THE GLOBAL SCIENCE BASE OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES- BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF ICT RESEARCH PAPERS

The science and engineering base is a key source of knowledge for the development and use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT s), in order to be able to effectively describe and monitor world-wide scientific activity related to ICTs, it is important to be able to pr ovide reliable macro-level statistics of this knowledge base. Internat ional bibliographic databases and related bibliometric indicators toge ther provide an analytical framework and appropriate measures to cover both the 'supply side' -research capabilities and outputs -and 'deman d side' -collaboration, diffusion and citation impact-related to the I CT research. This paper presents results of such a bibliometric study describing macro-level features of this ICT knowledge base. The data w ere retrieved from a specially developed CWTS ICT Database which provi des a broad-scope world-wide coverage of ICT-relevant research papers published in high-quality international scientific and technical journ als. The cross-country comparison focuses on the level of scientific o utput and co-operation patterns of the most actively publishing nation s with a focus on the three Triad zones -the European Union, the USA a nd Japan.