On Bibliometric Analysis of Chinese Research on Cyclization, MALDI-TOF, and Antibiotics: Methodical Concerns
Abstrakt
In the January issue of J. Chem.
Inf. Model., Jiang Li and Peter Willett presented their bibliometric analysis of the Chinese footprint in three independent areas of chemical research and compared it with research conducted in three other countries.
Similarly to the other authors, they concluded that the output of Chinese research is improving in number, and to lesser extent in the quality. Besides that, the authors had shown dramatic improvement of research output in the other countries tested, the majority of which was supposed to have happened in 1991 and in 1973, despite the lack of substantial stimulus in terms of higher science funding or new policies.
The results confirmed that the reported trends may be largely explained by the nonrandom absence of abstracts and address fields in some references. Replacing the "topic" search with a "title" search resulted in complete elimination of the reported one-point increase in publication output in 1991 (Figure 1A).
The difference between topic and title searches emerged as early as in 1966, when abstracts started to be included to some of the WoK references.