Retrospective studies are relevant primarily from the point of science history. Science policy makers show greater interest, however, toward prospective studies. The question is namely: which research projects should be granted, recently for attaining scientific, technological and social benefit in the future. Naturally, at this point several questions should be answered e.g., can science generate technological advance at all, or, only high financial potential may forward scientific research (P. Vinkler, 2008: Correlation between the structure of scientific research, scientometric indicators and GDP in EU and non-EU countries, Scientometrics, 74, 237–254).

Scientometric methods can give valuable support to science policy makers at each level for revealing emerging new fields (see, e.g., H. Small, 2006: Tracking and predicting growth areas in science, Scientometrics, 68, 595–610.)

The lecture of John Bruer applied the pathfinder associative network method (PFNET) to trace prospectively the development of cognitive neuroscience from its precursor research fields (cognitive psychology, single cell neurophysiology, etc.). The co-citation network of selected authors presented by the lecturer, revealed the structure and relations of the respective scientific fields. The authors were clustered through single-link clustering intrinsic to the PFNET algorithm used to present the co-citation networks. The main advantage of the method is that it is sensitive to the progress of the dialogue of authors relatively early, and it is converging with results based on other standard methods as the dialogue matures. The lecturer concluded that by 1990 a distinct cognitive neuroscience specialty cluster emerged, which may be dominated by authors engaged in brain imaging research.

Yuya Kajikawa, Yoshiyuki Takeda, Ischiro Sakata, Katsumori Matsushima reported on a method for revealing new research fronts in solar cell research. The lecture demonstrated that the scientometric approach, using citation network analysis can be applied to reveal trends also in technology. Thus, the citation-based analysis can be regarded as a complementary method to the expert-based approach. The mentioned team analyzed the citation network of energy and solar cell research by clustering the respective network. The overall structures were visualized and the emerging research domains detected. The analysis confirmed that the intensity of solar cell research is rapidly growing worldwide. Four main clusters were observed. It was found that dye-sensitized and organic solar cells domains are emerging most rapidly. It turned out that at lower hierarchical level, electrolyte research (dye-sensitized solar cells), research on plastic solar cells and on conjugated polymers as organic solar cells are emerging fields. The lecture presented also the name of the key inventors of patents on the field and their affiliate.

The lecture of Éric Archambault, Julie Caruso, Grégoire Côte, Vincent Larivièr dealt also with a very important topic: energy. According to the authors the number of publications on energy research has doubled by 2007 since 1996. China, Korea, Turkey, Brazil and Spain show an extremely high rate of development, parallel with this, the ratio of the US and Japan decreased somewhat by 2007.

The specific share of the publications can show the comparative effort of a country in the world competition. The highest [paper per year per million inhabitants] is shown by Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, Canada and the Netherlands. The lecturer pointed to the importance of selecting appropriate keywords for obtaining the sets of relevant publications. Several new indicators were presented for characterizing energy research both quantitatively and qualitatively.

The positional analysis presented yields the graphical representation of a composite index, combining research intensity, specific impact of papers (i.e. citedness) and publication strategy (i.e. mean Garfield factor of journals where the papers studied were published).

The authors hope that the results presented may draw attention of science policy makers to the relatively low performance of G7 countries concerning energy research.

Medicine seems to be very closely related with fundamental medical, toxicological, pharmacological, and chemical, etc.) research. The big pharmaceutical companies spend 5-15 per cent of their income on research and development, in general. (See, e.g., M.E.D. Koenig, 1983: Bibliometric indicators versus expert opinion in assessing research performance, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 34, 136–145). The level of medical care in a country must be related with the level of the R&D in that country. Therefore, it is highly relevant to be informed on the level of public health research. Public health is one of the main concerns in all countries. The possibilities of the human medication are steadily growing, nevertheless, parallel with the financial requirements of the medical treatments.

