Do New SCI Journals Have a Different National Bias? R. D. Shelton, Patricia Foland, and Roman Gorelskyy Sponsored by a sabbatical from Loyola and NSF Grant ENG

Outline  What is the problem?  Hypothesis  Methodology  Preliminary results  Conclusions from preliminary data  A way to refine data  Final conclusions

What is the Problem? Are new journals more favorable to Asian Tigers than EU and US? It is a SCI a rubber ruler in measuring National Publications? Asian Tigers = China, Taiwan, Singapore, and S. Korea.

Publication Shares Cause of US declining available at to appear in Scientometrics.

Hypothesis  In response to criticism that it is biased toward English language and the U.S., the Science Citation Index may have changed to be less favorable to the U.S. This could account for some of the rapid decline in U.S. publication since 1995.

Methodology For a sample of eight fields, partition their journals into two sets: new journals added to the SCI after 1994, and old added before. Then measure U.S. share of each journal to see if the difference between old and new is significant.

Example Analysis of U.S. Share in SCI

Sample of Eight Fields of Science

Conclusions from Bias Study In some fields (space science, math, and microbiology) new journals were much less favorable to the U.S. But, in some fields the opposite was true. In aggregate over 8 fields the change in bias was too small to account for the sharp changes in national shares. Most share differences between old and new journals are not statistically significant. Therefore, hypothesis is not proven, and is unlikely to be proven in the 24 fields of the National Science Indicator CD. Thus, the shifts in national shares are real and are probably not an artifact of the SCI database.

A Way to Refine Data Take the “new journals” and verify one by one if they are “truly new” by confirming the first publication date in other sources such as Google, Journalseek, Elsevier. Come back to SCI database and check if was added under a different name. Then compare with the original data.

Results from Refinement Process

Results from Refinement Process (continued)

Conclusions from refined data Even though there were many journals that were not “truly new” (because they had changed their names), it doesn’t affect the final results. New journals are not significantly more favorable to AT. This study confirms that SCI is an accurate method in measuring National Publications.

References Also see review draft of text paper for complete list of citations at: