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Dissemination of knowledge through the publication of findings is a cornerstone of the academic research system. Doctoral dissertations document the findings made by early-stage researchers during their doctoral studies. However, prior research suggests that dissertations may not be effective in disseminating these findings to the broader community of researchers. We study how knowledge documented in doctoral dissertations is disseminated. Specifically, we investigate which dissertation characteristics and institutional factors are related to the number of journal publications based on these dissertations and the number of citations that these publications receive. Our analysis uses a random sample of doctoral dissertations from German universities in economics, political science, and sociology. We find that "cumulative" dissertations—dissertations consisting of a number of separate articles—are turned into three times more publications which receive three times more citations than monographic dissertations. We also find explorative evidence that dissertations written in English and empirical dissertations have higher publication-based outcomes. We conclude that a policy allowing doctoral candidates to write their dissertations in a cumulative format provides them with an opportunity to share the results of their research through publications in peer-reviewed journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The soaring number of researchers has led to increasingly intense competition in academia. Early identification of scientists' potential is a practical but difficult issue currently attracting escalating attention. This study takes the business field as an example and explores whether early publishing in top journals is an effective yardstick to recognise scientists who will have better academic performance in their careers. We extract the career records of publication and citations for 1933 business scientists with stable and continuous publication records from the combination of the ORCID and Scopus databases. Through regression analysis and various checks, we find that researchers publishing in top journals early in their careers indeed perform better subsequently compared to peers with similar early career profiles but no top journal publications. Our research sheds light on a new perspective for early identification of potential star scientists, especially in the business field, and justifies encouraging junior researchers to devote themselves to publishing in top-ranked peer-reviewed journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The academic field of landscape architecture has taken an increasing interest in scholarly productivity and the impact of faculty research. Quantitative measures of academic output and reputation are important assessment tools used by many academic disciplines, especially for promotion and tenure evaluation. Citation analysis, one approach used for these purposes that combines metrics for productivity and impact, is seen as an effective way to assess scholarly activity in related fields such as urban planning and tourism. Universities are increasingly employing metrics of this kind to measure faculty members' scholarly productivity and impacts alongside their teaching and service records. This article applies citation analysis to the landscape architecture faculty inNorth America. UsingGoogle Scholar data, we analyzed four citation measures (total citation counts, h-index, hI, norm, and hI, annual) for tenure-track faculty. The results show that citation activity is correlated with rank (assistant, associate, or full professor), degree type (doctorate vs. non-doctorate), and number of years since first publication, with no detectable differences between male and female scholars. We found that landscape architecture faculty ranking in the top 20% according to total citation counts accounted for 87% of total citations, and 15% of the tenure-track faculty in the field have no citation records. Webelieve that our methods and findings can be used as a complementary measure to assess the level of scholarly contributions at the individual and program levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the potential of citation analysis of Ph.D. theses to obtain valid and useful early career performance indicators at the level of university departments. For German theses from 1996 to 2018 the suitability of citation data from Scopus and Google Books is studied and found to be sufficient to obtain quantitative estimates of early career researchers' performance at departmental level in terms of scientific recognition and use of their dissertations as reflected in citations. Scopus and Google Books citations complement each other and have little overlap. Individual theses' citation counts are much higher for those awarded a dissertation award than others. Departmental level estimates of citation impact agree reasonably well with panel committee peer review ratings of early career researcher support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new indicator of technological impact of a scientific journal is presented, based on citations in patent applications to papers published in that journal. Key characteristics are that patent citations are aggregated by patent family, and that not all citations are considered equal. To each family citation a weight is assigned that is proportional to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the countries in which protection is requested, to take into account the costs and expected benefits of patenting, and inversely proportional to the number of cited references in a patent family, as a way to correct for differences in citation frequencies in patent applications among technological fields. Around one third of journals indexed in Scopus have at least one citation from patent applications in a 5-year citation window. The distribution of the technological impact scores among journals can be modelled as a power law distribution, with the slope being a little smoother than that of common scientific impact indicators SJR and JIF. However, the correlations between technological and scientific impact indicators are mostly low or moderate, which shows that they measure quite different aspects of journal or research performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The five economies in Asia that invest the most in research and development, as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), are Israel, South Korea, Japan, Singapore and China. Nevertheless, the results in the number of scientific output in terms of research publications, and the citations received by them, reveal a whole different reality among those countries. Furthermore, the intellectual production based on quantitative research methods used to be much more popular and defended than that on qualitative methods. However, three of these five countries mentioned trust more in the qualitative paradigm, represented by grounded theory, than in the quantitative one, represented by structural equation modeling. The current study investigates 25 years of scientific production available in the Web of Science and shows that, even though China is undoubtedly Asia's leader in intellectual production, measured by publication productivity and scientific impact, the scientific community trusts the least on China's papers regarding grounded theory, placing China in fifth place among the studied countries for qualitative studies, and third place for quantitative studies. The paper also deepens on the concept of trust as a replacement of impact, and projects the near future for the five studied countries regarding quantitative and qualitative intellectual production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Study analyses scientometric assessment of LIS research performance of OPEC member countries. The research publication data indexed in Scopus for the OPEC member countries were extracted and used for the analysis. The data are analyzed to identify quantitative research performance of OPEC member countries in terms of total documents, citable documents, and non-citable documents. The citation impact is measured by different parameters, like total citations, citations per document, Relative Citation Impact, self-citations, and self-citations per document. Finally, the quality of the document is assessed by means of h-index. Nigeria has been found to be most productive country in LIS research and Iran is receiving highest citations and also in h-index performance amongst OPEC member countries. Iraq, Libya, and Ecuador are far away in LIS research productivity and needs strong steps to improve LIS research productivity for future endeavor.

