Research Trends: Special Issue on the 10 years of Scopus

Since its launch in the fall of 2004, Scopus has established itself as the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed research literature. In honor of the 10th anniversary of Elsevier’s bibliographical database, Research Trends recently published a Special Issue that looks back on these 10 years and illustrates how Scopus can be used in bibliometric studies of trends in the global science system.

For one of the issue’s contributions, Dr. Gali Halevi and Dr. Henk F. Moed conducted a comprehensive search on all Scopus data (limiting the results to full research articles only), coming up with a list of the most frequently cited articles published between 2001 and 2011 in eight main research areas. According to their findings, these were the top cited articles per research area:

Agricultural and Biological Sciences

MEGA4: Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis (MEGA) software version 4.0 (2007)

Molecular Biology and Evolution, Vol. 24, No. 8, pp. 1596-1599.

Arts & Humanities

The complexity of intersectionality (2005)

Signs, Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 1771-1800.

Energy  

Geant4 developments and applications (2006)

IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science, Vol. 53, No. 1, pp. 270-278.

Chemical Engineering

On the development of proton conducting polymer membranes for hydrogen and methanol fuel cells (2001)

Journal of Membrane Science, Vol. 185, No. 1, pp.  29-39

Computer Science

Distinctive image features from scale-invariant keypoints (2004)

International Journal of Computer Vision, Vol. 60, No. 2, pp. 91-110.

Engineering 

The rise of graphene (2007)

Nature Materials, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 183-191.

Environmental  Science

Pharmaceuticals, hormones, and other organic wastewater contaminants in U.S. streams, 1999-2000: A national reconnaissance (2002)

Environmental Science and Technology, Vol. 36, No. 6, pp. 1202-121.

Medicine

Risks and benefits of estrogen plus progestin in healthy postmenopausal women: Principal results from the women’s health initiative randomized controlled trial (2002)

Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 288, No. 3, pp. 321-333.

Other topics discussed in this Special Issue of Research Trends include an analysis of research trends in the domain of virology, current developments in the field of graphene research, patterns in co-authorship during the past 10 years, as well as trends in German publication output and its citation impact.

Although these studies look backwards in time, they also bear relevance to the present and future, as their outcomes and the explored bibliometric methodologies potentially contribute to a better understanding of the research process, and to an informed research policy.

To download the complete Research Trends Issue, click here.