The Study of Bibliometrics on Electronic Resources Data - A Case Study of Cancer Research

To evaluate development and growth of modern civilization, quantifying approaches such as mathematical and statistical methods have been adopted to not only describe academic development but also explore natures of Bibliometrics. One of the challenges of Bibliometrics is the integrity of literature search that also of relevance to the result of quantitative analysis. The case study adopted in this research was the journal list covered by Cancer Research of the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR). The database of PubMed was the sources of literature collection, in which we collected 608,790 articles from 172 journals published from 1945 to October 2015. By carrying out the three principles of Bibliometrics for verification, the result suggested the following: (1) In terms of literature growth, cancer researchrelated publications have exceeded one thousand publications annually since 1992, and showed a rising tendency. (2) The types of publications were dominated by journal articles (574,924 articles) followed by reviews (61,463 articles including systematic reviews). By considering the content and the type of research report, the major types were comparative study and non-U.S. government-supported research with 46,698 and 251,024 publications, respectively. (3) Most cancer research literature was written in collaboration with coauthors rather than by a single author. (4) According to Bradford's Law, the results can be divided into 4 groups, in which the 1: n: n²: n³ rations derived from Bradford's formula were applied and concluded that n equaled to 2.5. Finally, (5) by performing author productivity analysis based on Lotka's Law, we considered the numbers of first authors and all authors of an article, in which we substituted into Lotka's formula in- dependently. The result was in line with Bradford's Law given that the para- meters were modified as follows: f(x)=0.6387/x^1.975.