Bibliometric Analysis of Thermodynamic Research: A Science Citation Index Expanded-Based Analysis

Abstract

To analyze these aspects, the common evaluation indicators number of publications and their publication share were utilized (Schubert et al., 1989;Rehn et al., 2007).Impact factor was introduced by Garfield and Sher (1963) to help select additional source journals using the recent citations received from other journals, and has been also widely used to rank and evaluate journals (Garfield, 1996;Moed, 2002).In particular, the five indicators including total, independent, collaborative, first author, and corresponding author articles have been recently used to compare the publication performance of countries and institutions in the researched of Japanese lung cancer (Ho et al., 2010), solid waste research (Fu et al., 2010), desalination research (Tanaka & Ho, 2011), acupuncture research (Han & Ho, 2011), global climate change (Li et al., 2011), and estuary pollution (Sun et al., 2012).In addition, rankings are useful indicators, especially in terms of institutions and researchers in urgent demand by politics (Weingart, 2003).These indicators including number of publication, publication share, impact factor, rankings, and five newly indicators were utilized for the evaluation of thermodynamics research.The aim of this study was to systematically evaluate not only the publication characteristics of languages, annual publication outputs, journals and Web of Science categories, and national and inter-institutional contributors, but also the research emphases and trends by author keywords to obtain an overview of thermodynamic research during the period from 1991 to 2010. Methodology Data collectionDocuments used in this study were derived from the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-Expanded) database of the Web of Science, the Thomson Reuters.According to Journal Citation Reports (JCR), it indexes 8,073 journals with citation references across 174 scientific disciplines in 2010.The data was collected on November 20 in 2011, and the detail data collection process is illustrated in Fig. 1.Firstly, thermodynamics related keywords including "thermodynamic", "thermodynamics", "free energy change", "enthalpy change", and "entropy change" were searched in terms of topic (including four parts: title, abstract, author keywords, and KeyWords Plus) within the publication year limitation from 1991 to 2010 based on SCI-Expanded.Total 157,140 documents were therefore found out.However, these 157,140 documents contained the documents not closely relating to thermodynamics which was searched only in terms of KeyWords Plus which providing search terms extracted from the titles of papers cited in each new article listed in Current Contents (Garfield, 1990).To efficiently obtain the characteristics of thermodynamics, this study only focused on the documents (50,865) with searching keywords in front page which including three parts: title, abstract, and author keywords, while the documents where searching keywords only appeared in KeyWords Plus were excluded.These documents consists of 19 document types, where articles (41,245) dominants with a percentage of 81%, followed by proceedings paper (4,860; 10%), meeting abstract (1,787; 3.5%), and review (1,407; 2.8%).5 (0.76) 23 (0.34) 3 (1.4)11 (0.41) 13 (0.39) 73 University of Tokyo, Japan 280 6 (0.68) 6 (0.57) 11 (0.84) 6 (0.46) 6 (0.45) 50 University of Science and Technology Beijing, China 265 7 (0.65) 9 (0.53) 14 (0.82) 5 (0.47) 5 (0.48) 52 Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden 261 8 (0.64) 14 (0.45) 7 (0.91) 12 (0.41) 11 (0.40) 58 Pennsylvania State University, USA 256 9 (0.62) 5 (0.58) 19 (0.69) 9 (0.45) 10 (0.43) 45 Central South University, China 247 10 (0.60) 11 (0.51) 18 (0.74) 4 (0.50) 4 (0.52) 50 University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA 245 11 (0.60) 14 (0.45) 15 (0.81) 14 (0.41) 18 (0.37) 55 Indian Institute of Technology, India 242 12 (0.59) 4 (0.67) 42 (0.48) 6 (0.46) 8 (0.44) 33 University of California, USA 241 13 (0.59) 18 (0.39) 8 (0.88) 16 (0.39)22 (0.33) 61 Osaka University, Japan 240 14 (0.59) 16 (0.41)11 (0.84) 17 (0.37) 15 (0.38) 58 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA 222 15 (0.54) 8 (0.55) 35 (0.53) 10 (0.42) 11 (0.40) 40 University of Cambridge, UK 220 16 (0.54) 29 (0.30) 8 (0.88) 22 (0.34) 24 (0.33) 66 Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland 219 17 (0.53) 24 (0.33) 13 (0.83) 22 (0.34) 21 (0.35) 63

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No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.