Publication & citation patterns in the literature of a high metabolism area: The case of superconductivity in 1970

Abstract

From an analysis of bibliographic data on 255 randomly chosen documents on superconductivity (1969-1970) and the citations to them in the international literature over the twelve- year period 1970-1981, we have attempted to identify the geographical origin, language, and journal-wise distributions of the papers, the citedness of these papers and the distribution of citations as a time series for the more often cited papers. We have also verified some of our conclusions based on publication data alone by checking with an analysis of the 1479 supercon ductivity documents covered in Physics Abstracts 1981. English is the lingua franca of superconductivity research. Not only was more than 85% of the 251 non-patent publications in our 1970 sample in English, but even among the 10% in Russian most became available in English translation soon after their original publication. The United States of America, the Soviet Union and Japan led the field with at least 101, 32 and 20 publications respectively; however, not one of the papers from the USSR and Japan could win more than 24 citations in the 12-year period following its publication, whereas at least 22 US papers were cited 25 times or more. In all, the 251 non-patent papers received 2526 citations for an average of about 10 citations per paper. There were 63 papers which were not cited even once; at the other extreme, 3 papers were cited more than 100 times each and 20 papers received between 30 and 100 citations. The distribution of the citations to the 23 highly cited (at least 30 times in 12 years) papers as a time series shows a distinct pattern of an initial stage of rapid rise in citations per year followed by a plateau and a subsequent decline. With a larger sample, we believe that it should be possible to discern sciento metrically valuable patterns in the time series data on citation distributions. The limited data that we have corroborate the point made by Narin, Frame and Carpenter that Soviet papers published in Soviet journals are predominantly quoted in Soviet journals and papers written by Soviet authors, but published in non-Soviet journals, are quoted largely in non-Soviet journals.