IN CANADA, 2012 Appendices - Council of Canadian Academies

4 The State of Science and Technology in Canada, 2012
Appendix 1 Description of Bibliometric Data
and Indicators
This appendix provides additional details on the bibliometric data and indicators
used in this assessment. The indicators were produced for Canada, its provinces,
and leading countries by field, sub-field and over time (1999–2004 and 2005–2010
aggregated; and 1997–2010 by year) unless otherwise indicated. Data for all
indicators were only produced where appropriate considering the lower thresholds
at which data would become unreliable or uninformative; generally, no statistics
were computed for bodies of research with a sample size of less than 30 papers.
Data Source
The Scopus database from Elsevier was selected to generate the bibliometric data
used for this assessment. Scopus was selected instead of Thomson Reuters’ Web
of Science (WoS) primarily due to its broader coverage of the scientific literature
in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. Scholars in these fields publish more in
their own languages and in journals with national distribution than do researchers
in the natural sciences. Because the linguistic bias of Scopus towards scientific
literature authored in English is less pronounced than it is in the WoS, it is more
suited to the assessment of the work in the social sciences, humanities, and arts.
In addition, Scopus links the authors of papers to their institutional addresses,
which significantly reduces the time required to build researchers’ publication
portfolios as well as the risk of falsely assigning a paper to a researcher. As such,
the investigation of researchers’ migration patterns is easier and more reliable
with Scopus. Finally, conference proceedings are broadly covered in Scopus,
whereas in the WoS they are not covered extensively.
Only documents that were peer-reviewed prior to being accepted for publication
were retained in computing the bibliometric indicators used in this report. The
peer-review process ensures that the research is of good quality and constitutes
an original contribution to scientific knowledge. These documents are mainly
articles, conference papers, and reviews collectively referred to in this appendix
as “papers.”
Number of Publications
This is a count of the number of scientific publications (journal articles) based
on full counting of papers. In the full counting method, each paper is counted
once for each entity listed in the address field. For example, if a paper is authored
by two researchers from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, one from
University College London, and one from the University of Liverpool, the paper
will be counted once for the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, once for the