Average Citation Rate Research Articles

Breast cancer research output, 1945-2008: a bibliometric and density-equalizing analysis

IntroductionBreast cancer is the most common form of cancer among women, with an estimated 194,280 new cases diagnosed in the United States in 2009 alone. The primary aim of this work was to provide an in-depth evaluation of research yield in breast cancer from 1945 to 2008, using large-scale data analysis, the employment of bibliometric indicators of production and quality, and density-equalizing mapping.MethodsData were retrieved from the Web of Science (WOS) Science Citation Expanded database; this was searched using the Boolean operator, 'OR', with different terms related to breast cancer, including "breast cancer", "mammary ductal carcinoma" and "breast tumour". Data were then extracted from each file, transferred to Excel charts and visualised as diagrams. Mapping was performed as described by Groneberg-Kloft et al. in 2008.ResultsA total of 180,126 breast cancer-associated items were produced over the study period; these had been cited 4,136,224 times. The United States returned the greatest level of output (n = 77,101), followed by the UK (n = 18,357) and Germany (n = 12,529). International cooperation peaked in 2008, with 3,127 entries produced as a result; relationships between the United States and other countries formed the basis for the 10 most common forms of bilateral cooperation. Publications from nations with high levels of international cooperation were associated with greater average citation rates. A total of 4,096 journals published at least one item on breast cancer, although the top 50 most prolific titles together accounted for over 43% (77,517/180,126) of the total output.ConclusionsBreast cancer-associated research output continues to increase annually. In an era when bibliometric indicators are increasingly being employed in performance assessment, these findings should provide useful information for those tasked with improving that performance.

Agrifood research in Europe: a global perspective

The paper has the general aim of assessing the worldwide research activity in agricultural and food science and technology as it is reflected by the mainstream journal literature. The specific research questions were as follows: (1) What is the position of the European Research Area (ERA) represented by 33 countries in this study, on the world map of agrifood science publications? (2) Which countries are influential and what is their position? (3) Are there any specific European strengths and weaknesses by subfields of agrifood science? Overall, assessed by the total number of publications, the European Research Area (ERA), represented by 33 countries in this study, is in a dominant position on the world map of agrifood science. However, agrifood publications from the United States are more influential (judged by the average citation rates per paper). Correlation has been found between economic power and agrifood science publications: this is true not only for the total number of papers, but also for influence (measured by, again, the citation rates). Within Europe, the UK, Germany, France, Spain and the Netherlands dominate the agrifood research fields also in terms of citations. The Scandinavian countries, the Benelux states and Switzerland manage to produce influential papers across several fields of agrifood science. The EU's New Member States--a populous area--together have less than 10% share in Europe's agrifood publications and in citations they account for a 3---4% portion only. It seems that deepening of the integration of the national research systems in the European Research Area is desirable to have more impact of European agrifood research viewed from a global perspective.

Air pollution research: visualization of research activity using density-equalizing mapping and scientometric benchmarking procedures

BackgroundDue to constantly rising air pollution levels as well as an increasing awareness of the hazardousness of air pollutants, new laws and rules have recently been passed. Although there has been a large amount of research on this topic, bibliometric data is still to be collected. Thus this study provides a scientometric approach to the material published on this subject so far.MethodsFor this purpose, data retrieved from the "Web of Science" provided by the Thomson Scientific Institute was analyzed and visualized both with density-equalizing methods and classic data-processing methods such as tables and charts.ResultsFor the time span between 1955 and 2006, 26,253 items were listed and related to the topic of air pollution, published by 124 countries in 24 different languages. General citation activity has been constantly increasing since the beginning of the examined period. However, beginning with the year 1991, citation levels have been rising exponentially each year, reaching 39,220 citations in the year 2006. The United States, the UK and Germany were the three most productive countries in the area, with English and German ranked first and second in publishing languages, followed by French. An article published by Dockery, Pope, Xu et al. was both the most cited in total numbers and in average citation rate. J. Schwartz was able to claim the highest total number of citations on his publications, while D.W. Dockery has the highest citation rate per publication. As to the subject areas the items are assigned with, the most item were published in Environmental Sciences, followed by Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences and Public, Environmental & Occupational Health. Nine out of the ten publishing journals with more than 300 entries dealt with environmental interests and one dealt with epidemiology.ConclusionsUsing the method of density-equalizing mapping and further common data processing procedures, it can be concluded that scientific work concerning air pollution and related topics enjoys unbrokenly growing scientific interest. This can be observed both in publication numbers and in citation activity.

