Scientometric analysis of nature, the journal

300,000 reports inNature during the 1869–1998 period have been reviewed. The distribution of articles by subfields was determined. Additional sources of information were several journals on analytical chemistry and papers at the Pittsburg conference series during 1950–1999. The methodology used is based on the analysis of the average age of employed instruments. The agreement between scientometric data from various sources of information depends on the development stage of the field of science. Calculated and measured scientometric curves were compared. One of the key trends in the development of basic sciences, namely, the increase of articles dealing with instrumental analytical chemistry, inNature is revealed. The research was supported by the Russian Foundation of Basic Research (Project No. 97-06-80163a) and State Target Programme "Integracia" (Project No. 670).     

“U. S. Science in international perspective”

This is an investigation of the relationship between the institutional structure of American science and its position in world science, as shown byScience Indicators — 1976. It concludes that, compared to other countries, the distinct characteristics of American institutions are consistent with, and may actually explain, the leading American position according to the indicators. However recent changes in those institutions may have weakened American science in ways not reflected by the present indicators.     

Nalimov and the Polish Way Towards Science of Science

Nalimov's relations with Polish scientists date from the sixties. He was present in Polish science owing to his publication — also specially prepared for Polish journals — and for his participation in Polish-Soviet science of science conferences organized alternately in Poland and in (of that time) Soviet Union. He had a high opinion — which he many times expressed — on contemporary condition of Polish science of science as well as on its previous achievements. In such opinion he was not isolated; also John Bernal and Derek de Solla Price referred in their papers to precursory statements of Maria and Stanisław Ossowski formulating already in the thirties of XX century progressive programme for science of science research. Ten years earlier a similar views upon science presented world-famous Polish sociologist Florian Znaniecki. So, in the first part of the paper a common way of thinking and approaching science of science basic problems in Ossowski's, Znaniecki's and Nalimov's works is presented. In the second part the direct contacts of Nalimov with Polish science of science researchers widely described and commentated in Polish journals are discussed. At least using citation analysis the influence of Nalimov's ideas on science of science and scientometrics in Poland is presented. As a base to citation analysis the journal Problems of the Science of Science (1965–1999) and monographs devoted to scientometrics, bibliometrics and informetrics were taken. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

From Scattered Research on Diverse Materials to Materials Science

The manipulation of materials, and to some extent also their systematic classification, form an integral part of the skills and culture of all societies. Yet it took long for proper sciences (e.g., metallurgy, glass technology, polymer chemistry or solid-state physics) to develop out of many processing procedures, tapping the accumulated knowledge about specific material characteristics. In the late 20th century an overarching science of workable materials emerged: materials science. This concept and term originated from major boosts in materials research during WWII and the Cold War, first financed by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA). The COSMAT-Report from 1974, written by the American Presidential Science Advisory Committee??s ?Committee on the Survey of Materials Science and Engineering" four years after its inception, and subsequent reports heralded in the second institutionalization phase of materials science in the USA and with some delay also elsewhere. As the field continued to expand, the demand grew from within in the late 1990s for disciplinary status. This article sorts these claims from the various camps (by solid state physicists vs. chemists vs. engineers) and sets them in the context of unfolding institutional change. The developments within the German-speaking realm, thus far unduly neglected in these debates, are added. I close with a systematic discussion of eight indicator arguments for or against a convergence of this complex field of research into a single coherent discipline. Against Bensaude-Vincent??s (2001: 242) thesis that materials science still is an ??aggregation of fragments of knowledge", I argue that by 2010 materials science did indeed achieve disciplinary status in a historically rare and enduring process of discipline formation through ??emergence by integration" rather than by differentiation.     

Intelligence and Internationalism: The Cold War Career of Anton Bruun

The Danish marine biologist Anton Frederik Bruun (1901–1961) is chiefly remembered as an explorer of the deep‐sea fauna and a key figure in international scientific organizations during the 1950s. As the Cold War increasingly permeated the marine sciences and it became too expensive for small states to operate deep‐sea research vessels, he became an asset to the USA's oceanographic establishment as it sought to first assess Soviet strength (in terms of research, technology and logistical capacity) and then to build up American oceanography in response. Bruun's contacts with the USSR – including a visit in 1957 – strengthened his contacts to the American military as well as American oceanographers. His enthusiasm for raising interest in the marine sciences in developing countries could also be matched to American geopolitical goals. Bruun's participation in the Scripps Institution of Oceanography's Naga expedition to the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand captured the mutually beneficial nature of his American connections. Bruun was able to use the USA to reach distant oceans, while the USA in turn gained from Bruun's prestige as it forged connections with friendly states through science, an increasingly important arena for Cold War competition.     

