A framework for assessing a country’s scientific productivity based on published articles by scientists affiliated with that country
| Date | 21 March 2023 |
| Pages | 23-38 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/IDD-08-2021-0082 |
| Published date | 21 March 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Library & information services,Lending,Document delivery,Collection building & management,Stock revision,Consortia |
| Author | Negar Hamed Golzar,Elif Altunok,Amir Aghabaiglou,Muhammed Oğuzhan Külekci |
A framework for assessing a country’s scientific
productivity based on published articles by
scientists affiliated with that country
Negar Hamed Golzar, Elif Altunok and Amir Aghabaiglou
Informatics Institute, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey, and
Muhammed O
guzhan Külekci
Informatics Institute, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey and
Department of Computer Science, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, Indiana, USA
Abstract
Purpose –This study aims to propose a framework to assess the scientific productivity performance of a country in terms of its international
visibility and national capabilities.
Design/methodology/approach –In a given subject, all publications with at least one author from the target country as well as the received
citations are counted as quantitative and qualitative indicators, respectively. The ratios of these counts to their expected values, which are estima ted
according to the global gross domestic product (GDP) and population percentages of the country are used to assess international visibility. Also, in
certain publications, all authors are from the target country, therefore, their publication and citation proportions are provided as metrics of national
competence.
Findings –As a sample, this study analyzes Turkey’s performance in “Business, Economics & Management”and “Engineering & Computer
Science”in the top 20 publication venues of the regarding subject areas according to Google Scholar Metrics taxonomy. This study shows that in
some subfields, Turkey’s performance is 2.73–6 times as per expectations. This study also provides the international visibility assessment of all
countries for the past two decades in “Theoretical Computer Science”which shows that Israel is a leading country based on this framework.
Originality/value –This paper introduces new indices to evaluate a country’s national competence and international visibility on a subject field
based on the number of published papers affiliated with the country and their citations by considering the global GDP and population share.
Keywords Scientific productivity, Country evaluation, International visibility, National capabilities, Google Scholar, Theoretical computer science
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Scientific maturity is among the key factors of prosperity in
today’s world, and therefore, the scientific and technological
strategies of the countries play an important role in their
economic well-being (Meyer, 2006;Almeida et al., 2008;
Carter, 2008;Caliari and Chiarini, 2016;Csom
os, 2018;Jack
et al.,2021;Macías Ruano et al., 2021). In that sense, an
overview of a country’s scientific productivity can help the
policymakers while designing scientific and technological
strategies and the regarding instruments (Crouch et al., 1986;
Hicks, 1987;Franklin and Johnston, 1988;Debackere and
Gl«anzel, 2004;Smith and Marinova, 2005;Ventura and
Mombru, 2006;Huanget al.,2014).
In this paper, we attempt to introduce a framework to
evaluate the scientific productivity of a country via analyzing
the quantity and quality of the scientific papers contributed by
that country. We categorize the published papers in selected
venues with at least one author affiliatedwith the target country
and count the number of such studies and the citations they
receive for the assessment of the international visibility and
national capabilityperformances.
Basically, in this paper, our definition of international
visibility is indicating a country’s scientific production rate
according to its share of gross domestic product (GDP)or its
population to the world.A higher rate means that country plays
a more prominent role in international comparison. Also,
national capability means how much of a scientific article is
made in that country only based on its capabilities without
dependence on any other countries.This determines the degree
of independence of that country in scientific production based
on published articles.
The number of papers and the citations to them have been
widely used as the main bibliometric indicators to evaluate
scientific production. (Daniel, 2005;Durieux and Gevenois,
2010;Michalska-Smith and Allesina, 2017;OST, 2019;
Cardoso et al.,2020;García-Villar and García-Santos, 2021).
The current issue and full text archiveof this journal is available on Emerald
Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/2398-6247.htm
Information Discovery and Delivery
52/1 (2024) 23–38
© Emerald Publishing Limited [ISSN 2398-6247]
[DOI 10.1108/IDD-08-2021-0082]
Received 15 October 2021
Revised 25 January 2022
2 May 2022
16 August 2022
4 November 2022
Accepted 15 February 2023
23
These quantities and quality measurements are analyzed with
respect to the population and the GDP of the country, as
developed countries are expected to producemore papers than
less developed ones, and population-wise highly populated
countries are expected to produce more than sparsely
populated countries (Csom
os, 2018). Particularly, in a
countrywide analysis, it is essential to perform a normalization
respecting these values (Chahrour etal., 2020), and there have
been many such examples (Falagas et al.,2006;Clarke et al.,
2007) of previous bibliometric studies. Following this
approach, the metrics we propose in this study are tuned
according to the GDPand population ratios as well.
There appear some challenges in achieving a countrywide
analysis thatare summarized below.
1.1 Classification of scientificfields
The overview of national scientific productivity should be
considered per scientificfield basis with the aim to observethe
strengths and weaknesses in terms of different branches of
science. That brings the necessity to follow or create a
classification among the subject areas of science (Gl«anzel and
Schubert, 2003;Zitt et al., 2019).To cope with the purpose of
the countrywide analysis, the classification scheme should not
be too detailed nor too general, which is akin to observing a
target area with a binocular. When there is too much or too
little zoom, it is not possible to identifywhat is happening in the
field. In case the used taxonomy is too detailed, then the
corresponding research communities and the regarding
publicationvenues will become too specific.
Akin to the “law of small numbers”risk (Tversky and
Kahneman, 1971), combining the statistics obtained in small
communities will be hard to describe the general picture. On
the other side, extremelygeneral schemes obscure the details to
describe the positivesand negatives accurately.
Yet another factor to have a correct zooming level is the
varying impacts of the scientificfields in terms of the average
citations and publication counts. For instance, when we
investigate the h5-index (Hirsch,2005) distributions of the top
20 venues in the “Engineeringand Computer Science”division
of the Google Scholar metrics, we observe a great difference
among the subject areas as representedin Figure 1(a).Someof
the areas in this classification may be thought of as branches of
computer science in general. However, there is even a
significant difference among these fields as well, which is
Figure 1 The five-number statistics (min, 1st quarter, median, 3rd quarter, max) of the h5–index of the top 20 venues according to Google Scholar
Metrics, where representsall 56 subcategories, and shows the selected fields among them that are related with computingscience and engineering
Country’s scientific productivity
Negar Hamed Golzar et al.
Information Discovery and Delivery
Volume 52 · Number 1 · 2024 · 23–38
24
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