In this paper attempt has been made to identify the uncited publications in ‘micro-electro mechanical systems (MEMS) literature which is one of the emerging field in electronics. The search term ‘MEMS’ was used for retrieving literatures from SCOPUS database. A total of 294573 records were identified in the field of MEMS during the period 1970-2013. Out of which, 85146 (28.90 %) records were uncited publications. The uncited paper ranges between 0.09 % and 0.72 %. It can be seen that from 1988 onwards uncitedness has been reduced below the global average and it persists till 2010. Almost 56 % of the uncited publications are from the conference proceedings. 44.56% of China publications in MEMS were uncited followed by India (31.44 %), Japan (24.40 %), and France (19.44 %). Majority of the uncited publications, are of collaborative authors besides the self-citations. Mostly more than four authors’ papers were uncited. Even top author papers were also uncited. The uncitedness may be due to non-awareness of those papers in the MEMS literature.

Keywords:    Uncitedness  citation analysis  bibliometrics study  MEMS literature  uncited publications  scientific output

Over the past three decades, citation analysis along with peer review has been increasingly used to judge and quantify the importance of scientists and scientific research. Citation analysis is also used as the mean behind journal impact factors. Indeed, the output from citation studies is often the only way that un-specialists in governments and funding bodies–or even those in different scientific disciplines–can judge the importance of a piece of scientific research. These studies focused on the scientific output and impact of the research output published during different periods.In the past, several authors have examined the issue of uncitedness of journals as well as the subject specific disciplines. The studies on uncitedness of journals—Journal of American Chemical Society1, Nature2; subject-specific disciplines—Library and information science3, physics, chemistry, biological sciences, geosciences, engineering and medicine4; index database–ISI5; country-wise5-6 are the few. However, till date no study has been examined the uncitedness of a particular field or domain indexed by SCI-E or SCOPUS database. Therefore, an attempt has been made to identify the uncitedness in the field of MEMS (micro-electro mechanical systems).

The term ‘micro-electro mechanical systems (MEMS)’ one of the emerging filed in electronics, has been first included in the project proposal submitted to DARPA in 1986. Since then it has good impact on global economy for incorporating this techniques in mico system-based devices as tiny integrated product or the combination of both mechanical and electrical components. Integrated circuit (IC) has been used to fabricate the devices using these techniques and it ranges from millimeters to micro-millimeters. The main aim is to reduce not only the size of the system but also to reduce significantly the energy and material requirements which results in cost/performance advantage. These devices are possible to be embedded in a small area.

The MEMS, a combination of silicon-based microelectronics and micromachining technology, is an interdisciplinary nature used in areas like design, engineering and manufacturing products. It utilises expertise from a wide and diverse range of technical areas including IC technology, IC fabrication technology, mechanical engineering, electrical and material engineering, chemistry and chemical engineering, fluid engineering, optics, instrumentation and packaging. It is used to develop very small devices called to be in nano-scale. Today, MEMS emerged as a field in the modern technological era because of its impact in computer technology, mechanical engineering, manufacturing, production, and medical instrumentation.

Garg & Kumar7 identified that 6231 (17.5%) out of 35,640 Indian scientist papers published during the period 2008-2013 remained uncited. Most of the uncited papers were published by State Agricultural Universities and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research. The highest proportion of uncited papers was in the area of agricultural sciences followed by multidisciplinary and mathematical sciences. The Evidence report of Thomson Reuters has shown that there is a decrease in the percentage of papers emanating from India which do not receive citations8. High share of uncited publications, which included those produced by top scientists, was repeatedly reported to exceed 10 % of the total papers produced.

Petr Heneberg9 analysed the uncitedness among two independent groups of highly visible mathematicians represented by field medalists, researchers in physiology or medicine represented by Nobel Prize laureates. Over 90 % of the uncited database records of highly visible scientists have been presented in progress reports, meeting abstracts, letters to the editor, discussion, personalia by errors of omission and commission of the Web of Science (WoS) database and of the citing documents. Only 0.9 and 0.3 %, of original articles and reviews were found to be uncited.Uncitable documents were responsible for up to 30% of the total citations to the top-tier journals, with the highest values found for medical science journals (New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and Lancet) and lower values found for the science, nature, and cellseries journals. Self-citations to some of the top-tiert journls reach values higher than the total citation counts accumulated by papers in most of the Web of Scienceindexed journals10. Ayanguasgil11 indicated that a perfect correlation between the times a paper is cited and peer recognition cannot be seen.

