Bibliometric Mapping of Scholar Publishing in Physics: Exploratory Study

Authors

Anna Novotna, Institute of Computer Science, Silesian University in OpavaFollow
Jan Novotny, Institute of Physics, Silesian University in OpavaFollow
Kamil Matula, Institute of Computer Science, Silesian University in OpavaFollow

Date of this Version

2020

Document Type

Article

Citation

NOVOTNA, Anna. Jan NOVOTNY and Kamil MATULA. Bibliometric Mapping of Scholar Publishing in Physics: Exploratory Study. 2020.

Abstract

The focus of this study is quite narrow, still we strove to keep our ways of exploring the data extensive to thoroughly examine them. We were not led by specific hypotheses but we tried to find dependencies and interesting points which could be examined further in bigger scope with more data.

We investigated preference of journals based on publications. We also explored publishing groups and their core journals. We also examined quantity of topics in which the scholars publish and their behavior in terms of their uploads of preprints to arXiv.org before the paper gets officially published.

There were some conclusion drawn from these explorations. Based on our data it seems that preference of the journal lies in the scope or preference of the group the author publishes with not in personal preference. Another question we addressed was concerned with how much are scholars involved in more than one topic. It seems that scholars in our dataset concern themselves with 2 to 4 sub-disciplines of physics or disciplines immediately connected to their scope. Out of our next investigation we conclude that physicists are very motivated to keep their record in database arXiv.org up to date. We can assume it is to link their published articles with preprints to acquire more citations. We also tried to estimate the length of publication process in journals in our dataset. We estimate that in our journals (with one exception) the publication time from acquiring review till final publication takes less than 200 days.

Creation of this paper was supported by the Institute of Physics and Research Centre of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics, at the Silesian University in Opava as well as Development project ``Support of International Mobility of Academic Staff and Strengthening of International Ties of FPF 2019''.