Journal of Biosciences : an analysis of citation pattern

The study is based on 1049 citations appended to 34 research articles pertaining to issue nos. 2 to 4 of volume 20 of Journal of Biosciences of the year 2000. The authorship pattern of the citations shows that 18.68% per cent papers are single-authored, 52.71 per cent are double- and triple-authored, and the remaining 28.61 per cent are joint contributions of four or more authors. As in the case of medicine, the team size of this field is also bigger than those in the fields of chemistry and physics. As many as 25 articles of mega-authorship (i.e. contributions by ten or more authors) have been encountered in this study, and one of them was by22 authors . Of the citations .journal articles comprised 85.89 per cent, and monographs 10.1 per cent. Indian contributions comprised 5.53 per cent of the citations. Of the citing articles 30 are by Indian authors, 3 by foreign authors, and 1 (2.94%) jointly by Indian and foreign authors. Of the total citations 10.87 per cent are author self citations and 0.57 per cent are journal self citations