Science policy and democracy

Vannevar Bush's Science: The Endless Frontier (1945) continues to serve as the default statement of United States science policy and has been republished with an extended defense by Rush Holt, a research physicist, former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and recent executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Holt recognizes some challenges in Bush's conception of the science-democracy relationship but then makes his own case for a revised understanding of the relationship between science and the American regime. An unquestioned assumption of both Bush and Holt is that science benefits democracy, that democracy is even dependent on science. For Bush the dependency is strictly material, for Holt it is also procedural. Holt's particular appeal is to the value of science as providing evidence based knowledge that can increase rationality in democratic politics. This appeal is made, however, without acknowledging counter-evidence about the ways science can be socially destabilizing.     

Contribution of Indian universities to the mainstream scientific literature: A bibliometric assessment

This paper examines the contribution of Indian universities to the mainstream scientific literature during 1987–1989 along two distinct, but inter-related dimensions of quantity and quality of research output. The quantity of output is assessed through the number of articles published in journals covered byScience Citation Index, while the quality of output is assessed through the impact factors of journals in which the articles are published. The impact factors are normalized to eliminate the confounding effects of their covariates,viz. the subject field and the nature of journal. A number of relative indicators are constructed for inter-field and inter-institution comparisons,viz. publication effectiveness index,¹ relative quality index,² activity index³ and citability index⁴. Inter-field comparisons are made at the level of eight macrofields: Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Earth & Space Sciences, Agriculture, Medical Sciences and Engineering & Technology. Inter-institution comparisons cover thirty three institutions which had published at least 150 articles in three years. The structure of correlations of these institutions with eight macrofields is analyzed through correspondence analysis of the matrices of activity and citability profiles. Correspondence analysis yields a mapping of institutions which reveals the structure of science as determined by the cumulative effect of resource allocation decisions taken in the past for different fields and institutions i.e. the effect of national science policy.     

Science cited in patents: A geographic "flow" analysis of bibliographic citation patterns in patents

The interplay and cross-fertilization between science and technology, but also the specific role of science for technological development, have received ample attention in both the research and the policy communities. It is in this context that the concepts of absorptive capacity and knowledge spillovers play an important role. We operationalize the science-technology link by quantifying and modeling bibliographic references to the scientific literature as they occur in patents. This approach allows exploring the associative patterns between science creation (as emerging from the scientific literature) and technology development (as emerging from the patent literature). In the current paper, we focus on an analysis of the geographic distribution of the science citation patterns in patents, singling out two fields of (different) technological development, namely biotechnology and information technology. In both fields, the science citation flows from the European, Japanese and US science bases into USPTO and EPO-patents are explored and modeled. Intensive geographic citation flows between the regions are identified, pointing (amongst others) to the strength of both the US and the European science bases as sources for technological activity and creativity around the world.     

Intellectual structure of Antarctic science: A 25-years analysis

To delineate the intellectual structure of Antarctic science, the research outputs on Antarctic science have been analyzed for a period of 25 years (1980–2004) through a set of scientometrics and network analysis techniques. The study is based on 10,942 records (research articles, letters, reviews, etc.), published in 961 journals/documents, and retrieved from the Science Citation Index (SCI) database. Over the years interest in Antarctic science has increased, as is evident from the growing number of ratified countries and research stations. During the period under study, the productivity has increased 3-times and there is a 13-fold increase in collaborative articles. Attempt has been made to identify important players like scientists, organizations and countries working in the field and to identify frontier areas of research that is being conducted in this continent. The highest 41% scientific output is contributed by the USA and the UK, followed by Australia and Germany. British Antarctic Survey (BAS), UK and Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar & Marine Research, Germany are the most productive institutes in Antarctic science. Maximum number of research articles on Antarctic science, have been published in the journal Polar Biology, indicating substantial work being done on the biology of this continent. The journals — Nature and Science — are the highly-cited journals in Antarctic science. The paper written by J. C. Farman et al., published in Nature in 1985, reporting depletion of ozone layer, is the most-cited article. Semantic relationships between cited documents were measured through co-citation analysis. J. C. Farman and S. Solomon are co-cited most frequently.     

Some Thoughts on the Interaction between Scientometrics and Science and Technology Policy

In 1988 Le Pair postulated the existence of a citation gap for technological research. Several cases were studied, which confirmed his hypothesis. In the same period the use of bibliometric indicators for policy purposes increased. Here we saw the citation gap causing a disadvantage for application-oriented research groups. This is not merely an injustice, it also leads to suboptimum use of available funds, to the detriment of science as a whole. In addition, it may, in the long term, undermine the reputation of scientometrics as a science in its own right.     

