Traffic medicine–related research : a scientometric analysis

OBJECTIVE: Traffic crashes and related injuries are important causes of morbidity and mortality and impose insofar an important burden on public health. However, research in this area is often under-funded. The aim of this study was to analyse quantity, evolution and geographic distribution of traffic medicine-related research. This multi-sectorial field covers both transport and health care sectors. DESIGN: A scientometric approach in combination with visualizing density equalizing mapping was used to analyse published data related to the field of traffic medicine between 1900 and 2008 within the "Web of Science" (WoS) database. RESULTS: In total, 5,193 traffic medicine-associated items were produced between 1900 and 2008. The United States was found to have the highest research activity with a production of n = 2,330 published items, followed by Germany (n = 298) and Canada (n = 219). Cooperation analyses resulted in a peak of published multilateral cooperations in the year of 2003. The country with the highest multilateral activity was the USA. The average number of cited references per publication varied heavily over the last 20 years with a maximum of 27.67 in 1995 and a minimum of 15.08 in 1998. Also, a further in-depth analysis was performed with a focus solely on public health aspects which revealed similar trends. CONCLUSIONS: Summarizing the present data it can be stated traffic medicine-related research productivity grows annually. Also, an active networking between countries is present. The data of the present study may be used by scientific organisations in order to gain detailed information about research activities in this field which is extremely important for public health

A review of the literature on citation impact indicators

Citation impact indicators nowadays play an important role in research evaluation, and consequently these indicators have received a lot of attention in the bibliometric and scientometric literature. This paper provides an in-depth review of the literature on citation impact indicators. First, an overview is given of the literature on bibliographic databases that can be used to calculate citation impact indicators (Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar). Next, selected topics in the literature on citation impact indicators are reviewed in detail. The first topic is the selection of publications and citations to be included in the calculation of citation impact indicators. The second topic is the normalization of citation impact indicators, in particular normalization for field differences. Counting methods for dealing with co-authored publications are the third topic, and citation impact indicators for journals are the last topic. The paper concludes by offering some recommendations for future research

How to Compare the Scientific Contributions between Research Groups

We present a method to analyse the scientific contributions between research groups. Given multiple research groups, we construct their journal/proceeding graphs and then compute the similarity/gap between them using network analysis. This analysis can be used for measuring similarity/gap of the topics/qualities between research groups' scientific contributions. We demonstrate the practicality of our method by comparing the scientific contributions by Korean researchers with those by the global researchers for information security in 2006 - 2008. The empirical analysis shows that the current security research in South Korea has been isolated from the global research trend

A Review of Theory and Practice in Scientometrics

Scientometrics is the study of the quantitative aspects of the process of science as a communication system. It is centrally, but not only, concerned with the analysis of citations in the academic literature. In recent years it has come to play a major role in the measurement and evaluation of research performance. In this review we consider: the historical development of scientometrics, sources of citation data, citation metrics and the “laws" of scientometrics, normalisation, journal impact factors and other journal metrics, visualising and mapping science, evaluation and policy, and future developments