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Disciplinary classification of science is essential to bibliometric analyses. Given the conceptual and technical difficulties in classifying individual papers into disciplines and specialties, most classifications systems are implemented at the journal level, which affects the classification of papers published in multidisciplinary journals. In order to investigate the effect of the different classification systems on bibliometric evaluations, this study compares the rankings of the most productive institutions and most productive authors using the two types of classifications. Results show that the classification of papers has less influence on rankings at the institutional level than at the individual level. Implications for bibliometric evaluations are discussed.

Tenure provides a permanent position to faculty in higher education institutions. In North America, it is granted to those who have established a record of excellence in research, teaching and services in a limited period. However, in China, research excellence (represented by the number of Web of Science publications) is highly weighted in the tenure assessment compared to excellence in teaching and services, but this has never been systematically investigated. By analyzing the tenure assessment documents from Chinese Universities, this study reveals the role of Web of Science publications in China’s tenure system and presents the landscape of the tenure assessment process in Chinese higher education institutions.

This paper introduces author-level bibliometric co-occurrence network by discussing its history and contribution to the analysis of scholarly communication and intellectual structure. The difference among various author co-occurrence networks, which type of network shall be adapted in different situations, as well as the relationship among these networks, however, remain not explored. Five types of author co-occurrence networks were proposed: (1) co-authorship (CA); (2) author co-citation (ACC); (3) author bibliographic coupling (ABC); (4) words-based author coupling (WAC); (5) journals-based author coupling (JAC). Networks of 98 high impact authors from 30 journals indexed by 2011 version of Journal Citation Report-SSCI under the Information Science & Library Science category are constructed for study. Social network analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis are applied to identify sub-networks with results visualized by VOSviewer software. QAP test is used to find potential correlation among networks. Cluster analysis results show that all the five types of networks have the power for revealing intellectual structure of sciences but the revealed structures are different from each other. ABC identified more sub-structures than other types of network, followed by CA and ACC. WAC result is easily affected and JAC result is ambiguous. QAP test result shows that ABC network has the highest proximity with other types of networks while CA network has relatively lower proximity with other networks. This paper will provide a better comprehension of author interaction and contribute to cognitive application of author co-occurrence network analysis.

The paper studied 211,946 articles indexed in Thomson Reuters's Web of Science from January 1st 2002 to December 31st 2011, in order to describe the growth and distribution of Chinese international research collaboration (IRC), from the perspective of amount, authors, countries, discipline fields and journals. By applying bibliometric and social network methods, this study provided the collaboration network of countries and fields. The main results were as follow: the number of article increased faster comparing with the stable growth in average annual of IRC degree; the articles collaborated with SAC are 80 % more than all IRC's; as to the fields, collaboration in Social science is at disadvantage, while the largest field is physics and the fastest field is molecular biology and genetics; mathematics, physics, multidisciplinary and space science had more in fluencies than others in corresponding respective journals; as to the network, USA, as the largest and most important partner, had 30 % IRC articles, and collaborated with China in all 22 ESI fields.

Generally speaking, citation relationship among authors can be divided into 3 types: co-citation, coupling and cross-citation. Since author co-citation analysis was first introduced in 1982, it has been widely applied to study discipline structure, research state and research trends. Afterwards, conception of author bibliographic-coupling analysis was put forward and related empirical studies provided a method for mapping active authors in a research field for a more realistic picture of the current state of its research activities. Additionally, if one of author A's papers has a citation from one of author B's, there is cross-citation relationship between A and B. However, studies based on author cross-citation relationship mainly describe citation behaviors themselves using citation identity and citation image; they rarely involve any implicit knowledge communication, author research correlation or discovering academic communities. Author cross-citation analysis infers to both citing and cited phenomenon, which can be roughly correspond to citation identity and citation image. The study will further explore the author cross-citation relationship with core authors in scientometrics field as study object in order to provide reference for development of scientometrics field and in-depth application of citation analysis.

As indicator weights obtaining is often difficult in all types of evaluation, this paper describes an approach to improve the indicator weights of scientific and technological competitiveness evaluation of Chinese universities. As a public institution funded by Chinese government, the research center for Chinese science evaluation of Wuhan University has completed five annual evaluations for the scientific and technological competitiveness of Chinese universities since 2005, whose abundant and reliable data motivated us to try to improve the weights obtained by the AHP (analytical hierarchy process). Based on these data, we calculated the objective weights of the indicator using the representative mathematical methods of the least square and the variation coefficient. As the weights of AHP can be influenced by the knowledge, experience and preference of experts and the calculated objective weights neglect the subjective judgement information, we integrated the subjective and objective weights by respectively using the additive and multiplicative model to reflect both the subjective considerations of experts and the objective information, and obtained three kinds of integrative weights. Finally, we selected the integrative weights of multiplicative model as the best weights by comparing and analyzing the evaluation results in 2005 and 2009 of each kind of weights. The results show that the evaluation effect of the weights of multiplicative model is indeed the best for all types of Chinese universities among these kinds of weights, and the experts and university principals enquired also basically reached a consensus on the university rankings of the integrative weights of multiplicative model.