Some of the objectives of this study are:

  • Identify the uncited publications in the field of MEMS during the period of 1970-2013
  • Explore the growth rate of uncited publications
  • Find out the relative growth rate and doubling time of the uncited publications
  • Country-wise distribution of uncited publications in the field of MEMS
  • Identify the bibliographic form of publications those are uncited
  • Explore uncited publications of top authors cited

Based on the objectives, the following hypotheses were framed:

  • There exist considerable amount uncited publications exist in MEMS literature output.
  • There is a substantial amount of uncited publications from the countries that has contributed to MEMS literature.
  • The conference papers are the major contribution for the uncited literature.
  • There exist uncited among the top cited authors publications.
  • There is no significant difference in authorship pattern for uncited publications.

For this study, literature on MEMS was downloaded from online multidiscipline database SCOPUS, an international indexing and abstracting database using the search term ‘MEMS’. A total of 294573 records were identified in the field of MEMS worldwide for the period 1970-2013. Out of which, 85146 (28.90 %) records were identified as uncited publications.

The data have been classified by using Excel and the same been loaded into SPSS (statistical package for social sciences) for the purpose of statistical analysis. Statistical tools such as frequency distribution and percentage analysis and bibliometric techniques such as relative growth rate, doubling time, citation analysis were used.

Out of 2,94,573 publications, 85146 (28.90 %) of MEMS literature were uncited during the study period of 1970-2013 whereas 2,09,427 (71.10 %) of articles were cited at least once including self-citations (Table 1).

Year-wise distributions of uncited publications were identified from the collected data. The ratio of growth has been calculated between the cited and uncited publications. The year-wise distribution (Table 2) contains total publications, cited publications, uncited publications, percentage of uncited, cumulative uncited, percentage of cumulative uncited publications, ratio, R&G, uncited/cited publication.

Table 1. Total publications

It is seen from Table 2 that the uncited publications are in the rising side and every year it is getting increased. In 2013, approx. 15 % of the publications were uncited. Figures 1-3 show the raising trend of uncited publications.To visualise clearly, a two way trend line has been drawn (downward line indicates linear trend and arrow head line) and also a global uncited average has been indicated in doted. The uncited papers range between 0.09 and 0.72. The importance of cited has been realised from the beginning of 1970 onwards. It can be seen that from 1988 onwards uncitedness has been reduced below the global average and it persists till 2010. The piling of uncited literature is to be dealt with carefully and uncited articles are to be projected or brought to the attention of researchers.

The study has further been extended to block year-wise to identify the block period in which the raise of uncitedness were more. The entire study period has been divided in eleven-years block. Table 3 shows that between the block years 2003-2013, 73.31 % (62419) publications are uncited which gives an alarm to the researchers that they could not cite or refer the required papers for their research. The Ratio of Growth Rate in the block year 2003-2013 is 7.23% which is in the higher side.

The relative growth rate (RGR) and doubling time (Dt) have been calculated and are shown in Table 4, Figs 4 & 5. The RGR between 1970 and 2013 is between 5.27 and 11.19. The Dt in 1970 is 0.13 whereas in 2013, it is 4.17 which clearly confirms that the uncited publications over the year is in the increasing trend.

The country-wise distribution of uncited publications are shown in Table 5 and Fig. 6. It can be seen to that the uncited publications are more in the case of China (44.56 %), followed by India (31.44 %), Japan (24.40 %) and France (19.44 %). The least uncited publications are from Germany (14.62 %) (Fig. 6). The study has further been extended to block years and shown in Table 6. That shows 10689 belongs to USA in the block year of 2003-2013 followed by China and Japan. Overall from all the countries, the block year 2003-2013 has the highest uncited publications (62419).

Figure 1. Year-wise uncited publications.

Figure 2. Year-wise cited Vs uncited publications.

Figure 3. Ratio of uncited and total publications.

Bibliographic from of uncited publications were identified and the same is shown in Table 7. The maximum numbers of uncited publications were conference papers. It is followed with journal articles. Almost 50 % of the uncited publications are from the conference proceedings. It clearly indicates that more thrust should be given by the database providers while adding the details of the publications in the respective discipline.

Table 8 shows that about 24 % of the publications which were not uncited are authored by more than 4 authors followed by two authors and single author.

Table 2. Year-wise distribution of uncited publications

Table 3. Block year-wise distribution of uncited publications

Table 4. RGR and Dt of uncited MEMS publications

Table 5. Country-wise distribution of uncited publications

Figure 4. RGR of uncited publications.

Figure 5. Doubling time of uncited publications.

Figure 6. Cited Vs uncited publications.

It can be seen from Table 9 shows that the impacts of uncited publications are from more than 4 authors in particular in 2013 and there is no uniformity in the authortype whereas the uncited publications are in the increasing side from year to year.

