Showing papers on "Citation impact published in 2001"

National characteristics in international scientific co-authorship relations

Abstract: The main objective of this study is the elaboration of national characteristics in international scientific co-authorship relations. An attempt is made to find statistical evidence of symmetry and asymmetry in co-publication links, of the relation between international co-authorship and both national research profiles and citation impact. Four basic types can be distinguished in the relative specialisation of domestic and internationally co-authored publications of 50 most active countries in 1995/96 concerning the significance of the difference between the two profiles. Co-publication maps reveal structural changes in international co-authorship links in the last decade. Besides stable links and coherent clusters, new nodes and links have also been found. Not all links between individual countries are symmetric. Specific (unidirectional) co-authorship affinity could also be detected in several countries. As expected, international co-authorship, on an average, results in publications with higher citation rates than purely domestic papers. However, the influence of international collaboration on the national citation impact varies considerably between the countries (and within one individual country between fields). In some cases there is, however, no citation advantage for one or even for both partners.

Double effort = Double impact? A critical view at international co-authorship in chemistry

Abstract: An attempt is made to find statistical evidences of the relation between international co-authorship and citation impact. It was found that international co-authorship, in average, results inpublications with higher citation rates than purely domestic papers. No correlation has beenfound, however, between the strength of co-authorship links and the relative citation eminence ofthe resulting publications. International co-authorship links in chemistry, as represented by thewell-known Salton's measure, displayed a characteristic pattern reflecting geopolitical, historical,linguistic, etc. relations among countries. A new indicator, representing also the asymmetry ofco-authorship links was used to reveal main "attractive" and "repulsive" centres of co-operation.

International alignment and scientific regard as macro-indicators for international comparisons of publications

Abstract: Many international comparisons of the publication performance at themacro level are based on direct counts of citation frequencies in the ScienceCitation Index. However, these comparisons may reveal a significant negativelanguage bias for non-English-speaking countries, or other selection biases,which can be illustrated by the relation between research budgets of scientificinstitutions and SCI publications. Against this background, a two-dimensionalrepresentation, specifying for the international alignment of the nationalpublications and the journal-standardized citation impact, proves to be amore appropriate indicator base to assess the citation performance of countriessuch as Germany. In the light of a ten countries' benchmark, time seriesof these indicators for the nineties show a considerable impact of the Germanunification with a recent trend towards an adaptation of publication behaviourin East Germany towards the Western patterns.

Research Access, Impact and Assessment

Abstract: The RAE can help hasten the freeing of access to the research literature by mandating that all UK universities self-archive all their annual refereed research in their own eprint archives. The harvesters (e.g., http://citebase.eprints.org) will provide newer and richer measures of research performance and impact with the help of citation-linking services for open archives (http://opcit.eprints.org is an international collaboration between Southampton, Cornell and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, jointly supported by the NSF in the US and JISC in the UK). Both the citation impact and the usage (download) impact, for the papers and the authors at UK universities and abroad, will be not only accessible but assessable continuously online by anyone who is interested, any time, instead of just in a quadrennial RAE exercise.

Mapping national research profiles in social science disciplines

Abstract: The paper investigates the advantages of graphical mapping of national research publication and citation profiles from scientific fields in order to provide additional information with respect to research performance. By means of multi‐dimensional scaling techniques national social science profiles from seventeen OECD countries and two periods, 1989‐1993 and 1994‐1998, are mapped, each profile represented by a vector of either publication volumes or citation values for nine social science fields. Aside from demonstrating the developments of publication volumes and citedness ranges as well as patterns, the graphical maps display clusters and similarities of national profiles over time. Combined with international rankings of averaged national impact factors (NIF) relative to the average world impact of field (WIF) for the same number of fields and periods, the graphical display supplies additional otherwise concealed information of the differences in research patterns between countries – even when the NIFs are quite similar. The analyses show that low Pearson correlation coefficients can be applied to flag extraordinary instances of either high or low national citation impacts during a period. Most importantly, the graphical maps make a strong case for adjusting or tuning the baseline impact to the actual national publication profiles when comparing NIFs of different countries. A new indicator, the Tuned Citation Impact Index (TCII) is proposed. It is constructed from the amount of expected citations a country ought to have received in each research field aggregated over its true profile. Common baseline profiles, like those of the world or EU, are consequently not regarded as the ideal benchmark. In the case illustrated by the journal publications of the social sciences the paper verifies the hypothesis that a dominant central cluster exists consisting of the large Anglo‐American countries: USA, Canada and the UK. A further hypothesis, that the smaller northern EU countries with English as the second language are located together and close to the central cluster on the publication maps is only partly satisfied in the second period. A third hypothesis, that countries located near the central cluster on the citation maps may hold high(er) NIFs is falsified.

Why I think research access, impact and assessment are linked

Abstract: The RAE can help hasten the freeing of access to this literature by mandating that all UK universities self-archive all their annual refereed research in their own eprint archives. The harvesters (e.g., http://citebase.eprints.org ) will provide newer and richer measures of "impact" with the help of citation-linking services for open archives (http://opcit.eprints.org is an international collaboration between Southampton, Cornell and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, jointly supported by the NSF in the US and JISC in the UK). Not only the citation impact but the "hit" impact, for both the papers and the authors at UK universities and abroad, will be not only accessible but assessable continuously online by anyone who is interested, any time, instead of just in a quadrennial RAE exercise.

Searching for scientific excellence: Scientometric measurements and citation analyses of national research systems

Abstract: Scientific excellence has always been key criterion in evaluating research performance and allocating resources. Nowadays it has also become an important goal of governments for strategic and economic reasons. As a result, achieving and maintaining excellence is now at the top of many policy agenda's. But how should one define scientific excellence and operationalize this multidimensional concept into internationally comparative measurements and valid quantitative indicators. For research policy applications, the challenge is to develop adequate evaluation methods, and generally acceptable and reliable quantitative indicators, that allow greater comparability of disciplines and institutions both within and between countries. This paper introduces a citation-based scientometric framework for analyzing the various institutional and cognitive dimensions of scientific excellence in national research systems from an international perspective. We describe a methodology aimed at designing and applying citation impact indicators specifically aimed at identifying and comparing areas and institutions of (possible) international-level scientific excellence. By way of example, we present key results from a recent series of analyses of the research system in the Netherlands, focusing on the performance of the universities across the various major scientific disciplines. These benchmarking studies derived their data from the citations to research articles published in international journals indexed by ISI. Special attention is paid to the Dutch contribution in the top 1% most highly cited papers worldwide. The findings suggest that Netherlands is amongst the most highly cited nations and can boast on highly cited research in several disciplines and a range of what appear to be world class centres of scientific excellence.