Contents of Scientometrics Vol:74, No:2 (02.2008)

[Eugene Garfield]

Scientometrics, Vol. 74, No. 2 (2008)



CONTENTS & ABSTRACTS

TITLE:   Persistent nepotism in peer-review	175
AUTHORS: ULF SANDSTRÖMa MARTIN HÄLLSTENb
E-mail: ulfsa at tema.liu.se

aDepartment for Studies of Social Change and Culture, Linköping University, 
Lingköping (Sweden)
bDepartment of Sociology & Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm 
University, Stockholm (Sweden)

Abstract
In a replication of the high-profile contribution by Wennerås and Wold on 
grant peer-review, we investigate new applications processed by the medical 
research council in Sweden. Introducing a normalisation method for ranking 
applications that takes into account the differences between committees, we 
also use a normalisation of bibliometric measures by field. Finally, we 
perform a regression analysis with interaction effects. Our results 
indicate that female principal investigators (PIs) receive a bonus of 10% 
on scores, in relation to their male colleagues. However, male and female 
PIs having a reviewer affiliation collect an even higher bonus, 
approximately 15%. Nepotism seems to be a persistent problem in the Swedish 
grant peer review system.

Address for correspondence:
ULF SANDSTRÖM
Department for Studies of Social Change and Culture, Linköping University
58183 Lingköping, Sweden
E-mail: ulfsa at tema.liu.se

Scientometrics, Vol. 74, No. 2 (2008) 175–189
DOI: 10.1007/s11192-008-0211-3 


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TITLE  : Relations between national research investment and publication 
output: Application to an American Paradox	191

AUTHOR  :ROBERT D. SHELTON

Loyola College and WTEC, Baltimore (USA)
E-mail :  E-mail: shelton at wtec.org

Abstract

The term “European Paradox” describes the perceived failure of the EU to 
capture full benefits of its leadership of science as measured by 
publications and some other indicators. This paper investigates what might 
be called the “American Paradox,” the decline in scientific publication 
share of the U.S. despite world-leading investments in research and 
development (R&D) – particularly as that decline has accelerated in recent 
years. A multiple linear regression analysis was made of which inputs to 
the scientific enterprise are most strongly correlated with the number of 
scientific papers produced. Research investment was found to be much more 
significant than labor input, government investment in R&D was much more 
significant than that by industry, and government non-defense investment 
was somewhat more significant than its defense investment. Since the EU 
actually leads the U.S. in this key component, this could account for 
gradual loss of U.S. paper share and EU assumption of leadership of 
scientific publication in the mid-1990s. More recently the loss of U.S. 
share has accelerated, and three approaches analyzed this phenomenon: (1) A 
companion paper shows that the SCI database has not significantly changed 
to be less favorable to the U.S.; thus the decline is real and is not an 
artifact of the measurement methods. (2) Budgets of individual U.S. 
research agencies were correlated with overall paper production and with 
papers in their disciplines. Funding for the U.S. government civilian, non-
healthcare sector was flat in the last ten years, resulting in declining 
share of papers. Funding for its healthcare sector sharply increased, but 
there were few additional U.S. healthcare papers. While this inefficiency 
contributes to loss of U.S. share, it is merely a specific example of the 
general syndrome that increased American investments have not produced 
increased publication output. (3) In fact the decline in publication share 
appears to be due to rapidly increasing R&D investments by China, Taiwan, 
S. Korea, and Singapore. A model shows that in recent years it is a 
country’s share of world investment that is most predictive of its 
publication share. While the U.S. has increased its huge R&D investment, 
its investment share still declined because of even more rapidly increasing 
investments by these Asian countries. This has likely led to their sharply 
increased share of scientific publication, which must result in declines of 
shares of others – the U.S. and more recently, the EU.  

Address for correspondence:
ROBERT D. SHELTON
Loyola College, 4501 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21210, USA
E-mail: shelton at wtec.org

Scientometrics, Vol. 74, No. 2 (2008) 191–205
DOI: 10.1007/s11192-008-0212-2 

________________________________



TITLE  : Scientists’ perceptions of the social and political implications 
of their research	207

AUTHORS : HENRY SMALL, ANN KUSHMERICK, DOUG BENSON

Thomson Scientific, Philadelphia, PA (USA)
E-mail: henry.small at thomson.com

Abstract

We explore an empirical approach to studying the social and political 
implications of science by gathering scientists’ perceptions of the social 
impacts of their research. It was found that 78 percent of surveyed 
scientists from a variety of fields responding to a survey indicated that 
the research performed in connection with a recent highly cited paper had 
such implications. Health related implications were the most common, but 
other types of implications encountered were technological spin-offs, 
public understanding, economic and policy benefits. Surprisingly many 
scientists considered the advancement of science itself to be a social 
implication of their research. The relations of these implications to the 
field and topics of research are examined, and a mapping of implications 
gives an overview of the major dimensions of the social impacts of science. 

