CORRESPONDENCE FACTOR-ANALYSIS OF THE PUBLICATION PATTERNS OF 48 COUNTRIES OVER THE PERIOD 1981-1992

This study illustrates the application of a descriptive multivariate s tatistical method, Correspondence Factorial Analysis (CFA), to the ana lysis of a dataset of over 6 million bibliometric entries (data from I SI). CFA is used to show how the 48 most prolific nations stand in rel ation to each with regard to their publication interests in 17 specifi c disciplinary areas and one multidisciplinary field over the period 1 981-1992. The output of a CFA is a map displaying proximity among vari ables (countries and disciplines) and constitutes an impartial working document for experts interested in the evaluation of science. The pre sent study focuses on three aspects of a CFA: (1) The normalized ''pub lication patterns'' of countries with a common feature (e.g., that bel ong to the same geopolitical zone, economic union, etc.) can be pooled in order to highlight the position of the union with respect to indiv idual countries; (2) complex CFA maps can be simplified by selecting r eference countries or disciplines and observing how the remaining coun tries and disciplines relate to these references; (3) data on addition al countries (new publication profiles) or on additional variables (e. g., socio-economic data on all the countries under study) can be intro duced into the CFA maps used as mathematical models. Our CFA of the IS I dataset reveals the scientific interests of nations in relative term s. The main cleavage (the first factorial axis) is between countries t hat still concentrate on the disciplines of the industrial revolution such as physics and chemistry (or that have turned toward their offspr ing, materials sciences) and those that have veered toward more ''mode rn'' disciplines such as the life sciences (e.g., clinical medicine), the environment, and computer sciences. The second cleavage, along the second factorial axis, is between countries that focus on the agricul tural sciences (the land surface) and those interested in the geoscien ces (the sea, earth's mantle, and mining). The third and fourth axes d iscriminate even further between earth, life, and abstract sciences hi ghlighting the ostensible relationship between (organic) chemistry and all life science disciplines and between physics and disciplines rela ted to engineering, materials sciences, etc. The CFA maps disclose the specific behavior of each country with respect to these cleavages.