Research On The Development Strategy Of "Social Sciences,General" Based On ESI

Background: The Essential Science Indicators(ESI)is a tool to measure the performance of scientific research and track the development trend of science.It includes 22 subject areas,and the “Social Sciences,General” is one of them.The development of contemporary social science is worthy of our attention and consideration.However,there are few studies on the “Social Sciences,General” based on ESI in China,and most of them are still at the level of introduction and data collation.Objective: 1)To summarize the development status of the “Social Sciences,General” in the world and mainland China.2)To analyze the research status of Highly Cited Papers of the “Social Sciences,General” in the world and mainland China,separately.To preliminarily explore the influencing factors of the cited times of Highly Cited Papers of the “Social Sciences,General”,so as to provide references for the development of Social Sciences in China.Methods: 1)The ESI database was searched to collect the relevant information of papers on the “Social Sciences,General”.The data were retrieved at the same day,January 19,2019.Excel 2016 and ArcGIS10.5 softwares were used to make statistical analysis of the countries,journals,institutions and other information.2)Using ESI and Web of Science databases to collet Highly Cited Papers of the “Social Sciences,General” from the world and mainland China.VOSviewer and CiteSpace softwares were used to map the research status of Highly Cited Papers.The Stata13.0 software was used to preliminarily explore the influencing factors of cited times of Highly Cited Papers.Results: 1)There were 938,810 papers on the “Social Sciences,General” in the last 10 years,produced by 213 countries/regions,of which 107 countries/regions were in the top 50% of the world.The USA ranked first with the number of papers production(355,660)and citations(3,194,422),while mainland China with 8th in the number of papers production(24,198)and 9th in the citations(175,927).A total of 1,986 kinds of journals of the “Social Sciences,General” are listed in ESI,of which 1,095 are listed in the top 50% of the world.The most cited journal is Energy Policy,which published 7,350 papers and was cited 157,642 times.The journal with the highest number of published papers is BMC Public Health,which with 11,222 papers published and was cited 126,728 times.There are 1,468 institutions in the top 1% of the world of “Social Sciences,General” in ESI,including 30 institutions in mainland China.2)There are 9,347 Highly Cited Papers were obtained about the “Social Sciences,General”,including 466 papers in mainland China.Most of them were published in policy journals or epidemiological journals.These studies were in uneven distribution.The research hotspots of Highly Cited Papers mainly focused on social issues such as health,education,disease risk,research framework,etc.While the research hotspots of Highly Cited Papers of mainland China mainly focused on social issues such as urbanization,carbon dioxide emissions,environmental climate change,disease risk and energy consumption,etc.The median and quartile spacing of the number of authors of Highly Cited Papers was 3(4);the median and quartile spacing of influence factors of published journals was 3.44(1.92);the median and quartile spacing of the number of references was 55(44).From 2008 to 2018,except for 2017,the difference between the funded situation and the cited times was statistically significant(P<0.05).From 2008 to 2018,the overall number of authors and cited times showed a trend from negative correlation to positive correlation.The journal impact factors and the number and cited times of the author's country generally showed a trend of change from no statistical significance to statistical significance.The difference between the number of references and the cited times was statistically significant(P<0.05)and showed a positive correlation.The correlation coefficient(|r|<0.3)had no practical significance.Except for 2018,the difference between the number of pages in the paper and the cited times was statistically significant(P<0.05).In 2017,the results of multiple linear regression analysis of the Highly Cited Papers and the cited times showed that after controlling for possible confounding factors,the cited times increases with the increased of the number of authors(?=0.47,95%CI(0.26,0.68),P<0.05),increases with the increase of impact factors(?=0.56,95%CI(0.30,0.81),P<0.05),and increases with the increase of reference number(?=0.03,95%CI(0.01,0.05),P<0.05).The difference of the number of WOS subject categories,the number of author countries,the inclusion status of PubMed database,the status of fund,the number of paper pages,the literature type and the cited times were not statistically significant(P>0.05).Conclusions: 1)Generally,there is a big gap in the number and the cited times of papers of Highly Cited Papers between mainland China and developed countries.In addition,the regional distribution of research institutions is uneven,most of them located in Europe and North America,while the research institutions of mainland China are mainly distributed in Beijing,Shanghai and Jiangsu.2)The number of Highly Cited Papers in this subject has been increasing year by year.The papers are basically completed by the cooperation of multi-authors,multi-institutions and multi-countries,and the distribution is uneven among countries and regions.The journal impact factor in which these papers are published are mostly not high.Although there are differences in research hotspots between the international and mainland China,they all focus on social issues and livelihood problems that need to be solved urgently.The number of authors,journal impact factors and the number of references are the influencing factors of the Highly Cited Papers' cited times.