Research on research and some problems of research bureaucracy

The paper deals in its first part critically with the ideo-centric interpretation of the subject matter of the sociology of science. Especially American sociologists tend to regard sociology of science as apart of the sociology of knowledge, specialized in defining the nature of scientificideas and their relations to other kinds of ideas, institutional and personality factors, etc. However, in our days the center of gravity of sociological studies on science has shifted more and more outward of the domain of the sociology of knowledge.Research on research, particularly research on the objective socio-economic, organizational and operational aspects of institutionalized and professionalized research activity, have become very central to the sociology of science and have made probably some of the greatest contributions to its recent development. The material demands of society on science, and vice versa, the investiment of society in the scientific establishment, the bread-and-board questions of research activity, the hard realities of national and industrial research policies, etc., provide a vastterra incognita into which the contemporary sociology of science must foray. The second part of the present paper deals with the delineation of a stretch of the unknown land that has remained hitherto largely unexplored by the sociology of science, namely with the structure and the functions of contemporaryresearch bureaucracy. Some findings of a Hungarian empirical study are discussed which seem to indicate that big science tends to go hand in hand with big research bureaucracy, in particular with an increased share of administrative personnel in the total staff on research institutions.Presented at the Conference on Social Studies of Science (Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, November, 1976).     

The power law relationship between citation impact and multi-authorship patterns in articles in Information Science & Library Science journals

The aim of this paper is to extend the conversation about the correlation between collaboration and citation impact in articles in Information Science & Library Science journals by analyzing this correlation’s behavior using a power scaling law approach. 28,131 articles that received 215,693 citations were analyzed. The number of these articles that were published through collaboration accounts for 69%. In general, the scaling exponent of multi-authored articles, both international and domestic, increases over time while the exponent of single-authored papers decreases. The citation impact and collaboration patterns exhibit a power law correlation with a scaling exponent of 1.34 ± 0.02. Citations to multi-authored articles increased \(2^{1.34}\) or 2.53 times each time the number of multi-authored papers doubled. The Matthew Effect is stronger for multi-authored papers than for single-authored. The scaling exponent for the power law relationship of domestic multi-authored papers was 1.35 ± 0.02. The citations to domestic multi-authored articles increased \(2^{1.35}\) or 2.55 times each time the number of domestic multi-authored articles doubled. Contrary to previous studies we found that the Matthew Effect is stronger for domestic multi-authored papers than for international multi-authored ones.     

The business of being an editor: Norman Lockyer,Macmillan and Company,and the editorship of Nature, 1869–1919

Broadly speaking, Victorian scientific periodicals fell into one of two categories: specialist periodicals aimed at publishing original research for an audience of scientific researchers, or popularizing periodicals meant to share news about science with a broader readership. When astronomer Norman Lockyer founded Nature in 1869, he envisioned his new weekly as a member of the latter group. That vision resulted partly from his own wish to raise science's profile in Great Britain and partly from the interests of his publisher Macmillan and Company, which bankrolled Nature with its eye on eventual profit. This paper shows that the pressure for Nature to be a financial success shaped Lockyer's approach to editing and thus shaped Nature's content, leading the magazine to occupy an unusual space in the landscape of Victorian science publishing and placing unique burdens on its editor. Nature quickly moved away from Lockyer's initial vision of a popularizing magazine and became known as a periodical by and for researchers. The magazine's popularity among scientific researchers set it apart from its closest inspiration, the commercial weekly Chemical News. But in contrast to contemporary editors at learned society journals, such as George Gabriel Stokes at the Philosophical Transactions, Lockyer did not linger over the scientific details of Nature's papers. Instead, articles for Nature were usually either accepted or rejected immediately, with little editorial involvement shaping their scientific content. The difference between editing Nature and editing other research periodicals is clearly visible in the selection of Richard Gregory as Lockyer's successor in 1919. Most research periodicals selected eminent men of science as their editors-in-chief. Gregory, a science writer and long-time subeditor at Nature, did not lend scientific prestige to the masthead, but was eminently qualified to maintain Nature's distinctive content and its profitability for Macmillan and Company.     

