Scientific Metrics Analysis of Literature Related to Sustainable Wood Projects

Abstract

An analysis of the literature on wood projects (n = 205) was conducted to understand current scientific trends, key issues, and the appropriate representation of scientific results. Four scientific questions were addressed: whether the number of citations in the literature follows a power function distribution after a value, whether there is any relationship between the number of articles and the number of citations per year, whether the publications available in Scopus can be considered a "true" representation of the publications, and whether the Lotka distribution for author productivity holds for the publication sample on wood projects. The power function distribution test shows that most articles have very few citations, while some articles have very many. This suggests that the scientific value of articles is not necessarily determined by the number of citations. There is a correlation between the number of publications and citations over the same period or slightly skewed in time. The Bradford distribution suggests that publications available in Scopus describing wood projects cannot be considered as a real representation of the publications on the subject. Despite this, the frequency of author productivity follows a Lotka distribution.