A comparison of new analysis results and the results in ‘Research trends in proton exchange membrane fuel cells during 2008–2018: A bibliometric analysis’ by Yonoff et al.

Yonoff et al. recently published a paper in the journal, entitled 'Research trends in proton exchange membrane fuel cells during 2008–2018: A bibliometric analysis' [[1]Yonoff R.E. Ochoa G.V. Cardenas-Escorcia Y. Silva-Ortega J.I. Meriño-Stand L. Research trends in proton exchange membrane fuel cells during 2008–2018: a bibliometric analysis.Heliyon. 2019; 5: e01724Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (41) Google Scholar]. The results in the original paper [[1]Yonoff R.E. Ochoa G.V. Cardenas-Escorcia Y. Silva-Ortega J.I. Meriño-Stand L. Research trends in proton exchange membrane fuel cells during 2008–2018: a bibliometric analysis.Heliyon. 2019; 5: e01724Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (41) Google Scholar] were unacceptable because the use of method was inappropriate. Yonoff et al. stated in section 2. Materials and methods that 'Data were analyzed between 2008 to 2018; it was extracted from the SCI-Expanded online version of Thomson Reuters Web of Science, where the filter by title was used for the search keywords proton exchange membrane fuel cells.' 'SCI-Expanded online version of Thomson Reuters Web of Science' no longer exists and has been replaced by the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED) online version of Clarivate Analytics Web of Science. The Clarivate Analytics Web of Science Core Collection, the online version of the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), will provide the readers a clearer understanding of which database the authors have used in their research. Based on the searching keywords used in the original paper [[1]Yonoff R.E. Ochoa G.V. Cardenas-Escorcia Y. Silva-Ortega J.I. Meriño-Stand L. Research trends in proton exchange membrane fuel cells during 2008–2018: a bibliometric analysis.Heliyon. 2019; 5: e01724Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (41) Google Scholar], all related keywords in SCI-EXPANDED were considered. The database was searched using the searching strategy ("proton exchange membrane fuel cells" or "proton exchange membrane fuel cell" or "PEMFCs" or "PEMFC" or "proton membrane exchange fuel cells" or "PEM fuel cells" or "PEM fuel cell" or "proton exchange fuel cell" or "proton exchange fuel cells" or "protonexchange membrane fuel cell" or "proton exchanged membrane fuel cells" or "proton exchange memberane fuel cells" or "proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell" or "proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells") not ("polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells" or "polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell" or "polymer exchange membrane fuel cells" or "polyelectrolyte membrane fuel cell" or "polymeric electrolyte membrane fuel cell" or "proton electrolyte membrane fuel cell" or "polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cells" or "polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cell") in terms of topic (title, abstract, author keywords, and KeyWords Plus) in SCI-EXPANDED within the publication years from 2008 to 2018. This resulted in 9,504 documents. This data was collected on 11 May in 2020. However, the SCI-EXPANDED is not designed for bibliometric studies but for researchers to find published literatures [[2]Ho Y.S. Comments on "Mapping the scientific research on non-point source pollution: a bibliometric analysis" by Yang et al. (2017).Environ. Sci. Pollut. Control Ser. 2018; 25: 30737-30738Crossref PubMed Scopus (34) Google Scholar, [3]Qi Y. Chen X.Y. Hu Z. Song C.F. Cui Y.L. Bibliometric analysis of algal-bacterial symbiosis in wastewater treatment.Int. J. Environ. Res. Publ. Health. 2019; 16 (Article Number: 1077)Crossref Scopus (26) Google Scholar]. KeyWords Plus collects repetitive terms within the references that the author(s) cited [[4]Garfield E. KeyWords Plus: ISI's breakthrough retrieval method. Part 1. Expanding your searching power on Current Contents on Diskette.Current Contents. 