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

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Management Summary
Bibliometric analyses provide information on publication performance (quantitative), the
perception and impact of publications in the specialist community (qualitative), and
international scientific cooperations (co-publication analysis).
Of all of the various types of scientific publications (e.g. books, conference papers and
essays), bibliometric analyses focus predominantly on publications in journals. A database,
known to scientists as the Web of Science, evaluates approximately 9,300 international
scientific journals on a regular basis. The Web of Science consists of the Science Citation
Index (SCI), the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts & Humanities Citation
Index (A&HCI). The indexed journals are referred to as the “core journals” and they publish the
majority of scientific research results.
This study
Publications 1992 - 2007
focuses on the
following countries
from the 140000
500000
Asia-Pacific research
area:
120000
400000
Australia, China,
100000
Indonesia, Iran,
Japan, Malaysia,
80000
300000
New Zealand,
Singapore,
60000
200000
South Korea,
Taiwan, Thailand
and Viet-
100000
40000
20000
nam. The first
aspect we look
0
0
at is an output
1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007
analysis of
Germany Japan China Australia South Korea Taiwan New Zealand Singapore
Iran Thailand Malaysia Indonesia Vietnam USA EU-27
these and other
selected countries.
The development of the publication frequency in the Web of Science database will be
investigated for the period 1992 to 2007. The figure above shows the number of publications
by each country studied during the period under investigation. The almost exponential
increase in publications by China can be clearly seen. This aspect will be taken up and
discussed again in all of the following chapters of this analysis. Furthermore, this development
of publication activity reveals that Japan is on a similar course to Germany in terms of the
number of published scientific articles, and also that Japan is well ahead of the other countries
studied. The increase in publications in the period under review from 1992 to 2007 in Japan,
however, is much smaller than in China. Iran, in contrast, experienced a forty-fold increase in
its output. However, it should be noted that Iran has a very low total number of publications.
Number of publications
Number of publications (USA and EU-27)
III