Daisy Jacobs, Stephen M. Mutula lectured on the results of a bibliometric analysis of publications in public health research of 13 African countries. A total of 50874 documents were collected. It was demonstrated that South Africa produced 29 % of the total, followed by Nigeria with 13 % and Kenya with 11.6 %. The authors presented detailed data on the number of papers by country and by field. It would be interesting to study in the future both the scientific impact (citedness) of the publications and also the impact of the published information on the public health of the respective countries. The share of publications in clinical medicine, pharmacology, etc., i.e. in life sciences was found to be significantly lower in the developing countries than in countries with developed economy (P. Vinkler, 2008 op cit).

The future of a society depends primarily on the extent and level of education. Consequently,  the level of university education must be one of the most important issues in each country.

Isidro F. Aguillo, Judit Bar-Ilan, Mark Levene, José Luis Ortega presented a comprehensive lecture on comparing different university ranking systems. The interest in university rankings is increasing worldwide. The different ranking methods apply partly similar, partly different points of view for evaluation. The authors of the lecture used several similarity measures for characterizing overlaps of the ranking methods. The findings show, there are reasonable similarities between the rankings despite of the different evaluation techniques. Significant differences were found between the ranking provided by the QS-Times Higher Education Supplement and Ranking Web of the CSIC Cybermetrics Lab. The highest similarity was observed between the Taiwanese and Leiden rankings.

Some main points of the rankings are as follows: quality of education, internationalization, size, research output, research impact, prestige.

Quality of education is hard to characterize quantitatively. The number of Nobel Prize winners or the students/staff ratio seems to be not appropriate.

Three similarity measures were used for comparison: size of overlap, the Spearman’s foot rule, M-measure (introduced by Bar-Ilan, 2007).

The differences in ranks of the different lists can be attributed partly to using different data bases and partly to the different weighting of the individual part-indices by the different methods. The study reveals that one should be very cautions with applying university rankings. And, the selection of relevant indicators with appropriate weightings always depends on the purpose of the assessment.

Each lecture was followed by vivid discussion. There were mentioned many pros and cons. This proves that the topics tackled are really relevant and are in the forefront of not only scientometrics but also of science policy.

Written by Prof. Peter Vinkler – Chemical Research Center of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary.

He talked to ISSI 2009 Blog extending topics of his presentation, which analyzed properties of scientometric distributions considering the h-index and the characteristic scores and scales.

Blog ISSI 2009 – During your presentation you talked about the role of indexes, like h-index, and also about normalization. In your opinion, what is the importance of normalizing indicators?

Wolfgang Glänzel – Normalization is necessary because of the different publication and citation behavior in different fields. So, for instance, scientists in life sciences are more active than scientists in technical sciences, Engineering or Mathematics or Social Sciences, and citation reach so much higher in these fields. So that means that we have to normalize indicators in order to have the same comparative situations. The second reason is, of course, the time spent with the indicators based on different publications, periods and citations. We have to normalize to make indicators comparable, that is the main reason. Of course, normalization is not sufficient; we have also to aim reproducibility. Bibliometrics is in the Social Sciences field and any science resigns to be prepared under the same conditions, based on the same data material, it must be reproducible. So indicators created by one institute should be reproducible by other institutes. Otherwise it would come up with all these indicators, all these solutions and, at the end, we would have as many solutions as many institutions active in Bibliometrics.

Blog ISSI 2009 -What is negative and positive about having so many indicators?

Glänzel - Of course it is important to improve Bibliometrics or scientific measures indicators indexes because many of them have been developed at the time than Bibliometrics have a quite different orientation because of the databases influences, the ISI databases – now part of Thomson Reuters. They are created for different purposes, for information retrieve purposes. Impact factor, for instance, has been used in an evaluating context so it is some type of paradigm shift or perspective shift in Bibliometrics, that means we have to adapt and adjust the indicators to the new tasks. We have to make them fit for the new task. That means to improve them and also add new indicators which might be more appropriated in an evaluative context than the old indicators. But on the other hand we can observe that we have now a plenty of plethora of new indicators, as I would say each institute, almost each scientist aims at producing an own indicator. We have to separate the very useful things from the less useful things, but it has to be in practice and that is the reason we have to standardize and normalize everything in Bibliometrics in order to do that. Of course, we have to see in the near future which of these solutions are useful to bring as any further and which not. There are lots of attempts like correlating all indicators with all other indicators, but I think this is not the right solution. The right solution is to analyze and to test the properties of these indicators, to test these indicators in practice and then to see which indicators can be used. Of course you also have to see which indicators do measure what. For instance citation indicators measure different things than publication indicators and the h-index is a combination of both. We have to see what the h-index can add to the picture and that is also the reason why I am dealing with it. Then we will see in the near future which indicators are really useful and I think the other indicators will simply disappear from the picture.