Theory and experimentation on the most-recent-reference distribution

The cumulative distribution of the age of the most-recent-reference distribution is the “dual” variant of the first-citation distribution. The latter has been modelled in previous publications of different authors but the former one has not. This paper studies a model of this cumulative most-recent-reference distribution which is different from the first-citation distribution. This model is checked on JASIS and JACS data, with success. The model involves the determination of 3 parameters and is a transformation of the lognormal distribution. However we also show that the first-citation model (involving only 2 parameters and which is easier to handle), developed in an earlier paper, gives enough freedom to give close fits to the most-recent-reference data as well. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Collaboration and Cognitive Structures in Social Science Research Fields. Towards Socio-Cognitive Analysis in Information Systems

Bibliographic information systems have to address the needs of users by providing “value-added-components.” For instance, users would benefit from knowing the social and cognitive structures of research fields. Research suggests that a relationship exists between actors' position in scientific networks and the innovativeness of themes they examine. The present study confirms and expands these results through a technique that relates the cognitive and social structures of a research field (socio-cognitive analysis). The results from two social science fields suggest that well-integrated actors are engaged in the consolidation of the mainstream, whereas new ideas are most likely to be introduced and pursued by social climbers, i.e., actors who are starting to form a social network of collaboration. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Bibliometric analysis of the journal literature on women’s studies

This study uses bibliometric techniques to investigate the characteristics and implications of women’s studies literature over the period from 1900 to 2013. Using computer analysis for bibliometric techniques, the results of the present study demonstrate that the journal literature on women’s studies has grown exponentially, with an annual growth rate of 10.6% for over one century. Most of the document types in the area of women’s studies are in the form of research articles, review articles and book reviews. The United States of America and the United Kingdom contribute the largest number of articles. One hundred and seventeen core journals containing 33% of the women’s studies journal articles have been identified through the application of Bradford’s law on journal distribution. More than half of the 117 core journals began publishing from 1970 to 1990, and most of these core journals deal with the humanities (including literature, history and philosophy), women’s studies, medical science, psychology, political science and sociology. The highly productive journals associated with highly cited times are Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Women’s Studies International Forum, Sex Roles, Feminism and Psychology, Gender and Society, European Journal of Women’s Studies, American Historical Review, Psychology of Women Quarterly and Feminist Studies.     

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.     

An Analysis of the Articles in the Journal of Engineering Education

Twenty issues of the Journal of Engineering Education from 1993 through 1997 were analyzed. The most common keywords used were teaching, design, and computers. An average of 10.4 percent of the articles require discipline specific knowledge for complete understanding. Approximately 60 percent of the articles included a teaching component, and most of these articles included an assessment. Only 13.4 percent of the articles used an educational theory. Women comprised 22 percent of all authors, but only 15.3 percent of authors who had a degree in engineering, computer science or engineering technology were women. The average number of usable references per article was 15.2. The mean number of times a source was cited is one. Only 20 sources were cited five or more times. Twenty-four authors or organizations were cited 10 or more times. Of the most-cited authors 48 percent do not have a degree in engineering, computer science or engineering technology. The keyword and citation analyses showed that the Journal has great breadth of both content and sources for references. The mean number of times articles published in the Journal during 1993 and 1994 were later cited in the Journal was zero. The content of the Journal has become more professional and the quality has improved in the five years studied.     

Is It Possible to Measure Science? V. V. Nalimov's Research in Scientometrics

This article is devoted to the scientometric research of Professor V.V. Nalimov (1910–1997) of Moscow State University. His first scientometric article was published in 1959: mathematical models of world science growth were examined and logical grounds for the applicability of these models were also given. In his further works, V.V. Nalimov continued to stress the importance of quantitative studies of science development. In 1969, the monograph on scientometrics by V. V. Nalimov and his co-author Z. M. Mulchenko was published. This book reflected his earlier publications on scientometrics and the solutions of new tasks. In 1970, Nalimov published articles on the comparison of science and the biosphere, the geographic distribution of scientific information, and changes in the demand of scientific staff. In later articles in philosophy of science, he stressed the necessity of a combination of the scientometric approach with works on the logic of science development. One of the latest works by Nalimov was an analysis of articles published by The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology: Here the scientometric approach was used to study the origin and development of a new scientific branch. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Difficulties and challenges of Chinese scientific journals: Statistical analysis of Chinese literatures using Chinese Science Bulletin as example

Using statistical method, the author analyzed the citation rate of articles published in Chinese Science Bulletin (CSB) between 1995 and 1999 in Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) databases. Results indicated that: 1. Majority of authors who published in CSB were Chinese; 2. The articles were basically cited by the authors themselves in the first year after publication; 3. The peak of total citation rate appeared in the third year after publication and the peak of non-self-citation rate was further delayed. There are relatively high self-citation rates of articles from CSB and most of these citations are from Chinese scientific journals. This indicates that our citation environment is limited to a closed circle. The author, therefore, proposed a strategy for changing the current conditions of Chinese scientific journals to raise their influence. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.