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Disciplinary structures in Nature, Science and PNAS: journal and country levels

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Abstract

This paper analyzes, using Web of Science publications and two time periods (2004–2006 and 2014–2016), the disciplinary structures in the three prestigious journals Nature, Science and PNAS, compared with two baselines: Non-NSP_Multi (multidisciplinary publications that have other source journals than Nature, Science and PNAS), and Non-Multi (publications assigned to other categories than Multidisciplinary). We analyze the profiles at two levels, journal and country. The results for the journal level show that for Nature and Science, the publications are considerably less concentrated to certain disciplines compared to PNAS. Biology is the dominant discipline for all the three journals. Nature and Science have similar publication shares in Medicine, Geosciences, Physics, Space science, and Chemistry. The publications of PNAS are highly concentrated to two disciplines: Biology and Medicine. Compared with Non-NSP_Multi and Non-Multi, the shares of Biology in NSP journals are higher, whereas the share of Medicine is lower. At the country level, 14 countries are included, among them the five BRICS countries. With respect to the NSP journals, the emphasis disciplines (in terms of world share of publications) of most countries other than USA are the disciplines in which USA has its weakest performance. The disciplinary structures of USA and of most of the other studied countries therefore tend to be different. Regarding Non-NSP_Multi and Non-Multi, the shapes of the disciplinary structures of the 14 countries can be roughly grouped into three groups, while there are more types of shapes for the countries in the NSP journals. For all five units of analysis, the discipline structures of most countries generally change only slightly between different time periods. The structures of some BRICS countries, however, change to a relatively large extent.

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Notes

  1. http://www.nature.com/nature/about/.

  2. http://www.sciencemag.org/about/mission-and-scope?_ga=2.115635599.881174117.1524540131-1359036387.1524540131.

  3. http://www.pnas.org/page/authors/purpose-scope.

  4. For editorial process/policy, publication frequency, etc., we refer the reader to the web sites of the three journals.

  5. Bibmet does not include the ESI scheme.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Ronald Rousseau for valuable comments. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for suggestions that helped us to improve the paper considerably. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. L1422060).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Jielan Ding, Per Ahlgren, Liying Yang & Ting Yue

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 19A Yuquan Road, Beijing, 100049, China

    Jielan Ding & Ting Yue

  3. School of Education and Communication in Engineering Sciences (ECE), KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, 10044, Sweden

    Per Ahlgren

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  1. Jielan Ding
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Correspondence to Liying Yang.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14.

Table 6 Number of publications in Nature, Science and PNAS by discipline and time period
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Table 7 Number of publications in Non-NSP_Multi and Non-Multi by discipline and time period
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Table 8 Number of publication fractions and ranks of the 14 countries in the time period 2004-2006 by unit of analysis/NSP
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Table 9 Similarity values (cosine measure) between the 14 countries in Nature
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Table 10 Similarity values (cosine measure) between the 14 countries in Science
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Table 11 Similarity values (cosine measure) between the 14 countries in PNAS
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Table 12 Similarity values (cosine measure) between the 14 countries in Non-NSP_Multi
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Table 13 Similarity values (cosine measure) between the 14 countries in Non-Multi
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Table 14 Differences within countries between NSP journals and the two baselines with respect to world share of publications. Only main disciplines considered (cf. last paragraph of Sect. 3.2). Publication period = 2014–2016
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Ding, J., Ahlgren, P., Yang, L. et al. Disciplinary structures in Nature, Science and PNAS: journal and country levels. Scientometrics 116, 1817–1852 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2812-9

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