Authorship Trends and Collaboration Pattern in the

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Collaboration Measures, Dominance Factor, Lotka's Law. ABSTRACT ... collaboration pattern, applicability of Lotka's law, authors' dominance .... Arshad, Mohd Rizal. Chakraborty .... http://unllib.unl.edu/LPP/thanuskodi-bibmet.pdf. Willett, P.
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Authorship Trends and Collaboration Pattern in the Marine Sciences Literature : A Scientometric Study B. Elango* and P. Rajendran** CITATION: Elango, B. & Rajendran, P. (2012). Authorship trends and collaboration pattern in the marine sciences literature : a scientometric study. International Journal of Information Dissemination and Technology, 2(3), 166-169. *Librarian, IFET College of Engineering, Villupuram **University Librarian, SRM University, Kattangulathur Tamil Nadu

Corresponding Author B. ELANGO [email protected]

ABSTRACT In this study, we examine the authorship trend and collaboration pattern in Marine Sciences literature. For this purpose, the required data has been collected from the Indian Journal of Marine Sciences published from 2001 to 2010. Scientometric tools such as, collaboration index, collaboration co-efficient and dominance factor have been used. Applicability of Lotka's law has been tested. Further, level of collaboration has been observed among the authors. The study reveals that the coauthored papers are dominated and the author productivity follows the Lotka's law. Average collaboration rate (0.57) is better collaboration and mean number of authors per joint authored paper is 3.4. Keyterms: Bibliometrics, Scientometrics, Indian Journal of Marine Sciences, Collaboration Measures, Dominance Factor, Lotka's Law

Received On: 31.05.2012; Revised On: 24.08.2012; Accepted On: 02.09.2012

INTRODUCTION

are reviewed and presented below:

Co-authorship varies from one subject field to another. Authorship studies provide valuable information concerning characteristics of authors, their collaboration, assessing and monitoring research activities among others. Some specific areas in studying authorship are discovering changing patterns in the area of authorship, frequency, institution affiliation, etc. Kwadzo G and Grace A (2008). Collaboration among scientists implies that they are working together and pursuing a common scientific goal, Kundra (1996).

Afshar M, et al (2011) analyzed 615 articles published in the journal Scientometrics during 2004-2008 and found that mean number of authors in each article was 2.33.

Indian Journal of Marine Sciences is published by National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources, New Delhi (India) since 1972 as a quarterly publication. It publishes full length papers and short communications in the field of marine biology, marine chemistry, marine geology, physical oceanography, ocean engineering, marine instrumentation, marine corrosion and material science, satellite oceanography and modeling, marine engineering, marine pollution, marine archaeology and coastal zone management. The aim of the present study is to analyze the authorship trend and collaboration pattern, applicability of Lotka's law, authors' dominance and level of collaboration in the marine sciences literature.

PREVIOUS STUDIES A good number of studies have been carried out to explore the authorship trends and collaboration pattern. Few of the studies 166

Sevukan R and Sharma J (2008) studied the research output of biotechnology faculties in Indian central universities during 1997-2006 and reported that collaboration co-efficient was 0.65. A bibliometric analysis was conducted by Thanuskodi S (2011) on Indian Journal of Chemistry published during 2005-2009 and found that majority of the contributions (90%) were made by multiple authors. Ardanuy (2011) studied the level of co-authorship of Spanish research in Library and Information Science until 2009 and found that 46% of papers were published in collaboration within the same institution. Willet (2007) examined the authorship pattern of the articles contributed in the Journal of Molecular Graphics and Modeling published in the volumes 2-24 and found that the author productivity was followed the Lotka's original distribution. Keerti Bala Jain and Kumar S (2011) studied the research productivity of Indian Scientists contributing to world soybean research for the period 1989-2008 and found that most of the authors attained the low dominance factor value.

OBJECTIVES The purpose of the present study is to examine the authorship pattern, authors' collaboration, applicability of Lotka's law,

International Journal of Information Dissemination and Technology | July-September 2012 | Vol. 2 | Issue 3

authors' dominance and level of collaboration in the Marine Sciences literature.

