Forty years of computers & chemical engineering: A bibliometric analysis

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compchemeng.2020.106978Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Comprehensive bibliometric study to celebrate forty years’ contribution of computers & chemical engineering (CCE).

  • Identification of the leading topics, authors, institutions, and countries using WoS database.

  • Analysis of the publications of CCE with bibliometric indicators.

  • Mapping of the publications by using the VOS viewer software.

Abstract

Computers & Chemical Engineering (CCE) is one of the premier international journals in the field of chemical engineering. CCE published its first issue in 1977 and completed forty years in 2016. More than four decades of continuous and successful journey influenced us to celebrate its contribution through a comprehensive bibliometric study. Using the Web of Science Core Collection database we depict trends of the journal in terms of papers, topics, authors, institutions, and countries. Networks visualization of co-citation of journals and authors, bibliographic coupling institutions and countries, and co-occurrence of author keywords are prepared using the visualization of similarities (VOS) viewer software. The present analysis explores publication and citation patterns of the journal. Professor Ignacio E. Grossmann, Carnegie Mellon University, and USA respectively appear as the most productive and influential author, institution, and country in CCE publications. Optimization based research topics received most attention in CCE publications.

Introduction

The journal of Computers & Chemical Engineering (CCE) was established in 1977. The primary aim of this journal is to publish new findings in the application of computing and systems technology to chemical engineering problems. The journal's emphasis is put on new findings within various major areas, including: modeling, mathematical programming, cyber infrastructure, intelligent systems, process dynamics and control, abnormal events management, plant operations, enterprise-wide management and domain applications. It welcomes different types of research papers to cover different aspects including new applications of established methods, comparisons of methodologies, demonstrations of state-of-the-art industrial applications and noteworthy improvements in computation for training and education. CCE also welcomes general research papers on emerging new issues and topics. CCE publishes full-length articles, reviews, short notes and letters to the editor. Richard R. Hughes was the founding editor-in-chief of the journal along with Charles H. Ware, who acted as the editor of the special feature algorithms and programs. Richard R. Hughes edited CCE for 11 years until his death. In the inaugural editorial, Prof. Richard R. Hughes described the intention of the journal. The journal was created to provide the platform for new developments in the application of computers to chemical engineering problems. E.N. Pistikopoulos of Texas A&M University is currently working as the editor-in-chief and the editorial board is completed by four editors: J.H. Lee of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, A.B.P. Póvoa of Instituto Superior Técnico, V. Venkatasubramanian of Columbia University, and F. You of Cornell University and one associate editor: A. Mitsos of RWTH Aachen University. From the very beginning, the outstanding contributions and dedication of its editors have made this journal a success. The journal is now indexed in all well-established databases including Science Citation Index (SCI), Scopus, Current Contents, Engineering Index. According to Scopus, CCE has a CiteScore 3.98 in 2018. As per Journal Citation Reports from Clarivate Analytics the journal has an impact factor 3.334 and 5-year impact factor 3.373 in 2018. The Eigenfactor® and Article influence of CCE in 2018 are 0.011 and 0.609, respectively. In 2018, the journal recorded a total of 1129 submissions and 318 papers were accepted for publication. During last five year the journal has consistently shown an acceptance rate around one third of submissions, which proves its efficiency in editorial processes.

