The growth of biophysical literature

Abstract

The enormous growth of biophysical literature has created great difficulties in tracking out the significant literature of the subject. To cope with this unprecedented growth of literature, a new bibliometric technique has been applied to rank periodicals in the field based on 4228 citation data collected from the bibliographic data base published in the source journal namely,Annual Review of Biophysics. This list is expected to reflect the impact of literature on the advancement of knowledge in the field of biophysics. A striking feature of the ranking list is the high positions occupied by multidisciplinary science journals and biochemical journals as compared to journals exclusively and specifically devoted to biophysics or any particular aspects of it. Other remarkable findings are the wide scatter of biophysics literature; dominance of the USA journals and status attained by English as the preferred medium of communications of the working biophysicists. The data are also analysed according to subject categorization of the ranked periodicals. The results of the present study have been discussed in relation to Bradford's Law of Scattering and validity of the extension of the law, suggested earlier, has been well established. It is expected that the present ranking list will enable the working biophysicists to select journals from the viewpoint of their significance to the active areas of present-day biophysical research.