Search

Scientific topics vary in popularity over time. In this paper, we model the life cycles of 200 trending topics by fitting the Logistic and Gompertz models to their frequency over time in published abstracts. Unlike other work, the topics we use are algorithmically extracted from large datasets of abstracts covering computer science, particle physics, cancer research, and mental health. We find that the Gompertz model produces lower median error, leading us to conclude that it is the more appropriate model. Since the Gompertz model is asymmetric, with a steep rise followed a long tail, this implies that scientific topics follow a similar trajectory. We also explore the case of double-peaking curves and find that in some cases, topics will peak multiple times as interest resurges. Finally, when looking at the different scientific disciplines, we find that the lifespan of topics is longer in some disciplines (e.g. cancer research and mental health) than it is others, which may indicate differences in research process and culture between these disciplines.

Open peer review (OPR), where review reports and reviewers’ identities are published alongside the articles, represents one of the last aspects of the open science movement to be widely embraced, although its adoption has been growing since the turn of the century. This study provides the first comprehensive investigation of OPR adoption, its early adopters and the implementation approaches used. Current bibliographic databases do not systematically index OPR journals, nor do the OPR journals clearly state their policies on open identities and open reports. Using various methods, we identified 617 OPR journals that published at least one article with open identities or open reports as of 2019 and analyzed their wide-ranging implementations to derive emerging OPR practices. The findings suggest that: (1) there has been a steady growth in OPR adoption since 2001, when 38 journals initially adopted OPR, with more rapid growth since 2017; (2) OPR adoption is most prevalent in medical and scientific disciplines (79.9%); (3) five publishers are responsible for 81% of the identified OPR journals; (4) early adopter publishers have implemented OPR in different ways, resulting in different levels of transparency. Across the variations in OPR implementations, two important factors define the degree of transparency: open identities and open reports. Open identities may include reviewer names and affiliation as well as credentials; open reports may include timestamped review histories consisting of referee reports and author rebuttals or a letter from the editor integrating reviewers’ comments. When and where open reports can be accessed are also important factors indicating the OPR transparency level. Publishers of optional OPR journals should add metric data in their annual status reports.

We examined whether the publication characteristics of various scientific disciplines exhibit age-related trends. Our analysis was based on two large data sets comprising all major scientific disciplines. Citation data for European Research Council grant holders (ERC, n = 756) were obtained from Google Scholar. Publication data for Hungarian researchers (HUN, n = 2469) were obtained from the Hungarian Scientific Work Archive. The evaluated performance parameters include the number of citations received and the number of high quality first/last author papers published in the last five years. We designated the time between maximum growth and the achieved maximal annual value of total citations as the Golden Age of a researcher. Regarding citation growth, the mean age at the highest growth was 41.75 and 41.53 years for ERC grantees and Hungarian researchers, respectively. Each discipline had different values, with mathematics (38.5 years, ERC) and biology (34.7 years, HUN) having the youngest mean age of highest citation growth and agriculture (45.2 years, ERC) and language sciences (49.9 years, HUN) having the oldest mean age. The maximal growth of publications occurred at 44.5 years, with physics starting first (40.5 years, HUN) and language sciences as last (51.4 years, HUN). Most academic careers require decades to reach their peak and the length of the period of maximum performance varies across disciplines. The most creative time period is rising and is currently in the second half of the forties. Identifying the Golden Age in diverse research careers may be of substantial help in the distribution of grants and tenure positions.