Study analyses scientometric assessment of LIS research performance of OPEC member countries. The research publication data indexed in Scopus for the OPEC member countries were extracted and used for the analysis. The data are analyzed to identify quantitative research performance of OPEC member countries in terms of total documents, citable documents, and non-citable documents. The citation impact is measured by different parameters, like total citations, citations per document, Relative Citation Impact, self-citations, and self-citations per document. Finally, the quality of the document is assessed by means of h-index. Nigeria has been found to be most productive country in LIS research and Iran is receiving highest citations and also in h-index performance amongst OPEC member countries. Iraq, Libya, and Ecuador are far away in LIS research productivity and needs strong steps to improve LIS research productivity for future endeavor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paper deals with the scientometric analysis of scholarly communications of LIS in world level. Further study includes only top 25 countries of the world in terms of their performance in scholarly communications. Scopus database has been used for collection of data. The study analyses the extent of scholarly communications of LIS in terms of total scholarly communications, citable scholarly communications, and non-citable scholarly communications. Similarly, citations data has been analyzed in terms of total citations, selfcitations, and revised citations for top 25 countries. Performances of top 25 countries have also been studied by h-index calculations. The United States and the United Kingdom has been found as top performers in scholarly communications of LIS in the global scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union (EU) seems to presume that the mass production of European research papers indicates that Europe is a leading scientific power, and the so-called European paradox of strong science but weak technology is due to inefficiencies in the utilization of this top level European science by European industry. We fundamentally disagree, and will show that Europe lags far behind the USA in the production of important, highly cited research. We will show that there is a consistent weakening of European science as one ascends the citation scale, with the EU almost twice as effective in the production of minimal impact papers, while the USA is at least twice as effective in the production of very highly cited scientific papers, and garnering Nobel prizes. Only in the highly multinational, collaborative fields of Physics and Clinical Medicine does the EU seem to approach the USA in top scale impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wood vinegar, a valuable byproduct of biomass pyrolysis, has gained increasing attention due to its potential applications in agriculture, forestry, environmental sectors and other fields. This study presents a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of research conducted in the field of wood vinegar during the period 2002–2022. The aim is to explore research productivity, collaboration patterns, and publication trends in this domain. A systematic search of the Scopus database yielded 460 scientific articles from journal sources. The collected data were analyzed using bibliometric techniques, including co-authorship analysis, citation analysis, and keyword co-occurrence analysis. The results reveal a steady growth in the number of publications on wood vinegar over the years, indicating a growing research interest in the field. The number of papers published each year increased from 7 in 2002–79 in 2022. The growth increase in 2022 versus 2019 was + 170%. Analysis of authorship patterns highlighted key contributors and collaborative networks within the research community. The most productive country was China with 191 papers. Citation analysis provided insights into influential studies and the impact of research in the field. Through keyword co-occurrence analysis, the study identified prominent research themes and emerging topics within wood vinegar research. This bibliometric analysis offers a comprehensive overview of the research landscape in the field of wood vinegar, facilitating a better understanding of its progress, impact, and potential avenues for future research. [Display omitted] • A bibliometric study was conducted on 460 papers covering the year range 2002–2022. • Research performance and trends over the last four years were further analyzed in SciVal. • Wood vinegar showed a diverse range of applications and potential research trends. • China was the most productive country. • Wood vinegar is and will still being a research trend in the coming years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the research performance of European universities in a disaggregated way, using a large array of indicators from Scopus publications, including indicators of volume (number of articles; number of citations) and indicators of quality (percentage of publications in top 10% and top 25% SNIP journals; percentage of citations from top 10% and top 25% journals). These indicators are considered dependent variables in a multi-level estimation framework, in which research performance in a scientific area depends on variables at the level of university and at the level of the external regional environment. The area examined is Medicine, for the 2007-2010 period. The paper exploits for the first time the integration of publication data with the census of European universities (ETER). A large number of hypotheses are tested and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the research performance of the 39 central universities in India. The research publication data, indexed in the Web of Science, for the 39 central universities for a 25-year period (1990-2014) are used for analysis. The data are computationally analysed to identify productivity, productivity per capita, productivity per crore rupees grant, rate of growth of research output, authorship and collaboration pattern, citation impact and discipline-wise research strength of these institutions. Research performance of the central universities is measured and compared with two top-ranking