An Overview on the South Korean Scientific Production in the Field of Chemistry (1993–2012)

Information
2014,
5(2),
285-304;
doi:10.3390/info5020285

Review

An Overview on the South Korean Scientific Production in the Field of Chemistry (1993–2012)

Edoardo Magnone

Department of Chemistry and Biochemical
Engineering, Dongguk University, Manhae gwan 304-278, 30, Phildong-ro
1gil, Jung-gu, Seoul 100-715, Korea; E-Mail: magnone.edoardo@gmail.com; Tel.: +82-2-2260-4977

Received: 19 March 2014; in revised form: 23 April 2014 / Accepted: 24 April 2014 /
Published: 6 May 2014

Abstract

:
The present review seeks to take stock of the South Korean
publication activity on the field of chemistry by analyzing
systematically all chemistry-related scholarly communications collected
in the Web of Science (WOS) database published by at least one Korean
author or Korean institute- or university-affiliated author from 1993 to
2012. The studied parameters included the growth in number of the
communications, as well as the language-, document-, category-, source-,
organization-, and collaboration-wise distribution of the South Korean
communications. A total of 5660 communications on chemistry were found
to be published by South Korean researchers during the aforementioned
period of time, and South Korea was the 15th country (1.77%) in the
world in terms of informational communication activity in chemistry.

Keywords:

communication; information science; information flow;
scientometrics; informetrics; Korea; chemistry; scientific production;
research performance

1. Introduction

It is well known that chemistry—occasionally named as “the central science” [1] due to the fact that it is a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary science connected with other branches of knowledge (i.e., physics, engineering, materials science, geology, environmental sciences, and biology)—“is by far today’s most active science with regard to bibliometrical indicators” [2],
and it is also known that the modern scientometric science has emerged
in chemistry at the end of the 19th century as a standardized format [3].
A growing number of peer-reviewed literature examining, for example,
the information flow and the evolution of chemistry research [4], chemical journals [5,6,7,8], chemical substances [9], chemical databases [10], organic chemistry [11,12], green chemistry [13], nuclear chemistry [14], chemical engineering [15], synthesis organic chemistry research [16], chemical terminology [17], national and local scholarly communications in the selected field of science [18,19,20], the relationship between research performance and international collaboration in chemistry [21,22], as well as particular field of studies regarding Thorium [23], Vanadium [24], grapheme [25], energy [26,27] and high-temperature superconductors [28,29] have been published over time as research literature.

Many
studies have appeared in the scientific literature with their attention
focused on the national trend of research productivity on the most
varied subjects [26,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43],
and recent studies devoted to understanding the South Korean scientific
development process could confirm an exponentially increasing presence
of Korean authors in the world’s scientific literature [36,40,41,42,43,44].

Among others, Kim [42]
has presented a very interesting overview on research performance of
South Korean physicists from 1994 to 1998. In Kim’s study, 4665
scholarly communications published from the researchers affiliated with
the physics departments or physics-associated laboratories in South
Korean universities were analyzed, and his findings showed that (1)
South Korean-authored communications tended to be published in Korean
and Japanese journals; that (2) the most frequently used journal by
South Korean physicians was a domestic Journal named the Korean Physical Society; and that (3) Seoul National University (SNU) was South Korea’s most productive university in the field of physics [42].
These results in the physics literature also echo the findings of
another study on the chemical literature conducted by Kim and Kim [45], in which the authors reported that “major journals used by Korean chemists are Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society (Korea)”, which is again a domestic journal.

Taking
the above observations in account, the aim of the present study was to
quantitatively determine the growth of the literature on chemistry in
terms of scholarly communications (sometimes called as “article(s)” or
“item(s)”) in South Korea (officially the Republic of Korea but
hereinafter known as “Korea”) from 1993 to 2012.

To take stock of the situation of the chemistry sciences in Korea, the scholarly activity on “Chemistry”
in general and the change in the communication pattern of articles was
analyzed. This present study extends and updates the research of Kim [42] on the research performance of Korean physicists over four years from 1994 to 1998 and that of Kim and Kim [45]
on the productivity of the Korean chemists affiliated at the Chemistry
Department of Seoul National University from 1992 to 1998 by providing a
wider range of data collected from the Web of Science (WOS) database on
the Korean scholarly communications published from 1993 to 2012 in the
field of chemistry.