How do scientific disciplines evolve? This is one of the fundamental problems of the dynamics of science. This study confronts this problem here by investigating the evolution of experimental physics, which plays a vital role for the progress of science in society. In particular, the main aim of this article is to analyze the structure and endogenous processes of experimental physics to explain and generalize, whenever possible, the properties of the evolution of applied sciences in the phase of continuous expansion of the universe of science. Empirical analysis here suggests the following properties of the dynamics of science: (a) scientific fission, the evolution of scientific disciplines generates a process of division into two or more research fields that evolve as autonomous entities, creating new disciplines of scientific specialization; (b) ambidextrous drivers of science, the evolution of scientific disciplines by scientific fission is due to scientific discoveries or new technologies; (c) higher growth rates of the scientific production are in new research fields of a scientific discipline rather than old ones; (d) average duration of the growth phase of scientific production in research fields is about 80 years, almost the period of one generation of scholars. Overall, then, this study explains, whenever possible, the relationships that support scientific change of disciplines to develop comprehensive properties of the evolution of science directed to economic, technological and social progress.

The academic world is developing rapidly with many new countries becoming significant contributors to research. One important strategic issue is to ensure that the collaboration network develops at least in the same pace as the academic world is developing. This study proposes a new method to compare countries’ growth in research, thus highlighting that Indonesia, Iran and Pakistan are the countries with the highest growth among all countries with more than 10,000 Scopus publications in 2018. A new indicator for collaboration intensity is also proposed, which makes it easy to check to what extent the collaboration pattern incorporates countries with rapid growth. Using Sweden and Indonesia as examples, the study shows differences on national level as well as between different scientific disciplines. Whereas Sweden’s collaboration is very much focusing on other mature research countries with low growth, Indonesia’s collaboration is including other countries with rapid growth. In terms of policy, the study and the proposed methodology support better-informed strategy decisions as regards the prioritisation of countries for research collaboration. It argues that there is a need for strategies and policy support at different levels, if a more balanced mix of research collaboration is to be obtained. To manage rapid changes, it might be necessary to shift from a mainly reactive development of the collaborations to a more proactive one that fosters links to the rapidly developing research countries.

The open access (OA) publication model is evolving and gaining support in the international scientific community. However, there is no evidence regarding the open access pathways being used in educational research or regarding the relationship between its subject categories and various scientometric indicators. The objective of this study was to use InCites to analyse documents published in journals from 2010 to 2016 in the SSCI categories of ‘Education and Educational Research’, ‘Education, Scientific Disciplines’ and ‘Education, Special’. The percentage of documents published in the Gold OA model increased gradually over the period studied and was higher than in the Green OA model. ‘Education, Scientific Disciplines’ was the subcategory with the highest percentage of documents published in the Gold OA. There was greater international collaboration on articles and reviews in Gold OA, especially in the pure model (publications in Gold Open Access journals), and the percentage of articles cited was higher in the Green OA and Gold OA models than in a non-OA model. There was no evidence that the Gold OA hybrid was cited more often than Green OA, and both had more impact than Gold OA pure. The Category Normalized Citation Impact values and the presence of documents in first quartile journals were higher in OA than in non-OA models. A more detailed analysis of the percentiles of the most cited publications clearly demonstrates that OA publications dominated the top percentiles of most cited articles to a greater degree than non-OA publications. The ‘Education, Special’ subcategory showed the greatest international collaboration and the highest percentage of cited documents.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the dynamics of cross-disciplinary research in health-related fields as affected by individual and institutional factors. We examine the topics of more than 500,000 doctoral dissertations from U.S. institutions in six major disciplines in 1996–2014. We find that (1) the overall extent of cross-disciplinary studies has remained steady over the years, while there is an increasing trend of cross-disciplinary research between biological sciences and engineering, as well as biological sciences and behavioral sciences, especially in recent years; and (2) at the subject level, the cross-disciplinary research around neuroscience is rapidly increasing, and neuroscience is becoming one of the most important bridges across subjects in various disciplines. A further investigation shows that the tendency to conduct cross-disciplinary neuroscience research is driven by an institutional trend that occurs across various departments, and there is an association between lagged neuroscience funding input and the production of cross-disciplinary neuroscience dissertations. Overall, our results offer new insights into the dynamic nature of cross-disciplinary research in health, the role of topics as bridging different disciplines, and human and funding capital in building the bridges.

