Research Trends Issue 38 September 2014 Back to the future: 10 years of Scopus and beyond Research Trends Issue 38 September 2014 Page 01 Research Trends Issue 38 Back to the future: 10 years of Scopus and beyond This Special Issue of Research Trends is The first contribution is written by Gali Halevi, The next two contributions focus on nations published in honor of the 10th anniversary of in collaboration with me, Henk Moed. We rather than subject fields as the primary Scopus, Elsevier’s bibliographical database, present a list of the most frequently cited object of analysis. Stephanie Oeben and launched in the fall of 2004. The common articles published in the past decade in Sarah Huggett analyze trends in German denominator of the contributions published eight main research areas, and highlight publication output and its citation impact, in this issue is looking backwards in time, comments made by their authors on while Gali Halevi and I present a model ten years or even longer, and illustrating the their achievements. Matthew Richardson for the development phases of a country’s potential of Scopus in bibliometric studies of analyzes a decade’s research trends in research system. Our study focuses on trends in the global science system. Although the domain of virology by applying topic countries in Asia, the region in which these studies look backwards in time, they identification and visualization techniques, an important conference on research also bear relevance to the present and and Andrew Plume depicts developments assessment took place in June 2014, namely future, as their outcomes and the explored in a hot topic in the field of materials the APAC Research Intelligence Conference. bibliometric methodologies potentially science: graphene research. And in the last contribution of this issue, contribute to a better understanding of Alexander van Servellen and Ikuko Oba the research process, and to an informed In his next contribution, Andrew and Daphne report back on this event. research policy. van Weijen present patterns in co-authorship, for instance, in the number of co-authors in On behalf of the Editorial Team, I hope research articles, during the past 10 years that you will enjoy reading this issue. and more. The quality, archiving, availability Please do share your thoughts and feedback and re-use of research data are gaining with us, either by inserting your comments more and more interest. A detailed analysis in the section following each article on of data on cited references in Scopus our website, or by sending us an email enabled Sarah Huggett to trace the visibility ([email protected]). We look of research data in the published literature. forward to hearing from you! Kind regards, Henk F. Moed Editor-in-Chief Research Trends Issue 38 September 2014 Page 02 Page 03 10 years of research impact: top cited papers in Scopus 2001-2011 Gali Halevi and Henk Moed investigate what the most frequently cited articles were in Scopus from 2001-2011, in eight main research areas, and give their authors the chance to comment on their achievements. Page 10 A decade’s trends in virology research Matthew Richardson illustrates the trends that have influenced the field of Virology, the study of viruses, over the past 10 years, using bibliometric analysis and visualization techniques. Page 13 Graphene: ten years of the ‘gold rush’ In this article, Andrew Plume investigates whether a new approach to assigning ‘credit’ for article authorship can answer the question: “Who are the authors of high-impact graphene research”? Page 16 Publish or perish? The rise of the fractional author… Andrew Plume and Daphne van Weijen investigate how the pressure researchers feel to publish their work has affected co-authorship patterns over the past 10 years. Are researchers publishing more unique articles or co-authoring more articles? Page 19 A quick look at references to research data repositories In this contribution, Sarah Huggett investigates whether there is a way to estimate the visibility of research data in the published literature, and presents some initial findings. Page 22 The black eagle soars: Germany’s bibliometric trends 2004-2013 In this piece, Stephanie Oeben and Sarah Huggett investigate Germany’s research performance during the past decade, and discuss trends in German publication output and its citation impact. Page 25 Tracking scientific development and collaborations – The case of 25 Asian countries Henk Moed and Gali Halevi explain how a country’s current stage of scientific development can be determined through the use of a bibliometric model, and illustrate its use by examining 25 countries in Asia. Page 31 Reporting Back: The APAC research intelligence conference Alexander van Servellen and Ikuko Oba report back from the first APAC research intelligence conference, which focused on the challenges institutions face with regard to managing research and the best practices employed to optimize research strategy