Finding
The hypothesis of a decline has therefore to be rejected.
Paper
On the “scientometric decline” of British science. One additional graph in reply to Ben Martin
Abstract
With respect to the issue of whether the scientometric measurement of “the decline of British science” is an artifact of the specific database and underlying assumptions in methods, I argue that there are fewer analytical objections against measurement by usingSciSearch Online than against other methods (based on the “fixed journal set” and “fractional counting”). The measurement of “international co-authorship”, i.e. a network indicator, should not be confounded with measurement of performance of a single nation. The time series for the different subsets of UK-publications, which have been proposed, are given. None of the indicators can be shown to exhibit a trend (in contrast to a drift). The hypothesis of a decline has therefore to be rejected.
Authors
L. Leydesdorff
Journal
Scientometrics