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Examines a set of over 27,000 UK papers in cancer research in order to identify the individual factors that influence the impact category of the journals in which they are published, using multiple regression analysis. The most important independent variables that have a positive effect are the numbers of authors and funding bodies, the research level (from clinical to basic), and the presence of certain universities, or of the USA, in the address field. Inter-lab co-operation was shown to have a negative effect on journal impact category, as was international co-authorship. It is because such partnerships usually involve more authors and funding for the research that they are perceived to lead to higher impact work. There is also a tendency for papers to be published in higher impact journals in later years, probably because of market forces, which means that such journals will tend to expand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - Seeks to characterise world astronomy research during the last decade by an analysis of papers in the Science Citation Index identified with a special filter and to study Indian output in order to identify the leading institutions and authors. Design/methodology/approach - Lists of specialist journals and title words of papers were selected to create a filter giving high precision and recall for astronomy papers. Some biology papers were erroneously retrieved because of ambiguous title words. Potential citation impact was determined from journal citation scores, and multiple regression was used to evaluate leading countries. Findings - Title words added almost a quarter to the list of papers in specialist journals, and the final file contained over 96,000 papers. Potential impact increased with more authors per paper and more addresses; it was greater for papers from Canada, the UK and the USA, and less for papers from China, India and Russia; for other countries the effects of the author's location on potential impact were not statistically significant. Indian astronomy output has increased in potential impact, partly through greater international co-authorship, but also through indigenous papers. Research limitations/implications - The study was confined to one subject area, and impact was determined on the basis of journals, not of individual papers. Practical implications - Use of title words in addition to journal lists is essential to sub-field definition in order to have high precision and recall. Because of the confounding effects of authorship numbers, it is necessary to use multiple regression analysis in order to see whether research from a given country is significantly better or worse than average. Originality/value - Characterises world astronomy research during the last decade by an analysis of papers in the Science Citation Index identified with a special filter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - To map UK biomedical research by analysing biomedical publications from authors with UK institutional affiliation and indexed in Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). Design/methodology/approach - Bibliometric methods to assess the volume of research published, its impact and sources of funding of biomedical research in the UK are used. The analyses also include an examination of national and international collaboration, leading regions and institutions (by volume of output), types of research carried out and its potential impact factor. This was done for all of biomedicine and 32 selected sub-fields. The data used span 12 years, allowing changes and developments over time to be tracked. Findings - The UK's position as the second largest producer of biomedical research is under threat from Japan and Germany and other countries with traditionally weaker biomedical research base. Strength in malaria and asthma research and relative weakness in surgery and renal medicine is notable. The profile of UK biomedical research has changed significantly in the period analysed, with a doubling of the level of international collaboration, a significant increase in basic research papers and an increase in the potential impact of UK publications. A relative decrease of acknowledgement of UK Government funding was noted, as were increased acknowledgements to UK not-for-profit and international organisations. Practical implications - Bibliometric analyses can provide reliable tools in mapping the development of scholarly disciplines which can be of use, as demonstrated in this paper, in research policy, as well as in domain analysis in information science, library collection development or publishing. Originality/value - Apart from policy applications, bibliometric research of this type can provide valuable information about changes in the patterns of scholarly communication within a domain (areas of interest in sociology of science and information science) and inform collection development policies in libraries and information centres (by describing literatures: ageing and obsolescence, volume and impact). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to suggest an alternative to the widely used Times Cited criterion for analysing citation networks. The approach involves taking account of the natures of the papers that cite a given paper, so as to differentiate between papers that attract the same number of citations. Design/methodology/approach - ArticleRank is an algorithm that has been derived from Google's PageRank algorithm to measure the influence of journal articles. ArticleRank is applied to two datasets - a citation network based on an early paper on webometrics, and a self-citation network based on the 19 most cited papers in the Journal of Documentation - using citation data taken from the Web of Knowledge database. Findings - ArticleRank values provide a different ranking of a set of papers from that provided by the corresponding Times Cited values, and overcomes the inability of the latter to differentiate between papers with the same numbers of citations. The difference in rankings between Times Cited and ArticleRank is greatest for the most heavily cited articles in a dataset. Originality/value - This is a novel application of the PageRank algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]