Tribology research output in BRIC countries: a scientometric dimension.

B. Elango ; P. Rajendran ; J. Manickraj 等

INTRODUCTION

Tribology is multidisciplinary in nature and includes mechanical engineering, materials science, surface technology and the chemistry of lubricants and additives (1). British Lubrication Engineering Working Group (1966) defined tribology as the science and technology of interacting surfaces in relative motion and the practices related thereto. The word Tribology was first coined by Jost (1966) in a report and it was derived from the Greek word tribos (2).

Over the years, the subject of Tribology came to be recognized as a very important aspect in all industrial operations. The application of correct tribological practices protect and enhance the life of plants and machinery, improves efficiency of operations, reduce energy consumption and prevent expensive breakdowns (3). Tribology is receiving increasing attention, as it has become evident that the waste of resources resulting from high friction and wear is very great. Correspondingly, the potential savings offered by improved tribological knowledge are also great (4).

An acronym, BRIC (refers to Brazil, Russia, India and China) was coined by Jim O'Neil in a paper entitled "Building Better Global Economies BRICs" and it is estimated that BRIC economies will overtake G7 economies by 2027. As early as 2003, Goldman Sachs forecasted that china and India would become the first and third largest economies by 2050 with Brazil and Russia capturing the fifth and sixth spots. BRIC nations account for much of the increase in science research investments and scientific publications. From 2002 to 2007, the current spending on science research will be doubled by China, India and Brazil. By 2020, China plans to invest 2.5% of GDP in science research (5).

A very few studies on scientific output of BRIC countries have been carried out in the past. Norbert Walz (2010) (6) analyzed the scientific output of BRIC countries and outreach countries during 1999-2007 in the field of limnology. Alex and Preedip Balaji (2010) (7) compared the scientific output of BRIC countries during 2004-2009 in the field of climate change research. Rons (2011) (8) compared the research performance between BRIC countries and N-11 countries. Kumar and Asheulova (2011) (9) analyzed the scientific output of BRIC countries. More recently, Yu, Wang, Xu and Ho (2012) (10) compared the growth trends of BRIC countries in the field of photosynthesis during 1992-2010. A conclusion has been made from the above studies that there was study on tribology research output in BRIC countries has been reported. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the tribology research output in BRIC countries reflected in the SCOPUS database during 2006-2010. The focus of the present study are to compare the growth of literature using compound annual growth rate, pattern of co-authorship using Co-Authorship Index, changing pattern of research activity among BRIC countries using Transformative Activity Index and compare the performance of BRIC countries using citation per paper and relative citation impact.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Some of the earlier studies have been reviewed related to the objectives of the present study and presented below.

Sridhar (2007) (11) measured the growth rate of mobile subscribers across regions of India using Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR).

Elango and Rajendran(2012) (12) analyzed the authorship pattern using Collaboration Co-efficient in the research field of Marine Sciences published in the Indian Journal of Marine Sciences during the period 2001-2010 which revealed that the average collaboration rate was better among the authors.

Rajendran, Jeyshankar and Elango(2011) (13) used Co-Authorship Index (CAI) to analyze the pattern of co-authorship among the papers published in the Journal of Scientific and Industrial Research during 2005-2009. The study revealed that the average Co-Authorship Index for all the authors reflects the world average in the journal and improving trend of coauthored papers.

Sinha and Joshi (2012) (14) studied the changing pattern in thrust of research in different solar photo voltaic materials using Transformative Activity Index (TAI) in India's solar photo voltaic research output during 2000-2009.

The relative indicators Citations Per Paper (CPP) and Relative Citation Index (RCI) have been used by Lalitha Kumari(2009) (15) in Synthetic Organic Chemistry and Joshi, Avinash and Carg (2010) (16) in global forest fungal research to evaluate the scientific impact of a publication.

Moussa and Touzani (2010) (17) ranked marketing journals using h-type indices like h-index, g-index and hg-index.

OBJECTIVES

* To identify the pattern of tribology research output in BRIC countries during 2006-2010.

* To examine the quality and impact of tribology research output of BRIC countries

* To study the collaboration pattern of authors and activity profile of tribology research.

