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BIBLIOMETRY; SCIENCE OF SCIENCE S. Dr.Eugene GARFIELD. An Application for a S ubject Category: Energy & Fuels. İsmail Hakkı Demirel - Cem Saraç. Introduction. In recent years, bibliometric analysis techniques have been widely used in library and information science and management
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BIBLIOMETRY; SCIENCE OF SCIENCES Dr.Eugene GARFIELD An Application for a Subject Category: Energy & Fuels İsmail Hakkı Demirel - Cem Saraç
Introduction In recent years, bibliometric analysis techniques have been widely used in library and information science and management (Garfield, 1976; 1994). These techniques provide a quantitative analysis to describe the structure of publications within -a given scientific area, -university, -research institute or -country. (Moed et al, 1995; Narin and Hamilton, 1996; Almind, P. Ingwersen, 1997; Cronin, 2001; Tian and Hong, 2008; Coccia, 2008).
Bibliometric parameters include -the number of publications in a given year, -the source, -the document type, -the place of research (country), -the number of times cited (Moed, 2005) and -the patterns of co-subject categories. In addition, international scientific influence, generally recorded as the impact factor, is another crucial bibliometric parameter used to assess journal status (Van Raan, 2000; Bollen et al, 2006).
Studying the systematic evaluations using bibliometric parameters also provides new insights to policy makers restructuring research in particular fields for optimising the allocation of governmental research and (Lopez-Illescas et al, 2008).
A bibliometric analysis of worldwide research papers on Energy and Fuels, 1981-2007
The objectives of this studyare *to bibliometrically analyse energy and fuels literature published between 1981 and 2007 and *present a comparative assessment of the structure of energy and fuels research in the most prolific countries and unions. We focused on work published in the United States of America, eight countries inthe European Union-1, 10 countries in European Union-2, Brazil, Russia, India, PR China and South Africa constitute the BRICS countries (which are the most countries growing in science and technology) and six countries with active research communities. The study aims to strengthen the understanding of the development of scientific research on energy and may aid in formulating new strategies for energy and fuels research.
Data Setting and Methods-1 The documents used in the present study were based on source data of the Web of Science, provided by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI. Thomson Reuter, PA. USA). The keywords “energy and fuels” were used to search for appropriate titles, collecting documents belonging to 250 fields. The fields are defined according to the list of subject categories in the Web of Science database. In this study, the search was limited to the years between 1981 to 2007, inclusive and document types were limited to peer-reviewed journal articles, reviews and notes. Other types of documents such as editorials, proceedings papers, book reviews, etc. were not included in the publication counts.
Data Setting and Methods-2 Citations were counted during the 1981-2007 time interval. The citations per paper (CPP) value is calculated by dividing the total number of citations by the country’s total number of papers in the subject. Information about the journals in which the energy and fuels papers were published and the impact factors (IF) of the journals were determined using the annual update of Journal Citation Reports, published in 2007.
Figure 1 shows the distribution of the number of papers published in three periods within the 1981 to 2007 time frame.
A total of 116,801 papers on energy and fuels were published between 1981 and 2007 worldwide. During this time span, the total number of citations was 631,240, with an average citation per paper of 5.40. The world’s average number of documents in energy and fuels increased approximately 4.26 percent per year, indicating that the topic of energy and fuels is a rapidly developing subject area for research.
Table 1.Publication and citation numbers of themost prolific countries and their citation per paper (CPP) values in the period of 1981 and 2007.
It can be seen from the Table 1 that the United States, the greatestcontributor, published 36,013 (30.83 %) papers. Germany and Canada ranked second and third, respectively, contributing 7,182 (6.14 %) and 7,093 (6.07 %) papers on energy and fuels. Japan contributed 6,991 (5.99 %) and England contributed 6,940 (5.94 %), ranking these countries fourth and fifth in publication productivity. Russia (5,910; 5.06 %) and Australia (3,188; 2.73 %) are also in the top ten. One observation is that the total contribution ratio of EU-1 and EU-2 countries (30.55 %) was equal to the contribution ratio of USA (30.83 %). BRICS countries and Other Most Prolific countries contributed 15.67 % and 18.14 % of the total, respectively.
Although the national scientific performance, based on the annual number of publication, varies considerably, Germany, England and France have the similar publication trends in time span between 1981 and 2007. Publication trends of EU-1 countries differ, while trends in Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and Poland are more comparable to each other. Spain displays a sharp increase in publications from 2000 to 2007 with the total number of documents increasing by over a factor of two.
The total number of papers published by the EU-2 countries is 6,228, constituting 5.83 % of the entire world’s literature in the field. The total number of publications and citations attributed to the EU-2 countries is one-fifth of that of the EU-1 countries. The largest contributions to the entire EU-2 publications are from Greece (20.79 %), Scotland (15.46 %) and Denmark (13.79 %). Belgium, Finland and Austria came next, contributing 11.8 %, 11.43 % and 9.25 %, respectively, of all EU-2 papers. The smaller contributions are from Portugal (7.2 %), Ireland (3.93 %), Hungary (3.47 %) and Czech Republic (2.86 %).
Among the five BRICS countries, Russia has the largest number of publications (5,910), constituting 32.3 % of the total BRICS papers. India and China ranked second and third, respectively, with 5,443 and 5,278 papers. China is the most remarkable of the BRICS countries for its sharply increasing number of publications in the last 10 years. Brazil also displays a similar publication trend for the same time periods. South Africa is the least productive BRICS country.
*The total number of papers published by Canada and Japan are far greater than those of the other four countries. *The contribution rates of Canada and Japan to the world’s publications are 6.07 % and 5.99 %, respectively. *The annual number of publications in Japan in the last ten years is higher than papers in the other five countries, while the annual publications in Canada is the highest of the Other Most Prolific Countries. *the number of publications in South Korea grew quickly in the last eight years (2000-2007).
*Publications on energy and fuels are heavily concentrated in the fields of chemical engineering, petroleum engineering and thermodynamics. The total contribution from these fields constitutes 55 % in 1992 and 73 % in 2004. *Mechanical engineering (A), multidisciplinary geosciences (B), and electrical and electronic engineering, electrochemistry, and nuclear science and technology (C) contribute a smaller proportion to the energy and fuels literature. *The group comprised of other co-subject categories include seventeen subfields, such as physical chemistry; applied chemistry; environmental sciences; multidisciplinary materials science; organic chemistry; applied physics; and multidisciplinary engineering.
Table 2.The most productive institutions of the energy and fuels papers.
Table 3.A ranking list of energy and fuels journals with their impact factor and paper numbers, 1981-2007 (paper numbers from Web of Science, impact factors taken from Journal Citation Report of ISI, Thomson Reuter-2007)
Table 4.Energy and fels journals with at least three papers cited more than 100 times
Conclusions We have used bibliometric methods to quantitatively characterize the worldwide development of papers on energy and fuels. Energy and fuels-related topics are posited to be a favourite scientific research areas in the near future. Consequently, much attention and more efforts should be paid to the patterns of development in these fields.
Acknowledgements The authors are grateful to the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) for release of the data used in this study. The authors thank Erdal Akıllı, Serpil Yetgin and Ömer Büyükçınar (TUBITAK ULAKBIM) for the technical assistance regarding use of the database and in preparing figures.