Authors: Aparna Basu
Publish Date: 2010/02/10
Volume: 82, Issue: 3, Pages: 507-516
Abstract
In this paper we examine the question whether it is meaningful to talk about the scientific productivity of nations based on indexes like the Science Citation Index or Scopus when the journal set covered by them keeps changing with time We hypothesize from the illustrative case of India’s declining productivity in the 1980s which correlated with a fall in its journals indexed that an apparent increase/decrease in productivity for any country based on observed change in its share of papers could in fact be an effect resulting from the inclusion of more/less journals from the country To verify our hypothesis we have used SCIMAGO data We found that for a set of 90 countries the share of journals regressed on the share of papers gave a linear relationship that explained 80 of the variance However we also show that in the case of China’s unusual rise in world scientific productivity to second rank crossing several other countries there is yet another factor that needs to be taken into account We define a new indicator—the JOURNAL PACKING DENSITY JPD or average number of papers in journals from a given country We show that the packing density of Chinese journals has steadily increased over the last few years Currently Chinese journals have the highest ‘packing density’ in the world almost twice the world average which is about 100 papers per journal per annum The deviation of the JPD from the world average is another indicator which will affect so called ‘national productivities’ in addition to the number of national journals indexed We conclude that in the context of a five fold increase in the number of journals indexed over 20 years the simplistic notion of ‘scientific productivity’ as equivalent to papers indexed needs to be reexamined
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