* To map the highly productive journals and its ranking

METERIALS AND METHODS

SCOPUS abstract and citation database has been used for the present study and searched for the keyword 'TRIBOLOGY'. For downloading the bibliographic records for the period 2006-2010, the following search strategy has been used.

TITLE-ABS-KEY(tribology) AND PUBYEAR >2005 AND PUBYEAR <2011 AND (LIMIT-TO(AFFILCOUNTRY, "China") OR LIMIT-TO(AFFILCOUNTRY, "India") OR LIMIT-TO(AFFILCOUNTRY, "Russian Federation") OR LIMIT-TO(AFFILCOUNTRY, "Brazil")) AND (LIMIT-TO(DOCTYPE, "ar") OR LIMIT-TO(DOCTYPE, "cp") OR LIMIT-TO(DOCTYPE, "re"))

Information relating to title, authors, affiliations, document type and number of citations, source title and keywords for each publication are exported to MS-Excel then analyzed with the IBM SPSS Statistics 19. In some records, there is no information available for corresponding author. For our analysis, the first author approach where only the first author of a paper is taken into account (straight count) (18) has been applied and finally a total of 4405 papers have been taken into account for further analysis. Scientometric tools such as, growth rate, collaboration co-efficient, co-authorship index, transformative activity index, citation per paper and relative citation impact have been employed.

LIMITATIONS

The present study is limited to a period of five years from 2006 to 2010 based on the records as reflected in the SCOPUS database and document types are restricted to articles, conference papers and reviews.

ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

Country wise Growth Rate

Growth Rate is being measured with Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR). The mathematical formula of CAGR (19) is given below.

CAGR = [([Ending Value]/[Begining Value]).sup.1/n-1] - 1

The growth of publications in each BRIC countries is calculated with the above formula and presented in the table 1. Out of total publications, China topped with 3536 (80.27%) papers, followed by India 537 (12.19%), Russia 202 (4.59%) and finally Brazil 130 (2.95%). Among the BRIC countries, Russia recorded the higher growth rate of 63.81% followed by India with 51.91%.

Table 1--Year wise output and growth rate

         Year

Country  2006  2007  2008  2009  2010  Total    %    Growth in %

China     326   252   577  1118  1263   3536  80.27        40.30
India      40    49    74   161   213    537  12.19        51.91
Russia     10    14    25    81    72    202   4.59        63.81
Brazil     15    13    19    38    45    130   2.95        31.61
Total     391   328   695  1398  1593   4405    100

Collaboration Rate

Collaboration Co-efficient suggested by Ajiferuke (1988) [20] has been used to assess the strength of collaboration and the mathematical formula is given below.

CC = 1 - [[[SIGMA].sub.j=1.sub.k=k](1/j)[F.sub.j]]/N

Where, Fj = the number of j authored research publications

N = total number of research publications and

k = the greatest number of authors per publication.

Collaboration Coefficient is a number between 0 and 1. The more it is bigger than 0.5 the better is the collaboration rate among authors. When it is near 0, it means that authors have a weak collaboration.

It is observed from table 2 that among the BRIC countries, Brazil and China have been recorded higher collaboration rate of 0.689 followed by India with 0.616 and Russia with 0.591. According to Ajiferuke, the range of CC (0.591 - 0.689) for all BRIC countries seems to better collaboration among the authors.

Table 2--Collaboration Rate

                       # Authors

Country   1    2       3        4     5+   Total    CC

Brazil     3   22         28    34    43    130  0.689
China     93  480        923  1042   998   3536  0.689
India     27  154        190   110    56    537  0.616
Russia    29   40         45    21    67    202  0.591
Total    152  696       1186  1207  1164   4405

Co-authorship Pattern

Co-Authorship Index (CAI) is obtained by calculating proportionately the publications by single, double, multi and mega multi authored papers. CAI is calculated with the following formula suggested by Garg&Padhi (2001) (21).

CAI = [[N.sub.ij]/[N.sub.io]]/[[N.sub.oj][N.sub.oo] X 100

Here,

[N.sub.ij] = Number of publications for the particular authorship pattern for a particular country

[N.sub.io] = Total output for the particular authorship [pattern

[N.sub.oj] = Total output of the particular country

[N.sub.oo] = Total output of all BRIC countries

CAI = 100 reflects that the number of publications corresponds to the world average, CAI > 100 reflects higher than the world average and CAI < 100 reflects lower than the world average within a co-authorship pattern.

Here the publications have been divided into four categories according to the number of authors, i.e. single authored, two authored, multi authored (comprising three and four authors) and mega multi authored (comprising five or more authors). The results of CAI have been presented in the table 3. The values of CAI for China for multi and mega authored publications are higher than the average and it seems that they were more preferred to work in small and big teams. With regard to India, the same for single, two and multi authored publications are higher than the average and it seems that Indian scientists more preferred to work in small teams. For Russia, it is higher than the average for single, two and mega authored publications and single authored publications have received the highest value (416) for CAI which seems to Russian scientists were more preferred to work by oneself. However, Brazil scientists were more preferred to work with co-authored as well as big teams.

Table 3--Co-authorship Pattern

Country   Single      Two       Multi       Mega     Total

China     93 (76)   480 (86)  1965 (102)  998 (107)   3536
India    27 (146)  154 (182)   300 (103)    56 (39)    537
Russia   29 (416)   40 (125)     66 (60)   67 (126)    202
Brazil     3 (67)   22 (107)     62 (88)   43 (125)    130
Total         152        696        2393       1164   4405

( ) indicates CAI

Relative Research Effort

To study the development of tribology research activities among the BRIC countries during 2006-2010, Transformative Activity Index (TAI) suggested by Guan and Ma (2004) (22) has been employed. The mathematical form of TAI is given below.

TAI = [[C.sub.i]/[C.sub.o]]/[[W.sub.i][W.sub.o]] X 100

Here,

[C.sub.i] = Number of publications for a particular country in a particular year

[C.sub.o] = Total output for a particular country during the study period

[W.sub.i] = Number of publications for all countries in a particular year

[W.sub.o] = Total output for all countries during the study period

For this study, the publications for all BRIC countries in the year 2006 and 2010 have been taken into consideration. It is noticed from Table 4 that the tribology research activity has been increased for India and Russia while it is decreased for China and Brazil from 2006 to 2010. Higher increase of TAI was observed for Russia with 43 and decrease for Brazil with 34. Even though, there was decrease in TAI for China and Brazil but the value is relatively equal to the average in 2010. The value of TAI is relatively equal to the average for all BRIC countries in the year 2010 have been observed.

Table 4--Transformative Activity Index of BRIC countries

Country    2006       2010     Change in TAI  Total

China    326 (104)  1263 (99)             -5   3536
India      40 (84)  213 (110)            +26    537
Russia     10 (56)    72 (99)            +43    202
Brazil    15 (130)    45 (96)            -34    130
Total          391       1593                  4405

( ) indicates TAI

Citation profile of tribology output of BRIC countries

Of the total 4405 papers, 2129 (48%) papers did not receive any citation and remaining 52% of papers received one or more citations from their date of publication up to 15.04.2012. Out of total papers, 2276 papers received 11303 citations during 2005-2012 (up to 15.04.2012) with an average rate of citation as ~ 5 (Table 5). Average citation rate is 2.6 for all publications and both Brazilian and Indian papers received the citations more than average. A total of 586 papers received more than 5 citations each and it has accounted to 13% of total publications. 25% of Indian publications received more than 5 citations and only one Indian paper received the highest number of citations of 407 which was published in 2007.