1990; 32: 5-9Google Scholar]. In another word, it gives a greater insight in the publications, allowing researchers to read an expansive collection of studies [[4]Garfield E. KeyWords Plus: ISI's breakthrough retrieval method. Part 1. Expanding your searching power on Current Contents on Diskette.Current Contents. 1990; 32: 5-9Google Scholar]. Therefore, documents searched out by KeyWords Plus, may be irrelevant to the bibliometric study topic because it may only appear in the references instead of the paper instead [[5]Fu H.Z. Ho Y.S. Top cited articles in thermodynamic research.J. Eng. Thermophys. 2015; 24: 68-85Crossref Scopus (45) Google Scholar]. Documents that were only searched out by KeyWords Plus can be references in the PEMFCs. However these documents are not researches about the PEMFCs. In order to prevent problems like this, a filter named 'front page' (including the document title, the abstract, and the author keywords) was proposed by Ho's group [[6]Fu H.Z. Wang M.H. Ho Y.S. The most frequently cited adsorption research articles in the Science Citation Index (Expanded).J. Colloid Interface Sci. 2012; 379: 148-156Crossref PubMed Scopus (155) Google Scholar, [7]Fu H.Z. Ho Y.S. Top cited articles in adsorption research using Y-index.Res. Eval. 2014; 23: 12-20Crossref Scopus (45) Google Scholar, [8]Ho Y.S. Fu H.Z. Mapping of metal-organic frameworks publications: a bibliometric analysis.Inorg. Chem. Commun. 2016; 73: 174-182Crossref Scopus (51) Google Scholar]. Consequently, documents with searching keywords in their 'front page' were considered to be relevant publications. As a result, 8,184 documents (86% of the 9,504 documents) had searching keywords in their 'front page' while 1,320 documents (14%) did not have any searching keywords in their 'front page'. In all, 8,184 documents related to proton exchange membrane fuel cells were found. Table 1 shows distribution of publications for PEMFC by document types from 2008 to 2018. Documents could be classified in two document types in the Web of Science Core Collection, for example, highly cited documents 'Review of the proton exchange membranes for fuel cell applications' [[9]Peighambardoust S.J. Rowshanzamir S. Amjadi M. Review of the proton exchange membranes for fuel cell applications.Int. J. Hydrogen Energy. 2010; 35: 9349-9384Crossref Scopus (1575) Google Scholar] was characterized as both article and proceedings paper; and 'Advances in the development of inorganic-organic membranes for fuel cell applications' [[10]Jones D.J. Roziere J. Advances in the development of inorganic-organic membranes for fuel cell applications.Fuel Cell. I. 2008; 215: 219-264Crossref Scopus (113) Google Scholar] was characterized as both review and book chapter. Thus, the sum of percentages is higher than 100%. In 2011, Ho's group proposed a citation indicator, TCyear, the total number of citations from Web of Science Core Collection since publication to the end of the most recent year [[11]Wang M.H. Fu H.Z. Ho Y.S. Comparison of universities' scientific performance using bibliometric indicators.Malays. J. Libr. Inf. Sci. 2011; 16: 1-19Google Scholar, [12]Chuang K.Y. Wang M.H. Ho Y.S. High-impact papers presented in the subject category of water resources in the Essential Science Indicators database of the Institute for Scientific Information.Scientometrics. 2011; 87: 551-562Crossref Scopus (120) Google Scholar]. The advantage of TCyear is that they are invariable and that they can ensure repeatability in comparison to the index of citation from the Web of Science [[6]Fu H.Z. Wang M.H. Ho Y.S. The most frequently cited adsorption research articles in the Science Citation Index (Expanded).J. Colloid Interface Sci. 2012; 379: 148-156Crossref PubMed Scopus (155) Google Scholar]. Using the same idea, citation indicator, CPP2018, the citations per publication was also applied in Table 1. Other related results were also presented in tables. The characteristics of annual articles and the top 10 productive journals on PEMFC in the SCI-EXPANDED