Bibliometric methods or “analysis” are now firmly established as scientific specialties and are an integral part of research evaluation methodology especially within the scientific and applied fields. The methods are used increasingly when studying various aspects of science and also in the way institutions and universities are ranked worldwide. A sufficient number of studies have been completed, and with the resulting literature, it is now possible to analyse the bibliometric method by using its own methodology. The bibliometric literature in this study, which was extracted from Web of Science, is divided into two parts using a method comparable to the method of Jonkers et al. (Characteristics of bibliometrics articles in library and information sciences (LIS) and other journals, pp. 449–551, 2012: The publications either lie within the Information and Library Science (ILS) category or within the non-ILS category which includes more applied, “subject” based studies. The impact in the different groupings is judged by means of citation analysis using normalized data and an almost linear increase can be observed from 1994 onwards in the non-ILS category. The implication for the dissemination and use of the bibliometric methods in the different contexts is discussed. A keyword analysis identifies the most popular subjects covered by bibliometric analysis, and multidisciplinary articles are shown to have the highest impact. A noticeable shift is observed in those countries which contribute to the pool of bibliometric analysis, as well as a self-perpetuating effect in giving and taking references.

BackgroundWhile environmental research addresses scientific questions of possible societal relevance, it is unclear to what degree research focuses on environmental chemicals in need of documentation for risk assessment purposes.MethodsIn a bibliometric analysis, we used SciFinder to extract Chemical Abstract Service (CAS) numbers for chemicals addressed by publications in the 78 major environmental science journals during 2000-2009. The Web of Science was used to conduct title searches to determine long-term trends for prominent substances and substances considered in need of research attention.ResultsThe 119,636 journal articles found had 760,056 CAS number links during 2000-2009. The top-20 environmental chemicals consisted of metals, (chlorinated) biphenyls, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, benzene, and ethanol and contributed 12% toward the total number of links- Each of the top-20 substances was covered by 2,000-10,000 articles during the decade. The numbers for the 10-year period were similar to the total numbers of pre-2000 articles on the same chemicals. However, substances considered a high priority from a regulatory viewpoint, due to lack of documentation, showed very low publication rates. The persistence in the scientific literature of the top-20 chemicals was only weakly related to their publication in journals with a high impact factor, but some substances achieved high citation rates.ConclusionsThe persistence of some environmental chemicals in the scientific literature may be due to a 'Matthew' principle of maintaining prominence for the very reason of having been well researched. Such bias detracts from the societal needs for documentation on less well known environmental hazards, and it may also impact negatively on the potentials for innovation and discovery in research.

Bibliometric analysis (BA) has been used increasingly as a tool within the scientific community. Interplay is vital between those involved in refining bibliometric methods and the recipients of this type of analysis.

A central question concerning scientific publishing is how researchers select journals to which they submit their work, since the choice of publication channel can make or break researchers. The gold-digger mentality developed by some publishers created the so-called predatory journals that accept manuscripts for a fee with little peer review. The literature claims that mainly researchers from low-ranked universities in developing countries publish in predatory journals. We decided to challenge this claim using the University of Southern Denmark as a case. We ran the Beall's List against our research registration database and identified 31 possibly predatory publications from a set of 6,851 publications within 2015-2016. A qualitative research interview revealed that experienced researchers from the developed world publish in predatory journals mainly for the same reasons as do researchers from developing countries: lack of awareness, speed and ease of the publication process, and a chance to get elsewhere rejected work published. However, our findings indicate that the Open Access potential and a larger readership outreach were also motives for publishing in Open Access journals with quick acceptance rates.

This paper presents some indications to the existence of a citation advantage related to sharing data using astrophysics as a case. Through bibliometric analyses we find a citation advantage for astrophysical papers in core journals. The advantage arises as indexed papers are associated with data Sharing Data Increases Citations 68Liber Quarterly Volume 26 Issue 2 2016 by bibliographical links, and consists of papers receiving on average significantly more citations per paper per year, than do papers not associated with links to data.