Blog ISSI 2009 -Considering developing countries, what could be important for them to look at when it comes to indicators?

Glänzel - The access to literature, the access to publications channels is very important. To publish in good journals or good open access and good toll journals as well. But also to be present on the web. I think it should be a strategy to catch up with the citation and publication habits of developed countries and this will became very difficult, I know, because, I am a bit afraid that most of developed countries are a bit reluctant to accept the literature of less developed countries. Than it is very difficult to break through but this is the only way, I think. It is also important for those countries because it can be a bit distinguishing those developing countries that publish in English anyway, or have more access to English like for instance India, I would not say developing countries but these emerging economies. It is easier for them because they already publish in English. It is more difficult for those countries which are not publishing in English, this has also to do with changing the behavior of scientists because – in other countries as well – there are scientists not stimulated, they just publish in their own language, they just publish in what he has easy access or can easily report. So it is also needed a system of reporting and evaluating scientific activity because we have seen, specially in Europe, that this very much stimulated scientists to publish in better journals, to publish in English, to collaborate with those partners that have really benefit from both sides. So that is important, I think.

After four days of many scientific presentations ISSI 2009 was closed in a ceremony of spontaneous and short speeches. Abel Packer, Director of BIREME/PAHO/WHO was the master of ceremony in the conference organized by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), BIREME/PAHO/WHO and ISSI – International Society of Scientometrics and Informetrics.

Packer thanked all the participants for the presence and staff involved on the event organization. “In these days we had presentations on the state of the art in Bibliometric, Scientometric and Informetric sciences and the opportunity to contact people, to promote a network among researchers”, said Packer. He enlightened the institutions that made this Conference possible: CNPq, Capes, Faperj, Ministry of Health in Brazil as well as the sponsorship by Thomson Reuters, Avedas, Elsevier and Banco do Brasil.

Afterwards, he introduced the table for this ceremony, Ronald Rousseau, president of the Society and organizer of ISSI 2009, Jacqueline Leta, co-organizer of the conference. Packer also stressed the participation of Denis N. Ocholla, professor of the Department of Library Information Science, at the University of Zululand, in South Africa, where it will be held the 13th ISSI Conference in 2011.

Jacqueline Leta thanked all the participants, co-organizers and staff for being part of this challenge. “I think we were successful on the organization of this meeting, so we want to get comments, your opinion and impressions about the conference, the programme, all aspects you reached email, posts or comments on the blog”, said Jacqueline.

Ocholla awarded the participants of what will be waiting for them in 2011. He presented the Conference website available, talked about the development of committees involved and showed short videos on the local infrastructure and beauties. The southafrican tasty already inspired the audience to what is coming. “Brazil had a hard time on the soccer match against South Africa” teased Ocholla, meaning that all the efforts will be done so that ISSI will continue to be an event in progress, even reminding afterwards that the Brazilian team won the match during the last Confederations Cup.

Jane M. Russell, from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) made a speech in the name of all the participants during the ceremony. “I know we all want to join in the words of thanks to the local organizing committee for making this successful and enjoyable conference and experience. I think we all realized how much work it takes to get these conferences together. We are all very happy, we will leave this city with very happy memories of the conference, of Rio and Brazil”, said Russell asking for a special applause for the organization.

Rousseau declared the event evaluation as positive. “It really couldn’t be better. It was all very well organized without problems of any kind. Also contents were of high scientific quality and it was more than just organized it was, well pleasant, spontaneous, we all enjoyed it very much”, said the president of ISSI.

