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Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Steunpunt O&O Indicatoren, Leuven (Belgium)

ANOTHER ASPECT OF THE SCIENTIFIC PROFILES OF EASTERN & WESTERN EUROPEAN EU COUNTRIES: PECULARITIES OF JOURNAL USAGE. BALÁZS SCHLEMMER*. Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Steunpunt O&O Indicatoren, Leuven (Belgium).

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Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Steunpunt O&O Indicatoren, Leuven (Belgium)

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  1. ANOTHER ASPECT OF THE SCIENTIFIC PROFILES OF EASTERN & WESTERN EUROPEAN EUCOUNTRIES: PECULARITIES OF JOURNAL USAGE BALÁZS SCHLEMMER* Katholieke Universiteit Leuven,Steunpunt O&O Indicatoren, Leuven(Belgium) *with special thanks to Wolfgang Glänzel for providing and preprocessing data,and for offering valuable remarks

  2. OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY  The main objective of the study is to reveal what has changed in national publication strategies in terms of publication preferences regarding publication language, national/international orientation of journals, journal impact, document type and other characteristics from 1983 to 2003. The presentation will also shed light on methodological difficulties of journal categorisation as well as on journal usage related tendencies in a more general context. balazs.schlemmer@econ.kuleuven.be| slide 2 of 18

  3. DATA USED & LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY  DATA USED IN THE STUDY All data were extracted from the SCI (1983) and SCIE (2003) databases of Thomson Scientific THEREFORE, THE SCOPE OF SUBJECT FIELDS INCLUDE • all fields of natural sciences• all fields of life- and biosciences• all fields of mathematics, engineering and applied sciences• selected parts of SSCI covering psychology & behav. science PUBLICATION TYPES 4 publication types were taken into account:• articles, letters, notes and reviews balazs.schlemmer@econ.kuleuven.be| slide 3 of 18

  4. GEOGRAPHICAL SCOPE OF THE STUDY  • Concept: EU15 + 10 new EU countries of the enlargement in 2004 • CYP, EST, LTU, LUX, LVA, MLThad to be excluded • SVN was easily identifiable even within YUG in 1983 balazs.schlemmer@econ.kuleuven.be| slide 4 of 18

  5. TIME PERIODS; COUNTING SCHEMES TIMEFRAME OF THE STUDY unlike in earlier years, only 2 snapshots were selected now:• 1983• 1993• 2003 COUNTING SCHEME • full (integer) counting scheme (in all cases concerned) CITATION COUNTS • for Journal Impact Factors 3-year citation windows were used(publication yearn, yearn+1 and yearn+2) balazs.schlemmer@econ.kuleuven.be| slide 5 of 18

  6. RESEARCH AREAS IN FOCUS TOPIC 1  CHANGES OF PRODUCTIVITY (NUMBERS AND IMPACTS) method: some basic calculations TOPIC 2 SOME THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS... ...concerning the difficulties of categorisation of journals on the basis of internationality TOPIC 3 INTERNATIONAL / DOMESTIC NATURE OF PUBLISHING method: classification of national top10 journals by internationality balazs.schlemmer@econ.kuleuven.be| slide 6 of 18

  7. CHANGES IN TOTAL PUBLICATION OUTPUT Remarkable that in 1983 Spain’s publication output is about the same as Czechoslovakia’s one! Nevertheless, in just 20 years Spain’s and Portugal’s growth in number of publications exceeds 7x and 10x multiplication factors, respectively. Earlier observations (Cano & al, 1992; Román & al, 1994; Gomez & al, 1995; REIST-2, 1997) link this striking growth to the scientific programs of the EU. balazs.schlemmer@econ.kuleuven.be| slide 7 of 18

  8. GROWTH IN ARTICLES vs. JOURNALS USED & vs. TOTAL IMPACT  GROWTHIN 20 YEARS:from 1983 to 2003 PRT PRT ESP ESP GRC GRC Relative concentration of publications in case of the Southern countries: the “boom” of journals they publish in does not completely follow the even more exploding growth of their articles. Slovenia: opposite effect: their articles spread more than before. SVN SVN Remarkable: the growth in article production exceeds the growth of the total impact in ALL cases. Is it the triumph of quantity over quality, or does the dramatic growth in number of journals make it more difficult to reach the desired impact? balazs.schlemmer@econ.kuleuven.be| slide 8 of 18

  9. MEAN EXPECTED CITATION RATES  The Mean Expected Citation Rate (MECR) is defined as the average of the individual expected citation rates over a country’s whole journal set. Apparently, the “expectations” have doubled in 20 years. Do we publish in better journals? Or do our journals have higher impact? Or...? balazs.schlemmer@econ.kuleuven.be| slide 9 of 18