We quantified several different elements that reflect writing styles of scientific papers in four related disciplines: physics, astrophysics, mathematics, and computer science. Text descriptors such as the use of punctuation characters, the use of upper case letters, use of quotations, and other descriptors that are not based on the words used in the papers were extracted from each document. Based on these features alone an automatic classifier was able to identify the discipline of the paper with accuracy much higher than mere chance, showing that different disciplines can be differentiated by their writing styles, and without using their content directly as reflected by common words used in the papers. The study showed statistically significant differences between the different disciplines such as use of acronyms, sentence length, word length, and more. Our findings also show changes in writing styles in specific disciplines over time. For instance, mathematicians and computer scientists began to use less acronyms starting from 2006, and there is a dramatic decrease of the average of punctuation characters in mathematics papers. These observations suggest that even in closely related disciplines there are differences in the scientific communication expressed through writing styles, demonstrating the existence of a “signature” writing style developed in each discipline. These findings should also be taken into account when a multidisciplinary group of collaborators assign writing duties on a joint scientific manuscript.

The essential function of scientific disciplines is to generate knowledge using the scientific method. In a context characterised by acknowledgement of methodological complementarity and the existence of innumerable mechanisms for production (articles, theses…) and dissemination (databases, platforms…), production is a measure of any given discipline’s normative development and projection. As a result of this situation, in Pedagogy—and, more specifically, in Educational Theory—we can witness a growing concern with systematising knowledge in a complex and dynamic context and based on reference frameworks. Therefore, this article aims to describe scientific production in Educational Theory, with the intention of discovering the creation and dissemination processes involved in theses retrieved from the Spanish doctoral theses database TESEO (2001–2015). A descriptive-comparative census study was carried out, with a total of n = 229 sampling units. The results show the following: thematic axes, which categorise thesis content into groups, are present; dissemination is influenced by the non-specific use of keywords, as well as by the area’s organisation and structure in different universities; there are no statistically significant differences in terms of author gender. In conclusion, we can identify an ever greater intention to provide the area with more scientific content but little concern with increasing this content’s visibility in databases such as TESEO. All in all, research production in Spain relating to Educational Theory is a good representative sample of researchers’ efforts to project their interest in discovering, understanding and improving education. Therefore, special care should be taken when compiling production data in databases.

Publication hit lists of authors, institutes, scientific disciplines etc. within scientific databases like Web of Science or Scopus are often used as a basis for scientometric analyses and evaluations of these authors, institutes etc. However, such information services do not necessarily cover all publications of an author. The purpose of this article is to introduce a re-interpreted scientometric indicator called “visibility,” which is the share of the number of an author’s publications on a certain information service relative to the author’s entire œuvre based upon his/her probably complete personal publication list. To demonstrate how the indicator works, scientific publications (from 2001 to 2015) of the information scientists Blaise Cronin (N = 167) and Wolfgang G. Stock (N = 152) were collected and compared with their publication counts in the scientific information services ACM, ECONIS, Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, Infodata eDepot, LISTA, Scopus, and Web of Science, as well as the social media services Mendeley and ResearchGate. For almost all information services, the visibility amounts to less than 50%. The introduced indicator represents a more realistic view of an author’s visibility in databases than the currently applied absolute number of hits in those databases.

We present a bibliometric comparison of publication performance in 226 scientific disciplines in the Web of Science (WoS) for six post-communist EU member states relative to six EU-15 countries of a comparable size. We compare not only overall country-level publication counts, but also high quality publication output where publication quality is inferred from the journal Article Influence Scores. As of 2010---2014, post-communist countries are still lagging far behind their EU counterparts, with the exception of a few scientific disciplines mainly in Slovenia. Moreover, research in post-communist countries tends to focus relatively more on quantity rather than quality. The relative publication performance of post-communist countries in the WoS is strongest in natural sciences and engineering. Future research is needed to reveal the underlying causes of these performance differences, which may include funding and productivity gaps, the historical legacy of the communist ideology, and Web of Science coverage differences.