Over the past 30 years, the research behavior of Chinese scholars has continually evolved. This paper studied the citing behavior of Chinese scholars by employing three indicators of citation concentration from the perspective of citation breadth analysis. All the citations from 2,338,033 papers from the Chinese Citation Database (1979---2008) covering four disciplines--Chemistry; Clinical Medicine; Library, Information and Archival Science; and Chinese Literature and World Literature--were analyzed. Empirical results show a general weakening tendency towards citation concentration: (1) decreasing percentage of uncited published papers within a given year; (2) a higher percentage of papers required to account for the same proportion of citation than before; and (3) the steady decline in the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI) of citation distribution. All three measures indicate a decline in citing concentration or an increase in citation breadth. This phenomenon may be the result of increased access to materials, perhaps because of the ease with which scholarly materials can be accessed through the Internet.

In this era of a rapid change in the way people finding and using information resources, despite that the academic communication and using patterns for people in the traditional print environment have been studied for many years, the Internet media presents a new and relatively unexplored area for such study. In this article, we explored the distribution and utilization of web recourses in humanities and social sciences based on web citations. We collected 1,421,731 citations listed in 148,172 articles from 493 journals published during the period of 2006–2007 in the CSSCI, which resulted in 44,973 web citations. We counted the amount and types of web resources used in various disciplines, analyzed the URLs frequency from the host-level, fitted the frequency distribution into the regression models with SPSS, and perform the disciplines coupling analysis based on the web citations. We found out that: (a) The distributions of web citations by years or by websites and webpage types are selective and regular; (b) Great disparity exists among various disciplines in terms of using web information, and the high-frequency websites; (c) The frequency distribution of web citations is similar to the Garfield’s citation distribution curve; (d) Some relationships between disciplines are detected, based on the utilization of web information.

SCI has been popular all over the world since it was published by Garfield in 1963. Researches on evaluating a researcher’s output with SCI have always been continuous. In recent years, a great breakthrough has been made since the h-index was put forward in 2005. In this paper, we also advance a new method — Paper Quality Index (PQI) to evaluate the output of a researcher. The main purpose of our method is to solve two problems that consist in the method of h-index: one is that the h-index can’t compare the outputs of researchers in different fields; the other is that it is unsuitable for evaluating the outputs of young researchers. A simple mathematical expression is constructed to eliminate the difference of citation among different fields and makes the evaluation of short-term outputs of researchers possible.

Since the term “co-link” was put forward, many scholars have done exploratory investigations to prove the applicability and validity of co-link analysis used in mapping internet structure and mining relationships among internet colonies. All of these studies are based on the whole links in the web called “total co-link analysis”. However, there are both substantive and non-substantive links in the web, and the number of the latter outweights that of the former, which makes the preconditions of total co-link analysis untenable. In this paper, we present “substantive co-link analysis”, and believe it is more sound and valid than “total co-link analysis”. Then exploratory investigations on both total and substantive co-link analysis are carried out with the sample of 20 academic blogs on Library and Information Science, the results of which testify our assumption that “substantive co-link analysis” is more efficient and reasonable than “total co-link analysis”.

This article evaluates the scientific research competitiveness of world universities in computer science. The data source is the Essential Science Indicator (ESI) database with a time span of more than 10 years, from 01/01/1996 to 08/31/2006. We establish a hierarchical indicator system including four primary indicators which consist of scientific research production, influence, innovation and development and six secondary indicators which consist of the number of papers, total citations, highly cited papers, hot papers, average citations per paper and the ration of highly cited papers to papers. Then we assign them with proper weights. Based on these, we obtain the rankings of university and country/territory competitiveness in computer science. We hope this paper can contribute to the further study in the evaluation of a certain subject or a whole university.

This article aims to study the total backlink counts, external backlink counts and the Web Impact Factors (WIFs) for Chinese university websites. By studying whether the backlink counts and WIFs of websites associate with the comprehensive ratings and the research ratings for Chinese universities, the article demonstrates that the external backlink count can be a better evaluation measure for university websites than WIF. The study also investigated issues about data collection by using different search engines. It shows that data collected by Alta Vista are more stable than AllTheWeb.