Development of the Spanish scientific landscape: ISI Web of Science 1990-2005

• Published in: El profesional de la informacion Vol. 17; no. 1; pp. 22 - 37
• Main Authors: Vargas-Quesada, Benjamin, de Moya-Anegon, Felix, Chinchilla-Rodriguez, Zaida, Corera-Alvarez, Elena, Guerrero-Bote, Vicente
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: 01.01.2008
• Subjects: Bibliometrics; Scholarly publishing; Spain; Subject analysis
• ISSN: 1386-6710
• DOI: 10.3145/epi.2008.ene.03

This longitudinal study of the development of Spain's ISI scientific domain examines three key time periods: 1990-1995, 1996-2000 and 2001-2005, with the goal of describing the basic structure and backbone of Spanish research, as well as studying its development over time. To this end, ISI categories are used as units of analysis, co-citation as units of measure, and pruning algorithms to simplify the relationship between categories in the visualizations. The results show that from the macrostructure point of view, biomedicine and materials science research provide the basic nucleus at first. Over the years this nucleus is consolidated and expanded with agricultural and soil sciences research. From the microstructrue perspective, an increase is observed in the number of interdisciplinary categories, which occupy central positions, indicating increased interaction between disciplines that have traditionally been more important or visible and those on the periphery, or less well known. Adapted from the source document.