Informetric Portrait of Elinor Ostrom, the Nobel Laureate in the Field of Economic Sciences

The publication productivity of Elinor Ostrom, the renowned American Political economist and the first woman laureate to win the most aspired highest prize that is the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for her analysis of economic governance is analysed. The present study has analysed her 197 publications as indexed in Scopus using bibliometric methods covering the period 1965-2018. It is observed that during her 54 years of publication she published average 3-4 works each year. The years 2006, 20082013 accounts for 103 publications i.e. 52.28% and they are the most productive years in her life. She published 85 single-authored papers and 112 multiauthored papers. James Michael Walker who co-authored 19 publications is the most prominent collaborator. Natural resources management is the prominent area of her research. Ostrom used 116 channels prominently being the journal articles covering 119 (60%) of her publications. Ostrom’s works had high reception which can also be seen from the citations received; 50552 citations as per Scopus. Her Recency Index is nearly 0.47 which indicates that nearly 47% of her works are cited in the last five years. Ostrom’s works are an inspiration for the future Nobel aspirants and researchers in economics because she designed a new principle and argued with proof that common resources are best utilised and best managed when they are managed by the localities of the areas where those resources are found. This provided an opportunity for the common people to earn a living as well as helped in the best utilisation of the resources which is a unique idea. Her works therefore opened up avenues to find out the new resources of various areas and continues to be important in the future. The bibliometric analysis attempts to draw some insights of her interesting and important work.


INTRODUCTION
The Nobel Prize is the highest prize for research accomplishment. The reputation of a nation and its scientific community depends upon these highest awards and the intellectuals eagerly wait to earn such appreciation for their hard work. In 1901, the Nobel Prizes were started in physics, chemistry, medicine or physiology, literature and peace. In 1968, the Central Bank of Sweden (Sveriges Riksbank), concurrence with its tercentenary celebration introduced a new award, "The Central Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel" on the basis of an economic assurance by the bank in infinity. The award followed the same principles and rules as the original Nobel prizes. [1] So, till date this prize is called as "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel". From 1969 to 2019 the total number of Nobel Laureates in economic sciences is 83. In the initial years and till 2008 no woman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic sciences but Elinor Ostrom, Professor at the University of Indiana, USA became the first woman to be honoured with the award in 2009 jointly with Oliver E. Williamson from University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA. Her win ensured that 2009 was a record-breaking Nobel year for women in Economic Sciences.
Ostrom's work was to go underneath the usual economic statements of the problem and examine the microeconomic nature of how institutions evolved to alleviate common property issues. In the process she became one of the leading political economists of her time. [2] Ostrom's ideas are so pertinent because they are not simply theoretical proposals or the result of some laboratory experiment. Rather, they are based on far-reaching compilation of real life cases in many different countries and cultures and for different types of commons. This type of research provides insights based on the empirically observed behavior of individuals under conditions they live in. [3] Kevin Gallagher, one of the reporters in the Guardian after Ostrum's win reports on Oct 13, 2009 "Ostrom won the Nobel prize for showing that privatising natural resources is not the route to halting environmental degradation." Actually she contradicted with many environmental experts and proved that the government may not be the best allocator of public resources either. Often governments are seen as illicit, or their rules cannot be imposed. Indeed, Ostrom's Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action looking at forests, lakes, groundwater basins and fisheries shows that the commons can be an opportunity for communities themselves to manage a resource. When communities are given the right to self-organise they can democratically govern themselves to preserve the environment. [4] In the Obituary column of the Economist on June 30, 2012, it has been very rightly mentioned that "while others wrote gloomily of the tragedy of the commons, seeing only overfishing and over farming in a free-for-all of greed, Mrs Ostrom, with her loud laugh and louder tops, cut a cheery and contrarian figure." [5] So studying her life and works and analyzing them through scientometric indicators in this paper turns out to be very interesting from cross-disciplinary point of view. Such studies are either called as bio-bibliometrics or informetric portraits. 'Bio-bibliometrics' the term was first coined by Sen and Gan [6] to describe the quantitative and analytical method for finding and generating functional relationships between bio-data and biblio-data elements. Recently the term 'Biobibliometrics' is being used for a method of retrieving and visualizing biological information that uses co-occurrence of gene naming terms in Medical Sciences to generate semantic links between genes. [7] Kalyane and Kalyane [8] for the first time used the phrase 'Scientometric Portrait' to carry out biobibliometric studies on scientists while Sinha and Bhatnagar [9] and Sinha and Ullah [10] used the term 'Information profile' for such studies.
Therefore from the different studies, it is suggested that 'Scientometric Portrait' is the appropriate phrase for the studies on scientists and 'Informetric Portrait' can be used for the studies on personalities in other disciplines such as arts, humanities and social sciences. The importance of the study can be comprehended from the fact that by analysing individual bibliographical and biographical data those who have touched the top position in academic and research life may inspire the younger generations. The study of famous women who reached the top position in academic life makes the women society more stimulating.

