Towards new challenges

Our journal Acque Sotterranee-Italian Journal of Groundwater is now indexed in the Scopus database. Scopus (www.scopus.com) is one of the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature: scientific journals, books and conference proceedings. Delivering a comprehensive overview of the world’s research output in the fields of science and technology, Scopus features smart tools to track, analyze and visualize results and trends from the research world.

Периодичность издания и число статей в научных журналах в 2018-2019 гг.: исследование журналов в SCI, SSCI, CSCD и CSSCI

В этом исследовании использовались все журнальные данные и их систематический случайный отбор, чтобы в первую очередь определиться со средним числом выпусков в год и средним числом статей в выпуске у журналов в Указателе библиографических ссылок в научной литературе (the Science Citation Index SCI), Указателе библиографических ссылок в научной литературе по общественным наукам (the Social Sciences Citation Index SSCI), Китайской базе данных научного цитирования (Chinese Science Citation Database - CSCD, Китай) и Китайском указателе библиографических ссылок в научной литературе по общественным наукам (the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index - CSSCI, Китай). Данные случайного отбора основывались на 5 % выборок SCI и SSCI и 10 % выборок CSCD и CSSCI. Цели исследования состояли в получении данных за 2018-2019 гг. о периодичности издания журналов, подробно описывающих число статей в выпуске и число выпусков в год относительно журналов в этих списках, а также в сравнении данных китайских журналов с международными журналами в аспекте трансформаций научного издания в мире и в Китае за последние два десятилетия. В ходе исследования было установлено, что среднее число выпусков в год в указателях SCI, SSCI, CSCD и CSSCI составило 10,95, 5,18, 9,17 и 7,87, соответственно, но CSCD/CSSCI публикуют больше статей, чем SCI/SSCI, причем издательство указателей CSSCI происходит с существенно большим числом статей в год, чем издание SSCI. Авторские сборы в Китае для журналов не относящихся к открытому доступу могли давать преимущество в большем числе статей. Феномен «мегажурналов» не кажется признанной практикой у всех проанализированных списков журналов.

Trends in scientific research on precision farming in agriculture using science mapping method

The article highlights the worldwide dissemination of precision agriculture scientific researches published from the period of 1996–2018, data gathered in the Scopus citation database, using the science mapping method. The findings show that there is a constant rise in the number of publications in precision agriculture. The USA is not only leading in the adoption of precision agriculture technologies but also in the publication of papers, accompanied by China placed in second place. The most frequent keywords highlighted the main topics authors concentrated on more, and the national affiliation of most cited papers was the USA. The main prominence and contributions of the results present scientific research trends in precision agriculture in the last two decades, and demonstrate the main countries, authors and organizations who have contributed, and were more productive in this area.

Subject indexing in humanities: a comparison between a local university repository and an international bibliographic service

PurposeAs the humanities develop in the realm of increasingly more pronounced digital scholarship, it is important to provide quality subject access to a vast range of heterogeneous information objects in digital services. The study aims to paint a representative picture of the current state of affairs of the use of subject index terms in humanities journal articles with particular reference to the well-established subject access needs of humanities researchers, with the purpose of identifying which improvements are needed in this context.Design/methodology/approachThe comparison of subject metadata on a sample of 649 peer-reviewed journal articles from across the humanities is conducted in a university repository, against Scopus, the former reflecting local and national policies and the latter being the most comprehensive international abstract and citation database of research output.FindingsThe study shows that established bibliographic objectives to ensure subject access for humanities journal articles are not supported in either the world's largest commercial abstract and citation database Scopus or the local repository of a public university in Sweden. The indexing policies in the two services do not seem to address the needs of humanities scholars for highly granular subject index terms with appropriate facets; no controlled vocabularies for any humanities discipline are used whatsoever.Originality/valueIn all, not much has changed since 1990s when indexing for the humanities was shown to lag behind the sciences. The community of researchers and information professionals, today working together on digital humanities projects, as well as interdisciplinary research teams, should demand that their subject access needs be fulfilled, especially in commercial services like Scopus and discovery services.

Modeling the structure of recent philosophy

This paper presents an approach of unsupervised learning of clusters from a citation database, and applies it to a large corpus of articles in philosophy to give an account of the structure of the discipline. Following a list of journals from the PhilPapers-archive, 68,152 records were downloaded from the Reuters Web of Science-Database. Their citation data was processed using dimensionality reduction and clustering. The resulting clusters were identified, and the results are graphically represented. They suggest that the division of analytic and Continental philosophy in the considered timespan is overstated; that analytical, in contrast to Continental philosophy does not form a coherent group in recent philosophy; and that metaphors about the disciplinary structure should focus on the coherence and interconnectedness of a multitude of smaller and larger subfields.

Bibliometric outlook of the most cited documents in business, management and accounting in Ibero-America

Research on business, management and accounting (BMA) in the past century has been overwhelming. Regardless of its significance, regions such as Ibero-America have been overlooked from exhaustive studies on bibliometrics in the subject of BMA. Here, a bibliometric outlook of the subject of BMA in Ibero-America was conducted by analyzing the ten most cited documents in BMA in each country from 1996 to 2017 using the citation database Scopus. The main findings showed: a rapid increase in documents’ production; both Spain and Portugal domain the overall documents’ production and citations; most of the documents are pay-walled; the most-desired journal in the region is also the most- suspicious; a Pareto distribution in both citations by documents and authors by documents; and institutional status has a significant effect on AACSB accreditation.