Although the evaluation of knowledge in the form of a quantitation of scientific output is not uncontroversial, it is a widely practised form of science evaluation. For more than 30 years, the Science Citation Index (SCI) has been alone in fulfilling mis purpose. But since 2005 Scopus is a direct competitor to the SCI-databases. Comparing the two databases should help to answer questions that could have repercussions for the future generation of bibliometric analyses. The results of the comparison will allow us to more reliably rate Scopus, as a new data source, against the established SCI. In future, people who generate bibliometric analyses must be able to justify why they chose to use one database and not the other. It will not be enough to simply claim that SCI is the established source.

No abstract

No abstract

Based on a survey, the following study investigates opinions and also usage patterns relating to the ResearchGate social networking site for scientists and researchers. The survey consisted of 19 questions and was conducted online with 695 scientists from the disciplines of physics, biology, medicine, and neuroscience. Amongst other issues, the research questions concerned how much time and effort the interviewees expended on ResearchGate, what added value they perceived in using the site, the extent to which social aspects influence use, how participants planned to use the platform in future, and what role ResearchGate’s own metric, the RG score, played for the scientists. In addition, we discuss which of the factors of age, sex, origin, and scientific discipline have a decisive influence on the responses of the interviewees and which are of no statistical significance The results clearly show that the origin of the participants is frequently decisive, but that the remaining factors also have a considerable influence on the responses for more than 25% of the questions.

This paper describes the different forms of and tries to give reasons for international scientific collaboration in general. It focuses on eleven countries in the Asia-Pacific region by evaluating their national research output with the help of bibliometric indicators in particular.Over two million journal articles published by these countries between 1998 and 2007 in ISIlisted periodicals are analyzed. Discipline-specific publication and citation profiles reveal national strengths and weaknesses in the different research domains. The exponential increase in publication output by China over the last few years is astonishing, but in terms of visibility, i.e. citation rates, China cannot keep up with leading science nations, remaining below the world average. A discipline-specific analysis shows that Chinese authors took an active part in more than a quarter of all articles and reviews published in the field of materials science in 2007, while their contribution to medical research is very low. Co-publication networks among the eleven countries are generated to observe the development of cooperation bonds in the region. Applying Salton's measure of international collaboration strength, an above-average strengthening of scientific collaboration in the Asia-Pacific region can be observed.