  10. RELATIVE CITATION RATES  RCR = ratio of the Mean Observed Citation Rate to the MECR Significant changes in RCR in 20 years: • the Irish “boom”:from the bottom right to the top (see REIST-2, 1997; Battel, 2003 and Glänzel & al, 2007) • well-distinguishable cluster for countries of South and East Europe (see further similarities in their national re-search profiles, too!) balazs.schlemmer@econ.kuleuven.be| slide 10 of 18

  11. INTERNATIONAL vs. NATIONAL THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT INTERNATIONALITY Seems easy to identify and categorise a particular journal, but in practice it could not be any further from it. How to determine whether a particular journal is international or domestic? Two approaches: • Language of the journal • Nationality (or geographical diversity) of the authors balazs.schlemmer@econ.kuleuven.be| slide 11 of 18

  12. PROBLEMS WITH CATEGORISATIONS  LANGUAGE APPROACH GEOGRAPHIC APPROACH • Language has nothing to do with nationality • Anglo-Saxon dominance and bias; no real national journal can be found in English-speaking countries • other biasing factors related to language use: common languages, former colonies, coherent regions, multilingual journals etc. • wrong or incomplete address fields in records • international co-authorship • emigrant scientists inflate internationality • huge number of journal articles to be analysed manually –> “collateral damage” –> then international journal –> internationality threshold –> strong limitation of journals balazs.schlemmer@econ.kuleuven.be| slide 12 of 18

  13. SOLUTION = THRESHOLD + LIMITATION  • A) Due to the mentioned reasons, a threshold based on empirical experimenting has been introduced for national journals: • 5% • tolerance of international contributions. • In order to reduce the workload of manual data processing, the scope of investigations were limited only to the • top10 journals • of each EU country involved. balazs.schlemmer@econ.kuleuven.be| slide 13 of 18

  14. COVERAGES OF THE TOP10 JOURNALS  The article coverage of the top10 journals ranges from 9.5% to 35.5% in 1983; and from 6.4% to 18.5% in 2003. Interesting tendency: deconcentration (diversification) of papers(2.5 times as many journals in 2003 as in 1983!) balazs.schlemmer@econ.kuleuven.be| slide 14 of 18

  15. In 1993 Chemicke Listy becomes international because of 1 Canadian and 8 Slovakian articles (out of 89) Name variants like GERMANY, GER, FED REP GER In 75% of the cases the journal Paperi Ja Puu does not have anything in the address field A FEW TRICKY THINGS TO BE TAKEN INTO CONSIDERATION...  • journal name variants may occur • wrong addresses • non-real co-authorship (more than 1 affiliations in different countries • words like ‘and’ & ‘or’ in journal titles may cause difficulties at semi-automatized querying • researchers working abroad inflate the rate of internationality • researchers from India publish literally everywhere, consequently they inflate international balazs.schlemmer@econ.kuleuven.be| slide 15 of 18

  16. INTERNATIONAL vs. NATIONAL SHARE OF ARTICLES PUBLISHED NATIONALLY vs. INTERNATIONALLY IN THE TOP10 JOURNALS 1983 2003 balazs.schlemmer@econ.kuleuven.be| slide 16 of 18

  17. CONCLUSIONSON JOURNAL USAGE (1)  • There are dynamic growth rates both in number of articles published and journals to publish in. The EU-triggered tendency shown by South Europe hopefully marks the path for the recently joined EU countries, too. • Growth of impact does not follow the growth in number of publications to the same extent – again, PRT, ESP, GRC and SVN have outliers. •RCR values of South and East Europe tend to behave similarly. The two clusters shares the common feature of having RCR<1, that is, the average (country-wise) citedness is lower than expected on the basis of MECR. However, definite progression is observed over the 20 years.Of course, a subfield-normalised analysis would draw a lot more accurate picture about the countries’ RCR profiles. balazs.schlemmer@econ.kuleuven.be| slide 17 of 18

  18. CONCLUSIONSON JOURNAL USAGE (2)  •Internationality cannot be measured easily. • Once again, the not surprising tendency of decentralisation (diversification) of publication placement has been observed. • In 1983 publishing nationally was the playground of countries being small or having problems with language competence and/or political freedom (e.g. former communist countries where language education was rather limited to languages of “friendly” countries (if at all), and the directions of international co-operations (if at all) were also controlled). • For 2003 national publishing has become marginalised, at least in the top segment of the journal range. balazs.schlemmer@econ.kuleuven.be| slide 18 of 18

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