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2001
Journal Article
Titel
International alignment and scientific regards as macro-indicators for international comparisons of publications
Abstract
Many international comparisons of the publication performance at the macro level are based on direct counts of citation frequencies in the Science Citation Index. However, these comparisons may reveal a significant negative language bias for non-English-speaking countries, or other selection biases, which can be illustrated by the relation between research budgets of scientific institutions and SCI publications. Against this background, a two-dimensional representation, specifying for the international alignment of the national publications and the journal-standardized citation impact, proves to be a more appropriate indicator base to assess the citation performance of countries such as Germany. In the light of a ten countries' benchmark, time series of these indicators for the nineties show a considerable impact of the German unification with a recent trend towards an adaptation of publication behaviour in East Germany towards the Western patterns.