2. Data Collection and Methodology

The
Web of science (WOS) is the most widespread database on different
scientific fields which is frequently used for searching the statistical
data regarding scientific literature [46]. WOS includes over 1.2 × 10⁴ journals worldwide, 1.5 × 10⁵ conference proceedings and 2.75 × 10⁵
books and book chapters. WOS citation databases are Science Citation
Index Expanded (SCI-Expanded from 1998 to present), Social Sciences
Citation Index (SSCI from 1993 to present), Arts and Humanities Citation
Index (A&HCI from 1993 to present), Conference Proceedings Citation
Index—Science (CPCI-S), Conference Proceedings Citation Index—Social
Sciences and Humanities (CPCI-SSH), and the two chemistry databases
named Index Chemicus (IC) and Current Chemical Reactions (CCR-Expanded).
For these reasons in this paper the WOS database was used to collect
the articles related to the field of “Chemistry”.
The search was confined to the scholarly communications from 1993 to
2012 indexed by Thomson Reuthers’ WOS, and was performed from 1 to 10
January 2014.

Within the WOS database, 5660 articles published by
authors affiliated to Korean institutions or universities were found
within the target range of years (1993–2012). The evaluation of the
cumulated data from 1993 to 2012 was performed by analyzing the
bibliometric parameters including the time distribution of (1) scholarly
communications; (2) language; (3) document type; (4) categories; (5)
source titles; (6) countries; (7) organizations and (8) collaborations.
Each of these analysis steps are discussed in the next sections.

3. Results and Discussion

3.1. Geographical Distribution of Chemistry-Related Scholarly Communications

Table 1
shows the global distribution of the national chemistry-related
scholarly communications from 1993 to 2012. According to the WOS
database, 33.7% of the communications was published by at least one
author in the USA (106,323 communications), 10.8% was published by at
least one author in Germany (34,068 communications), and 7.92% was
published by at least one author in China (24,988 communications). The
average number of communications in the top-15 countries in these fields
of study was 21,033 (6.66%).

Table 1. List of the top 15 Countries (out of a total of 194) with the greatest number of scholarly communications in the field of chemistry from 1993 to 2012. The numbers in the first column represent the rank of the countries in terms of quantitative productivity. Click here to display table

Regarding the amount of these communications, Korea was the 15th most
productive country in the world with an overall score of 1.8% during
the range of years under discussion. This result is in good agreement
with the recent observation by Park and Leydesdorff [43],
who reported that—in terms of the amount of Korean S&T papers in
the Science Citation Index (SCI) journals—Korea has occupied the 14th
position in 2005.

For the purpose of the present study, the data
sample comprised all 5660 communications indexed by WOS from 1993 to
2012 containing at least one author affiliated to Korean institutions or
universities.

3.2. Comparison between the Growth of the Korean Chemistry-Related Scholarly Communications and That of the Rest of the World

Figure 1
gives an illustration of the worldwide and Korean annual growth rates
in the field of chemistry studies from 1993 to 2012. 5660 Korean
chemistry-related scholarly communications were published in total with
an average of 283 communications per year from 1993 to 2012. 2012 was
the most productive year where 775 (13.69% of total communications)
communications out of these 5660 were published. As clearly visualized
in Figure 1,
although there was some dispersion in the scholarly communications, a
polynomial fit could be used to represent the annual number of these
communications.

Figure 1.
Year-wise distribution of scholarly communications in the field of chemistry published (a) worldwide (3.19316E+05 records) and (b) by authors affiliated to Korean institutions or universities (5.66E+03 records) from 1993 to 2012.

