Scientific and technical knowledge can be tacit (kept as personal knowledge or skills), or it can be codified in the form of publications, patents or blueprints. The measurement of a country’s knowledge base is challenging, but bibliometrics is one means by which codified knowledge can be analysed.
Bibliometrics is the quantitative study of research publications. It can be used to gain an overall measure of a country’s research output (number of publications)1, to gain an overview of the subject distribution of a country’s research effort, to estimate the impact of a country’s publications by counting the citations to them, and to examine collaborative activity both within a country and internationally. A particular strength of the bibliometric approach is that it is possible to benchmark results against international findings. An earlier bibliometric study of New Zealand research was conducted by Liu (A bibliometric profile of the New Zealand science system, 2001). This work focussed on New Zealand-authored publications for the years 1986 and 1996, examining how New Zealand’s research output had changed in the 10 year period. The current study extends the analysis of Liu (2001), focussing on New Zealand’s research publications for the years 1997-2001.
This report uses the Thomson-ISI New Zealand National Citation Report database, 1997-2001. This database contains entries for research publications published in the 5 year period 1997-2001, which have at least one New Zealand author address. Publications from 8730 internationally distributed journals in the fields of science, engineering, social science, arts, and humanities are indexed in this database. A total of 23,757 New Zealand-authored publications are contained within the database, representing many (although by no means all) of New Zealand-authored academic journal publications for 1997-2001.
Purpose
The aim of this report is to show the size, impact and degree of collaboration in New Zealand’s knowledge production. This is achieved by:
• determining the number of New Zealand papers in various research fields
• determining the impact of New Zealand research papers through analysis of citations
• investigating the contribution of different sectors (tertiary, CRI, government, local government, private sector and health) to New Zealand’s research output and impact
• investigating patterns of inter-sectoral and international collaboration;
• examining changes in New Zealand’s research output, impact and collaboration over time, and
• wherever possible, benchmarking results against international findings.