Library and Information Science

The purpose of the paper is to elucidate the trends of scientists’ contributions to and publishing of scientific journals in terms of countries and disciplines. As a source the 1976 file of the Science Citation Index is used, which contains 342,610 articles scattered among 2,366 journals.

Among top 10 countries, 5 countries are English-speaking nations, and only three of them, the U.S., United Kingdom and Canada, occupy more than half of all contributing articles. On the other hand, the U.S. and U.K. account for three quarters of distribution of publishing countries. This fact shows that the English is already firmly established as a common language in the world’s scientific community. In addition, scientists in many other countries contribute to leading journals, and we define that those not dedicated to a single country contributors are international journals. Seventy six journals were selected as international. There are many substantially international journals among journals published in the Netherlands and Switzerland. Most of the international journals are published commercially, and there are few learned societies publishing them. It may be said that such countries as the Netherland, Switzerland, Denmark and the U.K. are under favorable conditions for publishing international journals.

The number of articles is relatively larger in the life sciences and physical sciences, and many articles are contributed from foreign countries. In contrast to this, the behavioral sciences produce less and their researches are carried out in lesser countries.

Fereign contributors to journals published in Japan are almost exclusively from the U.S.