Click here to enlarge figure

It is interesting to observe from Figure 1
that the number of papers authored or co-authored by Korean scientists
grew by an average of more than 5% per year from 1993 to 2012. This
phenomenal increase in the amount of research papers is an indication of
growing interest in chemistry in Korea, and it is in good agreement
with the previous results found recently by Fink et al. [44] on science and technological knowledge productions in Korea. From Figure 1,
it can also be clearly visualized that the growth of the cumulative
numbers of R&D literature in the field of chemistry was slow from
1993 to 2000 before accelerating during the last decade, which indicates
that the research activity on this field has received a major boost
during the last period (2000–2012). In particular, there was a
significant increase in 2008, which can be explained by the drastic
change in the WOS categories during this year. Overall, this result is
also in good accordance with that obtained by Shin on the evaluation of
the effects of South Korea’s “Brain Korea 21” (BK 21) project on Korean research productivity from 1995 to 2005 [47]. The results of the analysis obtained by Shin [47]
showed that in general, the growth of chemistry-related scholarly
communications by Korean institutes and universities had increased
significantly following the implementation of the BK 21 project in 1999.

3.3. Language-Wise Distribution of Worldwide and Korean Chemistry-Related Scholarly Communications

Worldwide Language-wise distribution of chemistry-related scholarly communications is shown in Figure 2a.
In language-wise distribution of communications in the world, English
topped the list, and 29 different languages in total were used to write
319,316 scholarly communications in the field of chemistry from 1993 to
2012. On the other hand, only 5 different languages were used by Korean
scientists to write the 5660 communications during the studied period.

Figure 2.
Language-wise distribution of scholarly communications published in the field of chemistry (a) in the world (24 Language values excluded from display figure) and (b) by authors affiliated to Korean institutions or universities (1993–2012).

Click here to enlarge figure

As reported in Figure 2b,
English was the most frequently used language by authors affiliated
with Korean institutions or universities in the field of chemistry with
5629 communications. In first approximations, this result is not in
agreement with the findings of Han [48]
who argued that Korean scientists and editors often had difficulty with
English, as the data of this exercise reveal that out of the 5660
scholarly communications, only 25 were published in Korean language. The
other languages used by Korean scientists in more than one
communication was Chinese with four communications, and other minor
languages included German and Russian with a percentage of about 0.018%
each.

3.4. Document Type-Wise Distribution of Korean and Worldwide Chemistry-Related Scholarly Communications

Figure 3a
shows the document type-wise worldwide distribution of the
communications in the field of chemistry (1993–2012). The highest number
was seen in communications published as Article (79.26%), followed by
Reviews (6.62%) and Proceeding Papers (5.94%).

The 5660 Korean communications were divided into 11 document types in the WOS database. Figure 3b
indicates the percentage (%) of total number of chemistry-related
scholarly communications in various document types (contains
duplicates).

Figure 3.
Comparison between (a) worldwide (12 Document Type values excluded from display figure) and (b) Korean document type distributions collected between 1993 and 2012.

Click here to enlarge figure

From Figure 3b,
the first document type amounted to more than 98% of the total number
of relevant chemistry-related scholarly communications. Out of 5660
communications, 5361 communications were published as Article (98.86%),
followed by Proceeding Paper (5.1%) and Review (3.4%). Scientists in
Korea are still publishing less Reviews and more Proceeding Papers than
their peers in other countries (see Figure 3a).
The country’s attempt to quickly increase the number of communications
listed in the Science Citation Index (SCI) by promoting everyday
competition among the scientists may have successfully resulted in
obtaining more scientific papers in a relatively short time (i.e., Article and Proceeding Paper) [45,47].

The
Worldwide and Korean scholarly communications published as Article,
Proceeding Paper, and Review between 1993 and 2012 were represented by
three exponential equations in Figure 4.

Overall, as illustrated in Figure 4,
Article and Review document types containing at least one author from a
Korean institution or university showed the greatest growth rates from
1993 to 2001. These trends were similar to the observed worldwide
trends. The number of Korean Proceeding Papers followed the same
behavior of worldwide scholarly communications, confirming the general
character of the production of proceeding records in the world.

Figure 4.
Year-wise cumulative research communications as Article, Proceedings Paper and Review in the field of chemistry (a) in the world and (b) by authors affiliated to Korean institutions or universities (1993–2012).