In sociology of science much attention is dedicated to the study of scientific networks, especially to co-authorship and citations in publications. Other trends of research have investigated the advantages, limits, performances and difficulties of interdisciplinary research, which is increasingly advocated by the main lines of public research funding.This paper explores the dynamics of interdisciplinary research in Italy over ten years of scientific collaboration on research projects. Instead of looking at the output of research, i.e. publications, we analyse the original research proposals that have been funded by the Ministry of University and Research (MIUR) for a specific line of funding, the Research Projects of National Interest (PRIN). In particular, we want to see how much interdisciplinary research has been conducted during the period under analysis and how changes in the overall amount of public funding might have affected disciplinary and interdisciplinary collaboration. We also want to cluster the similarities and differences of the amount of disciplinary and interdisciplinary collaboration across scientific disciplines, and see if it changes over time. Finally, we want to see ifinterdisciplinary projects receive an increasing share of funding compared to their disciplinary bounded counterparts. Our results indicate that while interdisciplinary research diminishes along the years, potentially responding to the contraction of public funding, research that cut across disciplinary boundaries overall receives more funding than research confined within disciplinary boundaries. Furthermore, the clustering procedure do not indicate clear and stable distinction between disciplines, but similar patterns of disciplinary and interdisciplinary collaboration are shown by discipline withcommon epistemological frameworks, which share compatible epistemologies ofscientific investigations. We conclude by reflecting upon the implications of our findings for research policies and practices and by discussing future research in this area.

Individual adoption of technology is crucial for the success of technology implementation and has thus attracted much attention from researchers. Recent advances in citation-based analysis have been suggested as being efficient for analyzing knowledge dissemination within scientific disciplines. This article presents a case that examines the technology acceptance research through the newly developed citation-based approach, in particular main path analysis and edge-betweenness clustering analysis. Based on the citation network constructed from a total of 1555 journal articles from the period 1989 to 2014, the most critical 50 citations were identified and used as the basis to map the major knowledge flow in technology acceptance research. In addition, edge-betweenness based clustering was used to classify the citation network into coherent groups. As a result, five distinct research fronts were identified, namely e-learning, mobile-commerce, e-health, e-tourism, and technology post-acceptance research. This case study highlights the theoretical development trajectories, and identifies the most active research fronts of technology acceptance research, providing a research-based platform for further scholarly discussions.

Gender studies (GS) has been challenged on epistemological grounds. Here, we compare samples of peer-reviewed academic journal publications written by GS authors and authors from closely related disciplines in the social sciences. The material consisted of 2805 statements from 36 peer-reviewed journal articles, sampled from the Swedish Gender Studies List, which covers > 12,000 publications. Each statement was coded as expressing a lack of any of three aspects of objectivity: Bias, Normativity, or Political activism, or as considering any of four realms of explanation for the behaviours or phenomena under study: Biology/genetics, Individual/group differences, Environment/culture, or Societal institutions. Statements in GS publications did to a greater extent express bias and normativity, but not political activism. They did also to a greater extent consider cultural, environmental, social, and societal realms of explanation, and to a lesser extent biological and individual differences explanations.

In this study we analyse a corpus of 300 randomly selected research paper titles written in English and published between 1998 and 2012 in the most prestigious journals in the field of Astrophysics, an under-researched discipline from a linguistic standpoint. We specifically address issues related to the evolution of titles, their length, their lexical density, their type distribution and their semantic content. Our findings reveal a trend towards relatively long titles with a high lexical density, a preference for nominal and simple titles over verbal and compound ones, a very low occurrence of question constructions, and a prevalence of purpose and results over methods as key research concepts expressed in titles. We compare our findings with the results of previous studies on titles in other scientific disciplines and provide explanations for the differences and similarities observed. This research was partially supported by Grant No. 1039-13-06-B from the University of the Andes Research Center.

