Abstract
In a broad sense, science can be understood as the knowledge contained in scientific manuscripts published in scientific journals. Scientific databases index only those journals that reach certain quality standards. Therefore, research and dissemination of scientific knowledge are essential activities for the growth of science itself. The aim of this manuscript is to assess the situation of medicine and environmental sciences among the bibliometric literature and to put it in perspective with the overall bibliometric publications in all scientific fields. The main countries publishing bibliometric manuscripts are China, USA and Spain. The latter country is ranked three out of the top five institutions according to the Scopus and WoS databases. In both databases, the average scientific collaboration of the top 20 institutions offers the same result, 41%. According to Scopus, the main subject categories in which this research falls are social sciences (38%), computer science (26%) and medicine (23%), while the environmental sciences category has 8%. In the analysis of the Medicine category alone, it has been observed that 136 countries have contributions in this field. The main countries are the United States, China and the United Kingdom. In the field of medicine, the main areas studied were: Epidemiology, Pediatrics, Orthopedics, Cardiology, Neurosurgery, Radiology, Ophthalmology, Oncology, Plastic Surgery and Psychiatry. With respect to environmental sciences, less international dissemination has been found, with only 83 countries having worked in this field. The main ones are China, Spain and the United States. Regarding the top 10 institutions, it can be stated that only Spain and China are relevant. Spain focuses on sustainability and China on the environment. The result of an independent keyword analysis of all published bibliometric manuscripts has shown that the main clusters are: Mapping Science (29%), Research Productivity (23%), Medicine (20%), Environmental Sciences (12%), Psychology (7%), Nursing (6%) and Engineering (4%). In short, medicine and environmental sciences are the most relevant areas in the field of bibliometrics after social sciences and computer sciences.
Highlights
Introduction iationsBibliometrics, as a science-related discipline, aims to provide a set of tools for the assessment of scientific production
The first goal of this research is to analyze the context of all the bibliometric studies carried out from 1996 to 2020 to discover if there is any bias towards any scientific category, if there are countries or institutions that devote a great effort to this issue and to analyze what consideration these works have, e.g., are they mostly considered as reviews or articles, and what level of citations they have in comparison according to the categories in which they are indexed
The number of reviews shows that this type of documents is the result of an analysis of a specific topic
Summary
Introduction iationsBibliometrics, as a science-related discipline, aims to provide a set of tools for the assessment of scientific production. Cole and Eales carried out the first bibliometric study through the statistical analysis of publications on comparative anatomy [1], initiating the use of bibliometrics for the measurement of scientific activity. Following this same approach, in 1926 Lotka focused his work on analyzing the scientific production of researchers with the so-called Lotka’s Law of Productivity, a law that determines that the greatest number of authors publish the least number of publications, while the least number of authors publish the greatest number of publications [2]. In 1956, Price formulated the Law of Exponential Growth of Scientific.
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