METHODOLOGY The required data for the present study has been collected from the Indian Journal of Marine Sciences. Forty issues of ten volumes from 2001-2010 have been taken into consideration for the present study and information about author and collaboration for each paper have been collected and entered into a spreadsheet. The collected data has been analyzed with the IBM SPSS Statistics 19 and presented in the form of tables. Further, the following scientometric tools have been employed to analyze the data.

o Collaboration Index (CI) It is a mean number of authors per joint paper. For this analysis, we have omitted the single authored papers which is equal to 1 always. To determine the mean number of authors per joint authored paper, the following formula has been used. CI =

Total Authors Total Joint Papers

o Collaboration Co-Efficient (CC) To measure the strength of collaboration among the authors who contributed to the marine sciences literature, the following formula suggested by Ajiferuke (1988) has been used. j=k

1 j

CC = 1 – j=1

Fj/N

o Dominance Factor (DF) Dominance Factor is the proportion of number of multi authored publications of an author as first author (Nmf) to total number of multi authored publications of author (Nmt). It is calculated with following formula used by Sudhir Kumar & Surendra Kumar (2008). DF =

Nmf Nmt

SCOPE & LIMITATIONS Being the source journal (Indian Journal of Marine Sciences) publishes various kinds of literature, the present study is confined to research papers, reviews and short communications published during 2001-2010. The study is based on the sample of 506 papers.

ANALYSIS & DISCUSSION o Authorship Pattern The pattern of authorship has been presented in the table 1. It is observed from table 1 that most of the papers (88.5%) are contributed by multi authored. Only 11.5% of the papers are contributed by single author. Highest number of papers (31%) is contributed by two authors followed by three authors with 24.7%, four authors with 14.4%. Remaining 18.4% of the papers are contributed with five or more authors. Only one paper has been contributed with the highest number of authors (16). It seems that team research dominated the solo research in the field of marine sciences. Table 1: Authorship Pattern

Where

Fj = the number of j authored research papers

Article Frequency

%age

1

58

11.5

11.5

2

157

31.0

42.5

3

125

24.7

67.2

4

73

14.4

81.6

5

49

9.7

91.3

6

25

4.9

96.2

7

13

2.6

98.8

8

3

0.6

99.4

9

2

0.4

99.8

16

1

0.2

100

506

100

100

#Authors

N = total number of research papers published and k = the greatest number of authors per paper. Collaboration Coefficient is a number between 0 and 1. The more it is bigger than 0.5 the better is the collaboration rate among the authors. When it is near 0, it means that authors have a weak collaboration.

o Lotka's Law Lotka's Law (1926) described the frequency of publication by authors in any given field. It states that the number of authors making n contributions is about 1 / n2 of those making one and the proportion of all contributors that make a single contribution is about 60%. This means that out of all the authors in a given subject about 60% publish only one article, 15% publish two articles, 7% publish three articles and so on. According to Lotka's Law of scientific productivity, only 6% of authors in a subject field will produce more than ten articles.

Total

Cumulative %age

The general formula of Lotka's Law is Y=

C Xn

Where, X is the number of publications, Y the relative frequency of authors with X publications, and n and C are constants depending on the specific field .

o

Collaboration Index

Table 2 provides the year wise mean number of authors per joint authored paper. CI ranges from 2.85 (2002) to 3.91 (2005) with an average of 3.4 per joint authored paper which implies the research team falls between 3 and 4 in the field of marine sciences.

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o Author Productivity

Table 2: Collaboration Index

Table 4 depicts the author productivity based on the Lotka's Law.