Click here to enlarge figure

3.5. Category-Wise Distribution of Korean and Worldwide Chemistry-Related Scholarly Communications

The
WOS categories of each of the 319,316 and 5660 scholarly communications
in the world and Korea, respectively, were studied. There was a great
diversity within the research topics of chemistry, including more than
100 categories identified by the WOS database from 1993 to 2012 which
indicates that chemical research published in the world covers a wide
spectrum of categories.

Table 2
lists the major WOS categories with the greatest number of
chemistry-related scholarly communications published in the world
(1993–2012). The major chemical categories in the world were Chemistry
Multidisciplinary, Chemistry Organic, Chemistry Inorganic Nuclear,
Chemistry Physical and Materials Science Multidisciplinary (212,497
communications, 66.55%).

Table 2. List of the top 10 WOS categories (out of a total of 158) with the greatest number of scholarly communications in the field of chemistry published by authors affiliated to Korean institutions or universities in terms of the number of communications (1993–2012). Top 10 worldwide WOS categories (out of a total of 248) are included in this table for comparison purposes. The first column represents the WOS Category’s rank (1–10). Click here to display table

Table 2
also lists the top 10 WOS categories published by Korean researchers
between 1993 and 2012. The five core Korean categories which are
Chemistry Multidisciplinary (34.88%), Chemical Engineering (14.84%),
Physical Chemistry (12.56%), Materials Science Multidisciplinary
(12.14%) and Chemistry Organic (9.22%) took the majority of the total
chemistry-related scholarly communications (4734 communications) with a
great percentage of 83.64%. The other categories with more than 200
communications were Physics Applied (7.2%), Chemistry Inorganic Nuclear
(6.17%), Physics Condensed Matter (5.07%), Nanoscience Nanotechnology
(4.99%), and Environmental Sciences (3.89%) with 407, 349, 287, 282 and
220 communications, respectively. These results are consistent with the
previous studies about the scientific sub-field distribution of
published papers from 1992 to 1998 covered by the Science Citation Index
(SCI) CD-ROM in chemistry fields by the Chemistry Department of Seoul
National University [45].
In particular, based on the titles of journals, the authors argued that
the SNU chemists focused heavily on Chemistry Multidisciplinary
(39.6%), Chemistry Organic (12.9%), and Physical Chemistry (10.9%) [45].
Considering these results, it can be noted that Korean chemists tend to
exclusively focus more and more on the few WOS categories, meaning that
about four fifths (83.64%) of all chemistry-related scholarly
communications published by Korean chemists are restricted to five
categories with a national pretension to Chemical Engineering, Physical
Chemistry and Materials Science.

Figure 5.
Year-wise cumulative scholarly communications in the top-3 Korean
WOS categories (Chemistry Multidisciplinary, Chemical Engineering, and
Chemistry Physical) published (a) in the world and (b) by authors affiliated to Korean institutions or universities (1993–2012).

Click here to enlarge figure

Figure 5
reveals the year-distribution of the worldwide and Korean
chemistry-related scholarly communications in the Top 3 categories from
1993 to 2012. In the Chemical Engineering and Chemistry Physical fields,
the communications have increased from 0 in 1993 to about 200 in 2012
and from 3 to about 120 communications in the same range of time,
respectively (see Figure 5b). Visibly in Figure 5b,
the proportion of the Korean communications in the three core
categories exhibited higher variation during the covered research period
than the global scholarly communications in the same scientific
subject. The changes in WOS categories plausibly explain the previously
obtained results on the year-wise distribution of all scholarly
communications published by authors affiliated to Korean institutions or
universities in the field of chemistry (without any distinction
regarding WOS categories) (see Figure 1b).
As a result of these changes, Korean chemists’ academic outputs have
significantly increased in number from 2007 to 2009, and Korea’s
influence on the field of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry Physical
has grown stronger during the last years.

3.6. Source Title-Wise Distribution of Korean and Worldwide Chemistry-Related Scholarly Communications

In
the present section, the worldwide and Korean source titles on
chemistry topic are taken as a tool to study the communications. There
were more than 100 different source titles among the 5660 Korean
chemistry-related scholarly communications. Table 3
shows the source title-wise distribution in the chemical journals
listed in WOS in the world and in Korea. The table indicates the top 10
communication sources in the field of chemistry from 1993 to 2012.