and impact. Page 37 Did you know? …. these 10 things about Scopus? Research Trends Issue 38 September 2014 Page 03 Section 1: Scopus is celebrating 10 years since its In this paper we review the following 8 Behind the data launch. As the largest abstract and citation subject areas and their top cited articles: database of peer-reviewed literature available today, Scopus boasts 53 million • Agricultural and Biological Sciences 10 years of records, 21,915 titles from 5,000 publishers. • Arts and Humanities In this paper we aimed to identify some • Computer Science of the top cited papers indexed in Scopus • Chemical Engineering research impact: across various disciplines between 2001 and • Energy 2011. In addition, we contacted the authors of • Engineering top cited papers these papers to seek their insight about why • Environmental Science they think their papers are as highly cited as • Medicine in Scopus they are. Agricultural and Biological Sciences 2001-2011 In order to achieve this, we conducted a The top cited article in Agricultural and comprehensive search on all Scopus data, Biological Sciences in 2001 - 2011 is: Dr. Gali Halevi and Dr. Henk F. Moed limiting the results to articles published Tamura, K., Dudley, J., Nei, M., Kumar, S. between 2001 and 2011. Scopus is the largest MEGA4: Molecular Evolutionary Genetics abstract and citation database of peer- Analysis (MEGA) software version 4.0 reviewed literature, and features smart tools (2007) Molecular Biology and Evolution, Vol. to track, analyze and visualize research. 24, No. 8, pp. 1596-1599. Cited 17,359 times The initial search results yielded more than (as of June, 2014) 13 million records (as of June 11, 2014). This set was further refined, to include only full Description: MEGA [Molecular Evolutionary research articles while excluding reviews, Genetics Analysis] is a freely available editorials or book chapters. The search software tool for conducting statistical results were then limited to one of Scopus’ 26 analysis of molecular evolution and for subject categories at a time (see Table 1 for constructing phylogenetic trees. MEGA full list). Each set of articles under a subject is used by biologists in a large number category was sorted by “cited by” counts of laboratories for reconstructing the (i.e. citations), which enables the highly cited evolutionary histories of species and inferring articles to be identified. the extent and nature of the selective forces shaping the evolution of genes and species In the first stage, we selected the top 5 (1). This software was first developed by articles most cited in each category. These Sudhir Kumar and Koichiro Tamura in the articles were manually examined to ensure laboratory of Dr. Masatoshi Nei (2). The first that they are indeed associated with the version of this software was released in correct subject area. In cases where one 1993. As expected, the main disciplines citing article was associated with more than this article are Agricultural and Biological one subject area, we made an informed Sciences, Biochemistry, Genetics and decision as to which subject area to assign Molecular Biology, Immunology, Medicine it, based on both the article content (mainly and Veterinary Sciences. However, there retrieved from its title and abstract) and are several interesting disciplines citing this whether the journal is best associated with software including Social Sciences, Arts and one subject area. In cases where we found Humanities and Business, which may not the same top cited article for more than one seem directly related to the core research discipline, the most cited article unique to field of this software. A closer look at these that subject area was used. The same was citing disciplines reveals that the software done, if, regardless of our initial limitation, has been used to track Ancient DNA in the top cited article was a review or a type Anthropology and Archeology and to sketch of methodological paper. the markup of civilization (3, 4) as well as study the phenomenon of the emergence and extinction of languages (5). Research Trends Issue 38 September 2014 Page 04 Chemical Engineering Comments from Prof. Kumar: Comments from Dr. McCall: The top cited article in Chemical Engineering This article described a useful software I believe [the high citation count] has in 2001 - 2011 is: tool that enables comparative analysis to do with interdisciplinary interest in Kreuer, K.D. of DNA and protein sequences from the issue of intersectionality across a On the development of proton conducting different individuals, strains, and wide range of fields. I try to extend the polymer membranes for hydrogen and species. Such analyses are becoming usefulness of the concept for quantitative methanol fuel cells. (2001) Journal of very important in this age of genomics, as well as qualitative research. The Membrane Science, Vol. 185, No. 1, pp. and increasingly larger numbers of latter tends to dominate the study 29-39.