Bibliometric Analysis Asia-Pacific Research Area ... - JuSER

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3.3 Publication Output and Perception of Countries Compared to Germany
In order to compare the perception generated by a country with its publication performance, this
section will take Germany as a benchmark and conduct a comparative study of each country
and Germany (for the entire period under review 1998 to 2007).
Figures 90(a) to 101(a) compare the number of publications by a country in each discipline with
the benchmark using the following formula. This gives us the percentage of publications that a
country produces in comparison to Germany. A negative value indicates in percent how far
below the benchmark a particular country is, while a positive value indicates how many more
publications the corresponding country has produced compared to Germany in that particular
subject.
PC
− P
PG
G
⋅100%
where
P C = number of publications by country C
P G = number of publications by Germany
Thanks to the analyses in the previous chapters, we know that most of the countries boast a
rather small publication output. The way we illustrate our results here allows us to compare the
countries in a discipline and determine those countries that publish either more or less than
Germany, the disciplines in which they do so, and the degree to which they do so. Taken as a
whole, we found only two countries that produce more scientific articles in individual disciplines
than Germany: Japan (in 8 disciplines) and China (in 6 disciplines). In the case of all of the other
countries, we can see the degree to which each country lies below the comparative value for
Germany.
The perception of the countries is measured against the scientific perception of Germany in
Figures 90(b) to 101(b). In order to measure the perception, we determine what percentage of
Germany’s citation rate a country achieves in a particular discipline. As was the case in the
previous analysis, a negative value indicates how far below the benchmark a country lies, while
a positive value correspondingly indicates how much higher (in percent) the citation rate of the
respective country is in relation to that of Germany in that particular subject. The calculations
are based on the following formula, which is equivalent to the previous comparison of the
number of publications:
CPPc − CPPG
⋅100%
CPPG
where
CPP C = citation rate of country C
CPP G = citation rate of Germany
It can be seen that China lies well below expectations in all of the disciplines analysed despite
its high publication output. China lies below the citation level of Germany in all of the disciplines
investigated. This is not the case for some of the other countries studied: in 4 of the 13
disciplines analysed, Australia generated a higher or at least the same perception as Germany,
despite the fact that Australia’s publication output is well below the level of China or Germany.
From this, we can conclude that a high number of publications alone is not a guarantee for a
high perception. The inverse holds for a comparably low publication output in that this does not
automatically mean that a country has no chance of a relatively high international visibility.
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