A geostatistical analysis of geostatistics

The bibliometric indices of the scientific field of geostatistics were analyzed using statistical and spatial data analysis. The publications and their citation statistics were obtained from the Web of Science (4000 most relevant), Scopus (2000 most relevant) and Google Scholar (5389). The focus was on the analysis of the citation rate (CR), i.e. number of citations an author or a library item receives on average per year. This was the main criterion used to analyze global trends in geostatistics and to extract the Top 25 most-cited lists of the research articles and books in geostatistics. It was discovered that the average citation rate for geostatisticians has stabilized since 1999, while the authors’ n-index seems to have declined ever since. One reason for this may be because there are more and more young authors with a lower n-index. We also found that the number of publications an author publishes explains only 60% of the variation in the citation statistics and that this number progressively declines for an author with a lower number of publications. Once the geographic location is attached to a selection of articles, an isotropic Gaussian kernel smoother weighted by the CR can be used to map scientific excellence around the world. This revealed clusters of scientific excellence around locations such as Wageningen, London, Utrecht, Hampshire, UK, Norwich, Paris, Louvain, Barcelona, and Zürich (Europe); Stanford, Ann Arbor, Tucson, Corvallis, Seattle, Boulder, Montreal, Baltimore, Durham, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles (North America); and Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney, Santiago (Chile), Taipei, and Beijing (other continents). Further correlation with socio-economic variables showed that the spatial distribution of CRs in geostatistics is independent of the night light image (which represents economic activity) and population density. This study demonstrates that the commercial scientific indexing companies could enhance their service by assigning the geographical location to library items to allow spatial exploration and analysis of bibliometric indices.

Papers featured in the World Journal of Gastroenterology from 2006 to 2007

To analyze papers published in the World Journal of Gastroenterology (WJG) from 2006 to 2007. We investigated the highly cited papers for geographic distribution of the cited authors, as well as the distribution of the citing journals and year of citation. Papers published in WJG from 2006 to 2007 and their citations were retrieved from the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE). The papers and their citations were analyzed according to bibliometric methods, including the number of citations for a given paper, the distribution of the highly cited papers, the geographic distribution of the cited authors, and the years of citation. Two thousand five hundred and six papers published in WJG from 2006 to 2007 were collected through SCIE, and 2335 of these were categorized as articles, reviews or proceedings. In 2006 and 2007, the average citation rate was 85.08% and 70.48%, respectively, and the average number of citations per paper was 4.33 and 2.51. Among the 2506 papers, 1963 were cited 8788 times by other articles. The mean number of citations per paper was 3.51. The papers with over three citations accounted for 54.72% of all those that were cited, and the total number of citations accounted for 85.38% of the total of 8788 citations. Thirteen papers were cited over 30 times and the highest number of citations for any one paper was 98. The cited authors came from 70 different countries or regions, with China, Japan and the United States being the most frequent. The highest average citation rate and number of citations per paper were for authors from Canada (96.30%, 6.89), Hungary (92.31%, 5.62), Australia (88.46%, 5.46), Germany (87.04%, 5.33), and Spain (87.50%, 5.11). The impact factor was 2.081 and the self-citation rate was 9.41% in 2008. The papers published in WJG in 2006-2007 were cited by 1597 journals. The papers in WJG have a high number of citations, and have been cited in numerous journals by authors from various countries. The results imply that WJG has an influential academic profile in gastroenterology around the world.

Comparing bibliometric country-by-country rankings derived from the Web of Science and Scopus: the effect of poorly cited journals in oncology

This article addresses the robustness of country-by-country rankings according to the number of published articles and their average citation impact in the field oncology. It compares rankings based on bibliometric indicators derived from the Web of Science (WoS) with those calculated from Scopus. It is found that the oncological journals in Scopus not covered by WoS tend to be nationally oriented journals, i.e. they mainly serve a national research community, and play as of yet a more peripheral role in the international journal communication system. In expanding the set of WoS journals with Scopus journals not indexed for WoS, the countries that profit most in terms of percentage of published documents tend to show a decline in their average citation rate. This paradoxical finding is further explained by mathematical—statistical considerations, and interpreted as a short term effect. The paper discusses its implications for the construction of bibliometric indicators.

