According to Garfield (1980), most scientists can name an example of an important discovery that had little initial impact on contemporary research. And he uses Mendel's work as a classical example. Delayed recognition is sometimes used by scientists as an argument against citation based indicators based on citation windows defined for a shortor medium-term initial period beginning with the paper's publication year. This study is focussed on a large-scale analysis of the citation history of all papers indexed in the 1980 annual volume of the Science Citation Index. The objective is twofold , particularly, to analyse whether the share of delayed recognition papers is significant and whether such papers are typical of the work of their authors at that time. In a first step, the background of advanced bibliometric models by Glänzel, Egghe and Rousseau, Rousseau and Burrell of stochastic citation processes and first-citation distributions is described briefly. The second part is devoted to the bibliometric analysis of firstcitation statistics and of the phenomenon of citation delay. In a third step, finally, delayed reception publications have been studied individually. Their topics and the citation patterns of other papers by the same authors have been studied to uncover principles of regularity or exceptionality of delayed reception publications.

Scientific meetings have become increasingly important channels for scholarly communication. In several fields of applied and engineering sciences they are -according to the statements of scientists active in those fields -even more important than publishing in periodicals. One objective of this study is to analyse the weight of proceedings literature in all fields of the sciences, social sciences and humanities as well as the use of the ISI Proceedings database as additional data source for bibliometric studies. The second objective is exploring the use of a further important feature of this database, namely, of information about conference location for the analysis of bibliometrically relevant aspects of information flow such as the relative attractivity, the extent of mobility and unidirectional or mutual affinity of countries.

Eight Eastern European countries joined the European Union in 2004. In this paper, bibliometric methods are used to analyse if the integration of these countries into the EU was accompanied by corresponding changes in their sectoral research profiles. In addition, the authors discuss changes in the national profiles of three accession countries and three EU15 member states during the last two decades. The results confirm that a process of European homogenisation and convergence is taking place, but also show that this process is slow and that member countries have maintained their individual peculiarities and preferences during this evolution.

The present paper analyses the role of author self-citations aiming at finding basic regularities of self-citations within the process of documented scientific communication and thus laying the methodological groundwork for a possible critical view at self-citation patterns in empirical studies at any level of aggregation. The study consists of three parts; the first part of the study is concerned with the comparative analysis of the ageing of selfcitations and of non-self citations, in the second part the possible interdependence between self-citations and foreign citations is analysed and in the third part the interrelation of the share of self-citations in all citations with other citation-based indicators is studied. The outcomes of this study are two-fold; first, the results characterise author self-citations -at least at the macro level -as an organic part of the citation process obeying rules that can be measured and described with the help of mathematical models. Second, these rules can be used in evaluative micro and meso analyses to identify significant deviations from the reference standards.