ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF DATA-BASES KEYWORDS FOR A LARGE-SCALE BIBLIOMETRIC INVESTIGATION IN FUNDAMENTAL PHYSICS

We present an automatized bibliometric investigation applied to the fi eld of fundamental research in physics. We briefly describe the scient ific context motivating this study and the statistical method used for analyzing the data. We discuss in more detail how we adapted our inve stigation to the questions motivating this study, namely the identific ation of relevant groups working in a well defined subfield of physics . We next present the results of our investigation. We particularly fo cus on an analysis of Index and Free terms, as obtained from the INSPE C data base we used for performing the bibliometric investigation. We discuss the relevance of Index and Free terms by means of a separation between ''Noise'', ''Interesting'' and ''Trivial'' entries. We show t hat Index and Free terms exhibit somewhat different behaviors when con sidered as distributions in terms of frequencies of occurrence in the references. We show the particular relevance of Free terms in this ana lysis. This may be connected to the emerging nature of the subfield of physics under consideration. This shed an interesting light on the re spective importance of Index and Free terms, as entries of data bases, in particular in the case of rapidly evolving scientific domains.