Scientometrics, Knowledge Management, and Social Network Analysis

Published in: Proceedings International Workshop on Webometrics, Informetrics and Scientometrics & Seventh COLLNET
Authors: Lixin, Chen and Zeyuan, Liu
Affiliation: Dalian University of Technology, the 21st Century Development Research Center, Dalian 116024, the People’s Republic of China

Chen and Liu (2006) examined the international collaboration in the field of mechanics among authors in different countries using the social network analysis perspective. 168,689 mechanics-related articles in 106 journals from 1945 to 2003 were collected from the Science Citation Index-Expanded Database. The authors of the articles were from 150 countries, but only the collaborations among 30 most productive countries were analysed, which was ranked based on the number of the first-authors.

Based on the publication data of the 30 most productive countries, a non-symmetrical collaboration matrix was constructed with the rows representing first-author’s countries and the columns representing non first-author’s countries. The diagonal of the collaboration matrix was not given any value.

Chen and Liu identified the 6 most productive countries, namely USA, UK, Japan, France, Germany and China. These 6 countries accounted for 66.8% of the 88.891 publications from the top 30 countries, and 58.37% of 18,660 collaborations among the 30 countries. There were 666 different pairs of collaborations among the 900 possible collaborations. This means that the density of the network is 0.74.

The degree centrality, which is the number of direct connections each node has, was also identified. Only the top 6 countries had a degree centrality of at least 7 led by USA with 26, UK with 18, Germany with 16, France with 14, and both China and Japan with 7 degree centralities.

Finally, Chen and Liu divided the 30 countries into 4 regions, namely Europe, North America, Asia, and other. They found that European countries had a tendency to collaborate with other European countries, which accounted for more than half of the European countries’ collaborations and 26.7% of total collaborations. The percentage of collaborations by European countries was the highest compared to other regions’ collaborations. However, they were not the most productive region; North America was the highest with 39% (35% by USA).

Chen and Liu finally concluded that USA was the most important node in the network and European countries led by United Kingdom, Germany, and French played important roles in the international collaboration in the field of mechanics.

Published in: Conservation Biology, 20(3), 2006, 652-657(6)
Authors: Autumn-Lynn Harrison
Affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Long Marine Laboratory, University of California, Santa Cruz, 100 Shaffer Road, Santa Cruz, CA 95060, U.S.A.

The four previous papers have illustrated how scientometrics techniques being applied in the level of journals, fields, as well as countries. Harrison (2006) studied the authorship trends of a specific journal, Conservation Biology, from its inauguration in 1987 to 2005.

Over the 19-years period, there were more than 5,200 unique authors representing almost 1,500 organisations from 89 countries contributing to 2,060 papers. These data were obtained from Thomson Scientific bibliometric records.

Harrison first investigated the 25 most cited papers. It was found that 62 individuals were involved in the 25 papers. From the first author perspective, 21 of them are men and 4 are women.

From the total number of authors, 82.6% of them published only a single paper and only 6 of them published 10 or more papers, namely Dennis Murphy with 13 papers, Joel Berger 12 papers, Philip Hedrick and Mac Hunter with 11 papers, and Tim Clark and Kent Redford with 10 papers. Interestingly, the top 3 most cited papers do not include any of the most productive authors. The three most cited authors were all from Australia, Richard J. Hobbs received 1021 total citations from 5 papers, Chris Margules received 951 citations from 3 papers, and Denis Saunders received 857 citations from the only paper that he published in Conservation Biology. 82.6% of them published only a single paper.

Harrison also found that the number of single-authored papers decreased significantly over the years from 56.7% in 1987 to 17.8% in 2005. While the number of papers with 5 or more authors ranged from 0 in 1987 to 23% in 2005. Overall, the average number of authors per paper increased from 1.6 in 1987 to 3.3 in 2005.

Finally, Harrison investigated the affiliation of the authors. 62% of the total number of institutions contributed only a single paper. The U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service with its 63 papers was the most productive, while the University of Florida and University of California, Davis, were the two institutions with the highest number of first authors with 41 and 40.