25 years at Knowledge-Based Systems: A bibliometric analysis

Abstract

In commemoration of the Anniversary 25th of KnoSys we present a bibliometric analysis of the scientific content of the journal during the period 1991–2014. This analysis shows the conceptual evolution of the journal and some of its performance bibliometric indicators based on citations, as the evolution of its impact factor, its h-index, and its most cited authors/documents.

Introduction

Bibliometrics is an important tool for assessing and analyzing the academic research output. It contributes to the progress of science in many different ways [1]: allowing assessing progress made, identifying the most reliable sources of scientific publication, laying the academic foundation for the evaluation of new developments, identifying major scientific actors, developing bibliometric indixes to assess academic output, etc.

Bibliometrics provides objective criteria to assess the research developed by researchers, being increasingly valued as a tool for measuring scholarly quality and productivity [2]. It is an important approach to assess and analyze the research developed by different actors: countries, universities, research centers, research groups, journals and, in general, scientists [1], [3].

In bibliometrics, there are two main methods for exploring a research field: performance analysis and science mapping [4], [5]. While performance analysis aims to evaluate the citation impact of the scientific production of different scientific actors, science mapping aims to display the conceptual, social or intellectual structure of scientific research and its evolution and dynamical aspects.

The main aim of this paper is to carry out a thorough bibliometric analysis of the research conducted by the journal Knowledge-Based Systems (KnoSys) from 1991 to 2014. On the one hand, a performance bibliometric analysis on KnoSys is carried out by showing any data on some important performance indicators, such as, published documents, received citations, impact factor (IF) of journal [6], h-index of journal [7], [8], most cited papers [9], [3], most cited authors, and data on geographic distribution of publications. On the other hand, using SciMAT¹ [10], a science mapping analysis [11] based on co-word networks is performed in order to discover the most important research themes dealt in the journal and its conceptual evolution across the period of time 1991–2014. This science mapping analysis is based in the approach presented in [12], and it allows us to enrich the analysis with bibliometric performance indicators in order to highlight those themes that have received more attention by the research community.

This article is organized as follows: Section 2 introduces the dataset. In Section 3, the performance bibliometric analysis is carried out. In Section 4 the science mapping analysis of KnoSys is presented. Finally, some conclusions are drawn in Section 5.