Carbon nanotubes – A scientometric study

AbstractThis study has been carried out to analyze the carbon nanotubes research field by scientometric methods. The data are based on the Thomson/ISI Web of Science (WoS) and on the literature file of the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS). The time dependent overall number of articles dealing with nanotubes is given. The data reveal a dramatic increase of basic research activity in this research field. The most productive authors and leading research organizations are determined. The distribution of the nanotubes articles on the countries of the authors and on the leading journals is given. The citation data of nanotubes articles are discussed: The average citation rate of nanotubes related articles and of articles out of other currently popular research fields published in the year 2000 are compared with the average citation rates in chemistry and physics. The time evolution of the most highly cited nanotubes papers and of the complete ensemble of the nanotubes articles published in 2000 are shown. The impact of two nanotubes papers appeared prior to 1991 is discussed. (© 2008 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

Focus and future of occupational health journals

Focus and future of occupational health journals

The current state of six sigma application in services

PurposeSince its introduction by Motorola in the 1980s, six sigma and its philosophy have found widespread application in many manufacturing industries. It has also inspired applications in service industries. It is felt that there is a need to take stock of the knowledge accumulated in what is now an emerging field of study and look for directions to take the application of six sigma further in services. This article aims to review six sigma application in services along five main themes. The article seeks to draw on these themes to reflect on the wider applicability of six sigma in services.Design/methodology/approachAn analysis of relevant publications, citations and references was carried out using multiple databases. The impact of various key researches in this area is also discussed. The analysis then moves to discussing the necessary factors for success, key performance indicators, critical to quality characteristics, and the benefits and limitations of applying six sigma in services.FindingsThe findings are based on analysis done both quantitatively and qualitatively. The quantitative analysis shows that articles on this topic are scattered in various types of publications and there is dominance of a few articles in terms of average citation rate. The qualitative analysis shows that application of six sigma in the service sector is concentrated in a few services. The articles provide parameters to be considered for successful implementation of six sigma and there is some unanimity among articles on these parameters. Overall the literature analysis on this topic shows that six sigma is slowly but surely finding structured and beneficial application in service industries.Research limitations/implicationsThe quantitative and qualitative literature analysis provides the knowledge on the five themes discussed in this article. The non‐availability of citations in well‐known databases like SCI Expanded and the inflated citations by probable self‐citations limit the proper interpretation of average citation rate. Further research can be done in expanding the knowledge base on the discussed themes in different types of service industries.Practical implicationsThe article provides a theoretical framework consisting mainly of critical success factors, critical to quality characteristics, and key performance indicators as management guidelines to widen the application of six sigma in service industries.Originality/valueThis article contributes with a literature review, an analysis on the articles both quantitatively and qualitatively, and discusses how their contribution can be utilized for further research on this particular topic.

A systematic analysis of Hirsch-type indices for journals

A theoretical model of the dependence of Hirsch-type indices on the number of publications and the average citation rate is tested successfully on empirical samples of journal h-indices.

Effect of E-printing on Citation Rates in Astronomy and Physics

In this report we examine the change in citation behavior since the introduction of the arXiv e-print repository (Ginsparg, 2001). It has been observed that papers that initially appear as arXiv e-prints get cited more than papers that do not (Lawrence, 2001; Brody et al., 2004; Schwarz & Kennicutt, 2004; Kurtz et al., 2005a, Metcalfe, 2005). Using the citation statistics from the NASA-Smithsonian Astrophysics Data System (ADS; Kurtz et al., 1993, 2000), we confirm the findings from other studies, we examine the average citation rate to e-printed papers in the Astrophysical Journal, and we show that for a number of major astronomy and physics journals the most important papers are submitted to the arXiv e-print repository first.

Citation rates and perceptions of scientific contribution

AbstractIn this study scientists were asked about their own publication history and their citation counts. The study shows that the citation counts of the publications correspond reasonably well with the authors' own assessments of scientific contribution. Generally, citations proved to have the highest accuracy in identifying either major or minor contributions. Nevertheless, according to these judgments, citations are not a reliable indicator of scientific contribution at the level of the individual article. In the construction of relative citation indicators, the average citation rate of the subfield appears to be slightly more appropriate as a reference standard than the journal citation rate. The study confirms that review articles are cited more frequently than other publication types. Compared to the significance authors attach to these articles they appear to be considerably “overcited.” However, there were only marginal differences in the citation rates between empirical, methods, and theoretical contributions.

