Bibliometric Analysis Asia-Pacific Research Area ... - JuSER

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Figure 9 reveals that a significant proportion of the total publications in some countries consists
of documents other than research articles – for example the USA, Australia and the EU-27. In
the USA, this proportion of other document types amounts to more than one third. This quota is
significantly lower for China and the countries of the Asia-Pacific research area. This difference
can be explained by the fact that the editors and publishers of the majority of refereed journals
in the Web of Science come from the countries within the EU-27 and, above all, from the USA.
This also explains the higher proportion of editorial material.
Research articles 1992-2007
Number of reseach articles
100000
90000
80000
70000
60000
50000
40000
30000
20000
10000
400000
350000
300000
250000
200000
150000
100000
50000
Number of reseach articles (USA and EU-27)
0
1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007
0
Germany Japan China Australia South Korea Taiwan New Zealand Singapore
Iran Thailand Malaysia Indonesia Vietnam USA EU-27
Figure 10: Number of research articles published over time
The development over time of publication activity in the category of “research articles” is
extremely similar to the development of the absolute number of publications (Figure 2) in that
research articles also account for the largest proportion of total publications. A detailed
comparison with Figure 2, however, reveals that the EU-27 had overtaken the USA in terms of
the total number of articles 10 years earlier, in other words in 1995, when the assessment basis
is research articles. This can be explained by a smaller proportion of research articles in terms
of total publications in the USA than in the EU-27. It should also be noted that China overtook
Germany in 2006 in terms of the total number of research articles for the very same reason.
Figure 11 illustrates the development of the total number of records in the Science Citation
Index (SCI) and how it underlies the evaluations that follow on the relative proportion of
publications by a country in terms of the database as a whole. It should be noted that the data
shown in Figures 11 – 13 only refer to SCI, the science edition of the Web of Science, in
contrast to the other graphs and charts in Chapter 1 of this study.
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