Highly contributed top 10 authors of uncited papers were analysed and the same is shown in Table 10 that indicates that the uncited publications of the author Esashi, M. tops first among the top 10 authors followed by Fujita, H. and Maeda, R. It is seen from Table 11 and Fig. 7 that in the case of cited references, Esashi, M. and Fujita, H. gained the top 2 ranks, respectively, where as, they were placed in the rank of 8 and 9 in respect of uncited publications. Brennan, M.F. and Bhushan, B. were placed in the first two ranks in uncited publications whereas they are in 6th and 3rd in rank in cited publications.

Further to the analysis of the global authors, the top 10 Indian authors were analysed (Table 12, Fig. 8) with the cited and uncited publications. Chandra, S. has maximum no. of publications in which 34 are cited and 20 are uncited. Further it is interesting to note that Bhattacharyya, T.K. has almost equal cited and uncited publications. The author Mishra, D.C. has the least uncited publications (4 out of 34 publications) who ranks first in uncited publications. It may be clear that even highly produced authors publications may also go uncited.

Table 6. Block Year-wise distribution of uncited publications

Table 7. Bibliographic form of uncited publications of MEMS

Table 8. Authorship pattern of uncited publications

Some of the findings derived are:

  • Uncited publications in the beginning of the publication are more. The growth of the publications over the year results in reduction in uncited publications.
  • An average of 29 % of the publications goes uncited in the MEMS literature during the study period of 1970 to 2013.
  • There is a drastic reduction in uncited papers during the period of 1990 to 2010.
  • Though there is an increase in uncited publications during the period 2011 to 2013, there may be a possibility to cite these publications in later years. This will result in decrease in uncited publications during the period 2011 to 2013.
  • Uncited papers are all higher than the corresponding values of cited papers, again, no matter the journal. These results are in line with well-known trendsregarding citations received by publications12.
  • The citation of papers commences after a year or so from the date of publications.
  • Conference publications are more in number in uncited publications than journal publications. Almost 56 % of the uncited publications are from the conference proceedings. It may not surprise if other form of publications such as letters, review papers, erratum, etc.
  • 44.56 % of China publications in MEMS were uncited. It is followed by India (31.44%), Japan (24.40 %) and France (19.44 %).
  • Majority of uncited publications, besides the self citations, are of collaborative authors. Mostly more than four authors’ papers were uncited. Even top author papers were also uncited.

Table 9. Authorship pattern vs year for uncited publications

Table 10. Global top 10 authors with citation ratio

Table 11. Ranking of global authors with cited and uncited publications

Figure 7. Global top authors rank based on total, citation, uncited and ratio of publications.

Figure 8. lndian top authors rank based on total, citation, uncited and ratio of publications.

Table 12. Indian top 10 authors with citation ratio and ranking.

Davis13,14 indicated citation errors, citation takes time and citation is limited by the universe of indexed papers are the three primary reasons behind this uncited articles. The policy of the citation databases is also one of the primary reasons of uncitedness. Few are discussed as follows:

  • Citation errors - Authors misspell journal names or errors in the volume or page numbers. To overcome this error DOIs and disambiguation software at the indexing stage can help correct well-intentioned mistakes, they still take place. Errors prevent a directional link to be made from the citing article to the cited article, which means that it cannot be counted. Counting assumes good metadata.
  • Citation takes time. An article may wait years for its first citation. Some papers go unnoticed for decades until they are awakened by a citation event. After which they attract a lot of attention. The longer a paper waits to be cited, the less likely it is to be cited.
  • Citation is limited by the universe of indexed papers. Thomson Reuter’s datasets embody has policy to index the ‘core’ literature meaning a smaller collection of elite journals. Scopus in comparison is based on a much broader selection of journals. Google Scholar as mentioned in a recent post has a much broader definition of a scholarly document. All three indexes will provide different citation counts.
  • Policy of the database–Non-inclusion of conference proceeding papers in the databases may leads to uncitedness. Similarly the policy of inclusion of few countries publication in the databases which results that majority of the underdeveloped country publications are not included in database.
  • Unawareness of the publication by the researchers.

Publications are brought to new things or awesome results, new inventions, and so on. It means to disclose the unknown things to known things to the particular community. In science and technology field, it is quite normal to invent new things or practices and explore to the scientists through publications, especially, scientific scholarly journals. The scientists and researchers are on the same line to utilise these results and make to find new things for their new inventions. The earlier a paper is cited, more likely to be cited. Citations beget citations. Sometimes, it may get delayed citation which may be termed as ‘Delayed Recognition’15. Publications that are uncited for prolonged period may, subsequently receive more citations are known as ‘Sleeping Beauties’16. Normally, the researchers take note of the figure of merit on impact factor and citation when deciding which journal to submit their work so that it is read as widely as possible.

This study shows that some of the articles thus published even in reputed journals or by the eminent authors goes uncited. Therefore, instead of sticking into cited articles alone, they may also peruse the uncited publications too for the scholarly communications. Uncited publication may get citations in the literature that does not included in the bibliographic databases.

