Bulletin of Mathematical Biology - facts, figures and comparisons

The Society for Mathematical Biology (SMB) owns the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology (BMB). This is an international journal devoted to the interface of mathematics and biology. At the 2003 SMB annual meeting in Dundee the Society asked the editor of the BMB to produce an analysis of impact factor, subject matter of papers, submission rates etc. Other members of the society were interested in the handling times of articles and wanted comparisons with other (appropriate) journals. In this article we present a brief history of the journal and report on how the journal impact factor has grown substantially in the last few years. We also present an analysis of subject areas of published papers over the past two years. We finally present data on times from receipt of paper to acceptance, acceptance to print (and to online publication) and compare these data with some other journals

Do fixed citation windows affect the impact maturation rates of scientific journals?

ABSTRACTScientific fields employ distinct citation practices. As such, bibliometric indicators based on citations need to be standardized to allow comparisons between fields. This paper examines more than six hundred journals in eight JCR categories. Results indicate that impact maturation rates vary considerably from one category to another. The time elapsed until the citation distribution reaches a maximum oscillates between two and five years; hence the opening and closing of the citation window is crucial to the impact factor. Some journals are penalized by the two-year impact factor and benefited by the five-year impact factor, and the reverse situation was also found. Nonetheless, there are impact factors of variable citation windows that produce closer measures of central tendency

Gender Representation on Journal Editorial Boards in the Mathematical Sciences

We study gender representation on the editorial boards of 435 journals in the mathematical sciences. Women are known to comprise approximately 15% of tenure-stream faculty positions in doctoral-granting mathematical sciences departments in the United States. Compared to this pool, the likely source of journal editorships, we find that 8.9% of the 13067 editorships in our study are held by women. We describe group variations within the editorships by identifying specific journals, subfields, publishers, and countries that significantly exceed or fall short of this average. To enable our study, we develop a semi-automated method for inferring gender that has an estimated accuracy of 97.5%. Our findings provide the first measure of gender distribution on editorial boards in the mathematical sciences, offer insights that suggest future studies in the mathematical sciences, and introduce new methods that enable large-scale studies of gender distribution in other fields.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figure

The skewness of science in 219 sub-fields and a number of aggregates

This paper studies evidence from Thomson Scientific about the citation process of 3.7 million articles published in the period 1998-2002 in 219 Web of Science categories, or sub-fields. Reference and citation distributions have very different characteristics across sub-fields. However, when analyzed with the Characteristic Scores and Scales technique, which is replication and scale invariant, the shape of these distributions over three broad categories of articles appears strikingly similar. Reference distributions are mildly skewed, but citation distributions with a five-year citation window are highly skewed: the mean is twenty points above the median, while 9-10% of all articles in the upper tail account for about 44% of all citations. The aggregation of sub-fields into disciplines and fields according to several aggregation schemes preserve this feature of citation distributions. It should be noted that when we look into subsets of articles within the lower and upper tails of citation distributions the universality partially breaks down. On the other hand, for 140 of the 219 sub-fields the existence of a power law cannot be rejected. However, contrary to what is generally believed, at the sub-field level the scaling parameter is above 3.5 most of the time, and power laws are relatively small: on average, they represent 2% of all articles and account for 13.5% of all citations. The results of the aggregation into disciplines and fields reveal that power law algebra is a subtle phenomenon.

Estudi comparatiu de la publicació científica en les àrees de matemàtiques i estadística i investigació operativa a la UPC vs. altres universitats d’àmbit internacional (2006-2015)

El present estudi bibliomètric dóna continuïtat a l’Estudi comparatiu de la publicació científica en les àrees de matemàtiques i estadística i investigació operativa a la UPC vs. altres universitats d’àmbit internacional (2003-2012). El seu origen parteix de l’interès de la comunitat matemàtica i estadística de la Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – Barcelona Tech (UPC) i en particular de Mat-UPC2, expressat a través de l’Oficina de Suport a la Recerca Matemàtica. L’informe utilitza criteris estrictes de metodologia bibliogràfica relacionats amb la producció científica i el seu impacte, sempre dins el context de les eines disponibles. Un element clau de l’estudi és la tria de les institucions amb què es fa la comparació. La tria s’ha basat en tres criteris: seleccionar institucions de reconegut prestigi científic, incloure especialment institucions d’orientació tecnològica i, finalment, tenir una perspectiva d’àmbit estatal. El resultat de l’aplicació d’aquests principis no és necessàriament únic, però els responsables de l’estudi creiem que és prou encertat. El document posa de manifest una apreciació que ja ha quedat reflectida en altres documents d’aquesta naturalesa. Tant la quantitat com el nivell de la producció científica en matemàtiques i estadística situa la UPC en els primers llocs de les universitats de l’Estat en aquest àmbit, i en una posició molt sòlida en el context internacional. Aquesta coincidència dóna credibilitat addicional a l’estudi i proporciona un element més per consolidar el reconeixement d’una feina en la línia dels objectius acadèmics més exigents.Postprint (published version