To completely close the ceremony in an inspiring mood, the participants enjoyed a slideshow of pictures on “faces of ISSI 2009”, with various people and moments of the event under a soundtrack of Turibio Santos, musician that performed on the opening ceremony. As a last and surprising session, outside the room it was provided a coffee break and a performance by UFRJ choir, with 40 local children. It was appealing, making everyone smile. The message left was that it is even possible to sing in the rhythm of science.

Numbers of ISSI

- total of submissions: 254

- final programme: 2 keynotes, 69 full papers, 29 research in progress and 64 posters

- participants: 223, from 34 countries

Written by Patrícia Santos and Lilian Calò – BIREME/PAHO/WHO

Right after the ISSI2009 closing session, on July 17th, Birger Larsen, lecturer at the Royal School of Library and Information Science of Denmark and also one of the coordinators of the conference, spoke about his participation on the event organization, specifically to develop the scientific conference programme together with Jacqueline Leta, lecturer at the Instituto de Bioquímica Médica – UFRJ and coordinator of the ISSI 2009.

How do you evaluate the whole scientific programme and all the work done for ISSI 2009?

We were very happy to have an increase in the number of papers. This was the largest number of papers ever submitted to ISSI. I think the quality of the contents is rising, so papers are getting better and better for every year. We actually had to go out and have a lot of programme to read it to have more members on the programme committee to get them all. So it is getting more complex. I think it is a very good programme and it has been very well received by the participants.

What about growing on other fields, not only experts in Scientometrics and Bibliometrics, but other areas interested in publications?

Some people are publishing Bibliometrics, Scientometrics research in their own journals, so people who deal with Biology, Microbiology by starting to make these studies and them making them available. So what I’ll hope for is that the next conference organizers will distribute the cover papers more widely so we would attract people from other fields. That is something we have started already. And indeed, many of the primaries in the field come from other fields, they are physicists, etc. I think this is time again to make it broader and try to attract people from other sides as well.

What was the most challenging thing on this programme?

It was to select the papers so having all the review back. We have more than 100 papers in the programme probably more than 150 or 180 to select from. So we have to reject some of the papers. We had a good support from the reviews, three reviews for each paper, the very last were Jacqueline and me to go out and prioritize between the papers, and read all the reviews and put the programme together

Expectations for the next, do you already have any? For South Africa 2011?

I think the scientific field is growing and that there will be even more papers in South Africa. I think there will be even better papers as well. So the field is growing because people need the results, they need the methods. That’s why the field is growing.

The first presentation was from Geraldo da Silva e Souza and Eliane Gonçalves Gomes from Embrapa, Brasília, DF, Brazil  and Roberta Blass Staub, from the Central Bank of Brazil, Brasilia, DF, Brazil, with the paper entitled “Probabilistic measures of efficiency and the influence of contextual variables in nonparametric production models: an application to agricultural research evaluation in Brazil”.

The authors aimed to identify which management practices have influence on the scientific research production efficiency. For this purpose, they analyzed the “statistical significance of contextual variable type, size, financial resources acquisition, intensity of partnerships, process improvements and management change. The analysis is carried out for the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation over the period 1999-2006. The statistical analysis used a balance dynamic panel data model”. The authors conclude that “only financial resources acquisition is statistical significant. The association with the production process is positive. We also found statistically significant the two lag inertial component of the ratio conditional FDH (Free Disposal Hull) to unconditional FDH indicating a two year effort to improve efficiency”.

The next presentation was from Roberto C. Penteado Filho and Antonio F.D.Avila, from Secretaria de Gestão e Estratégia da Embrapa, Brasília, Brazil with the paper entitled “ A scientometric analysis of Embrapa’s Brazil Web of Science Articles from 1977 to 2006”.