Table 3. The top 10 Source Titles (out of a total of 991) in terms of the number of scholarly research communications published by authors affiliated to Korean institutions or universities from 1993 to 2012. Top 10 worldwide Source Titles (out of a total of 8952) are included in this table for comparison purposes. Click here to display table

According to Han [48],
there are 662 societies of science and technology in Korea, including
Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. In the chemistry area, the “Korean
Chemical Society” has established two journals, which are the Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society (BKCS) and the Journal of the Korean Chemical Society (JKCS). The official journal of the “Korean Society of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry” in Korea is the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry
(JIEC). It is interesting to note here that 646 (11.41%) communications
containing at least one author affiliated to Korean institutions or
universities which were on the highest rank in number were from the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry (JIEC), followed by the Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society (BKCS) with 391 communications (6.91%). According to Table 3,
it can be observed that many Korean researchers prefer to publish their
works in national journals and this fact may have implications for the
future internationalization of academic results in chemistry fields
obtained by Korean researchers.

These results are consistent with
the previous studies conducted by Kim and Kim where the authors had
said that one of the major journal used by Korean chemists at the Seoul
National University (SNU) was the Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society (BKCS) [45].

While
Korea’s Science Citation Index (SCI) communications publication in
English in the above journals has been rapidly increasing, another
interesting exercise is to identify the Journal-type distribution of the
25 chemistry-related scholarly communications published in Korean
language by Korean chemists and recorded in WOS database.

The resulting data from this exercise has revealed that out of 25 scholarly communications, 11 communications were published in Polymer Korea (official journal published bimonthly by the “Polymer Society of Korea”), followed by 8 communications in the Korean Journal of Laboratory Medicine (official journal of the “Korean Society for Laboratory Medicine”) and 2 in the Korean Journal of Metals and Materials
(domestic academic journal of the “Korean Institute of Metals and
Materials”). The other 4 communications wrote in Korean were in the Journal of Korean Academy of Nursing (journal published by “Korean Society of Nursing Science”), the Korean Journal for Food Science of Animal Resources (bimonthly journal published by “Korean Society for Food Science of Animal Resources”), the Korean Journal of Medical History (journal published by “Korean Society for the History of Medicine”), and the Journal of the Korean Institute of Metals and Materials.
In fact, a characteristic of most Korean scholarly journals is that
they are university-based journals and that most of them are published
by academic societies without any cooperation from commercial publishers
[43,48].

3.7. Organizations-Wise Distribution of Korean Chemistry-Related Scholarly Communications

The top 10 Korean organizations that produced the highest number of chemistry-related scholarly communications are shown in Table 4.
These ten institutions have published 3255 communications, about 57.51%
of the total amount of all Korean communications in chemistry published
from 1993 to 2012.

The most productive Korean institutions and
universities in the field of chemistry were the Seoul National
University (SNU) with 705 communications (12.46%), Korea Advanced
Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) with 450 communications
(7.95%), Yonsei University (YU) with 398 communications (7.03%), Korea
University (KU) with 307 communications (5.4%) and Pohang University of
Science and Technology (POSTEC) with 284 communications (5.02%). These
results are in good agreement with the results recently obtained in a
large-scale analysis of measuring research performance in Korean
universities [33].
For more information regarding the relationship between the governance
in the Korean higher education and the Korean public universities, see
Byun [49].

Table 4. Top 10 Korean Organizations (out of a total of 2026) in terms of the productivity of scholarly communications from 1993 to 2012. The first column represents the rank of the Organization. Click here to display table

The top 10 Korean research grants ranked by the quantity of chemistry-related scholarly communications are shown in Table 5.
As it can be noted, the most cited grant code on the acknowledgment
section of the papers published by Korean scientists in the field of
chemistry were two Korean World Class University
(WCU) programs, called R31-2008-000-10010-0 and R31-2008-000-10059-0
with 50 and 20 communications respectively, and a Grants-in-Aid coded
20108010 with 26 communications (0.46%).