world universities, namely University of Cambridge and Stanford University. While older well-established big universities such as University of Delhi and Banaras Hindu University perform better than newer universities, some relatively smaller universities, such as the university of Hyderabad have impressive research performance. What is disturbing is that combined research output of all central universities taken together is less than that of either of University of Cambridge or Stanford University alone. The results also provide discipline-wise research strengths of all the universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research performance of Konstantin Momirović (1932-2004), a prominent Serbian psychologist and statistician was analyzed, based on one domestic (SocioFakt) and one international citation database (SSCI). His productivity was described in terms of number of papers published in various local journals, while his typical research interests were revealed by applying frequency analysis of his keywords, abstract terms, and international authors he had cited. In order to evaluate his impact in various research fields, his citations and heterocitations was cross-tabulated against all citing disciplinary journals. Finally, latent influence of his contribution on the structure of national social sciences was tested by deriving two co citation maps of local journals: one produced with, and the other without his papers and citations. The results show Momirović'es exceptional output and its substantial influence on the structure of social factual sciences, particularly on the position of psychology as a discipline. His output turned out to be also specific one asking for careful treatment of leaders of hidden colleges in practical evaluation. Incidentally, results also revealed his intellectual relatedness with Hans Eysenck, a hidden finding which was possible to corroborate by perceived personalities of both, accompanied with some critical details from their biographies.

Quantity and quality of research publication productivity are the main areas of concern for the scientific community. The way of accountability of research performance evaluation has been changing with the advent of new metrics. The research performance evaluation clearly emphasizes on peer review approach. This approach possesses a central position in making an economic decision and monitoring of research and development programs of Higher Education Institutions. The combined use of various indicators is consistently recommended for Research Performance Evaluation (RPE). The study empirically examines and evaluates the feasibility of new RPE development by applying the h and h-type indices along with traditional metrics for the case of Malaysian Engineering Research at the meso level. This study helps in understanding the application of h and h-type indices and establishes that these indices are helpful in supporting and monitoring RPE and can be used along with traditional activity and impact metrics. Among the studied h-type indices, the revised development was found comparatively more meaningful with a less statistical error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web of Science ( wos) and scopus have often been compared with regard to user interface, countries, institutions, author sets, etc., but rarely employing a more systematic assessment of major research fields and national production. The aim of this study was to appraise the differences among major research fields in scopus and wos based on a standardized classification of fields and assessed for the case of an entire country (Slovenia). We analyzed all documents and citations received by authors who were actively engaged in research in Slovenia between 1996 and 2011 (50,000 unique documents by 10,000 researchers). Documents were tracked and linked to scopus and wos using complex algorithms in the Slovenian cobiss bibliographic system and sicris research system where the subject areas or research fields of all documents are harmonized by the Frascati/ oecd classification, thus offsetting some major differences between wos and scopus in database-specific subject schemes as well as limitations of deriving data directly from databases. scopus leads over wos in indexed documents as well as citations in all research fields. This is especially evident in social sciences, humanities, and engineering & technology. The least citations per document were received in humanities and most citations in medical and natural sciences, which exhibit similar counts. Engineering & technology reveals only half the citations per document compared to the previous two fields. Agriculture is found in the middle. The established differences between databases and research fields provide the Slovenian research funding agency with additional criteria for a more balanced evaluation of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Evaluating the performance of institutions with different resources is not easy, any citation distribution comparisons are strongly affected by the differences in the number of articles published. The paper introduces a method for comparing citation distributions of research groups that differ in size. The citation distribution of a larger group is reduced by a certain factor and compared with the original distribution of a smaller group. Expected values and tolerance intervals of the reduced set of citations are calculated. A comparison of both distributions can be conveniently viewed in a graph. The size-independent reduced Hirsch index – a function of reducing factor that allows the comparison of groups within a scientific field – is calculated in the same way. The method can be used for comparing groups or units differing in full-time equivalent, funding or the number of researchers, for comparing countries by population, gross domestic product, etc. It is shown that for the calculation of the reduced Hirsch index, the upper part of the original citation distribution is sufficient. The method is illustrated through several case comparisons. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper investigates the citation impact of three large geographical areas – the U.S., the European Union (EU), and the rest of the world (RW) – at different aggregation levels. The difficulty is that 42% of the 3.6 million articles in our Thomson Scientific dataset are assigned to several sub-fields among a set of 219 Web of Science categories. We follow a multiplicative approach in which every article is wholly counted as many times as it appears at each aggregation level. We compute the crown indicator and the Mean Normalized Citation Score (MNCS) using for the first time sub-field normalization procedures for the multiplicative case. We also compute a third indicator that does not correct for differences in citation practices across sub-fields. It is found that: (1) No geographical area is systematically favored (or penalized) by any of the two normalized indicators. (2) According to the MNCS, only in six out of 80 disciplines – but in none of 20 fields – is the EU ahead of the U.S. In contrast, the normalized U.S./EU gap is greater than 20% in 44 disciplines, 13 fields, and for all sciences as a whole. The dominance of the EU over the RW is even greater. (3) The U.S. appears to devote relatively more – and the RW less – publication effort to sub-fields with a high mean citation rate, which explains why the U.S./EU and EU/RW gaps for all sciences as a whole increase by 4.5 and 5.6 percentage points in the un-normalized case. The results with a fractional approach are very similar indeed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Rankings are a controversial issue in higher education because of their often unsatisfactory methodological standards in contrast to their high practical relevance. In this paper, we focus on research rankings of universities and departments to discuss some of their most crucial characteristics, the use of an appropriate indicator for performance and a valid way to aggregate the scores on an institutional level. In spite of some particular shortcomings, we argue, citation data seems to be the most adequate way to assess the intellectual impact of research publications. On this basis, we propose three different ways to aggregate the scores of individual scholars on an institutional level. The method is applied to business departments in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Based on these results, we investigate economies of scale within the dataset. The paper concludes with a critical evaluation of the obtained results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper analyses relationships between university research performance and concentration of university research. Using the number of publications and their citation impact extracted from Scopus as proxies of research activity and research performance, respectively, it examines at a national level for 40 major countries the distribution of published research articles among its universities, and at an institutional level for a global set of 1500 universities the distribution of papers among 16 main subject fields. Both at a national and an institutional level it was found that a larger publication output is associated with a higher citation impact. If one conceives the number of publications as a measure of concentration, this outcome indicates that, in university research, concentration and performance are positively related, although the underlying causal relationships are complex. But a regression analysis found no evidence that more concentration of research among a country''s universities or among an institution''s main fields is associated with better overall performance. The study reveals a tendency that the research in a particular subject field conducted in universities specializing in other fields outperforms the work in that field in institutions specializing in that field. This outcome may reflect that it is multi-disciplinary research that is the most promising and visible at the international research front, and that this type of research tends to develop better in universities specializing in a particular domain and expanding their capabilities in that domain towards other fields. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper studies evidence from Thomson Scientific (TS) about the citation process of 3.7 million articles published in the period 1998-2002 in 219 Web of Science (WoS) categories, or sub-fields. Reference and citation distributions have very different characteristics across sub-fields. However, when analyzed with the Characteristic Scores and Scales (CSS) technique, which is replication and scale invariant, the shape of these distributions over three broad categories of articles appears strikingly similar. Reference distributions are mildly skewed, but citation distributions with a 5-year citation window are highly skewed: the mean is 20 points above the median, while 9-10% of all articles in the upper tail account for about 44% of all citations. The aggregation of sub-fields into disciplines and fields according to several aggregation schemes preserve this feature of citation distributions. It should be noted that when we look into subsets of articles within the lower and upper tails of citation distributions the universality partially breaks down. On the other hand, for 140 of the 219 sub-fields the existence of a power law cannot be rejected. However, contrary to what is generally believed, at the sub-field level the scaling parameter is above 3.5 most of the time, and power laws are relatively small: on average, they represent 2% of all articles and account for 13.5% of all citations. The results of the aggregation into disciplines and fields reveal that power law algebra is a subtle phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – Several bibliometric indicators that are extensively used to estimate research performance have not been validated against an external criterion of excellence. This paper aims to investigate whether this validation is possible using the number of Nobel Prize awards. Design/methodology/approach – This study uses several analytical treatments of the data to investigate: whether Nobel Prize awards are sporadic events or they depend on the scientific activity of countries or institutions and can be used in research evaluation; and the association between the number of Nobel Prize achievements and conventional bibliometric indicators across countries and institutions. Findings – This study finds that conventional bibliometric indicators, numbers of publications, citations, and top 1 per cent most cited publications, correlate with the number of Nobel Prize achievements in several advanced countries with similar research abilities. Contrarily, in countries and institutions with more variable research characteristics, there is no association between conventional bibliometric indicators and the number of Nobel Prize achievements, and their use as indicators of research excellence is not valid. In contrast, the number of national articles in Nature and Science correlates with the number of Nobel Prize achievements across countries and institutions. Practical implications – Science administrators implementing research evaluations and research incentives based on conventional bibliometric indicators should consider that increasing the scores of these indicators does not imply an improvement in research excellence. Originality/value – The study demonstrates that Nobel Prize achievements are not singular events that occur by chance. Therefore, the number of Nobel Prize achievements can be used to validate bibliometric indicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper introduces a novel methodology for comparing the citation distributions of research units of a certain size working in the same homogeneous field. Given a critical citation level (CCL), we suggest using two real valued indicators to describe the shape of any distribution: a high-impact and a low-impact measure defined over the set of articles with citations above or below the CCL. The key to this methodology is the identification of a citation distribution with an income distribution. Once this step is taken, it is easy to realize that the measurement of low-impact coincides with the measurement of economic poverty. In turn, it is equally natural to identify the measurement of high-impact with the measurement of a certain notion of economic affluence. On the other hand, it is seen that the ranking of citation distributions according to a family of low-impact measures is essentially characterized by a number of desirable axioms. Appropriately redefined, these same axioms lead to the selection of an equally convenient class of decomposable high-impact measures. These two families are shown to satisfy other interesting properties that make them potentially useful in empirical applications, including the comparison of research units working in different fields. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper, scientific performance is identified with the impact that journal articles have through the citations they receive. In 15 disciplines, as well as in all sciences as a whole, the EU share of total publications is greater than that of the U.S. However, as soon as the citations received by these publications are taken into account the picture is completely reversed. Firstly, the EU share of total citations is still greater than the U.S. in only seven fields. Secondly, the mean citation rate in the U.S. is greater than in the EU in every one of the 22 fields studied. Thirdly, since standard indicators—such as normalized mean citation ratios—are silent about what takes place in different parts of the citation distribution, this paper compares the publication shares of the U.S. and the EU at every percentile of the world citation distribution in each field. It is found that in seven fields the initial gap between the U.S. and the EU widens as we advance towards the more cited articles, while in the remaining 15 fields—except for Agricultural Sciences—the U.S. always surpasses the EU when it counts, namely, at the upper tail of citation distributions. Finally, for all sciences as a whole the U.S. publication share becomes greater than that of the EU for the top 50% of the most highly cited articles. The data used refers to 3.6 million articles published in 1998–2002, and the more than 47 million citations they received in 1998–2007. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The Center for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University advocates the use of specific normalizations for assessing research performance with reference to a world average. The Journal Citation Score (JCS) and Field Citation Score (FCS) are averaged for the research group or individual researcher under study, and then these values are used as denominators of the (mean) Citations per publication (CPP). Thus, this normalization is based on dividing two averages. This procedure only generates a legitimate indicator in the case of underlying normal distributions. Given the skewed distributions under study, one should average the observed versus expected values which are to be divided first for each publication. We show the effects of the Leiden normalization for a recent evaluation where we happened to have access to the underlying data. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The impact factor is a bibliometric index that reflects the frequency with which the “average article” of a scientific journal has been cited in subsequent publications. The purpose of the present study was to examine the current trends of the impact factor of the sport sciences journals, its relative position in relation to journals belonging to other scientific fields, and its temporal stability. Scientific journals' impact factors classified under the “Sport Sciences” subject category of the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) database from 2000 to 2006 were included in the present study. Results showed that during that period of time, 78 journals appeared in the “Sport Sciences” subject category. The mean impact factor rose from 0.851 (median=0.747) in 2000 to 1.178 (median=1.155) in 2006, following a linear trend or even a quadratic trend. The overall mean impact factor of the “Sport Sciences” category was 0.954 (median=0.876). In relation to the other 172 subject categories of the Science Edition of the JCR, “Sport Sciences” was placed slightly below the middle for the year 2006. Finally, intra-class correlation coefficients (0.850) suggested that “Sport Sciences” journals' impact factors remained relative stable during the seven years examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]