Agriculture is an important sector of Brazilian’s economy, and therefore, it is important to evaluate, using the technique of bibliometric analysis, Embrapa’s research centers participation in the journals indexed by the Web of Science (WoS) database, from 1977 to 2006. The authors analyzed the performance of the research centers by measuring the number of papers produced by research center, and then conduced a survey on the journals which published these articles (national and international publications) and finally analyzed the partnership with other institutions abroad. “The results indicate that Embrapa is among the top ten institutions to lead in the volume of scientific articles published in indexed WoS journals. They also indicate the relevance of the adoption of a goal and results system by an institution of Science, Technology and Innovation and the need to select strategies to establish partnerships, select journals in accordance with the institutional stated mission and standardize their authors affiliations, in order to facilitate the identification and improve their scores”.

Isola Ajiferuke from the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, London, UK and Dietmar Wolfram, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee – Wisconsin, USA, presented the paper “Citer Analysis is a measure of Research Impact: Library and Information Science as a Case Study”.

This interesting paper reports the effect of number of citers on an author’s research impact.  The traditional way to measure citation does not differ whether a paper receives n citations from the same citer or from n different citers. This study aims to measure this particular parameter. According to the authors, this complementary information provides a measure of how an authors’ work exerts influence in a field. In this study, “Web of Science (WoS) was used to tally citer and citation based counts for 25 highly cited researchers in information studies in the United States and 26 highly cited researchers from the UK. Outcomes of the tallies using several different measures, including an introduced ch index, were used to determine whether differences arise in author ranking when using citer-based counts. The findings indicate a strong correlation between some citations and citer-based measures, but not with others. The findings of the study have implications for the way authors’ research impact may be assessed”.

The last paper from this session was presented by Rogerio Meneghini and Abel L. Packer, from BIREME/PAHO/WHO, “The extent of multidisciplinary authorship of articles on scientometrics in Brazil”.

The objective of this study was to produce a directory of brazilian investigators who published articles related to scientometrics, information sciences and related subjects. These data would be used to establish contacts among the investigators and to set a group of discussion to seed the creation of a Brazilian Society. The articles were retrieved from Web of Science (WoS) or Google Scholar and the identification of the authors were performed through the Lattes Platform. The authors showed that the publications in scientometrics with Brazilian authorship increased exponentially in the 1990-2006 period, whereas in the rest of the world, it had a linear growth. The increase is higher than the total Brazilian scientific production in the same period. The journals where most of the articles were published were the Brazilian “Ciencia da Informação”, which accounted for 44 from the 197 articles and Scientometrics, with 32 articles. “The articles encompass an impressive participation of authors from areas other than information science”.  “The advantages of improving the intercommunicability among authors and of using other scientometric and bibliometric batabases, such as SciELO, to avoid an almost exclusive use of the WoS database are evident, due to the regional science (humanitie, agriculture, public health) which is published in the journals indexed in those databases. Moreover, it is worth noting that the SciELO database in Brazil includes approximately 200 journals, 100,000 articles and two million citations. It has tools in place to allow bibliometric surveys with ease of access and handling in a universe of publications which is not usually explored by scientometric studies”.

Written by Lilian Calò – BIREME/PAHO/WHO

The first paper was presented by Ronald Rousseau, from KHBO, Industrial Sciences and Technology, Oostende, Belgium  and Ping-huan Hua and collaborators, from the China Scientometrics and Bibliometrics Research Center of Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. The paper entitled “ A download h(2)- index as a meaningful usage indicator of academic journals” suggests that “the download index – h(2)  can represent a new social impact of scientific journals”. The authors claim that “the number of downloads can be considered as representing usage as well as social impact of scientific journals. The download h(2) index, an adaptation of Kosmulski’s h(2) index of six thousand Chinese academic journals have been determined”. The authors compared the “download h(2) with other indicators such as the number of downloads and the download immediacy index and highlight advantages of using the download h(2) index. It is shown that this new index is a number that agrees well with high volume of data”.

The second paper “The steady state growth of scientific publications and the declining coverage provided by Science Citation Index” was presented by Peter O.Larsen, from Marievej, Hellerup, Denmark  and Markus von Ins, from the Institute for Research Information and Quality Assurance, Bonn, Germany. 

