Chad Bonar

CE Article Summary

 1/22/14

            When Civil Engineers write it is usually in short specific sentences, and they communicate to each other through bibliographies and citations. Engineers make everything more complicated but it is really professional. I learned from the article that Civil Engineers write a lot of bibliographies and that 96.2%, the U.S. being at the top of thirty countries with 27%, of them are in the English language. The bibliographies are measured in quantitative and qualitative manners the results of the measure have grown drastically. Since 1997 they have almost tripled. Most of the same time period bibliographic articles have the same key words in them. Majority of Universities and Research centers use indicators such as number of articles and citations, impact factors, and number of authors per article to measure their research activity.  The main reason they do this is because research centers study articles and reviews.

            When doing this research they have to use a lot of different methods and materials such as the WOS (Web of Science) to do their research and articles. The WOS is what rates the impact factor and separates all of it by category and key words. All relevant information while doing analyses on the articles are sent to a bibliographic manager called EndNote for posterior treatment. What happens when they send it to EndNote? To answer that question, they separate everything by editor, title, author, addresses, source, times cited, keywords, language, and Web of Science Category. So they could do this work more smoothly they created an application that processed and identified the participating centers and where the center are located. With using this application there were 6638 that didn’t have and address to go with it, which is only 6.2% of the articles, so I would say the application helped them out a lot to get everything organized.  What does the application do other than check what country the article is from? I can answer that question for you. The application counts how many research centers, authors participated in article, and the citations for the article; after all of this it assigns corresponding impact factors for each of the articles, and so on.

            To measure the results of everything, they use bibliometric methods to measure scientific and engineering progress that measures them in respect to many disciplines of science. They also use these bibliometric methods as a common research instrument for systematic analysis. “Through this bibliometric analysis the following subjects have been analyzed: the evolution of the research activity in the “Engineering, Civil” category; the evolution of the most important research topics; the research activity carried out by the most productive countries and research centers; and the internationalization and impact of the journals in this category.”

            The way Civil Engineers publicize has been evolving a lot, even up to this day. In the year 2011 there were 11,836 publications almost tripling the amount in 1997. This growth is superior and pretty much the same for all the related categories of Engineering ranging anywhere from two to three times more publications in 2011 than in 1997. From 1997 to 2011 a lot of things have grown not all drastically but still grown but the percentage of articles with international collaboration has grown a lot from 11% to 21% in the 14 year span of time. The number of research center involved in each article on the other hand has only grown from 1.5 to 1.8 in the 14 years.

            Engineering and science progress has been growing drastically since the 90’s and it doesn’t look like it is going to stop any time soon. The scientist keep discovering more and more about the world and technology around us that I don’t think we will ever stop evolving. Sooner or later we are going to have hoover cars floating around everywhere and I can’t wait to see what evolution has in store for us.

Cañas-Guerrero, Ignacio, Fernando R. Mazarrón, Ana Pou-Merina, Cruz Calleja-
            Perucho, and María F. Suarez - Tejero. "Engineering Structures.
            "Analysis of Research Activity in the Field “Engineering, Civil” 
            through Bibliometric Methods" 56 (2013): 2273-286. Web.