Address for correspondence:
HENRY SMALL
Thomson Scientific 
3501 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
E-mail: henry.small at thomson.com

Scientometrics, Vol. 74, No. 2 (2008) 207–221
DOI: 10.1007/s11192-008-0213-1 
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TITLE  : A structural analysis of publication profiles for the 
classification of 
European research institutes	223

AUTHORS : BART THIJSa, WOLFGANG GLÄNZELa,b
E-mail: Bart.Thijs at econ.kuleuven.be

a Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Steunpunt O&O Indicatoren, Leuven 
(Belgium)
b Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Research Policy Studies, 
Budapest (Hungary)

Abstract
In the present study we propose a solution for a common problem in 
benchmarking tasks at institutional level. The usage of bibliometric 
indicators, even after standardisation, cannot disguise that comparing 
institutes remains often like comparing apples with pears. We developed a 
model to assign institutes to one of 8 different groups based on their 
research profile. Each group has a different focus: 1. Biology, 2. 
Agricultural Sciences, 3. Multidisciplinary, 4. Geo & Space Sciences, 5. 
Technical and natural Sciences, 6. Chemistry, 7. General and Research 
Medicine, 8. Specialised Medicine. Two applications of this methodology are 
described. In the first application we compare the composition of clusters 
at national level with the national research profiles. This gives a deeper 
insight in the national research landscape. In a second application we look 
at the dynamics of institutes by comparing their subject clustering at two 
different points in time.


Address for correspondence:
BART THIJS
Steunpunt O&O Indicatoren, KU Leuven
Dekenstraat 2, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium
E-mail: Bart.Thijs at econ.kuleuven.be

Scientometrics, Vol. 74, No. 2 (2008) 223–236
DOI: 10.1007/s11192-008-0214-0

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TITLE :  Correlation between the structure of scientific research, 
scientometric indicators and 
GDP in EU and non-EU countries	237
AUTHOR : PETER VINKLER
E-mail: pvinkler at chemres.hu


Chemical Research Center, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest (Hungary)

Abstract

Significant discrepancies were found in the ratio and relative impact of 
the journal papers of several scientific fields of some Central and Eastern 
European (CEE) countries compared to the European Community member states, 
the US and Japan (EUJ countries). A new indicator, characterizing the Mean 
Structural Difference of scientific fields between countries has been 
introduced and calculated for CEE countries. For EUJ countries correlation 
between the GDP and number of publications of a given year proved to be non-
significant. Longitudinal studies showed, however, significant correlations 
between the yearly values of GDP and number of papers published. Studying 
data referring to consecutive time periods revealed that there is no direct 
relationship between the GDP and information production of countries. It 
may be assumed that grants for R&D do not actually depend on real needs, 
but the fact is that rich countries can afford to spend more whilst poor 
countries only less money on scientific research.


Address for correspondence:
PETER VINKLER
Chemical Research Center, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
1525 Budapest, P. O. Box 17, Hungary
E-mail: pvinkler at chemres.hu

Scientometrics, Vol. 74,  No. 2 (2008) 237–254
DOI: 10.1007/s11192-008-0215-z
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TITLE : Which h-index? – A comparison of WoS, Scopus and Google Scholar	257
AUTHOR : JUDIT BAR-ILAN

Department of Information Science, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan (Israel)
E-mail: barilaj at mail.biu.ac.il

	
Abstract

This paper compares the h-indices of a list of highly-cited Israeli 
researchers based on citations counts retrieved from the Web of Science, 
Scopus and Google Scholar respectively. In several case the results 
obtained through Google Scholar are considerably different from the results 
based on the Web of Science and Scopus. Data cleansing is discussed 
extensively. 

Address for correspondence:
JUDIT BAR-ILAN
Department of Information Science, Bar-Ilan University
Ramat Gan, 52900, Israel
E-mail: barilaj at mail.biu.ac.il

Scientometrics, Vol. 74, No. 2 (2008) 257–271
DOI: 10.1007/s11192-008-0216-y 
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TITLE : Sources of Google Scholar citations outside the Science Citation 
Index: A comparison 
between four science disciplines	273

AUTHORS : KAYVAN KOUSHAa,b, MIKE THELWALLb

a Department of Library and Information Science, University of Tehran, 
Tehran (Iran)
b School of Computing and Information Technology, University of 
Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton (UK)
E-mail: kkoosha at ut.ac.ir



Abstract

For practical reasons, bibliographic databases can only contain a subset of 
the scientific literature. The ISI citation databases are designed to cover 
the highest impact scientific research journals as well as a few other 
sources chosen by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). Google 
Scholar also contains citation information, but includes a less quality 
controlled collection of publications from different types of web 
documents. We define Google Scholar unique citations as those retrieved by 
Google Scholar which are not in the ISI database. We took a sample of 882 
articles from 39 open access ISI-indexed journals in 2001 from biology, 
chemistry, physics and computing and classified the type, language, 
publication year and accessibility of the Google Scholar unique citing 
sources. The majority of Google Scholar unique citations (70%) were from 
full-text sources and there were large disciplinary differences between 
types of citing documents, suggesting that a wide range of non-ISI citing 
sources, especially from non-journal documents, are accessible by Google 
Scholar. This might be considered to be an advantage of Google Scholar, 
since it could be useful for citation tracking in a wider range of open 
access scholarly documents and to give a broader type of citation impact. 
An important corollary from our study is that Google Scholar’s wider 
coverage of Open Access (OA) web documents is likely to give a boost to the 
impact of OA research and the OA movement.

