1. Overview

The study “Greek scientific Publications 1996-2010: bibliometric analysis of Greek publications in international scientific journals / Scopus” is part of a series of studies undertaken by EKT with an aim to record and analyze Greek scientific activity in the international landscape. The present study (the third in the series) relies on data from the Scopus international database. By presenting indicators between the two most established international databases (Web of Science: the previous study of EKT, and Scopus: this version), EKT aims to give a fuller picture of important indicators that characterize both the current state and the evolution of scientific production in the country and expands the number of Greek publications and scientific fields covered. The study examines the period 1996-2010 by following the same methodological approach to calculating indicators used in previous studies.

Bibliometric indicators provide significant information and contribute to a measurable and objective picture of the Research & Development systems. They are commonly used measures of research activity and performance in institutions, research centers, research groups or individual researchers. Moreover, they provide information about research activity across scientific fields, point to the emergence of new subject areas and map research networks created for the achievement of common scientific goals.

Bibliometric indicators are a valuable tool, part of a broader system of indicators for the evaluation of research activity. It is a fact that an amount of published articles point to certain limitations of bibliometric analyses (e.g. differences in publications practices and citations across scientific fields such as for example the differences observed between the fields of medicine and humanities). However, these limitations can be overcome when bibliometric indicators are interpreted in the right contextual framework, taking into account additional data and statistics but also qualitative research outcomes.

The National Documentation Center (EKT) has applied a robust methodological approach and validation techniques in bibliometrics. It has also developed software tools which enabled the processing of data collected and the calculation of bibliometric indicators (data cleaning, processing and normalisation, distribution of publications across scientific fields and subfields, graphic representation).

The indicators present the number and share (%) of publications, percentage (%) of cited publications, number and share (%) of citations, citation impact and field normalised citation score.

The following paragraphs summarise findings regarding the total output and performance of Greek publications, the main institution categories in which scientific activity is distributed, scientific fields with the greatest share of publications, scientific collaborations etc. Readers may find detailed information about data and figures throughout the chapters and read about the study’s methodological approach in Annex I.