Braun Tibor, Glänzel Wolfgang, Schubert András: Országok, szakterületek, folyóiratok tudománymetriai mutatószámai 1981-1985 (A MTAK Informatikai És Tudományelemzési Sorozata 6., 1992)
Introduction
A. SCHUBERT, W. GLÄNZEL, T. BRAUN : SCIENTOMETRIC DATAFILES Introduction Scientometric indicators 1 are on the way to become a standard tool of evaluation and analysis in research management and science policy 2. These publication and citation based indicators, representing more or less unobtrusive and objective measures of scientific productivity and impact, supplement advantageously the time-honoured methods of peer review and committee evaluations. Scientometric indicators may concern, in principle, to any level of aggregation: from individual scientists to a major science field as a whole. The only fundamental requirement is that the list of publications submitted to analysis is supposed to form, in a sense, a sufficiently large and statistically representative sample. There are, of course, no universally valid rules to decide how large a sufficiently large population is and what kind of criteria of representativeness should be fulfilled. Skilled statisticians believe that data reveal themselves if managed properly. It has, however, to be added that even more skilled statisticians consider that data don't disclose anything unless crunched to death. As a general rule of thumb, a sample size of 30 to 100 can be suggested as a minimum and samples preselected just on the basis of the characteristics being analyzed are to be avoided. During the last decade, a good deal of experience in building and analyzing scientometric indicators of national research performance has been cumulated at ISSRU (Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary). Most of the historical and methodological rudiments of using scientometric indicatory has been reviewed in our previous monograph 1. Subsequent research on this topic has been reported in the previous pieces of the "World flash" series". This volume contains a more detailed than ever compilation of scientometric indicators for the 1981-1985 period. Indicators of 96 countries in 114 major science fields and subfields are reported. Similarly to all of our earlier investigations, as main data source, the tapes of the Science Citation Index (SCI) database of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI, Philadelphia, PA, USA) have been used. An in-house devised software has been used for the computer processing of the SCI data. 4 Scientonietrics 16 (1989)
