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Scope, characteristics, and use of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s intramural research

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Abstract

This article presents for the first time a portrait of intramural research conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). We describe the nature, characteristics, and use of USDA research based on scientometric indicators using patent analysis and three bibliometric methods: publication analysis, citation analysis, and science mapping. Our analyses are intended to be purely descriptive in nature. They demonstrate that USDA maintains several core scientific competencies and its research is much broader than and reaches well beyond traditional agricultural sciences for which it is best known. We illustrate the current status, recent trends, and clear benchmarks for planning and assessing future USDA research across an array of scientific disciplines.

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Notes

  1. Co-citation analysis and science mapping was developed courtesy of SciVal Spotlight©, Elsevier B.V.

  2. In the current analysis we focus on publications counts and citations and limit our analysis of patents to patent count and the class of patents held by the USDA.

  3. This study focuses on publications from 2005 and citations received during the 2005–2008 period. Looking at the distribution of research output over 28 subject areas over a 10-year time frame we found very little change in the relative contributions of each subject area to overall output. We are confident that this period is very representative of USDA’s research output.

  4. Below we further develop the notion of core competencies.

  5. There are areas such as health professions and business management, where nonUSDA authors have cited USDA research but for which USDA authors have not designated as such.

  6. We assume the appropriate period of time for references to meaningful accumulate following any given year of publication is roughly 3 years. With the exception of seminal articles, the scientific value of an article takes a year or two to be discovered and then typically peaks at 3 years (Price 1980).

  7. Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Pharmaceutics has a very impressive CPP of 27.1 because the small number of articles published in 2005 (73) have 1,975 citations. Four of the top cited USDA authored articles within this subject area were published in Science and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, which tend to be highly-cited journals.

  8. While it was determined Scopus was the most complete source for bibliometric information for the life, physical and social sciences, social science information may be somewhat underrepresented. Scopus has updated its accounting of social science publications since this article was written.

  9. Clearly those decisions are beyond the scope of this paper; these indicators are presented merely as additional information to aid decision-making.

  10. A publication weighted CPP also was calculated reflecting production capacity. The citation weighted CPP is considered more meaningful because it reflects the value of the research.

  11. Index is normalized such that all subject areas are compared to agricultural and biological sciences.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express sincere appreciation to Matthew Treskon for his skilled assistance in processing the data. Without his expertise, this work would not have been possible.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Agricultural Library, Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Abraham Lincoln Building, 10301 Baltimore Avenue, Beltsville, MD, 20705-2351, USA

    Stanislaw Kosecki

  2. National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 800 Ninth St., S.W., Washington, DC, 20024, USA

    Robbin Shoemaker & Charlotte Kirk Baer

Authors
  1. Stanislaw Kosecki
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  2. Robbin Shoemaker
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  3. Charlotte Kirk Baer
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Robbin Shoemaker.

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The views expressed here are the authors' and do not necessarily represent the policies or views of the United States Department of Agriculture.

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Kosecki, S., Shoemaker, R. & Baer, C.K. Scope, characteristics, and use of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s intramural research. Scientometrics 88, 707–728 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0359-0

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