Table 5. Top 10 Korean Grants and Programs (out of a total of 2318) in terms of the quantity of scholarly communications in the field of chemistry (1993–2012). 3935 records (69.5%) do not contain data in the analyzed field. Click here to display table

In general, the Korean government invested KRW 825 billion for World Class University
(WCU) programs over five years, and following three selection rounds
(Establishment of Majors/Departments, Invitation of Scholars and
Invitation of World Renowned Scholars) [50], the Korean World Class University (WCU) programs have funded about 140 different programs in 33 Korean universities [51]. For a comprehensive overview of the Korean government’s policies for establishing World Class University (WCU) and their implications for Korean higher education institutions, see Byun et al. [51] and Deem et al. [52].

3.8. The Top Cited Korean Chemistry-Related Scholarly Communications from 1993 to 2012

The
20 most cited chemistry-related scholarly communications published by
Korean scientists from 1993 to 2012 have attracted more than 12,539
citations in total with about 627 citations per communication on average
(see Table 6).

Table 6. The most frequently cited scholarly communications in the field of chemistry published by authors affiliated to Korean institutions or universities from 1993 to 2012. The “Times Cited” in the last column indicates the number of the times where a published communication was cited by other authors (including conference proceedings). Click here to display table

Out of these 12,539 citations made by researchers from all over the
world, the highest number of citations per year was obtained in the year
2003, followed by the year 2000 and 2009. The lowest number of
citations was obtained in the year 1995, 1996 and 2011. In particular,
the highest number of citations for a single Korean communication was
obtained in the year 2003 with 3499 citations on a Review published in Nature in the WOS categories of “Multidisciplinary Sciences” (where the authors introduced the “conceptual
approach that requires the use of secondary building units to direct
the assembly of ordered frameworks epitomizes this process” called reticular synthesis) [53].

3.9. International Collaboration-Wise Distribution of the Korean Chemistry-Related Scholarly Communications

Approximately
65 countries were involved in the Korean chemistry-related scholarly
communications’ production through international collaborations. In this
section the top 10 producing countries in terms of double affiliations
with the Korean chemistry-related scholarly communications are
discussed.

The USA had the majority of the total collaborative
communications with Korean institutions and universities (930
communications) with a great percentage of 16.43 % (see Table 7).
After the USA, other countries have been categorized into two groups.
The first group is constituted by cooperative countries in the same
geographical area of Korea: Japan (286 communications), China (151
communications), and India (116 communications). Germany (106
communications), Canada (88 communications), France (85) England (64),
Australia (58) and Russia (57) are in the other group of six countries
with more than 50 communications. As this categorization indicates,
after the USA with 16.43% of collaborative chemistry-related scholarly
communications with Korea, about 9.77% of the communications were
coproduced with countries in the first Asia Pacific region and 8.09%
with the countries in the second group. This result is in good agreement
with the recent observation by Scheidt, et al. [54] and Haustein et al. [55],
who have shown that the USA has been Korea’s most important
co-publication partner in all fields since 2000, such as in Medicine,
Physics, Engineering, Biology and Chemistry, followed by Japan, EU and
China.

In addition, an exercise was carried out to determine the
international scholarly activity in the field of chemistry (1993–2012)
of the top 3 countries with the highest percentage of co-affiliated
scholarly communications with Korean chemists. The distribution of the
co-affiliated scholarly communications from Korea with USA, Japan and
China from 1993 to 2012 is given in Figure 6.

Table 7. The top-10 International Collaboration pattern (out of a total of 66 Countries) of Korean communications on chemistry (5660 records) from 1993 to 2012. Click here to display table

Figure 6.
Year-wise cumulative cooperative scholarly communications from Korea and the top 3 Countries of Table 7 (the USA, Japan, and China) in the field of chemistry from 1993 to 2012.