Year

Multi Authored Papers

Total Authors of Multi Authored Papers

CI

2001

40

129

3.23

2002

48

137

2.85

2003

46

172

3.74

2004

44

144

3.27

2005

35

137

3.91

2006

36

119

3.31

2007

34

105

3.0 9

2008

49

176

3.59

To test the applicability of Lotka's Law to the marine sciences Literature, a software program called Lotka (available at http://www.cindoc.csic.es/cybermetrics/articles/v4i1p4.html) developed by Rousseau & Rousseau (2000) has been used. Using the values of table 4 (Papers row as Production and Authors row as Sources) to the above said software, it produced the values for C and n of 0.83 and 2.99 respectively. The value of n (2.99) is well fitted within the range of values observed by Pao (1986) i.e. 1.78 to 3.78 and therefore author productivity of the marine sciences literature follows the Lotka's original distribution.

2009

55

189

3.44

o Ranking of Authors

2010

61

217

3.56

Total

448

1525

3.40

Table 5 shows the ranking of authors. For this analysis, we have taken the authors having 5 or more papers to their credit during the study period and a total of 23 authors having 5+ publications. The author Srinivas, K topped the rank with 0.88 dominance factor. Out of 23 authors, 7 authors attained the 0 dominance factor and only 5 authors attained the dominance factor value with above 0.50. Shilesh Nayak is top author with 10 papers but attained the eighth rank with 0.22 dominance factor.

# Papers

o Collaboration Rate The distribution of year wise collaboration rate has been presented in the table 3. It is seen from table 3 that the value for collaboration rate has been calculated with minimum to 0.50 in 2007 and maximum to 0.67 in 2009 with an average of 0.57 which is higher than the journal Scientometrics where it was 0.27 for all the countries publishing papers and JRMS articles where it was 0.55. According to Ajiferuke, the range of collaboration rate (0.50 - 0.67) is better collaboration among the authors. The relatively equal to the average collaboration rate has been observed in the year 2006 and the years 2001, 2003, 2004, 2008 & 2009 have been claimed the higher than the average collaboration rate while the year 2002, 2005, 2007 & 2010 have been claimed the lower than the average collaboration rate. Table 3: Collaboration Rate Author Year

1

2001

2

Table 4: Author Productivity

2

3

12

18

4 2

5+ 8

Total Articles

CC

42

0.62

# Authors

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9 10

992 137 36

19

15

4

1

1

1

1

Table 5: Ranking of Authors Author

# First Single Papers Authored Authored

DF

Rank

Srinivas, K

9

1

7

0.88

1

Neelamani, S

5

1

3

0.75

2

0.75

2

Neethiselvan, N

5

1

3

Chauhan, Prakash

5

-

3

0.60

3

Ganesan, M

5

-

3

0.60

3

Ingole, B

6

1

2

0.40

4

Pandey, A C

5

-

2

0.40

4

Rai, Shailendra

5

-

2

0.40

4

Khare, N

8

-

3

0.38

5

Ramanathan, AL

7

-

2

0.29

6

Budiyono, Agus

5

1

1

0.25

7

Ramaiah, N

5

1

1

0.25

7

2002

6

25

11

7

5

54

0.54

2003

6

12

11

7

16

52

0.60

Nayak, Shailesh

10

1

2

0.22

8

2004

3

16

12

9

7

47

0.60

Dwivedi, R M

5

-

1

0.20

9

2005

9

11

8

5

11

44

0.53

Dimri, V P

6

-

1

0.17

10

Rao, P V Subba

6

-

1

0.17

10

Ramavat, B K

6

-

-

-

Arshad, Mohd Rizal

5

1

-

-

Chakraborty, S K

5

-

-

-

Edward, J K Patterson

5

-

-

-

2006

5

12

10

8

6

41

0.57

2007

8

18

6

4

6

42

0.50

2008

7

14

17

7

11

56

0.58

2009

2

13

19

14

9

57

0.65

2010 Total

168

10 58

24 157

13 125

10 73

14 93

71 506

0.55

Mairh, O P

5

-

-

0.57

Mody, K H

5

-

-

-

Revichandran, C

5

-

0

-

International Journal of Information Dissemination and Technology | July-September 2012 | Vol. 2 | Issue 3

o Level of Collaboration Table 6: %age Distribution of Level of Collaboration Level

Afshar, M., Abdulmajid, A.H. & Danesh, F. (2008). Survey on Authors Collaboration Rate and Citation Behaviors in JRMS articles curing 2004 – 2006. Paper presented at the Fourth International Conference on Webometrics, Informetrics and Scientometrics & Nineth COLLNET Meeting, Berlin.

