Scientometric analysis of city terms Ljubljana and Maribor in bibliographic fields title and abstract in selected international databases during 1990-2005

Abstract

We scientometrically evaluated and reviewed principal global bibliographic databases, such as ISI Web of Knowledge's  Web of Science (Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences, and  Arts & Humanities Citation Index), BIOSIS Previews (Biological Abstracts, biology),  CAB Abstracts (agriculture),  Chemical Abstracts (CA, CAplus; chemistry, biochemistry), Compendex+Inspec (physics, electronics, technology, information technologies), Francis (humanities, economics), GeoRef (geography, geology, pedology), Medline (medicine, biomedicine), Pascal (life sciences, biology), Sociological Abstracts (sociology, social sciences) with regard to occurrence of city names Ljubljana and Maribor in the bibliographic fields Title and Abstract during the period 1990-2005, and scatter in the respective databases. Attention was also paid to the database architecture and possible retrieval techniques and search characteristics. Ljubljana, the capital and principal university city of Slovenia, exhibits a much higher occurrence rate than Maribor, the second Slovenian university and research hub. The highest occurrences were observed in Web of Science (by far the largest global database), followed by Francis and CAB Abstracts. Some typical topical contests are e.g. climate, ecological conditions, townscape, urban forestry, international  cooperation, environment, wastewater, pollution etc. City can come about as a place of research or as a research topic in its own right. occurrence is frequently related to different population groups, such as students, patients etc. The databases show some common characteristics, however, it is necessary to pay some attention to retrieval particularities, such as a non-existence of Abstract field in the Web of Science, or inclusion of postal address in the database Francis or Pascal what requires some manual editing prior to conclusive scientometric assessment.