Elsevier

Engineering Structures

Volume 56, November 2013, Pages 2273-2286
Engineering Structures

Analysis of research activity in the field “Engineering, Civil” through bibliometric methods

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engstruct.2013.08.038Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Characterize research activity in the field of “Engineering, Civil” in the last 15 years.

  • Study focus on “Engineering, Civil” category from 1997 to 2011 from the Web of Science.

  • Analyse all the articles and reviews through bibliometric analysis.

  • Establish a ranking of leading countries and research centres in this field.

  • Analyse the evolution of the most important research topics.

Abstract

The present study analyzes the evolution of research activity carried out in the field of civil engineering. With this end in mind, all of the articles published in the category “Engineering, Civil” from the Web of Science from 1997 to 2011 have been analyzed using bibliometric methods. For each paper (107,623 papers, 96.2% in English) quantitative and qualitative parameters (number of weighted papers, impact factor, number of citations, h-index, international collaborations, number of authors, and research centers) were analyzed. With these indicators, rankings of the outstanding countries and research centers have been established including an analysis of evolution in said rankings over the years. The study is complemented by an analysis of the main research topics (through keywords) and by an analysis of the journals in the category. The results show great growth in research activity—the number of articles and average impact factor has tripled since 1997. Eighty-seven percent of scientific production takes place in thirty countries. The countries of the G8 stand out especially (except for Russia). The USA is the country with the highest production level (at 27% of the total and with 39 of the 100 most productive research centers). The spectacular increase in production and impact of China threatens the future domination of the USA. The increase in collaboration at all levels demonstrates greater complexity and structure of research. In the research carried out, more than 134,000 different keywords have been identified, although only 1% appear in more than 100 articles. The rapid increase in the use of certain keywords and the decrease of others allows us to identify changes in research topics. In the majority of journals, there exists a clear relationship between impact factor and the level of internationalization and diffusion of said journals.

Introduction

The majority of universities and research centers use indicators to measure their research activity (number of articles and citations, number of authors per article, impact factor, etc.) and use these indicators for activities such as recruitment, promotion of researchers, and so on.

The Journal Citations Report (JCR) allows the indexing of specialist journals, which helps researchers and centers to locate the information regarding a subject of interest. Moreover, the journals indexed in the JCR increase the diffusion of published articles, thus obtaining more citations for them with the corresponding increase of impact factor and international diffusion.

From the growth of specialist journals in the last few years, we can see the necessity for new systems to facilitate the organization of information. There are few tools that can be used by researchers and research centers that allow them to quantify the quality and impact of the research, comparing it in the adequate context. This complicates the analysis of productivity. Thanks to bibliometric study, we will know which are the principal journals, where they are published, and the impact and quality achieved by the publications of the universities/research centers, all of which is very useful to establish new paths for collaboration between poorer facilities and those that are more prolific and of higher quality [1].

The study of the articles and reviews that scientific journals publish must be taken into account by research centers. Bibliometric analysis is a very useful tool for the design of new lines of work [1]. Despite the valuable information that bibliometric analysis can offer, we know of no previous study that analyzes the field of civil engineering.

The results of the research focused on the civil engineering field are globally coordinated thanks to the database of the Web of Science (WoS). According to WoS, the “Engineering, Civil” category includes resources on the planning, design, construction, and maintenance of fixed structures and ground facilities for industry, occupancy, transportation, use, and control of water and harbor facilities. Resources also may cover the sub-fields of structural engineering, geotechnics, earthquake engineering, ocean engineering, water resources and supply, marine engineering, transportation engineering, and municipal engineering.

The main objective of this study is to offer a global vision of the evolution of research activity in the field of civil engineering. This can be described more concretely as the evolution of all the articles published in the last fifteen years with available impact factor (period 1997–2011). Reference levels of qualitative and quantitative indicators have been established and used to form rankings of the most relevant countries and research centers. The evolution of the principal research topics has been studied. The internationalization and diffusion of the journals has also been determined.

The results of the study allow for the comparison of the growth of research carried out in this field with similar fields, the identification of research topics with the highest growth in the last years (as well as those in which interest has waned), and the establishment of reference values to evaluate the merits of researchers and research centers with respect to their real context. The study gives countries and research centers information to evaluate the suitability of investments and strategies carried out in the last few years; it also determines the diffusion and internationalization of the journals.

Section snippets

Materials and methods

As previously indicated, the analysis is based on the data gathered from the Web of Science. The WOS is the indexed database most widely used in this kind of work [2], [3], [4], [5], [6].

As a starting point, all the articles and reviews published during the period 1997–2011 under the category “Engineering, Civil” of the WoS were selected (this is the period for which information about impact factor of the Journal Citations Reports exists). Documents such as mail, publishing material, or

Results

Bibliometric methods have been used to measure scientific progress in many disciplines of science and engineering, and are a common research instrument for systematic analysis [8]. Through this bibliometric analysis the following subjects have been analyzed: the evolution of the research activity in the “Engineering, Civil” category; the evolution of the most important research topics; the research activity carried out by the most productive countries and research centers; and the

Conclusions

This article applies bibliometric methods to study the “Engineering, Civil” category from the Web of Science Database, analyzing the situation and evolution of research in this field.

The category “Engineering, Civil” has experienced an increase in the number of articles published since 1997 and has indeed almost tripled (surpassing 11,800 articles). The growth of the impact of research is a consequence of the increase in the number of articles and of journals, going from an average IF of 0.44

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