In 2018, CCE completed its forty two years’ journey. This study aims to examine the performance of the journal during those years. More specifically, its aim is to discover the consequence, productivity and influence of CCE in new research findings in the application of computers to chemical engineering problems. A general bibliometric study is used to classify statistical information of its publications and then to analyze its performance. Bibliometric studies use a procedure to measure the quality of scientific information using different qualitative as well as quantitative indexes. Library and information sciences provide the basic concepts of bibliometric study. Ideas from computer science and statistics have helped to advance its methodological and data processing procedures. This type of study is useful in surveys, reviews and big data analysis. It is commonly used to analyze influence of a topic in literature, contribution of a journal in a particular discipline, tribute to legends, contribution of an institution and a country. For instances; Bornmann et al. (2015) use bibliometric study to measure contributions of different countries; Linton (2004) uses this type of study to quantify contributions of universities; and Merigó et al. (2018) use the study to measure contributions of journals. Bibliometric studies are also common to use in the analysis of a topic based research works. Merigó et al., (2019b) and Laengle et al. (2018a) presented a bibliometric analysis to measure performances of universities on Production & Operations Management (POM) and Operations Research and Management Science (OR-MS) respectively. Using a bibliometric study, Kazemi et al. (2018) analyzed research publications on reverse logistics and closed-loop supply chain published in the International Journal of Production Research. Examples of some notable topics based bibliometric studies are: natural resource (Zhong et al., 2016), innovation (Merigó et al., 2016), fuzzy research (Blanco-Mesa et al., 2017), sustainability (Franceschini et al., 2016), etc. In early years, citation analysis was the main reputed tool to identify influential journals in a particular discipline. Generally, scientific journals have some explicit objectives, aims and scopes. Journals publish research works to fulfill their aims which in turn helps to enhance scientific understanding and innovations. Journals oftentimes modify their aims and scopes due to the ever changing scientific environment. Occasionally, it is useful to reassess performance of a journal during its journey. Bibliometric study can help to re-examine a journal's performance. The trends to revisit journals’ performance in their important anniversaries have started more than three decades ago. In 1986, Hech and Bremser (1986) demonstrated sixty years’ publication details of the journal The Accounting Review and analyzed its performance. Later in 2008, Weiss and Qiu (2008) investigated the publication outline of The Journal of Risk and Insurance to celebrate its platinum jubilee. There are several examples from almost all well-established publishers which used bibliometric studies to reassess performance of their journals during their significant anniversaries (Please see Table 1).

Table 1 illustrates journals from six well-established publishers including Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Emerald, Taylor & Francis and World Scientific which analyzed their publications during their important anniversaries. Four journals in Table 1 (Information Sciences, Transportation Research Part A, Quality & Quantity, European Journal of Marketing) celebrate their half century through bibliometric studies. Four well-established journals from Elsevier analyze their journey of four decades. During the last decade this type of studies have increased a lot due to easily accessible data from sources like Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar. Zhang et al. (2019) used different text mining techniques to analyze all CCE publications for the period of 1977 to 2017. The present article differs from Zhang et al. (2019) in many aspects. Using computing technology, Zhang et al. (2019) presented a topic analysis of the published articles in CCE while the present article uses the bibliometric methods to explore exclusively publication pattern, citation structure, most cited articles, leading authors, institutions and countries. Moreover, the present article presents the network visualizations of the bibliographic coupling among countries and institutions, co-citation among the journals & authors, and co-occurrence of keywords of all the CCE publications.

The purpose of the present bibliometric study is to celebrate the four decades of CCE and analyze all articles published in this journal from 1977 to 2018. Its aims are to reveal the most influential and contributing authors, universities and countries in CCE publications. The study intends to analyze publication and citation details, highly cited articles, and collaborations among the authors, institutions and countries. Moreover, it divulges analysis of bibliographic coupling (Kessler, 1963) among the countries and institutions, co-citation (Small, 1973) of journals & authors, and co-occurrence of keywords in the CCE publications. More specifically, this work intends to answer the following questions. During the journey since 1977, what is the publication and citation pattern of CCE? Which publications and issues have received high attention? Which authors, institutions and countries contribute the most? Which authors, universities, and countries receive the highest number of citations in the publications of CCE? Which journals have close links with CCE? In the published research in CCE, which universities and countries are involved in collaborative works? Which keywords are most often used in the publications? The aim of this study is not only to find answers to the above questions but also celebrate the journal's achievements. The study commemorates the contribution of the editors, authors, institutions, and countries during the forty years journey of the journal. It also provides entire information of the publications of the journal, which will be helpful to the young researchers for their future research planning. Moreover, it will be helpful to the editors of the journal to assess those topics which have the most potential and which, in turn, may help to decide future strategies of the journal.

Remaining parts of the paper are arranged as follows. The second section discusses the method of the study. Section 3 demonstrates details of publication pattern, citation structure, and most often cited articles, leading authors, institutions and countries of CCE. Section 4 presents a discussion with the network visualizations of the bibliographic coupling among countries and institutions, co-citation among the journals & authors, and co-occurrence of keywords. Final section summarizes the key conclusions of the work.