Address for correspondence:
KAYVAN KOUSHA
Department of Library and Information Science, University of Tehran
Jalal-Al-e-Ahmed Ave., P.O. Box 11455/6456, Tehran, Iran
E-mail: kkoosha at ut.ac.ir

Scientometrics, Vol. 74, No. 2 (2008) 273–294
DOI: 10.1007/s11192-008-0217-x
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TITLE  : Maps of the academic web in the European Higher Education Area – 
an exploration of visual web indicators	295

AUTHORS : JOSE LUIS ORTEGAa, ISIDRO AGUILLOa, VIV COTHEYb, ANDREA 
SCHARNHORSTc
a Cybermetrics Lab, CINDOC-CSIC, Madrid (Spain)
b School of Computing and Information Technology, University of 
Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton (United Kingdom)
c Virtual Knowledge Studio, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 
Amsterdam (The Netherlands)

E-mail: jortega at cindoc.csic.es

Abstract

This paper shows maps of the web presence of the European Higher Education 
Area (EHEA) on the level of universities using hyperlinks and analyses the 
topology of the European academic network. Its purpose is to combine 
methods from Social Network Analysis (SNA) and cybermetric techniques in 
order to ask for tendencies of integration of the European universities 
visible in their web presence and the role of different universities in the 
process of the emergence of an European Research Area. We find as a main 
result that the European network is set up by the aggregation of well-
defined national networks, whereby the German and British networks are 
dominant. The national networks are connected to each other through 
outstanding national universities in each country. 

Address for correspondence:
JOSE LUIS ORTEGA
Cybermetrics Lab, CINDOC-CSIC
Joaquín Costa, 22, 28002 Madrid, Spain
E-mail: jortega at cindoc.csic.es

Scientometrics, Vol. 74, No. 2 (2008) 295–308
DOI: 10.1007/s11192-008-0218-9
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TITLE : Benchmarking Google Scholar with the New Zealand PBRF research 
assessment exercise	309

AUTHOR : ALASTAIR G. SMITH

School of Information Management, Victoria University of Wellington, 
Wellington (New Zealand)

E-mail: alastair.smith at vuw.ac.nz


Abstract

Google Scholar was used to generate citation counts to the web-based 
research output of New Zealand Universities. Total citations and hits from 
Google Scholar correlated with the research output as measured by the 
official New Zealand Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF) exercise. The 
article discusses the use of Google Scholar as a cybermetric tool and 
methodology issues in obtaining citation counts for institutions. Google 
Scholar is compared with other tools that provide web citation data: Web of 
Science, SCOPUS, and the Wolverhampton Cybermetric Crawler. 

Address for correspondence:
ALASTAIR G. SMITH
School of Information Management, Victoria University of Wellington
P.O. Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand
E-mail: alastair.smith at vuw.ac.nz

Scientometrics, Vol. 74, No. 2 (2008) 309–316
DOI: 10.1007/s11192-008-0219-8
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TITLE : A new look at evidence of scholarly citation in citation indexes 
and from web sources	317
 

AUTHORS : LIWEN VAUGHANa, DEBORA SHAWb

a Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, 
London, Ontario (Canada)
b School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, 
Bloomington (USA)

 E-mail: lvaughan at uwo.ca

Abstract

A sample of 1,483 publications, representative of the scholarly production 
of LIS faculty, was searched in Web of Science (WoS), Google, and Google 
Scholar. The median number of citations found through WoS was zero for all 
types of publications except book chapters; the median for Google Scholar 
ranged from 1 for print/subscription journal articles to 3 for books and 
book chapters. For Google the median number of citations ranged from 9 for 
conference papers to 41 for books. A sample of the web citations was 
examined and classified as representing intellectual or non-intellectual 
impact. Almost 92% of the citations identified through Google Scholar 
represented intellectual impact – primarily citations from journal 
articles. Bibliographic services (non-intellectual impact) were the largest 
single contributor of citations identified through Google. Open access 
journal articles attracted more web citations but the citations to 
print/subscription journal articles more often represented intellectual 
impact. In spite of problems with Google Scholar, it has the potential to 
provide useful data for research evaluation, especially in a field where 
rapid and fine-grained analysis is desirable.

Address for correspondence:
LIWEN VAUGHAN
Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada, N6A 5B7
E-mail: lvaughan at uwo.ca

Scientometrics, Vol. 74, No. 2 (2008) 317–330
DOI: 10.1007/s11192-008-0220-2