No Arabic abstract
Many studies in information science have looked at the growth of science. In this study, we re-examine the question of the growth of science. To do this we (i) use current data up to publication year 2012 and (ii) analyse it across all disciplines and also separately for the natural sciences and for the medical and health sciences. Furthermore, the data are analysed with an advanced statistical technique - segmented regression analysis - which can identify specific segments with similar growth rates in the history of science. The study is based on two different sets of bibliometric data: (1) The number of publications held as source items in the Web of Science (WoS, Thomson Reuters) per publication year and (2) the number of cited references in the publications of the source items per cited reference year. We have looked at the rate at which science has grown since the mid-1600s. In our analysis of cited references we identified three growth phases in the development of science, which each led to growth rates tripling in comparison with the previous phase: from less than 1% up to the middle of the 18th century, to 2 to 3% up to the period between the two world wars and 8 to 9% to 2012.
Growth of science is a prevalent issue in science of science studies. In recent years, two new bibliographic databases have been introduced which can be used to study growth processes in science from centuries back: Dimensions from Digital Science and Microsoft Academic. In this study, we used publication data from these new databases and added publication data from two established databases (Web of Science from Clarivate Analytics and Scopus from Elsevier) to investigate scientific growth processes from the beginning of the modern science system until today. We estimated regression models that included simultaneously the publication counts from the four databases. The results of the unrestricted growth of science calculations show that the overall growth rate amounts to 4.10% with a doubling time of 17.3 years. As the comparison of various segmented regression models in the current study revealed, the model with five segments fits the publication data best. We demonstrated that these segments with different growth rates can be interpreted very well, since they are related to either phases of economic (e.g., industrialization) and / or political developments (e.g., Second World War). In this study, we additionally analyzed scientific growth in two broad fields (Physical and Technical Sciences as well as Life Sciences) and the relationship of scientific and economic growth in UK. The comparison between the two fields revealed only slight differences. The comparison of the British economic and scientific growth rates showed that the economic growth rate is slightly lower than the scientific growth rate.
The web application presented in this paper allows for an analysis to reveal centres of excellence in different fields worldwide using publication and citation data. Only specific aspects of institutional performance are taken into account and other aspects such as teaching performance or societal impact of research are not considered. Based on data gathered from Scopus, field-specific excellence can be identified in institutions where highly-cited papers have been frequently published. The web application combines both a list of institutions ordered by different indicator values and a map with circles visualizing indicator values for geocoded institutions. Compared to the mapping and ranking approaches introduced hitherto, our underlying statistics (multi-level models) are analytically oriented by allowing (1) the estimation of values for the number of excellent papers for an institution which are statistically more appropriate than the observed values; (2) the calculation of confidence intervals as measures of accuracy for the institutional citation impact; (3) the comparison of a single institution with an average institution in a subject area, and (4) the direct comparison of at least two institutions.
Todays scientific research is an expensive enterprise funded largely by taxpayers and corporate groups monies. It is a critical part in the competition between nations, and all nations want to discover fields of research that promise to create future industries, and dominate these by building up scientific and technological expertise early. However, our understanding of the value chain going from science to technology is still in a relatively infant stage, and the conversion of scientific leadership into market dominance remains very much an alchemy rather than a science. In this paper, we analyze bibliometric records of scientific journal publications and patents related to graphene, at the aggregate level as well as on the temporal and spatial dimensions. We find the present leaders of graphene science and technology emerged rather late in the race, after the initial scientific leaders lost their footings. More importantly, notwithstanding the amount of funding already committed, we find evidences that suggest the Golden Eras of graphene science and technology were in 2010 and 2012 respectively, in spite of the continued growth of journal and patent publications in this area.
We have organized Workshop III entitled Cited References Analysis Using CRExplorer at ISSI2021. Here, we report and reflect on this workshop. The aim of this workshop was to bring beginners, practitioners, and experts in cited references analyses together. A mixture of presentations and an interactive part was intended to provide benefits for all kinds of scientometricians with an interest in cited references analyses.
This paper presents a study that analyzes and gives quantitative means for measuring the gender gap in computing research publications. The data set built for this study is a geo-gender tagged authorship database named authorships that integrates data from computing journals indexed in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG). We propose a gender gap index to analyze female and male authors participation gap in JCR publications in Computer Science. Tagging publications with this index, we can classify papers according to the degree of participation of both women and men in different domains. Given that working contexts vary for female scientists depending on the country, our study groups analytics results according to the country of authors affiliation institutions. The paper details the method used to obtain, clean and validate the data, and then it states the hypothesis adopted for defining our index and classifications. Our study results have led to enlightening conclusions concerning various aspects of female authorships geographical distribution in computing JCR publications.