of the study is to elaborate such a measure to be used in addition to the share of international publications and the Multilateral Collaboration Index. In addition, a detailed analysis of national citation impact of domestic, bilateral and multilateral papers in the major science fields is conducted. The model, we develop and the statistical analysis that it allows, support the practical conclusion that the ratio of the number of international links and international papers turns out to be roughly proportional to the ratio of full and fractional publication counts.     

Validation of Bibliometric Indicators in the Field of Microbiology: A Norwegian Case Study

This paper addresses two related issues regarding the validity of bibliometric indicators for the assessment of national performance within a particular scientific field. Firstly, the representativeness of a journal-based subject classification; and secondly, the completeness of the database coverage. Norwegian publishing in microbiology was chosen as a case, using the standard ISI-product National Science Indicators on Diskette (NSIOD) as a source database. By applying an "author-gated" retrieval procedure, we found that only 41 percent of all publications in NSIOD-indexed journals, expert-classified as microbiology, were included under the NSIOD-category Microbiology. Thus, the set of defining core journals only is clearly not sufficient to delineate this complex biomedical field. Furthermore, a subclassification of the articles into different subdisciplines of microbiology revealed systematic differences with respect to representation in NSIOD's Microbiology field; fish microbiology and medical microbiology are particularly underrepresented.In a second step, the individual publication lists from a sample of Norwegian microbiologists were collected and compared with the publications by the same authors, retrieved bibliometrically. The results showed that a large majority (94%) of the international scientific production in Norwegian microbiology was covered by the database NSIOD. Thus, insufficient subfield delineation, and not lack of coverage, appeared to be the main methodological problem in the bibliometric analysis of microbiology.     

Evolving importance of anticancer research using herbal medicine: a scientometric analysis

Phytocompounds and herbal extracts have been utilized in Ayurveda, Siddha and Unani medicine since thousands of years for treatment of various ailments. Success behind herbal medicine strongly suggests the interaction between bio-active phytocompounds with crucial biochemical pathways in a human body without causing adverse effects. The increasing incidence of diseases like cancer instigated the scientific world to focus intently on their pathophysiology and prevention, leading to accelerated research activity in past three decades. This study aims at understanding the evolving global importance of herbal medicine and quality of research against various cancers through scientometric analyses by studying the output from research publications, followed by the contribution from various countries, research institutes, authors, scientific journals and areas of research. To visualize the research structure and dynamics, more than 5000 publications with Science Citation Index that appeared from 1984 to 2013 have been studied and compared for a trend in its growth of publication along with the contributions from various bibliometric parameters stated above. After using the ‘Web of Science’ database it became well evident that the concerned bibliometric parameters contributed substantially in projecting the overall scientific output in the field of herbal anticancer research as reflected from the citation analysis and h-index data. It has been observed that the number of publications increased with compound annual growth rate of 10.39% during the studied periods. Evolving trend of the research topics was visualised by drawing the keyword co-occurrence map in this field.     

How does scientific success relate to individual and organizational characteristics? A scientometric study of psychology researchers in the German-speaking countries

Purpose: To provide up-to-date bibliometric reference data describing the output and success of psychology researchers in the German-speaking countries, including lifetime publication and citation numbers, and to investigate associations of bibliometric measures with academic status and gender as well as the department characteristics of size and quota of senior researchers. Method Queried literature databases using an extensive online register of academic psychologists in the German-speaking countries, obtaining valid data for 85 % (N = 1742) of the population of interest. Findings Skewed distributions for publications and citations; maximum number of German-language (=native) publications much higher than maximum number of English-language publications; relatively large part of population publishing almost exclusively in German; publication count predictable by academic status, gender, department size, and quota of senior researchers; citation count predictable by publication count, status, department size, and quota of senior researchers; department characteristics interact with individual characteristics to produce specific conditions under which publication count and citation count are higher or lower than expected: combination of female gender, small department size and large quota of senior researchers is associated with particularly increased publication count; female gender and large department size are associated with decreased publication count; high publication count, large department size and low quota of senior researchers are associated with increased citation count; low publication count and large quota of senior researchers are associated with decreased citation count. Conclusions Reference values for scientific output provided in this study provide an anchor for monitoring and international comparison; despite considerable noise in data, we show that interactions of individual and organizational characteristics are relevant for scientific success and should be investigated further, e.g. by adopting various measures of organizational diversity and tracing a population longitudinally.     

