Report
An Analytical Look at Chemical Publications E. Bujdoso
W.
Institute of Inorganic and Analytical Chemistry L. EOtvos University 1443 Budapest. P.O Bo* 123
Dept, of Informatics and Science Analysis. Library Hungarian Academy ol Sciences Budapest. Hungary
Oak Ridge National Laboratory P.O. Box X Oak Ridge. Term 37830
We analytical chemists needn’t always analyze samples: Sometimes it is enlightening to analyze ourselves and our scientific output. Workers in other disciplines have been increasingly in-
six countries showed conclusively that the U.S. occupies first place in overall scientific publication; the distant runner-up is the U.S.S.R. In the field of chemistry, however, the Soviet Union in 1972 (the last year of the count) led the U.S. in publications by a considerable margin as shown in Table I. Narin and Carpenter also make a significant observation concerning science literature in general, i.e., “The most dramatic change, from the viewpoint of the entire 20th century, has been the striking decrease in the relative importance of German science. There has also been a major, longterm, downward trend in the relative importance of French science. Almost all of the relative decline in French and German science has been balanced by the rise in the positions of U.S. and Soviet science." They go on to explain, however, that the interpretations made are comparative rather than absolute... ."Thus a decline in German chemistry means a decline in the fraction of the world's chemical literature that is German, and not an absolute decline in the amount of German chemical research
terested in scientometric studies of their activities. Some few papers have appeared from within the ranks of analytical chemistry, notably those of Brooks and Smythe (/1, Boig and Howerton (2), Fischer et al. ( ?). Orient (4), and Braun (.5). The subfield of nuclear analytical chemistry has been examined by Lyon (6), Braun, Lyon and Bujdoso (7), and again by Lyon (8). But no clear overall picture of the publication activity of analytical chemistry by country has appeared- Neither has a comparison been made between publication activity in analytical chemistry and the field of which it is a subset, chemistry. In this REPORT we describe some of these results concerning distribution of papers by country, national growth rates, distribution of papers among various journals, and publication times in several analytical journals.
National Trends in Analytical Productivity Narin and Carpenter (9) in a large study that involved counts of 500,000 publications and millions of citations in 492 large, heavily cited scientific journals in seven major disciplines and
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publication.”
Brooks and Smythe ( /) reviewed the progress of analytical chemistry in the period 1910-70. Building upon previous counts by Fischer et al. (3), these authors compared entries in An-
S.Lyon
atytical Abstracts and Chemical Abstracts. They were able to derive a factor to convert from total entries in
the “Analytical Chemistry” section of Chemical Abstracts to an estimate of total analytical papers. The entire chemical literature was obtained from a total count of Chemical Abstracts. In addition they sampled Chemical Abstracts to determine countries in which analytical work was performed. Their data for 196-5 and 1970 are shown in Table II. We have used the data of Brooks and Smythe to compute the dynamic growth rates of analytical output of various countries. We feel that dynamic growth rate (or doubling time) better characterizes national trends than percentages. The procedure used was to multiply the yearly number of analytical papers in Chemical Abstracts by the interpolated share values of the countries given in Table II. The logarithms of the cumulated number of papers were then plotted
Table I. Chemistry and Metallurgy: Percentages of Articles, Letters, and Notes Counted* USSR. 1965 1969
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US.
Germany
U.K.
France
Other
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0003-2700/60/03$ 1-617 AS01 00/0