Related works and Objectives of the study
Some previous studies like Dutta [11] conducted a bibliometric study with the works of Bimal Kanti Sen, a professional librarian and information scientist. The year-wise distribution of authorship pattern, collaborative authors, degree of collaboration, core journals and highly cited publications are studied in this paper. Bhui and Bhattacharyya [12] studied the scientometric portrait of the scholarly publications of Dr. S. R. Ranganathan, mathematician and librarian from India and also considered as the father of Library Science in India. They analyzed Ranganathan's publications as well as citations received by him as delineated in the Google Scholar database. Barik and Jena [13] presented a study on the publications of Dr. Amartya Kumar Sen, Nobel laureates in Economic Sciences and analyzed his 111 publications from Scopus database during 1969-2015. The results reveal that Sen published an average of 2-3 scholarly article per year, his 21(18.9%) papers are more than 100 times cited and 2 papers are more than 300 times cited, his core domain of research are economics and applied areas of economics. Munnolli, Pujar and Kademani [14] highlighted quantitatively the publication productivity of Harald Zur Hausen a renowned scientist and Nobel Laureate in Physiology who published 285 papers during 1964-2009. The main domains of publications were studied and publication density was found as 3.60, publication concentration was 3.49 and the productivity coefficient was 0.50. Kademani, Kalyane and Kumar [15] carried out the Scientometric analysis of 190 scientific publications by Harold W. Kroto, the Nobel laureate in Chemistry (1996) published during 1985 -2000. They found the core journals publishing his papers, publication concentration as 4.5, publication density as 3.05 and the average Bradford multiplier as 3.5. They also indicated his research impact assessment by keyword occurrence in the titles. Kademani, Kalyane and Kumar [16] analysed 246 papers by Ahmed Hassan Zewail, the Nobel laureate in Chemistry in 1999 and found his productivity coefficient as 0.52 and opined that it is a clear sign of consistent publication productivity behaviour during his 19 years of research. Akakandelwa [17] tried to portray the life-sketch of Professor Seter Siziya, a medical bio-statistician. After analyzing 152 papers published by Professor Seter Siziya between 1988 to 2008, he showed that 241 researchers from various institutions at local and international level collaborated with Siziya and found that he was the primary author in 27 papers, second author in 40 papers, third in 50 papers. His productive co-efficient was 0.92. González-Alcaide [18] presented the study on bibliometric indicators on Santiago Grisolia's scholarly creation in the field of biochemistry and molecular biology. Sife and Bernard [19] conducted a scientometric study to evaluate the publication productivity of Prof. Rudovick R. Kazwala. They analyzed 111 scholarly publications and showed that Kazwala attained the 50-percentile productivity life at the productivity age of 18. His productivity co-efficient was 0.69, publication density was 2.18 and publication concentration was 23.68. El Aichouchi and Gorry [20] explores Hagenmuller's (a figure of French solid-state chemistry) works using scientometric analysis. They reveal the impact of his research, main research topic and his collaboration with other collaborators.
The above studies which focused on the works of different scholars as well as Noble laureates from various fields provided grounding for the present study on Elinor Ostrom.
The study aims to find out why Ostrom inspite of being a Political scientist with all her degrees in Political science became so famous among the Economists that she was awarded one of the highest prizes. For this concentration has been paid on Ostrom's publication productivity over the years, the most prominent researchers with whom she collaborated for her researches, the major subject domains on which Ostrum worked, the works which received highest citations and the most used keywords used in the titles of Ostrom's works. The main research questions drawn from these objectives are therefore:

