ABSTRACT
Bibliometric methods or "analysis" are now firmly established as scientific specialties and are an integral part of research evaluation methodology especially within the scientific and applied fields. The methods are used increasingly when studying various aspects of science and also in the way institutions and universities are ranked worldwide. A sufficient number of studies have been completed, and with the resulting literature, it is now possible to analyse the bibliometric method by using its own methodology. The bibliometric literature in this study, which was extracted from Web of Science, is divided into two parts using a method comparable to the method of Jonkers et al. (Characteristics of bibliometrics articles in library and information sciences (LIS) and other journals, pp. 449-551, 2012: The publications either lie within the Information and Library Science (ILS) category or within the non-ILS category which includes more applied, "subject" based studies. The impact in the different groupings is judged by means of citation analysis using normalized data and an almost linear increase can be observed from 1994 onwards in the non-ILS category. The implication for the dissemination and use of the bibliometric methods in the different contexts is discussed. A keyword analysis identifies the most popular subjects covered by bibliometric analysis, and multidisciplinary articles are shown to have the highest impact. A noticeable shift is observed in those countries which contribute to the pool of bibliometric analysis, as well as a self-perpetuating effect in giving and taking references.
ABSTRACT
Valid and reliable information on the use and effects of chemicals is a key factor in the industry and not least within many regulatory agencies. Identification data from lists of substances sometimes leads to incomplete bibliographic analysis in the major chemical databases. The present study takes as its starting point environmentally important chemicals and the retrieval of selectively chosen substances in the four databases: SciFinder, Web of Science (WoS), Scopus and Google Scholar. The way chemical data are stored in the databases plays a major role in the recovery process but differences in coverage, sometimes major, are still found. No single database records all publications about a substance. Inspection of individual titles is necessary when performing a complete count of references. Special care is taken in order to make data from the different databases comparable using the same journals and time periods (2000-2009). A number of nomenclature as well as problems related to the chemical structure and function, often inherent in quantitative or qualitative bibliographic studies of chemicals, are discussed. The practical implications for registration of chemicals in different databases are demonstrated.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: While environmental research addresses scientific questions of possible societal relevance, it is unclear to what degree research focuses on environmental chemicals in need of documentation for risk assessment purposes. METHODS: In a bibliometric analysis, we used SciFinder to extract Chemical Abstract Service (CAS) numbers for chemicals addressed by publications in the 78 major environmental science journals during 2000-2009. The Web of Science was used to conduct title searches to determine long-term trends for prominent substances and substances considered in need of research attention. RESULTS: The 119,636 journal articles found had 760,056 CAS number links during 2000-2009. The top-20 environmental chemicals consisted of metals, (chlorinated) biphenyls, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, benzene, and ethanol and contributed 12% toward the total number of links- Each of the top-20 substances was covered by 2,000-10,000 articles during the decade. The numbers for the 10-year period were similar to the total numbers of pre-2000 articles on the same chemicals. However, substances considered a high priority from a regulatory viewpoint, due to lack of documentation, showed very low publication rates. The persistence in the scientific literature of the top-20 chemicals was only weakly related to their publication in journals with a high impact factor, but some substances achieved high citation rates. CONCLUSIONS: The persistence of some environmental chemicals in the scientific literature may be due to a 'Matthew' principle of maintaining prominence for the very reason of having been well researched. Such bias detracts from the societal needs for documentation on less well known environmental hazards, and it may also impact negatively on the potentials for innovation and discovery in research.
