B-on’s evolution and its contribution to the development of Portuguese science

Abstract

In recent years several initiatives have taken place to promote universal access to the Information and Knowledge Society. It was in this context that in 2004 the Online Knowledge Library (b-on) was launched in Portugal. With it, it became easier to get access to full text international scientific publications. This study aims to present and analyze some bibliometric indicators of the Portuguese scientific output seeking to evaluate its link it with b-on. It was analyzed the usage of b-on resources by the public universities members of the consortium from 2004 to 2010, and we chose as sample the five universities with more downloads per FTE (full time equivalent).In addition to the usage data of the consortium, we used the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus from which we identified the articles indexed with Portuguese affiliation and by the five Portuguese universities between 2000-2010. In WoS we found 79.192 articles indexed with at least one Portuguese author, published in the years under analysis, 40.413 have affiliation at least in one of the five universities considered in this study (51%). In Scopus the number of articles is similar, 62.634 articles for Portugal from which 33.417 have affiliation in at least one of the five universities (54%).We identified the research areas with the largest number of articles. The national scientific production concerning the scientific areas is relatively diverse in accordance with both databases: Chemistry, Physics Engineering, Materials Sciences and Biochemistry Molecular Biology are the subject areas with more indexed articles in WoS; Medicine, Engineering, Physics and Astronomy, Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology and Chemistry in Scopus . The same article can have multiple authors, with different institutional affiliations from different nationalities. The Portuguese international co-authorship is growing in the recent years, mainly with the USA, Spain and United Kingdom. We conclude that the availability and access to electronic resources contributes to the increased of the scientific productivity of the universities and that the study and analysis of its use and output are essential.