Computer science in Eastern Europe 1989-2014: a bibliometric study
| Pages | 526-541 |
| Date | 21 September 2015 |
| Published date | 21 September 2015 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-02-2015-0027 |
| Author | Dalibor Fiala,Peter Willett |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval |
Computer science in Eastern
Europe 1989-2014:
a bibliometric study
Dalibor Fiala
Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
University of West Bohemia, Plzeň, Czech Republic, and
Peter Willett
Information School, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to study the development of research in computer science in
15 Eastern European countries following the breaching of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Design/methodology/approach –The authors conducted a bibliometric analysis of 82,121
computer science publications indexed in the Web of Science database and investigated publication,
citation, and collaboration patterns of the individual countries.
Findings –Poland has been the most productive country, followed by Russia, the Czech Republic,
Romania, Hungary, and Slovenia.Publication rates haveincreased substantiallyover the period, but this
has not been accompanied by a corresponding increasein the quality of the publications. Hungary and
Sloveniaare the most influentialcountries in termsof citations per paper.Artificial Intelligenceis the most
frequentlyoccurring computer sciencesubject category, with InterdisciplinaryApplications the category
with the greatest impact. USA,Germany, UK, France, and Canadaare the most frequently collaborating
western nations,and papers published in collaborationwith US authors accrue the most citations.
Originality/value –This is the first ever bibliometric study of the whole post-communist Eastern
European computer science research as indexed in the Web of Science.
Keywords Analysis, Web of Science, Eastern Europe, Computer science, Bibliometrics
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
The breaching of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was perhaps the most significant event in the
break-up of the former USSR’s domination of Eastern Europe. In the 25 years since
then the Communist Block countries, both those already in existence (e.g. Hungary and
Poland) and those arising from the subsequent break-up of the USSR (e.g. Belarus,
Moldova, Ukraine and the Central Asia and South Caucasian states) have gone their
separate ways socially, economically, and scientifically. In this paper, we present a
bibliometric study of the development of computer science in 15 of these countries over
this period.
There have already been several bibliometric studies of scientific developments
in the former Communist Block (hereafter FCB) countries during this period. Thus,
Karamourzov (2012)analysed development trends in the Commonwealth of Independent
States and demonstrated the large, and in some cases, near catastrophic, reductions in
scientific activity that have taken place. Kozak et al. (2014) showed that the break-up of
Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 67 No. 5, 2015
pp. 526-541
©Emerald Group Publishing Limited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-02-2015-0027
Received 16 February 2015
Revised 24 June 2015
Accepted 25 July 2015
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/2050-3806.htm
This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), project “NTIS –
New Technologies for Information Society”, European Centre of Excellence, CZ.1.05/1.1.00/
02.0090 and in part by the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic under grant MSMT
MOBILITY 7AMB14SK090.
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AJIM
67,5
the Block did not result in significant increase in publication counts or in academic
collaborations with international researchers. Radosevic and Yoruk (2014) compared the
science andsocial science capabilitiesof the countries of Central and EasternEurope with
those of the long-established membersof the European Union. Allik (2013)contrasted the
very differentapproaches to research excellence thathave been taken by the three Baltic
states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), Popovic et al. (2012) and Ivanovic and Ho (2014)
discussed the improving quality of Serbian academic research, and Vanecek (2008)
compared bibliometric data for the Czech Republic with six other EU countries. There
have also been many published bibliometric studies of computer science,these involving
either a comparison of multiple countries (e.g. Fiala, 2012; Guan and Ma, 2004;
Ma et al., 2008) or a focus on a specific country, e.g., Brazil (Arruda et al.,2009),China
(Xie and Willett, 2013), India (Gupta et al., 2011), and Malaysia (Bakri and Willett, 2011).
However, we arenot aware of any such studies of computerscience that focus on the FCB
countries and thework reported here hence fills a nichein the literature. The next section
summarizes the methods used, and we then discuss FCB publications, citations to those
publications, the nature and extent of international collaborations involving these
countries, and similarities between their individual research profiles.
2. Data and methods
The study is based on the Science Citation Index Expanded and the Conference
Proceedings Citation Index –Science databases in the Thomson-Reuters Web of
Science system. A search was carried out in early 2014 for journal articles, proceedings
papers, or reviews published in the period 1989-2014 in the Research Area Computer
Science, and then noting those FCB countries that had at least 1,000 publications that
met these search criteria. In order of decreasing productivity these countries were:
Poland, Russia, Czech Republic (shortened to Czech in some places of the text below),
Romania, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Ukraine, Croatia, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Serbia,
Yugoslavia, Latvia, and Estonia. Yugoslavia has been included in the list as meeting
the publications threshold; however it should be noted that the last of its publications
was in 2006, by which time the country had ceased to exist.
In addition to the countries above, searches were also carried out for the
publications of the three South Caucasian states which lie on the boundary between
Europe and Asia (i.e. Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia), of four Balkan states
(Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Bosnia), of Moldova and Belarus, and of two
other countries –the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia –that are now defunct. None
of these countries, however, had reached the minimal threshold of 1,000 publications
and they were thus excluded from further analysis. (The first FCB country below the
threshold was Belarus with 784 publications.) This study concentrates on Eastern
Europe, and the Central Asian republics (e.g. Kazakhstan) were hence not considered
at all. In total, the 26 countries inspected produced 82,121 publications; the
15 countries chosen for further analysis were responsible for more than 95 per cent of
these publications. The full Web of Science publication records for the 15 countries
were downloaded in March 2014 and saved as plain text files that were then
subsequently imported into a relational database for the analyses that are described
below. In this context it is relevant to note that, of course, the 2014 publication data
are far from being complete and the 2013 publication data are, most probably,
incomplete too due to indexation delays in the Web of Science database. However,
we decided to retain these years in our analysis because 2014 marks the significant
25th anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain.
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Computer
science in
Eastern
Europe
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