Table 5--Citation profile of BRIC countries

                           # Papers

Citations Range   Brazil    Russia      India      China      Total

0                      59       132        175       1763       2129
1                      14        33         76        605        728
2                      14        16         51        321        402
3                      10         5         43        202        260
4                       4         3         33        134        174
5                       7         1         24         94        126
6-10                   17         8         70        231        326
11-20                   2         3         50        143        198
21-50                   3         1         14         38         56
51-80                   0         0          0          5          5
>80                     0         0          1          0          1
Total                 130       202        537       3536       4405
Total Citations       376       217       2589       8121      11303
Avg Citation          2.9       1.1        4.8        2.3        2.6
More than 5      22 (17%)   12 (6%)  135 (25%)  417 (12%)  586 (13%)

Performance of Tribology Research output of BRIC countries

Quality and impact of scientific publications are being measured with two relative indicators, namely Citations Per Publication (CPP) and Relative Citation Impact (RCI). CPP was used by Zhi Lei and Yuh-Shan Ho (2008) (23) to assess the impact of a publication of years, countries, institutes and authors. It is computed as the average number of citations per publication. RCI is more robust than other indicators in the sense that it measures both the influence as well as visibility of research activity, irrespective of the level of evaluation either country or institute or author (24). It is calculated with the following formula.

RCI = [A country's share of total citations]/[A country's share of total publications]

RCI = 1 indicates that the country's citation rate is equal to average citation rate, RCI > 1 indicates that the country's citation rate is higher than the average citation rate and also implies high impact of research in that country & RCI < 1 indicates that the country's citation rate is lower than the average citation rate and also implies that the research efforts are higher than its impact.

Quality and impact of scientific publications of BRIC countries are being measured for the two categories namely, document type and country wise scientific outputs. A total of 8121 citations have been received by contributions from China with 72% and Indian contributions received 23% of total citations received by the publications contributed by BRIC countries. It is noticed from table 6 that among the BRIC countries, Brazil and India have received higher citation rate and citation impact than average while China and Russia received lower rates than average. India topped with high citation rate of 4.82 and high citation impact of 1.88.

Table 6--Country wise output & their impact

Country   TP     TC    CPP   RCI

China    3536   8121  2.30  0.90
India     537   2589  4.82  1.88
Russia    202    217  1.07  0.42
Brazil    130    376  2.89  1.13
Total    4405  11303  2.57

For calculating CPP and RCI for various document types, the country has been replaced by document type in the above said formula. It is observed from table 7 that out of 4405 publications, articles comprised of 79% followed by conference paper 20% and review 0.7%. Citation impact explored that the articles and reviews have received higher CPP and RCI rates while conference paper received lower rates than average.

Table 7--Document types & their impact

Document Type      TP    % P     TC    % C    CPP   RCI

Article           3482   79.0  10383  91.86   2.98  1.16
Conference Paper   891   20.2    325   2.88   0.36  0.14
Review              32    0.7    595   5.26  18.59  7.51
Total             4405  100.0  11303    100   2.57

Impact of highly productive journals& their rank

Quality and Impact of journals have been measured with h-index and the mathematical formula is given below.

h = c[P.sup.1/3][(CPP).sup.3/2]

Where, c is constant (0.9 for journals), P is number of papers and CPP is citation per publication.

Among the various methods to calculate the h-index, Fred Y Ye (2009) (25) found that Glanzel-Schubert model of h-index was better to estimate the h-index of countries and other information sources.

Impact of journals of contributions with more than 60 by each BRIC country published during 2006-2010 has been analyzed and provided in the table 8. A total of 1226 papers contributed by authors from BRIC countries have been published in the top eleven journals during 2006-2010 and these account to 28% of total papers. A total of 4940 citations have been received by 1226 papers published in the top 11 journals since their publication and these citations account to around 44% of total citations. Out of top 11 journals, only 2 journals are published in the BRIC countries (China) while remaining 9 journals are publishing from rest of the world. Out of 202 total contributions by Russia, 77 papers published in the top 11 journals with 38% of its total contributions and other BRIC countries managed to 28%. The journals Tribology, Wear and Advanced Materials Research ranked first, second and third respectively in terms of number of publications while they ranked seventh, first and ninth respectively in terms of h-index. Materials and Design ranked 10th in terms of number of publications while it is ranked 5th in terms of h-index.

