A Comparative Study of Bibliographic Analysis and Research Front between Anesthesiology and Anesthesia-related Institutions
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Wei, Ling-Fang
Abstract
Most of bibliometric analysis studies for anesthesiology collected data from journal articles which title contained specific keywords or which subject category indexed as the “anesthesiology” in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCI-E). In order to realize performance of researchers in the anesthesiology department and compare with which in the anesthesiology subject, this study collected data from SCI-E in which articles published on journals indexed in 2014 Journal Citation Reports (JCR) during 1995-2014 as “subject dataset” and also extracted articles which address columns contained “anesthes* or anaesthes*” as “department dataset”. For the whole 20 years period, there were totally 64,199 articles in the subject dataset; 130,801 articles in the department dataset. These two datasets were further utilized to analyze on journal, country, institute, author levels and co-authorship. In addition, research fronts were also identified based on highly-cited articles in the datasets. The results showed that observing number of articles during the 20-year period, subject articles did not grew as much as department articles. Especially since 2007, the discrepancy of article numbers between subject and department apparently had become larger. In near 10 years, even though anesthesiology journals still the most important publications, more and more researchers preferred and turned to publish on non-anesthesiology journals with higher cited times. In addition, journals indexed in the Surgery subject got most department articles and in which Neurosciences received most citations. The diverse of department’s subject distribution means that department articles are more suitable employed for analyzing performance of researchers than subject ones. Observing research performance of countries in the anesthesiology, the U.S. and EU countries published most “department” and “subject” articles, and both received most citations. Although the U.S. got most articles and citations, by HHI measurement, only citation distribution in the department dataset presented highly concentrated in specific countries with HHI over 0.30. Observing countries in East Asia, China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan had more than 50% of department articles published in non-anesthesiology subjects. About institute and author levels analysis results, US institutions published most department and subject articles and received more citations compared with other countries. The U.S. was also played as important role in the co-authoring with other countries. EU countries tended to co-author with those also from EU. The U.S., Great Britain and Germany are the three countries with most co-authored subject and department articles. With respect to research front analyses, this study set 4 citation windows to group highly cited articles by bibliographic coupling and identified research fronts for each window. In the subject dataset, 18 research fronts were identified and categorized as anesthesiology and pain medicine; in the department dataset, 23 research fronts categorized as oriented based research, anesthesiology, pain medicine, and critical care medicine. Most of research fronts developed independently in one of four window (i.e. 6 years), and only a few of fronts had connections with that in other windows. Researchers from anesthesiology departments not only published on journals indexed in the anesthesiology but in various subjects. High impact articles in other subject were more presented in the result of department research fronts with more fronts categorized in oriented based research and critical care medicine. In general, this study suggests that due to difference between analyzed results in the subject and department datasets, to have exact illustrations and statements, future study should carefully examine which dataset is suitable based on its objective.
Subjects
anesthesia
bibliometrics
research front
Type
thesis