Bibliomining and Comparison of Q4 and ESCI Indexed journals under Statistics and Probability Category

Abstract

The field of ‘Statistics and Probability’ has expanded its scope over the last few decades and have become an integral part of many fields with continuously increasing demand. This manuscript aimed for at a bibliometric analysis and comparison of all published documents during 2015 – 2019, from journals in the study topic category of ‘Statistics and Probability’ for Q4 Impact Factor (IF) journals and Emerging Source Citation Index (ESCI) of Web of Science (WoS). Sources with incomplete data for study timeframe were excluded and 31 sources from Q4 IF and 32 from ESCI journals were selected yielding 12808 and 4294 documents respectively. After data extraction from WoS, the bibliometric analysis at; source, author and document levels, were performed using “Bibliometrix” R-package. Q4-IF sources produced around 3 times more documents than ESCI sources. Articles were the main document type for both categories. China and USA were leading countries for Q4-IF while India, USA and Korea were dominant among ESCI documents. Two authors, namely, ‘Cordeiro GM’ and ‘Alizadeh M’ were among the 10 most productive authors in both categories. Sources “Communications in Statistics-Theory and Methods” and “Korean Journal of Applied Statistics” were leading contributors for Q4-IF and ESCI category respectively. For both categories, mainly similar trends were observed for keywords and topic coverage. In both Q4-IF and ESCI journals ‘Maximum likelihood’ and ‘Ordered statistics’ were observed to be most predominant keywords. A consistent publication trend with few similarities was observed in terms of documents production over the years for these two categories.