Table 8--Impact of highly productive journals

Name of Journal          Papers     Total    h-index  Rank
                           (R)    Citations           by h

MocaxueXuebao/Tribology  254 (1)        347        7     7

Wear                     195 (2)       1483       20     1

Advanced Materials       130 (3)         49        2     9
Research

Surface and Coatings     120 (4)        895       17     2
Technology

Tribology International   96 (5)        732       16     3

Run Hua Yu                93 (6)         40        2     9
MiFeng/Lubrication
Engineering

Tribology Letters         90 (7)        423       11     6

Key Engineering           67 (8)         46        3     8
Materials

Applied Surface Science   61 (9)        492       14     4

Journal of Friction and  60 (10)         27        2     9
Wear

Materials and Design     60 (10)        406       13     5

CONCLUSION

The present study examined the tribology research output in BRIC countries as reflected in the SCOPUS database for the period from 2006 to 2010 using scientometric tools. The study reveals that China leads in terms of number of publications with 80% of total output and Russia recorded the higher growth rate among the BRIC countries with 63%. According to Ajiferuke, the collaboration rate for all BRIC countries is better collaboration among the authors. India outperformed other BRIC countries by higher citation rate and citation impact. Review papers received higher citation rate and citation impact than average while conference paper received lower than average. Among the BRIC countries, China was a leader in terms of number of publications in the field of tribology during the study period and this result acknowledged the analysis conducted by Kumar and Asheulova (2011) (26).The journal Tribology gets top rank in terms of number of publications and Wear gets top rank in terms of h-index.

REFERENCES

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(2.) Bhushan B (1999). Principles and applications of tribology. John Wiley, New York.

(3.) http://www.tribologyindia.org (04 June 2012)

(4.) http://www.synlube.com/tribolog.htm (04 June 2012)

(5.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRIC (04 June 2012)

(6.) Norbert Walz (2010). Publications of BRIC and Outreach countries in International Journals on Limnology. International Review of Hydrobiology, 95: 298-312.

(7.) Alex P and PreedipBalaji B (2010).Mapping Climate Change Research in India: A Bibliometric Approach. Paper presented at the Sixth International Conference on Webometrics, Informetrics and Scientometrics& Eleventh COLLNET Meeting, Mysore.

(8.) Rons N (2011).Research Excellence Milestones of BRIC and N-11 countries. In: Proceedings of ISSI 2011, 13th Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics, Durban, South Africa, 04-07 July 2011. Ed Noyons, Patrick NgulubeandJacquelineLeta (Eds.), Vol. 2, 1049-1051. (Poster abstract)

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(18.) Op cit. 14

(19.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_annual_growth_rate

(20.) Ajiferuke I (1988). Collaborative Co-efficient: A single measure of the degree of collaboration in research.Scientometrics, 14(5-6): 421-433.

(21.) Carg K C and Padhi P (2001). A study of collaboration in science and technology.Scientometrics, 51 (2):415-427.

(22.) Guan J and Ma N. (2007). A bibliometric study of China's semiconductor literature compared with other major Asian countries. Scientometrics, 71(1):107-124.

(23.) Li Z and Ho Y S (2008). Use of citation per publication as an indicator to evaluate contingent valuation research. Scientometrics, 75 (1): 97-110.

(24.) Sinha B (2010). Mapping Solar Photovoltaic Research in India. India, Science & Technology: 2010-11. CSIR-NISTADS, New Delhi.

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(26.) Op cit. 9

B Elango

IFET College of Engineering, Villupuram, elangokb@yahoo.com

P Rajendran

SRM University, Chennai, India, periyaswamyrajendran@gmail.com

J Manickraj

SRM University, Chennai, India, manickraj@gmail.com

Elango, B; Rajendran, P; and Manickraj, J, "Tribology Research Output in BRIC Countries: A Scientometric Dimension" (2013).

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal). Paper 935.

http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/935

B. ELANGO

Research Scholar, Bharathiar University, Coimbatore, India. (Librarian, IFET College of Engineering, Villupuram, India)

elangokb@yahoo.com

P. RAJENDRAN

University Librarian, SRM University, Kattangulathur, India.

periyaswamyrajendran@gmail.com

P. MANICKRAJ

AssistantLibrarian, SRM University, Kattangulathur, India.

manickraj@gmail.com