METHODOLOGY
The data presented in this paper have been accessed from Scopus (an Elsevier's abstract and citation database launched in 2004). The basic data, relating to the bibliometric characteristics of Elinor Ostrom were collected using 'Author Search' option in Scopus. Due to non-availability of exact name search facilities in the database, the search result was refined by author affiliation. Affiliation of the author was determined by authors' address. All the searched results were first saved in CSV file and then imported into MS-Excel. Only for the citation analysis two other databases as Google scholar and Web of Science in addition to Scopus are consulted to collect data. However book citations of Elinor Ostrom are not found in Web of Science database probably because they are not indexed in that database and hence are omitted in the tabular data. After sorting the data in MS-Excel the data is analysed to satisfy the objectives.
The following formulae have been used to calculate the Collaborative Index and Collaboration co-efficient in the Table 1. , where N m number of Multiple-authored research papers in the discipline published during a year and N s = number of single-authored research papers in the discipline published during the same year. [21] It is also shown in Table 1.

Biographical sketch of Elinor Ostrom
Elinor Ostrom or Lin, as she is often called was born on 7 th August 1933 in Los Angeles, California and grew up in a family of simple means. She lived with her divorced mother. She graduated with honours in political science from the University of California. She got her Ph.D. awarded in 1665. She married political economist Vincent Ostrom. She started her academic career at Indiana University, was also a founding director of the Centre for the Study of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University. She published several books during her career like Governing the Commons (1990) and Understanding Institutional diversity (2009). She was the first woman to receive the prestigious Nobel in economic sciences in 2009 which raised some eyebrows. On December 8, 2009 she delivered her Nobel Prize lecture in Stockholm, Sweden entitled "Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems" which was published in American Economic Review by American Economic Association in June 2010. [22] Her award-winning scholarly work demonstrates how communities can successfully share common resources, such as waterways, livestock grazing land and forests, through collective property rights that best define her legacy. She died on 12 th June 2012 in Bloomington, USA. [23,24] -1967, 1969-1970, 1972, 1977, 1979-1980, 1984, 1987, 1997, 2016-2017. It also appeared that many years after her death in 2012, her contributions are being published. She published 85 single-authored papers and 112 multi-authored papers. She was the main author in 104 (52.79%) of her publications and in 93 publications acted as co-author. Her productivity coefficient was found to be 0.80 which indicates her publication productivity was steady throughout the period.  Table 1 depicts the quinquennium publication data of Elinor Ostrom which shows that the highest publication output of 62 papers (31% of her total contributions) is found during the 10 th quinquennial during 2010-2014 (age range 77-81) and second highest is found during the 9 th quinquennial during 2005-2009 (age range 72-76) i.e. 55 papers (28% of her total contributions). It is worth mentioning that Prof. Ostrom received the Nobel prize during these two quinquennium.

Growth of Publications
The contribution of Ostrom was least during the age range 32-36 years i.e. since 1965-1969. It is seen that Ostrom's contribution increased with her age.

Co-Authorship pattern
It appears from the Table 1  Collaboration in scientific research is a growing phenomenon and the proportion of co-publications in the total number of scientific publications is growing steadily. The proportion of co-authorship of Prof. Ostrom increases significantly since 1999, at least 421 different collaborators are associated with her in various publications. Table 2 shows the prominent collaborators associated with her. The most prominent co-author is James Michael Walker who co-authored 19 publications over 21 years and both are affiliated to the same university, followed by Marco A. Janssen, Professor, Arizona State University where she was founding director of the Centre for the Study of Institutional Diversity, co-authored 12 publications over 7 years.

