World Library and Information Congress, Milan, 2009 - IFLA

350
Bhaskar Mukherjee
by US authors in collaboration with authors
from other countries. Whereas for countries like
the United Kingdom, Canada and China the
percentage of international collaboration is
31.63 percent, 34.43 percent and 41.18 percent
respectively. The result agrees with the fi ndings
of Frame and Carpenter (1979), where they concluded
that the larger a country’s research effort
(the greater the number of its publications) the
smaller is the proportion of international coauthorship
associated with the country.
Further analysis of the authorship pattern by
country indicated that there are 8 countries from
which authors contribute articles only under solo
authorship and 10 countries from which authors
contribute articles only under joint authorship.
Authors from these 10 countries are the co-authors
of the remaining 37 countries. On the other hand,
there are 3 countries from which authors contribute
articles only with authors from other countries
and 16 countries from which authors do not collaborate
with any other country. Sin (2006) pointed
out that researchers could be infl uenced by factors
other than the substantive content of the work
itself. Authors working in reputed organizations
were more likely to be perceived favorably. It may
be that authors in low-income countries might
be placed in a less advantageous position. Nevertheless,
it was gratifying to see publication from
most parts of the globe. Kofi Annan called on the
world’s scientists to close the research and development
gap between developed and developing
countries (Annan 2003).
Prolifi c Authors and their Productivity
Authors’ productivity is defi ned as the number
of papers an author has published within a given
duration. In fact, assessing the importance of
multiple authorship is problematic. Giving every
author of a paper one credit in measuring author
productivity, a total of 2153 authors, including
fi rst author and coauthors, were identifi ed from
the articles in JASIST. Table 6 lists 19 prolifi c authors
and the number of articles they published
in JASIST during 2000–2007. Each name appears
on 5 or more articles (irrespective of whether
the author is the fi rst named or not). This table
also indicates the number of articles they have
published under single and joint authorships.
It is clear from the table that most of the prolifi c
authors contributed their articles in joint authorship.
Among the fi rst 10 prolifi c authors, out
of their 185 publications, 151 articles appeared
in joint authorship and 32 articles in single
authorship. Mike Thelwall occupies the first
position with a contribution of 17 articles; 13 of
these appeared under joint authorship. He is
followed by L. Egghe (16 articles), Amanda Spink
and Ronald Rousseau (both published 14 articles).
Each article of JASIST prints the dates of
submission, fi nal acceptance and date of electronic
publication. In most of the cases, the lapse
of time between submission or acceptance and
publication varies between 8–12 months. So contributions
of more than one article per year in this
8-year period signify that some authors in LIS
have been producing their research papers at a fast
rate. It may also indicate that some authors are
more likely than the others to have their papers
accepted by this journal.
Citations Given versus Citations Received
As indicated in Table 7A, the 975 articles published
in JASIST contained 35,045 references
and received 9379 citations up to August 2009.
The number of references per articles has increased
from 33.43 in 2000 to 41.26 in 2007.
The maximum average number of references per
article was noted in 2007 (about 42 references
per article), and the minimum in 2001 (about 31
references per article).
On the other hand, articles published in 2000
received the highest number of citations (1762
citations) whereas the lowest was recorded in
respect of articles published in 2007 (525 citations),
followed by articles published in 2005
(792 citations). Overall, the average number of
citations per article is 10.59. There are 103 articles
(10.56 percent) that have not received any citations
up to August 2009. These articles were
mostly published in 2007 (47 articles) followed
by 2006 (22 articles) and 2005 (12 articles). The
average number of references per article increased
by 7.83 from 2000 to 2007 whereas the average
number of citations per article decreased by 13.85
during same period. This implies that the number
of references does not infl uence whether or not
an article attracts citations.
Although the vast changes in publication technology
and electronic mail now make it possible to
access articles immediately after publication,
these did not result yet in getting citations faster.
The low number of citations for 2007 may thus
be ignored at this stage, however the numbers