Page 20 - IDEA Study 1 2016 Publication Output

There are only a few disciplines where the Czech publication output exceeds the average publication output in the other selected countries: Chemistry, analytical; Chemistry, inorganic & nuclear; Physics, nuclear23; Spectroscopy, Crystallography; Material science, coatings & films; Mineralogy; Instruments & Instrumentation; Material science, characterization and testing. All of these disciplines also show an exceptionally high publication output. Especially worth mentioning are the last two disciplines, which show an exceptionally high and outstanding publication output not accompanied by an exceptionally high output in less prestigious journals. The field of Parasitology stands out significantly among all other disciplines, due to its exceptionally high publication output in less prestigious journals, and a roughly average output in prestigious journals. The aforementioned field of Agricultural Economics & Policy is also an exception, albeit in a different way: its overall output in the Czech Republic is abnormally high, thanks to high publication output in national journals with a low AIS (see discussion in previous section). The standing of most WoS disciplines may be found in Charts 3a–e, divided into the following groups: Agricultural Sciences, Engineering & Technology, Medical Sciences, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences. For better clarity, the charts only show the segment of Chart 2a which includes Czech disciplines within a given category. As we have pointed out earlier, using the example of the Agricultural Economics & Policy field, the position of certain disciplines in international comparison may be influenced by the inclusion of national (Czech and Slovak) WoS journals, usually in the lowest, 4th quartile. Such journals tend to publish articles of authors affiliated with Czech institutions, with low international citation rates. Readers interested in the importance of such journals for international science field comparison may find the list of all such journals in Table A1 attached to this paper. WoS classifies 14 of them under Social Sciences (6 in economic disciplines), and about 60 of them under Sciences. As shown in the table, the overwhelming majority of these journals belong to the lowest quartile based on their AIS, and show a fairly high self- 23 Physics, nuclear is a highly specific field, due to its practice of publishing articles written by huge teams of many authors, where the participation of scientists from a certain country may not reflect that country’s actual scientific contribution. Large teams of authors are also frequent in the fields of Astronomy & Astrophysics and Physics, Particles & Fields, where collective authorship may distort the results: such publications can be credited to many countries, and usually fall into the 1st quartile. The overall output therefore depends on the ratio of standard results and those by such huge authorial teams – negligible on the international scale, but some Czech research teams produce almost exclusively such publications. 18