Scientific co-authorship of African researchers has become a fashionable topic in the recent scientometric literature. Researchers are investigating the effects, modes, dynamics and motives of collaboration in a continental research system which is in an embryonic stage and in different stages of development from country to country. In this article we attempt to provide some additional evidence by examining both patterns of collaboration at country and continental levels and the scientific disciplines emphasised. Our findings indicate that the continent's research emphasises medical and natural resources disciplines to the detriment of disciplines supporting knowledge based economies and societies. Furthermore, we identify that the collaborative patterns in Africa are substantial higher than in the rest of the world. A number of questions related to research collaboration and its effects are raised.

The access to bibliographic and citation databases allows to evaluate scientific performance, and provides useful means of general characterisation. In this paper we investigate the clustering of Iberian universities, resulting from the similarity in the number and specific nature of the scientific disciplines given by the Essential Science Indicators database. A further refining of the analysis, as provided by PCA, clearly reveals the relationship between the universities and the scientific disciplines in the main groups. Similarity between universities is not dictated only by the number of areas in the ranking, but also stems from the nature of the ranked scientific areas and the specific combination in each university.

The causes of gender bias favoring men in scientific and scholarly systems are complex and related to overall gender relationships in most of the countries of the world. An as yet unanswered question is whether in research publication gender bias is equally distributed over scientific disciplines and fields or if that bias reflects a closer relation to the subject matter. We expected less gender bias with respect to subject matter, and so analysed 14 journals of gender studies using several methods and indicators. The results confirm our expectation: the very high position of women in co-operation is striking; female scientists are relatively overrepresented as first authors in articles. Collaboration behaviour in gender studies differs from that of authors in PNAS. The pattern of gender studies reflects associations between authors of different productivity, or "masters" and "apprentices" but the PNAS pattern reflects associations between authors of roughly the same productivity, or "peers". It would be interesting to extend the analysis of these three-dimensional collaboration patterns further, to see whether a similar characterization holds, what it might imply about the patterns of authorship in different areas, what those patterns might imply about the role of collaboration, and whether there are differences between females and males in collaboration patterns.

This article presents for the first time a portrait of intramural research conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). We describe the nature, characteristics, and use of USDA research based on scientometric indicators using patent analysis and three bibliometric methods: publication analysis, citation analysis, and science mapping. Our analyses are intended to be purely descriptive in nature. They demonstrate that USDA maintains several core scientific competencies and its research is much broader than and reaches well beyond traditional agricultural sciences for which it is best known. We illustrate the current status, recent trends, and clear benchmarks for planning and assessing future USDA research across an array of scientific disciplines.

This article reports the results of a scientometric assessment of the Southern Africa Development Community countries. The National Science Indicators database of Thomson-Reuters and the online ISI Web of Knowledge are utilized in order to identify the number of publications of the 15 countries over a period of 15 years; the activity and relative impact indicators of 22 scientific disciplines for each country and their collaborative patterns. It is identified that South Africa with 19% of the population in the region is responsible for 60% of the regional GDP and 79% of the regions publications. All countries tend to have the same focus in their disciplinary priorities and underemphasize disciplines such as engineering, materials science and molecular biology. It is expressed concern that the current research infrastructures are inadequate to assist in reaching the objectives developed in the Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan of the Community.

This paper analyses the nationalities of the editorial board members of the top 20 journals (according to their impact factor in the ISI Journal Citation Report, Science Edition 2005) serving 15 scientific disciplines. A total of 281 journals were analysed (some journals crossed disciplinary boundaries) and 10,055 of their editorial board members were identified. Some 53% of board members were from the United States. Europe provided 32%, with the United Kingdom making the greatest contribution (9.8%). The analysis of scientific output by nationality in these journals showed a significant correlation, in all disciplines, with the representation of the corresponding nations on the editorial boards. The composition of editorial boards may therefore provide a useful indicator for measuring a country’s international scientific visibility. The present results should be taken into account in the design of national policies with the aim of enhancing the presence of a country’s most prestigious scientists on the editorial boards of the main international journals.