“The growth rate of scientific publication has been studies from 1907 to 2007 using data available from a number of databases, including the expanded version of Science Citation Index (SCIE). Traditional peer reviewed scientific publication is still increasing, although there are big differences between fields. There are no indications that the growth rate has decreases in the last fifty years.  At the same time, publications using new channels such as conference proceedings, open archives and homepages is growing fast. The growth rate for SCIE is smaller than for comparable databases. This means that SCIE is covering a decreasing part of the traditional scientific literature. There are also clear indicators that the coverage of SCIE is especially low in some of the scientific areas with the highest growth rate, including computer science and engineering sciences. The role of conference proceedings, open access archives and online publications is increasing, especially in scientific fields with high growth rates, but this is only partially reflected in the databases. It is therefore problematic that SCIE has been used and is used as the dominant source for scientific indicators based on publication and citation numbers”.

The next presentation was from Yasar Tonta and and Yurgagül Ünal, from the Department of Information Management, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey, and was entitled “Does Urquhart’s Law hold for consortial use of electronic journals?”   

“This paper tests the validity of Urquhart’s Law (“the inter-library loan demand for a periodical is as a rule a measure of its total use”). It compares the use of print journals at the Turkish Academic Network and Information Center (ULAKBIM) with the consortial use of the same journals in their electronic form by the individual libraries making up the Consortium of Turkish University Libraries (ANKOS). It also compares the onsite use of electronic journals at ULAKBIM with the consortial use of ANKOS. Findings validate Urquhart’s Law in that a positive correlation was observed between the use of print journals at ULAKBIM and the consortial use of their electronic copies of ANKOS. The onsite and consortial use of electronic journals was also highly correlated. |Both print and electronic journals that were used most often at ULAKBIM tend to get used heavily by the member libraries of ANKOS consortium, too” . “These findings can be used in developing consortial collection management policies and negotiate better consortial license agreements” said the authors.

 The paper from Katy Börner and collaborators, from the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center, School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Indiana, USA was entitled “Rete-Netzwerk-Red: analyzing and visualizing scholarly networks using the net workbench tool”.

According to the authors, “the enormous increase in digital scholarly data and computing power combined with recent advances in text mining, linguistics, network science, and scientometrics make it possible to scientifically study the structure and evolution of science on a large scale. This paper discusses the challenges of this ‘BIG science of science – also called ‘computational scientometrics’ research – in terms of data access , algorithm scalability, repeatability, as well as result communication and interpretation.  In then introduces two infrastructures: (1) the Scholarly Database (SDB), which provides free online access to 20 million scholarly records – papers, patents and funding awards which can be cross searched and downloaded as dumps, and (2) Scientometrics-relevant plug –ins of the open-source Network Workbench (NWB) Tool . The utility of these infrastructures is then exemplarily demonstrated in three studies: a comparison of the funding portfolios and co-investigator networks of different universities, an examination of paper citation and co-author networks of major science researchers and an analysis of topic bursts in streams of text. The paper concludes with a discussion of related work that aim to provide practically useful and theoretically grounded cyberinfrastructure in support of computational scientometrics research, practice and education”.

The last paper of this session was presented by Andreas Strotmann and  Tania Bubela from the School of Public Health and Dangzhi Zhao, from the School of Library and Information Studies, both institutions at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The paper entitled “A multi-database approach to field Delineation”.  This paper reports an effort by the authors to “systematically  combine a number of databases  to collect metadata records for the literature that defines a rsearch field. . In three cases study  the authors have combined information retrieved from PubMed with metadata from Scopus, and employed the NCBI Entrez Genes database to delineate research areas. At the core of the multi-database field delineation approach that the authors describe are: first, amethod for matching full record back and forth between the Scopus and PubMed databases (95% or higher match rate) augmented by a method for matching Scopus cited reference to PubMed records (90% success rate); and second, the wealth of information and services available from NCBI thai is connected to individual PubMed records through its various Entrez database connections. The authors’ approach  allow them to combine strengths and overcome weaknesses of multiple databases, for an excellent coverage of the target area – interdisciplinary biomedical research”.

Written by Lilian Calò – BIREME/PAHO/WHO