#Papers

%age

Cumulative %age

Without Collaboration (Single authored)

58

11.47

11.47

Collaboration with International Institutions

37

7.31

18.78

Ardanuy, J. (2011). Scientific Collaboration in Library and Information Science viewed through the Web of Knowledge: the Spanish Case. Scientometrics, DOI 10.1007/s11192-011-0552-1.

Collaboration with another Institution (same country)

117

23.12

41.90

Dutt, B., Carg, K.C. & Bali, A. (2003). Scientometrics of the international journal Scientometrics. Scientometrics, 56(1), 81-93.

Collaboration within the same institutions

294

58.10

100

Total

506

100

100

Table 6 gives the distribution of different levels of collaboration among the authors of the papers. 58.10% of the papers are collaborated within the same institution followed by multi institute (within country) collaborated papers (23.12%). Only 7.31% of the papers are collaborated with the international level institutions.

CONCLUSION The study of authorship trends and collaboration pattern has been carried out in the marine sciences literature and the following conclusions are made from the above analysis and discussions.

o Multi authored contributions are dominated in the field of marine sciences.

Ajiferuke, I. (1988). Collaborative Co-efficient : A single measure of the degree of collaboration in research, Scientometrics, 14(5-6), 421433.

Jain, K.B. & Kumar, S. (2011). Indian Contributions to World Soybean Research : Measurement of Research Productivity of Soybean Scientists. CALIBER. Kwadzo, G. & Grace, A. (2008). Authorship Trends in Ghana Journal of Agricultural Sciences: A Bibliometric Study. Ghana Library Journal, 41-64. Kumar, S. & Surendra, K. (2008). Collaboration in Research Productivity in Oil Seeds Research Institutes in India. Paper presented at the Fourth International Conference on Webometrics, Informetrics and Scientometrics & Ninth COLLNET Meeting, Berlin. Kundra, R. (1996). Investigation of collaborative research trends in Indian Medical Sciences : 1900–1945. Scientometrics, 36(1), 69-80. Lawani, S.M. (1980). Quality Collaboration and citations in cancer research : A bibliometric study. Ph.D Dissertation, Florida State University, 395p. Lotka, A.J. (1926). The frequency distribution of scientific productivity. Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, 16(2), 317-323.

o Average number of authors per joint authored paper is 3.4.

Pao, M.L. (1986). An empirical examination of Lotka's Law. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 37(1), 26-33.

o Average Collaboration rate (0.57) shows the better

Rousseau, B. & Rousseau, R. (2000). Lotka: A Program to fit a power law distribution to observed frequency data. Cybermetrics, 4(1), 4p.

collaboration among the authors.

o Author productivity follows the Lotka's original distribution o 58% of the papers are collaborated within the same institution.

o Author Srinivas, K attained the higher value of dominance factor (0.88)

REFERENCES Afshar, M. (2011). Survey of Authors' Collaboration Rate in Scientometrics Journal Articles during 2004 – 2008. International Journal of Information Science and Management, 9 (1), 47–56.

Sevukan, R. & Sharma, J. (2008). Bibliomtric Analysis of Research Output of Biotechnology Faculties in some Central Universities. DESIDOC Journal of Library and Technology, 28(6), 11-20. Thanuskodi, S. (2011). Bibliometric Analysis of the Indian Journal of Chemistry. Library Philosphy and Practice,Available at: http://unllib.unl.edu/LPP/thanuskodi-bibmet.pdf. Willett, P. (2007). A bibliomtric analysis of the Journal of Molecular Graphics and Modelling. Journal of Molecular Graphics and Modelling, 26(3), 602-606.

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