The Scientometrics of Nature

Deepjyoti Kalita

Scientific Information Resource Division, Indira Gandhi Center for Atomic Research, Kalpakkam, India.

Abstract:

Nature is a weekly journal of multidisciplinary sciences with a huge range of followers in the scientific community. The purpose of the study is to analyse the citations of the full research articles published in Nature journal from 2006 to 2015. During this period Nature has published 8335 research articles. In the study the weightage of the research articles published in Nature were measured through immediacy index comparison of the research articles to the overall journal. The authorship pattern of the articles were measured and a cited references study was also conducted for measuring the self citations generated by Nature each year,the references per articles present and identifying core cited journals by Nature and their respective subject areas, which libraries in turn may use for collection development policies. Ranking of contributing countries and contributing organizations were also made by % share of article contribution. To check if any kind of biasness is present in Nature publications, a comparative evaluation of top contributing countries has also been made based on Nature Index. Web of Science core collection was used as the data source and Bibexcel bibliometric tool was used for data analysis purpose.