Validation of Bibliometric Indicators in the Field of Microbiology: A Norwegian Case Study.

Autor/inn/en	Aksnes, Dag W.; Olsen, Terje Bruen; Seglen, Per O.
Titel	Validation of Bibliometric Indicators in the Field of Microbiology: A Norwegian Case Study.
Quelle	In: Scientometrics, (2000) 1, S.7-22 PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0138-9130
DOI	10.1023/A:1005653006993
Schlagwörter	Subject Classification; Related Issue; Scientific Field; Methodological Problem; Scientific Production
Abstract	Abstract This paper addresses two related issues regarding the validity of bibliometric indicators for the assessment of national performance within a particular scientific field. Firstly, the representativeness of a journal-based subject classification; and secondly, the completeness of the database coverage. Norwegian publishing in microbiology was chosen as a case, using the standard ISI-product National Science Indicators on Diskette (NSIOD) as a source database. By applying an "author-gated" retrieval procedure, we found that only 41 percent of all publications in NSIOD-indexed journals, expert-classified as microbiology, were included under the NSIOD-category Microbiology. Thus, the set of defining core journals only is clearly not sufficient to delineate this complex biomedical field. Furthermore, a subclassification of the articles into different subdisciplines of microbiology revealed systematic differences with respect to representation in NSIOD's Microbiology field; fish microbiology and medical microbiology are particularly underrepresented. In a second step, the individual publication lists from a sample of Norwegian microbiologists were collected and compared with the publications by the same authors, retrieved bibliometrically. The results showed that a large majority (94%) of the international scientific production in Norwegian microbiology was covered by the database NSIOD. Thus, insufficient subfield delineation, and not lack of coverage, appeared to be the main methodological problem in the bibliometric analysis of microbiology.
Erfasst von	OLC
Update	2023/2/05