Page 10 - IDEA Study 1 2016 Publication Output

Chart 1a, panel A (top left) uses bar charts to indicate the number of articles per country, normalized for the population of the Czech Republic, in each quartile and in the top decile based on the AIS. The top decile includes articles published in the 10 percent most prestigious scientific journals in the given field. Articles included in the top decile have not been included in the first quartile shown, so that the total chart size for each given country corresponds to the total number of articles. In the years 2010–2014, the Czech Republic’s publication output in the Chemistry, Analytical field was the highest of the 12 countries included in our comparison, followed by Slovenia and Sweden. However, normalization of the publication output by GDP (see Table 1) puts the Czech Republic even further ahead of Sweden, whereas comparison to Slovenia remains almost unchanged, since the normalization coefficients for both population and GDP are nearly identical. Using normalization by GDP, the Czech Republic comes close to the advanced Western countries included in our comparison as to the number of articles published in journals with the highest AIS. Panel B (bottom left) shows the same numbers as Panel A, but expressed as the percentage of the total number of articles per country. This gives a clearer indication of the level of contribution by publications in each quartile of the AIS to the total publication output. For instance, it is apparent that the Czech Republic’s overall high publication output in Analytical Chemistry compared to Sweden, Finland and Austria is caused by a higher proportion of articles in the lower two quartiles, similarly as in other post-Communist countries in our comparison. Panel C (top right) indicates the average year-on-year increase17 in the normalized number of articles in the years 2010–2014, shown separately for articles from the lower and upper half of journals for the given discipline based on the AIS (quartile 1 & 2 and quartile 3 & 4 respectively; quartile 1 also includes the 1st decile). It is apparent that in most countries, the total number of articles in the upper half of journals has grown by a mere few percent a year, apart from Poland, where the increase has been significantly higher (however, Poland’s starting point was very low). In the lower half, on the other hand, there has been a significant increase in the number of articles for several countries: Austria, Estonia, 17 The average year-on-year growth has been calculated as an average of year-on-year growths in the period between 2010 and 2014. 8