Scientific Reviews in Web of Science Core Collection Data Base

Abstract

Scientific reviews are a publications type, which is very important for the world scientific community. This article considers reviews positions in the world publication flow (within the database «Wed of Science Core Collection» (WoS CC) array) for six natural sciences research areas (physics, chemistry, mathematics, geology, biology, computer science) during the period 2010–2019 for the leading countries of the world and Russia. The article considers additionally this type documents citation specialties depending on the research area.

By means of the WoS CC database, bibliometric parameters of publication flows of scientific reviews for the six mentioned research natural sciences areas were determined: the number of records, it’s percentage in the total publication flow, the place of Russian reviews in the world flow, the average citation rate, the proportion of not cited records, the period of active citation. The dynamics of changes for these parameters over time (2010–2019) is considered.

The article establishes the following features of scientific reviews, as a specific publication type:

• the percentage of reviews in both the world and Russian information flow is relatively small, it significantly depends on the research area, but over time it increases for all research areas;
• the trends of changes for the Russian reviews flow over time and in all research areas, follows world trends;
• Russian reviews occupy places, in terms of quantity, from 6–9 to a place in the fifth ten in the world array of WoS CC documents (depending on the year and research area), but they show a large spread in average citation terms. Sometimes, Russian reviews average citation is approaching and even exceeds the world average citation for some years and some research areas (and sometimes significantly);
• the non-cited reviews publications share is significantly lower than even for articles (the most cited type of publications);
• the reviews active citation period reaches 9–10 years and is significantly longer than (from some publications opinion) for scientific publications in general.