1. Ghosh J.S. & Neufeld, M.L. Uncitedness of articles in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Inf. Stor. Retri., 1974, 10, 365-69.

2. Ghosh, J.S. Uncitedness of articles in Nature, a multidisciplinary scientific journal. Inf. Process. Manag., 1975, 11, 165-69.

3. Schwartz, C.A. The rise and fall of uncitedness. Coll. & Res. Lib., 1997, 58, 19-29.

4. Hamilton D P, Publishing by–and for?–the numbers. Science, 1990, 250, 1331-332. http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/commentaries/tsv12(14)p10y19980706.pdf (accessed on 29 August 2014).

5. Hamilton, D.P. Research papers: Who’s is uncited now? Science, 1991. http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/commentaries/tsv12(14)p10y19980706.pdf (accessed on 29 August 2014).

6. Pendlebury, D.A. Science, citation and funding. Science, 1991, 251, 1410-411.

7. Garg, K.C. & Kumar, S. Uncitedness of Indian scientific output. Current Science, 2014, 107(6), 965-70.

8. India, Science and Technology (Department) Government of India, New Delhi, Bibliometric study of India’s Scientific Publication outputs during 2001-10: Evidence for Changing Trends. Department of Science and Technology, July 2012.

9. Heneberg, Petr. Supposedly uncited articles of nobel laureates and fields medalists can be prevalently attributed to the errors of omission and commission. JASIST, 2013, 64(3), 448-54

10. Heneberg, Petr. Parallel worlds of citable documents and others: Inflated commissioned opinion articles enhance scientometric indicators. JASIST, 2014, 65(3), 635-43.

11. Ayanguasgil. Musings on uncited articles, the dark matter of scientific literature, 2013. http://www.ayanguasgil.net/2013/07/uncited-articles/ (accessed on 15 December 2014).

12. Harsanyi, M.A. Multiple authors, multiple problems—Bibliometrics and the study of scholarly collaboration: A literature review. Lib. & Inf. Sc. Res., 1993, 15(4), 325-54.

13. Davis, Phil. How much of the literature goes uncited? 2012. http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/12/20/how-much-of-the-literature-goes-uncited/ (accessed on 16 December 2014).

14. Davis, Phil. Growing Impact of older articles. 2014. http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/11/10/growing-impact-of-older-articles/ (accessed on 16 Dec 2014)

15. Glänzel, W.; Schlemmer, B. & Thijs, B. Better late than never? On the chance to become highly cited only beyond the standard bibliometric time horizon. Scientometrics, 2003, 58(3), 571-86.

16. Van Raan, A.F.J. Sleeping beauties in science, Scientometrics, 2004, 59(3), 461-66.

Dr S. Gopalakrishnan is working as Head-Resource Centre in National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), Chennai holds PhD in Library and Information Science and Master of Business Administration (MBA). He is also certified with Green Belt in Six Sigma. He has more than a decade of professional experience and actively involved in the automation of NIFT Resource Centre. He has published number of papers in national and international journals and seminar volumes and attended conferences such as IFLA, FID and ALA and presented papers. He has visited several countries such as The Netherlands, UK, USA and Sri Lanka. His main areas of research interest include: Information needs, information seeking behaviour, digital libraries, digital preservation and networking.

Dr S. Gopalakrishnan is an Assistant Universty Librarian, Anna University, MIT, Chennai. He possess Masters Degrees in Political Science and Library and Information Science and Doctorate in LIS and a Diploma in System Analysis and Data Processing. He has prepared course materials for Distance Education in LIS for Madras, Annamalai and Alagappa Universities. He has published more than 100 papers in the journals, edited volumes and national and international seminar proceedings; written 3 books entitled ‘Fundamentals of Computers’, ‘Computer Programming: made simple’, and ‘Computers and Softwares’. He has brought out the CD-Rom product on LIS for UGC NET/SLET examinations. He is the visiting faculty of University of Madras and a resource person for distance education programmes and refresher courses in LIS.

Mr A.L. Bathrinarayanan obtained his MPhil degree from same Annamalai University during May, 2003. He has more than 16 years of experience in academic Libraries that include Alagappa University, Karaikudi& Amrita University, Coimbatore. At present, he is working as the Librarian at Sri Krishna College of Technology, Coimbatore. He has published papers in International and National Journals and in conferences. He is a member of SALIS, ALLIS, and ISTE.

Dr M. Tamizhchelvan is working as Deputy Librarian at The Gandhigram Rural Institute–Deemed University, Gandhigram. He holds PhD in Library and Information Science from University of Madras. He has presented 75 papers and 30 articles in national and international conferences and seminars and journals.