Analysing Publishing Trends in Information and Communication Technology Literature Output Using Scopus Database: a scientometrics analysis

The study discussed in this article attempts to trace the research trends in information and communication technology (ICT) in top 10 countries during 1999–2018, as reflected by scholarly publications index in the Scopus database. During the mentioned time period, total 18,382 research papers were published. Of these, maximum 1622 (8.82%) records were published in 2017. The annual growth (–11.07 to 51.30) and the compound annual growth (–0.01 to 0.23) have shown a fluctuating trend. However, a considerable number of records (7345) were published in the field of computer science while 52.35% of the records (9623) were journal article-type publications. ‘Information and communication technology’ was the most significant keyword used in 4997 records while the average (145.3) publications were contributed by top 10 organizations in which Japan National Institute of Information and Communications Technology was the most productive organization with 256 records. The maximum contributing country was the United States, standing for 22% of the total publications produced. Toyoshima, M. is the most prolific author with 53 publications on a particular topic, that is, ICT. The overall relative growth has shown a decreasing trend (0.92 to 0.09) while during the period of study, the doubling time has shown an increasing trend (0.75 to 7.54). Out of the total 18,382 records, total 209,919 citations were recorded in which the maximum citations (20,548) were found in 2010. Out of the total 55,913 research papers, maximum (5058) records were contributed by two authors while the least number of publications (2186) came from four authors. The mean value of the degree of collaborations was 0.92 and the overall degree of collaboration has exhibited an increasing trend during the period of study. The average author’s collaboration coefficient and modified collaboration coefficient was recorded to be 0.69 while collaborative index was recorded at 4.21. However, Lotka’s law of authors’ productivity shows, the authors observed are somehow unlike from the numbers of authors expected during the period of study.