Longitudinal variation in national research publication portfolios

Steps required to index balance and evenness

Bibliographic Data

ID21255992
AuthorsJonathan Adams (0000-0003-3890-4630, King's College - North Carolina), Gordon Rogers (0000-0002-9971-2731, Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate Analytics, 160 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8EZ, UK), Warren Smart (0000-0002-9796-4505, Ministry of Education), Martin Szomszor (0000-0003-0347-3527, Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate Analytics, 160 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8EZ, UK)
Year2020
Volume1
Issue3
Pages1182-1202
Publication date2020-08-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueQuantitative Science Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2641-3337 • E-ISSN: 2641-3337
PublisherMIT Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1162/qss_a_00073
OpenAlexW3035657855
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited26

National research diversity is explored through the balance of global and national papers in journal categories in the Web of Science (WoS) and Essential Science Indicators (ESI) and we examine the consequences of “normalizing” national publication counts against global baselines. Global balance across subject categories became more even as annual WoS indexing grew fourfold between 1981 and 2018, with a relative shift from biomedicine towards environment and technology. Change at the country level may have tracked this or been influenced by local policy and funding. We discuss choice of methods and indices for analysis: WoS categories provide better granularity than ESI; Lorenz curves are explored but found limiting; the Pratt index, Gini coefficient, and Shannon diversity are compared. At the national level, balance generally increases and is greatest in non-Anglophone countries, perhaps due to shifts in language and journal use. Two aspects of national change are revealed: the balance of actual WoS paper counts and the balance of counts normalized against world baseline. The broad patterns for these analyses are similar, but normalized data indicate relatively greater evenness. National patterns link to research capacity and regional networking opportunities, while international collaboration may blend national differences. A data set is provided for analytical use

Econometrics · Economics · Geography · Gini coefficient · Inequality · Library science · Political science · Regional science · Species diversity · Species evenness · Statistics · Computer Science · Mathematics · Psychology · scientometrics and bibliometrics research · Ecology

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