Degree of collaboration
Value of Degree of Collaboration (DC) gives a fairly clear idea of degree of collaboration with Prof. Ostrom. From Table 1 it has been observed that in her 54 years of productive life, DC=1 only for 7 years which implies that no single author publications of the author appear in these years. Value of DC lies between 0.5 and 1 for 12 years means multi-authored papers of Ostrom are published more than her single authored papers in these years, value of DC equal to 0.5 for 6 years means multi-authored publications and single-authored publications are equal in number, value of DC is less than 0.5 for 5 years means multi-authored papers of Ostrom are published less than her single authored papers in these years and value of DC equal to zero for 11 years i.e. only singleauthored publication appears in these 11 years.   (10), editorial (7) and note (6). Only two contributions each are made in the item categories namely conference paper, letter and short survey.

Citation analysis
After publication, research results are used by other researchers for their own studies and cited as references in their subsequent articles. The citation of one article by another is characteristic of scientific publications and it is generally accepted that the number of citations of a particular article is a reflection of its impact in the scientific community. [25] Citations provide data that can be used statistically and mathematically to quantify the relative importance of a particular article or a particular journal. There is positive correlation between citation and H-index of a researcher.
As per SCOPUS record, a total of 197 scholarly publications have received 50718 citations, while Google scholar reports the citation number to be 204963 and Web of Science indicates the number of citations to be 20277. So we can say that Google scholar outshines the reporting for the number of citations when compared to other databases. Table 3 depicts the list of works of Ostrom which are cited more than 100 times in Scopus database. It is noticed that the first two highly cited works are books and then the next three highly cited works are the publications in the Journal Science. Seven of her works published in the journal Science received 100 or more than 100 citations. Among the 63 works which received 100 or more citations 24 works are published post Nobel Prize and rest are published prior to the receiving of Nobel Prize.      2015-2019. It means that her works got more recognition and importance over time and there is rare chance of obsolescence of her works in the coming future. As scientists like Ostrom receives large recognition for her works so it is not only sufficient to evaluate the academic performance based on h-index and therefore to get accurate results e-index is calculated in addition to h-index depicted in the citation database to make up the loss of citation information. The quality of Ostrom's papers is evaluated by the a-index and R-index.

Keyword Tomography
The titles of the publications express the reflective content of the papers. Keyword in the titles is one of the best indicators of understanding the thought content of the scholarly writings. Therefore, if certain key-words are used repeatedly in the titles of an author's research writings, then it reflects an idea of the theme of her research.

CONCLUSION
This study on Elinor Ostrom, the first woman Nobel laureate in Economic sciences is indeed interesting as one can get an overview of some of the most vital publications and the trend of her research publications. Her publications are found for 54 long years in Scopus database and the scientometric indicators indicate a very high recognition of her works. She has a high h-value and e-value which jointly reflects that her works are highly cited. Also the papers are highly qualitative and that brought her the real laurel with the award of the highest prize. Her works are so worthy that they are continued to be published even after her death. She is such a scholar with simple living but high thinking and great modesty that even in her Nobel lecture which was published in the American Economic Review in 2010 she included 195 references which is worth praising. Even if we leave her 45 self-citations, the number of others references are still 150. She shows her reverence for other researchers which included Noble laureates like Amartya Sen, Oliver E. Williamson among many others. Her argument that individuals and communities could manage their own collective resources challenged Hardin's approach to the "Tragedy of the Commons". She set some design principles while working in Maine, Indonesia, Nepal and Kenya and showed that the common resources are well managed when they are managed by the localities who live in close proximity of those resources. She showed the real path for the sustainable development of the communities and reflected clearly that government interventions will not be effective unless and until they are well supported by individuals and communities (Elinor Ostrom-The "nontragedy of the commons. [26]