Selection of research fellowship recipients by committee peer review. Reliability, fairness and predictive validity of Board of Trustees' decisions

In science, peer review is the best-established method of assessing manuscripts for publication and applications for research fellowships and grants. However, the fairness of peer review, its reliability and whether it achieves its aim to select the best science and scientists has often been questioned. The paper presents the first comprehensive study on committee peer review for the selection of doctoral (Ph.D.) and post-doctoral research fellowship recipients. We analysed the selection procedure followed by the Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds (B.I.F.), a foundation for the promotion of basic research in biomedicine, with regard to the reliability, fairness and predictive validity of the procedure - the three quality criteria for professional evaluations. We analysed a total of 2,697 applications, 1,954 for doctoral and 743 for post-doctoral fellowships. In 76% of the cases, the fellowship award decision was characterized by agreement between reviewers. Similar figures for reliability have been reported for the grant selection procedures of other major funding agencies. With regard to fairness, we analysed whether potential sources of bias, i.e., gender, nationality, major field of study and institutional affiliation, could have influenced decisions made by the B.I.F. Board of Trustees. For post-doctoral fellowship applications, no statistically significant influence of any of these variables could be observed. For doctoral fellowship applications, we found evidence of an institutional, major field of study and gender bias, but not of a nationality bias. The most important aspect of our study was to investigate the predictive validity of the procedure, i.e., whether the foundation achieves its aim to select as fellowship recipients the best junior scientists. Our bibliometric analysis showed that this is indeed the case and that the selection procedure is thus highly valid: research articles by B.I.F. fellows are cited considerably more often than the “average' paper (average citation rate) published in the journal sets corresponding to the fields “Multidisciplinary', “Molecular Biology & Genetics', and “Biology & Biochemistry' in Essential Science Indicators (ESI) from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA). Most of the fellows publish within these fields.

The effect of highly cited papers on national citation indicators

Citation distributions are extremely skewed. This paper addresses the following question: To what extent are national citation indicators influenced by a small minority of highly cited articles? This question has not been studied before at the level of national indicators. Using the scientific production of Norway as a case, we find that the average citation rates in major subfields are highly determined by one or only a few highly cited papers. Furthermore, there are large annual variations in the influence of highly cited papers on the average citation rate of the subfields. We conclude that an analysis of the underlying data for national indicators may be useful in creating awareness towards the occurrence of particular articles with great influence on what is normally considered an indicator of “national performance”, and that the common interpretation of the indicator on research policy level needs to be informed by this fact.

From Laboratory to Scientific Literature

This study documents the course of submission of a group of biomedical research papers to peer-reviewed journals and characterizes their quality through citation analysis for published papers and through a typology of originality for those papers that were never accepted. Of fifty-nine papers, 47 percent (n = 28) were accepted by the first journal to which they were submitted, 25 percent (n = 15) by the second, and 7 percent (n = 6) by the third to sixth journal. For the first five years of publication, the average citation rate per year was 1.5, and 43 percent had more than 1 citation per year. Fifteen papers (25 percent) were never accepted. Typologic analysis of five of these papers suggests some standards by which it may be possible to characterize scientific originality.

A bibliometric study of highly cited European physics papers in the 80s

In this study highly cited publications are determined using citations from the Science Citation Index (SCI) database and source documents from a non-SCI database. Instead of the journal-impact factor, which in this case is questionable as a reference standard, the average citation rate of a subfield was used for the analysis of European physics papers published in the period 1980–87 and covered by the Physics Briefs database. The methodology is followed by a detailed analysis of the results obtained. The discussion includes an analysis of the number, and the absolute and relative share, of highly cited papers by countries. The added value of indicators based on highly cited papers to other indicators such as the citation mean is shown. The paper concludes with an investigation of the role of international collaboration among highly cited papers. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Reference standards for citation based assessments

One of the most crucial points of citation-based assessments is to find proper reference standards to which the otherwise meaningless plain citation counts can be compared. Using such standards, mere absolute numbers can be turned into relative indicators, suitable for cross-national and cross-field comparisons. In the present study, three possible choice of reference standards for citation assessments are discussed. Citation rates of publications under study can be compared to the average citation rates of the papers of the publishing journals to result inRelative Citation Rate (RCR), an indicator successfully used in several comparative scientometric analyses (see, e.g. Refs 1–5). A more “customized” reference set is defined by therelated records in the new CD Edition of theScience Citation Index database. Using the socalled “bibliographic coupling” technique, a set of papers with a high measure of similarity in their list of references is assigned to every single paper of the database. Beside of being an excellent retrieval tool, related records provide a suitable reference set to assess the relative standing of a given set of papers as measured by citation indicators. The third choice introduced in this study is specifically designed for assessing journals. For this purpose, the set of journals cited by the journal in question seems to be a useful basis to compare with. The pros and cons of the three choices are discussed and several examples are given.