A multivariate analysis of publication trends in the 1980s with special reference to South-East Asia

This study is a follow-up to a published correspondence Factor Analysis (CFA) of a dataset of over 6 million bibliometric entries. In the previous paper, CFA was used to show how the 48 most prolific countries stand in relation to each with regard to their publication interests in 17 specific disciplinary areas and one multidisciplinary field over the period 1981–1992. In this paper, we illustrate how the publication profiles of these 48 countries evolved over time during this period. We have (i) shown how analysis of the dataset highlights cutting edge versus ancient disciplines; (ii) identified the countries whose publication patterns underwent the most marked changes (e.g. the Asian dragons who chose to focus on engineering, materials sciences, computer sciences and molecular biology), and (iii) revealed the widespread attraction exerted by the publication pattern of the USA. There is, without doubt, an overall shift toward an Americanstyle pattern that may be a true reflection of research interests worldwide but that may also be explained by the hegemony of those who hold the reins of international publication. A multidisciplinary field (MUL) covers publications inNature, Science and in theProceedings of National Academies of Sciences that could not be assigned to any one of these 17 areas.     

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.     

Exploring the management information systems discipline: a scientometric study of ICIS, PACIS and ASAC

This paper examines the rapid growth of China in the field of nanotechnology and the rise of collaboration between China and the US in this emerging domain. Chinese scientific papers in nanotechnology are analyzed to indicate overall trends, leading fields and the most prolific institutions. Patterns of China–US nanotechnology paper co-authorship are examined over the period 1990–2009, with an analysis of how these patterns have changed over time. The paper combines bibliometric analysis and science mapping. We find rapid development in the number of China–US co-authored nanotechnology papers as well as structural changes in array of collaborative nanotechnology sub-fields. Implications for both China and the US of this evolving relationship are discussed.     

Improving the functionality of interactive bibliometric science maps

The use of a map as a metaphor of a scientific field is an established idea and using it as aninterface to bibliometric data seems to have great potential. Nevertheless, our own implementationof such an interface came up with some limits inhibiting the user to comprehend as to what hewas looking at. As a result, the map was not used to its fullest potential. The implementationdescribed in this paper as a high-level (conceptual) design, addresses the problems noted by users.It combines both top-down and bottom-up access to the bibliometric data, something we see asvital to mapping internal knowledge onto the external depiction and vice versa. And as such, itbecomes a more complete tool to explore the mapped scientific field and to find and retrieverelevant information.     

EU27 and USA leadership in fruit and vegetable research: a bibliometric study from 2000 to 2009

We performed an analysis of published literature related to fruit and vegetable and indexed in the Web of Science^®, covering the period 2000–2009. The EU27 and the USA are the two leading actors in terms of number of fruit and vegetable articles published. This paper compares their publication outputs using bibliometric methods. We assessed the fruit and vegetable species, topics (from Web of Science^® categories), countries and institutions involved. The top species, topics and institutions are ranked according to their number of publications. Collaboration networks between countries were mapped to visualize the intensity of the relationships involved in international fruit and vegetable research and to obtain an overall picture of the fruit and vegetable research landscape. These results can be useful for policy makers.     

Universality of performance indicators based on citation and reference counts

We find evidence for the universality of two relative bibliometric indicators of the quality of individual scientific publications taken from different data sets. One of these is a new index that considers both citation and reference counts. We demonstrate this universality for relatively well cited publications from a single institute, grouped by year of publication and by faculty or by department. We show similar behaviour in publications submitted to the arXiv e-print archive, grouped by year of submission and by sub-archive. We also find that for reasonably well cited papers this distribution is well fitted by a lognormal with a variance of around ??²?=?1.3 which is consistent with the results of Radicchi et al. (Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 105:17268?C17272, 2008). Our work demonstrates that comparisons can be made between publications from different disciplines and publication dates, regardless of their citation count and without expensive access to the whole world-wide citation graph. Further, it shows that averages of the logarithm of such relative bibliometric indices deal with the issue of long tails and avoid the need for statistics based on lengthy ranking procedures.