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Scientometric analysis of social science and science disciplines in a developing nation: a case study of Pakistan in the last decade

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Abstract

Our study is a scientometric analysis of research publications of science and social science disciplines in Pakistan during 2009–2018. The study examines 2000 published articles belonging to 50 research scholars of different disciplines. This analysis is conducted on three different levels: researcher level, field level and domain level. In this paper we discuss readability scores, title formats, single and multiple authorships of articles, citation rates, publication rates over time, the research contribution of both genders and the impact of PhD institution of authors in research publications. The IR features like number of words, sentence length and readability scores are extracted. The results indicate that more research is being conducted in science disciplines as compared to social sciences. It also appears that the readability scores of authors changed over time, and Science articles have higher readability scores compared to Social Science articles. Moreover, title formats are observed to effect citation rates. Titles tend to use more colons over time; and the use of simple sentences as titles is more than 50%, while use of question marks is below 3%, the rest are titles with colons. The citation rates also appear to increase due to co-authorship. Male researchers contribute more to research activities in science disciplines while in social science the ratio is almost equal while PhD institutes appear to influence the performance of researcher slightly. Finally, it is observed that the publication rates of Science disciplines are much higher than Social Science articles, depicting that the growth of Science disciplines is more rapid in Pakistan.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science & IT, The Islamia University, Bahawalpur, 63100, Pakistan

    Malik Muhammad Saad Missen, Sajeeha Qureshi, Nadeem Akhtar & Hina Asmat

  2. Department of Mathematics, Khawaja Fareed University of Engineering and Technology, Rahim Yar Khan, 64200, Pakistan

    Nadeem Salamat

  3. Laboratoire Informatique, Image et Interaction (L3i), Facultés des Sciences et Technologies, University of La Rochelle, La Rochelle, France

    Mickaël Coustaty

  4. Division of Biomedical Informatics, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH, 45229, USA

    V. B. Surya Prasath

  5. Department of Pediatrics, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA

    V. B. Surya Prasath

  6. Department of Biomedical Informatics, College of Medicine, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, 45267, USA

    V. B. Surya Prasath

  7. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, 45221, USA

    V. B. Surya Prasath

Authors
  1. Malik Muhammad Saad Missen
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  2. Sajeeha Qureshi
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  3. Nadeem Salamat
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  4. Nadeem Akhtar
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  5. Hina Asmat
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  6. Mickaël Coustaty
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  7. V. B. Surya Prasath
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Correspondence to Malik Muhammad Saad Missen.

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Appendix: Medians, citation range, and number of articles

Appendix: Medians, citation range, and number of articles

For the analysis conducted in this work, we had to consider every article written by the selected authors in the past 10 years. A total of 2351 articles of science disciplines and 1176 articles of social sciences were considered. These were separated in two groups; those with single authorship and multi-authorship. The medians, citation range, and number of articles examined are given in the Table 10. Note that these results for each field show that there are very few articles written by single author, except in Mathematics where there are considerable number of single author articles relative to other fields, however they too are less than multiple author based articles.

Table 10 The medians and ranges of citation rates for single and multi-authored articles in different fields
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Missen, M.M.S., Qureshi, S., Salamat, N. et al. Scientometric analysis of social science and science disciplines in a developing nation: a case study of Pakistan in the last decade. Scientometrics 123, 113–142 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03379-8

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