Click here to enlarge figure

In all analyzed cases, there was an increase in cooperation levels
between Korea and foreign scientists from 2000 to 2004. Several possible
interpretations come to mind, but the most appropriate explanation is
that this phenomenon was a consequence of the grand government-initiated
project in the Korean education sector (as seen above, called “Brain Korea 21” project) [33,47]
which was executed during the first phase (1999–2005), aiming to raise
Korea to become one of the top 10 countries in the world particularly in
terms of number of papers listed in the Science Citation Index (SCI) as
well as economic scale [51].
Looking at the results in more depth, a further possible explanation is
that the number of international students in Korea has increased
noticeably since the introduction of the “Study Korea Project” in 2004, with the aim of lead “the globalization of Korean universities” [56]
through increasing the chance to initiate new international research
collaborations between the Korean hosts and the sender institutions or
universities from other countries. This fact can be used to explain the
observed data on co-affiliated communications.

It is also
interesting to note that 930 Korea-USA co-affiliated communications
obtained in this analysis evolved in Chemistry Multidisciplinary (473
communication and 50.86% communication share), Materials Science (182
communications and 19.57% communication share) and Physics (136
communications and 14.62% communication share). In the same way, 286
Korea-Japan communications evolved in Chemistry Multidisciplinary (181
communications and 63.29% communications share), Materials Science (31
communications and 10.84% communication share), and Physics (21
communications and 7.34% communications share), whereas 151 Korea-China
communications evolved in Chemistry Multidisciplinary (81 communications
and 63.29% communications share), Materials Science (28 communications
and 18.54% communications share) and Chemical Engineering (26
communications and 17.22% communications share). To summarize these last
results, Korean scientists seem to have the tendency to collaborate
with Japanese institutions or universities in the field of Materials
Science, while they are inclined to collaborate with Chinese
institutions or universities in the field of Chemical Engineering.

4. Conclusions

The
present systematic review employs a scientometric analysis of the Web
of Science (WOS) database to explore the trends in the Korean
chemistry-related scholarly communications from 1993 to 2012. Within the
limits of this type of study [33,44,46],
the following results have been obtained from this analysis: (1) A
total number of 5660 communications related to chemistry were published
by at least one author affiliated to Korean institutions or universities
during the observed period of time; (2) The Koreans’ interest in the
field of chemistry—and more specifically in the field of Chemical
Engineering Physical Chemistry and Materials Science—has strongly
increased recently as shows the exponentially increasing quantity of
chemistry-related scholarly communications; (3) The 20 most cited
chemistry-related scholarly communications published by Korean
scientists (1993–2012) have attracted more than 12,539 citations in
total (627 citations per communication).

Statistical findings
suggest that English (5629 communications, 99.5%) and Article (5361
communications, 98.9%) were the most commonly used Language and Document
Type, respectively, by authors affiliated to Korean institutions or
universities. Chemistry Multidisciplinary (34.9%), Chemical Engineering
(14.8%), Physical Chemistry (12.6%), Materials Science Multidisciplinary
(12.1%) and Chemistry Organic (9.2%) were the top five most common WOS
categories in which a total of 4734 communications (83.6%) were listed.

The national Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry (646 communications, 11.4%) and Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
(391 communications, 6.9%) were the most commonly used scholarly titles
by Korean chemists to exchange information in this field of research.

Most
of the Korean chemistry-related scholarly communications were done by
the Seoul National University (705 communications, 12.5%), Korea
Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (450 communications, 8%)
and Yonsei University (398 communications, 7%). Korean World Class University (WCU) programs were the most productive National Programs in Korea.

The
values of international collaborative activities indicators suggest
that the USA has the majority of the total collaborative communications
with Korean institutions and universities (930 communications, 16.4%),
followed by other cooperative countries in the same geographical area of
Korea, like Japan (286 communications, 5%), China (151 communications,
2.7%) and India (116 communications, 2%).

The Korean scientific
production in the field of chemistry is growing fast compared to its
relatively short history. Nonetheless, despite the intense efforts of
the Korean government, institutions and universities, which resulted in a
growing number of Korean chemistry-related scholarly communications
over the last decade, there still seems to be a sort of collective
hesitation to submit the obtained results out of Korea and to initiate
new scientific collaborations with groups far from the Asia
Pacific-region (like Middle East, Europe, South America, etc.).

Conflicts of Interest

The author declares no conflict of interest.

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