This study compares the citations characteristics of researchers in engineering disciplines with other major scientific disciplines, and investigates variations in citing patterns within subdisciplines in the field of engineering. Utilizing citations statistics including Hirsch’s (Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 102(46):16569–16572, 2005) h-index value, we find that significant differences in citing characteristics exist between engineering disciplines and other scientific fields. Our findings also reveal statistical differences in citing characteristics between subdisciplines found within the same engineering discipline.

We analyze the temporal evolution of emerging fields within several scientific disciplines in terms of numbers of authors and publications. From bibliographic searches we construct databases of authors, papers, and their dates of publication. We show that the temporal development of each field, while different in detail, is well described by population contagion models, suitably adapted from epidemiology to reflect the dynamics of scientific interaction. Dynamical parameters are estimated and discussed to reflect fundamental characteristics of the field, such as time of apprenticeship and recruitment rate. We also show that fields are characterized by simple scaling laws relating numbers of new publications to new authors, with exponents that reflect increasing or decreasing returns in scientific productivity.

According to authors like H. E. Stanley and others, growth dynamics of university research displays a quantitative behaviour similar to the growth dynamics of firms acting under competitive pressure. Features of such behaviour are probability distributions of annual growth rates or the standard deviation of growth rates. We show that a similar statistical behaviour can be observed in the growth dynamics of German university enrolments or in the growth dynamics of physics and mathematics, both for the 19th century. Since competitive pressure was generally weak at that time, interpretations of statistical similarities as to pointing to a “firm-like behaviour” are questionable.

This study investigates the role of self-citation in the scientific production of Norway (1981-1996). More than 45,000 publications have been analysed. Using a three-year citation window we find that 36% of all citations represent author self-citations. However, this percentage is decreasing when citations are traced for longer periods. We find the highest share of self-citation among the least cited papers. There is a strong positive correlation between the number of self-citations and the number of authors of the publications. Still, only a minor part of the overall increase in citation rates that can be found for multi-authored papers is due to self-citations. Also, the share of self-citation shows significant variations among different scientific disciplines. The results are relevant for the discussion concerning use of citation indicators in research assessments.

Collaboration in science has become a prevailing trend and it will be worthwhile to study the patterns of co-authorships in scientific research. In this study a three-dimensional behavioural pattern of Indian medicinal co-authorship network is presented. The high evenness of this pattern has caused us to carry out a non-linear regression analysis. The pattern of Indian Medicinal coauthorships can be described by the same non-linear mathematical function that describes the behavioural patterns of international medicine co-authorship networks and networks of other scientific disciplines. The following question has arise: Is there a general validity of this function in co-authorship networks?

This article presents a scientometric procedure which assists in the production of bibliometric indicators for conducting international comparisons about transdisciplinary research field. The procedure aims at the analysis of how a nomenclature in the field of the environment, established by public research administrators, translates into subsets of scientific journals. Relations between the nomenclature and scientific disciplines were obtained through analysis of reviews. The environmental field's structure has been analysed by using journal cross-citation data.

An attempt is made to correlate bibliometric data of journals (impact factors, half-life) for scientific disciplines in the exact sciences to bibliotheconomic data (subscription prices, prices per article and holdings). Data are presented for 5399 journals in 131 disciplines, as mentioned in theJournal Citation Reports 1900 (Science Citation Index).

A new method for the analysis of leadership and subdisciplinary structure of a scientific discipline is discussed. The database consists of lists of participants in international scientific meetings. Disciplinary leaders are identified by means of their frequency of participation. The subdisciplinary structure is mapped by means of cluster analysis of meetings with respect to degree of similarily. The method possesses strengths not shared by citation analysis: in addition to scientists frequently cited in the literature for their contribution to cognitive research programs, it also identifies administrative discipline builders. The method may also represent better the cognitive interests of scientists.

