Apple scab literature: a bibliometric study

Abstract

We evaluated apple scab-related publishing. 1441 different documents were obtained in the period 1986-1997 from three principal agricultural databases AGRICOLA, AGRIS in CAB. There exists some fluctuation between particular years, however, no significant yearly increase in the number of publications was noticed. To better asses the trends we classified the records with additional subject categories. We devised the following categories: Apple, Fungus, Chemical protection, Biological and other non-chemical protection methods and Integrated protection. All categories exibit a trend of growth, excepting the category of Chemical protection which shows decrease - an obvious trend towards environmental-friendly methods of crop protection. Furthermore, two main bibliometric laws were applied. With the use of Bradford's law as the primary indicator of the scatter of the scientific literature the core (nucleus) of the most important journals was defined. Among the 254 titles, there are 13 (5%) of the so called core journals which contain a third (359) of all relevant articles. Author productivity was assessed with the Lotka's law according to which a small number of very productive authors publish a large percentage of relevant articles within a certain field. In this analysis the most productive author published 37 articles, whereas there were as many as 772 authors who published only one article in the observed period.