Death comes as the end — Effects of cessation of personal influence upon rates of citation of astronomical papers

DEATH OF COMES PERSONAL AS THE END INFLUENCE OF EFFECTS UPON ASTRONOMICAL RATES OF OF CESSATION CITATION PAPERS V. T r i m b l e Astronomy Pro#rarn, University of_Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA and Department of Physics, University of California, Irvine, California 92717, USA A n attempt is made to investigate the extent to which direct, personal influence on students, colleagues, and mentors affects the frequency with which a scientist's papers are cited by others working in his field. The method used is a n analysis of changes in citation rate between 1965 and 1984 to papers written over their entire careers by a n index group of astronomers who died between 1969 and 1982. These citation histories are compared to those of papers written over the same period by a control group of astronomers who were still activ› at the end of 1984. Only papers written during the lifetimes of the index astronomers are considered. The data show signs that the death of a scientist is followed by a few-year sympathy period , during which citation rates rise, and then by a decade or more of gradual forgetfulness, during which citation rates drop off faster t h a n those to papers written during the same period by living astronomers. The amounts of the rise and decline suggest that about 4 0 ~ of astronomical cita- tions are mediated by personal influence. 1. I N T R O D U C T I O N Most of us believe that the frequency with which a scientific paper is cited depends primarily u p o n how useful it is to other workers in the field. Most of us also suspect, however (especially when our own papers go uncited), that there are other factors, related to where, when, and by whom the paper is published. One of these factors is direct, personal influence on mentors, colle- agues, and students with whom the author communicates. R a o and Vahia [1] have gone so far as to suggest that this personal influence factor may be sufflciently i m p o r t a n t to account for the rough proportionality that exists between the n u m b e r of authors of a n astronomical paper and the n u m b e r of times it is cited [2]. Along the same lines, the fact that astronomers typically write their most-cited papers between the ages of 50 and 60 [3] has been attributed by Woltjer [4] to the peaking of personal influence (in the form of directorships, editorships, chairmanships, etc.) during that decade. The intent here is to probe the effect of personal influence on citation rates. The method is a comparison of the citation histories of papers written by 34 astronomers who died between 1969 and 1982 to the citation histories of papers written by a control group still active in astronomy at the end of 1984. The control individuals were matched as nearly as possible to the index ones in subdiscipline, gender, country of employment, and (most important) year in whi™ career began. This last is important, because average citation rates to astronomical papers peak 5 yr after publication and decline monotonically, and roughly linearly, thereafter, with a half-life near 20 yr [5]. The death dates for the sample were constrained a t o n e end by the appearance of the first cumulative issue of Science Citation Index including astronomical papers (1965--69) and, at the other end, by the time needed for the astronomical community to be aware of the death when writing papers published in 1984. The usable sample is hot very large, leading to a preliminary conclusion that investigations like this require a larger population (or a n older one!) t h a n the world's 7000 research astronomers (median age a b o u t 40) to achieve great statistical significance. Czech. J. Phys. B 36 [1986]

CITATIONS TO FEDERALLY-FUNDED AND UNFUNDED RESEARCH

ABSTRACT The 1409 papers published in 1974 in the three general American astronomical research journals produced 21,106 citations (references) during the years . Papers coming from most kinds of organizations (universities, NSF and NASA centers, foundations, and miscellaneous governmental and military organizations) have statistically the same average citation rates, whereas papers from commercial companies rank higher and foreign papers (in 1974) rank lower. Sloan Fellows and university authors receiving most furms of auxiliary outside funding (NASA, NSF) produce higher-cited papers than papers without such funding.

On scientometrical characteristics on information activities of leading scientists

A comparative analysis of the information activities of leading scientists has been carried out, including 5 Soviet chemists and 5 foreign ones, and 8 Soviet physicists, specialist in low temperature physics. Within chemists there has appeared a tendency to a new form of scientific activities, namely ephemeron teams which favour the “production line” mode of getting new information. In physics, the traditional scheme is preserved: leading scientists publish few articles and have few co-authors. The ephemeron teams produce an expanding information: new objects and processes are studied from the previously elaborated point of view. The specific average citation rate (number of references per number of papers) is a criterion for separating the publications of the “intellectual industry” from the pilot studies full of novel ideas.