Mathematical models of the science and technology (S&T) system have a long tradition in scientometrics. They entail models of statistical properties such as the cumulative advantage model for citation patterns by Derek de Solla Price (1976) or models of scientific processes such as the epidemics of scientific ideas by William Goffman (1966). Frequently, new modeling attempts ‘‘echo’’ major breakthroughs in mathematical modeling. For example, models developed in physics, economics, or the social sciences are frequently applied to the science system itself, validated using S&T data, and interpreted by the authors of these models and their collaborators. This special issue aims to establish models of the science system as a promising area of research in scientometrics enabled by high-quality and high-coverage data, advanced data mining and modeling approaches, and new means to visualize the structure and dynamics of science at multiple levels. Models of science aim to answer questions regarding the basic mechanisms behind emergent structures such as scientific disciplines, scientific paradigms and cross-disciplinary research fronts, or the career trajectories of researchers. The issue comprises six selected contributions, resulting from presentations at the workshop ‘‘Modeling Science—Understanding, Forecasting and Communicating The Science System,’’ held in Amsterdam October 6–9, 2009.

“Field switchers” are an interesting group of people to study if one wants to find out to what extent and the ways in which the various scientific disciplines influence each other. In this paper we present and discuss the results of an inquiry that was conducted at Dutch universities among one particular type of field switchers, namely migrated physicists. By migrated physicists we mean physicists working in universities but not in physics departments. Although migrated physicists form a very heterogenous group one can draw some general conclusions about their attitudes, characteristics and capacities. Migrated physicists apparently continue to feel themselves to be physicists, and they think that physics or natural sciences should play a greater role in their “adopted” fields. At least in the case of physicsts, field-mobility seems to be linked with general mobility Migrant parform a useful and important sevice.

In the paper science is regarded as a self-adapting system consisting of two subsystems. The stochastic model of one of the subsystems is proposed. The model reflects changes of the structure of a scientific discipline. As an example a model for the physics of elementary particles is presented.

Ranking lists of periodicals in different scientific disciplines are generally based on the total number of citations derived from a group of source journals with equal weightage given to all citations irrespective of chronology. As a result, in all these ranking lists, the position occupied by the post-war journals, may not be an accurate index of their demand or usefulness to research workers in the concerned field. This may happen because the quantum of published literature in the new journals is limited by the period for which they have been in existence, which is in many cases less than 20 years. Moreover, many of the post-war journals appearing in all these recent ranking lists have started publication even after 1960s, and their enumerated citations cover in fact a variable period of less than 20 years unlike in the case of pre-war journals. To avoid such discriminating against new journals which necessarily have fewer citation credits Sengupta suggested earlier an off-setting weightage formula which has been applied in this paper to rerank microbiology periodicals. A revised ranking list in the field of microbiology has been recommended in preference to the earlier one compiled by Sengupta. Results and findings, after application of the weightage formula, have been presented and discussed in this paper.

The communication behaviour of Belgian university scientists is investigated over the period of 1977–1979. For 5 broad scientific domains the general characteristics are given and the distribution of the scientists over groups with 1 to 20 communications per three year is discussed. For two domains, Arts and Basic Sciences, an analysis is given of constituent disciplines. The present investigation presents a background profile of the communication activities, enabling evaluation of extreme activity in the disciplines discussed.

Relationships between publication language, impact factors and self-citations of journals published in individual countries, eight from Europe and one from South America (Brazil), are analyzed using bibliometric data from Thomson Reuters JCR Science Edition databases of ISI Web of Knowledge. It was found that: (1) English-language journals, as a rule, have higher impact factors than non-English-language journals, (2) all countries investigated in this study have journals with very high self-citations but the proportion of journals with high self-citations with reference to the total number of journals published in different countries varies enormously, (3) there are relatively high percentages of low self-citations in high subject-category journals published in English as well as non-English journals but national-language journals have higher self-citations than English-language journals, and (4) irrespective of the publication language, journals devoted to very specialized scientific disciplines, such as electrical and electronic engineering, metallurgy, environmental engineering, surgery, general and internal medicine, pharmacology and pharmacy, gynecology, entomology and multidisciplinary engineering, have high self-citations.