Section snippets

Methods

Data collection is an important part of a bibliometric study. Details of each CCE publication from 1977 to 2018 are accessed from the Web of Science (WoS) core collection database. Presently, there are several databases of scientific publications including Scopus, Google Scholar and WoS. In this study, we use the WoS core collection database and Scopus due to their reliability and easily accessible citation data. WoS is a modified form of the first ever scientific publication and citation

Results

CCE started its journey in 1977 with the 100 pages inaugural issue. The inaugural issue consisted of seven original articles, two short communications and one review article. The opening volume of CCE had three issues. Each year starting from 1978 up to 1982, i.e., from the 2nd to the 6th volume, it published four issues in each volume. From the 7th volume (1983) to the 11th volume (1987), it published six issues per year. From the 12th volume (1988) to the 27th volume (2003) the journal

Mapping CCE related information with VOS viewer software

This section presents graphical visualizations of co-citation of journals and authors, co-occurrence of keywords, and bibliographic coupling of institutions using the VOS viewer software. The VOS viewer software forms network visualization based on weight and link strength. The size of a node depends on its weight. The link strength of a node determines its connective edges with other nodes. Let us first concentrate on the co-citation of journals with CCE. Co-citation of journals occurs when

Conclusions

CCE began its journey in 1977 and has already completed its forty eventful years. During this amazing journey, it has published a number of excellent research findings and established its high reputation in the field of chemical engineering. In 2017, this SCI indexed journal had an impact factor of 3.113. This bibliomeric retrospective study has analyzed CCE publications in celebration of its four very successful decades. The study has collected data from the WoS and summarized them using

Acknowledgment

The authors are grateful to the editor-in-chief and the anonymous referees for their useful suggestions to enhance the quality of the paper. The first author is always grateful to Shri Bibhas Chandra Das for giving endless support and encouragement.

Declaration of Competing Interest

There is no conflict of interest with the subject matter or research presented in the manuscript.

References (42)

  • N.M. Modak et al.

    Fifty years of Transportation Research journals: a bibliometric overview

    Transportation Research Part A

    (2019)
  • M. Morari et al.

    Model predictive control: past, present and future

    Comput Chem Eng

    (1999)
  • N. Takama et al.

    Optimal water allocation in a petroleum refinery

    Comput Chem Eng

    (1980)
  • V. Venkatasubramanian et al.

    A review of process fault detection and diagnosis: part I: quantitative model-based methods

    Comput Chem Eng

    (2003)
  • D. Yue et al.

    Biomass-to-bioenergy and biofuel supply chain optimization: overview, key issues and challenges

    Comput Chem Eng

    (2014)
  • T. Zhang et al.

    Forty years of Computers and Chemical Engineering: analysis of the field via text mining techniques

    Comput Chem Eng

    (2019)
  • S. Zhong et al.

    A bibliometric review on natural resource accounting during 1995–2014

    J Clean Prod

    (2016)
  • W. Biemans et al.

    Twenty years of the Journal of Product Innovation Management: history, Participants and Knowledge Stocks and Flows

    Journal of Product Innovation Management

    (2007)
  • F. Blanco-Mesa et al.

    Fuzzy decision making: a bibliometric-based review

    Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems

    (2017)
  • L. Bornmann et al.

    BRICS countries and scientific excellence: a bibliometric analysis of most frequently cited papers

    J Assoc Inf Sci Technol

    (2015)
  • J.M. Douglas

    Conceptual Design of Chemical Processes (Vol. 1110)

    (1988)
  • Cited by (18)

    • Hydrogen electrolyser for sustainable energy production: A bibliometric analysis and future directions

      2023, International Journal of Hydrogen Energy
      Citation Excerpt :

      Bibliometric has been extensively employed in the past for hotspot research [54], subjects [55], co-authorship analysis [52], co-citation analysis, countries that publish global research output, and the growth of entire subject fields. Numerous bibliographic indicators have been conducted to analyse bibliographic data, including the cumulative amount of literature and citations [56,57], the h-index [58], citations per paper [59], and citation thresholds [60], and several other related indicators. This study analysed hydrogen electrolyser articles from 2012 to 2022 by selecting the top-cited articles based on the number of citations per paper.

    • Process intensification in biofuels production

      2022, Biofuels and Biorefining: Volume 2: Intensification Processes and Biorefineries
    • Ten years of Arabian Journal of Chemistry: A bibliometric analysis

      2020, Arabian Journal of Chemistry
      Citation Excerpt :

      The authors also celebrated their decades of contributions. For example, the golden jubilee of the transportation research journal (Modaka et al., 2019), the forty years anniversary of computers & chemical engineering (Modak et al., 2020), the publication growth of safety science journal (Merigóa et al., 2019), the golden jubilee of quality & quantity journal (Mastur et al., 2019), the 30 years anniversary of the computer integrated manufacturing journal (Laengle et al., 2018a,b) and the 25 years of new emerging trends in group decision and negotiation journal (Laengle et al., 2018a,b). Interestingly in all of the stated reports the authors employed the Web of Science (WOS) for data retrieval.

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text