from 2008 to 2018 were shown in Tables 2 and 3 respectively.Table 1Shows distribution of publications for PEMFC by document types from 2008 to 2018.Document typeTP%TC2018CPP2018Article7,69494141,74418Proceedings paper7339.012,69817Review2883.522,03176Meeting abstract1281.6160.13Correction470.57170.36Editorial material210.26572.7Book chapter60.07321235News item20.02400Retraction20.02400Letter10.0123737Reprint10.01211.0TP: number of articles; TC2018: total citations from Web of Science Core Collection since publication to the end of 2018; CPP2018: citations per paper (TC2018/TP). Open table in a new tab Table 2Characteristics of PEMFC scientific article between 2008 and 2018.YearTPAUAU/TPNRNR/TP20085502,2564.114,3422620095642,3764.215,9932820107993,4914.424,1713020117613,3074.323,9673120127683,3504.424,8053220136703,0504.622,4083320147723,5224.627,3663520156923,2054.625,9623820167223,3854.728,6844020176973,4585.028,5674120186993,4885.029,97143Average4.535Total7,69434,888266,236TP: total number of articles; AU: number of authors; AU/TP: number of authors per article; NR: number of cited references; NR/TP: number of cited references per article. Open table in a new tab Table 3Top 10 journals in PEMFC during the period 2008–2018.RankJournalTP%1International Journal of Hydrogen Energy1,637212Journal of Power Sources1,037133Journal of the Electrochemical Society3654.74Electrochimica Acta3414.45Fuel Cells2493.26Journal of Fuel Cell Science and Technology1582.17Journal of Membrane Science1481.98Applied Energy1391.89Energy1391.810Energy Conversion and Management1101.4TP: total number of articles. Open table in a new tab TP: number of articles; TC2018: total citations from Web of Science Core Collection since publication to the end of 2018; CPP2018: citations per paper (TC2018/TP). TP: total number of articles; AU: number of authors; AU/TP: number of authors per article; NR: number of cited references; NR/TP: number of cited references per article. TP: total number of articles. Yonoff et al. mentioned in section 3.7. Article visibility and citation trends that 'To assess the visibility of research articles, the number of times an item was cited from publication to the end of 2018 (TC2018) was used as an indicator [[28]Pan J. Lu S.F. Li Y. Huang A.B. Zhuang L. Lu J.T. High-performance alkaline polymer electrolyte for fuel cell applications.Adv. Funct. Mater. 2010; 20: 312-319Crossref Scopus (441) Google Scholar].' This is a quotation error. "TC2018" was not mentioned in the cited reference [[13]Caicedo Salinas L.F. Ochoa G.V. Escorcia Y.C. A scientometric analysis of the investigation of biomass gasification environmental impacts from 2001 to 2017.Int. J. Energy Econ. Pol. 2018; 8: 223-229Google Scholar]. In 2011, the citation indicator (TCyear) was first proposed by Ho's group [[11]Wang M.H. Fu H.Z. Ho Y.S. Comparison of universities' scientific performance using bibliometric indicators.Malays. J. Libr. Inf. Sci. 2011; 16: 1-19Google Scholar, [12]Chuang K.Y. Wang M.H. Ho Y.S. High-impact papers presented in the subject category of water resources in the Essential Science Indicators database of the Institute for Scientific Information.Scientometrics. 2011; 87: 551-562Crossref Scopus (120) Google Scholar]. Yonoff et al. also noticed that 'The scientific impact was studied by analyzing the 20 most cited publications in PEMFC research for papers published from 2008 to 2018. The list of the most cited articles (TC2018 > 300) is shown in Table 4.' 'Article title' in Table 4 such as 'Fuel Cell Systems Explained' and 'PEM Fuel Cells' from the original paper [[1]Yonoff R.E. Ochoa G.V. Cardenas-Escorcia Y. Silva-Ortega J.I. Meriño-Stand L. Research trends in proton exchange membrane fuel cells during 2008–2018: a bibliometric analysis.Heliyon. 2019; 5: e01724Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (41) Google Scholar] cannot be found in SCI-EXPANDED. Only five (25% of the 20 articles) were 'article' and 13 were 'review'. Only two of the 20 articles in Table 4 of the original paper [[1]Yonoff R.E. Ochoa G.V. Cardenas-Escorcia Y. Silva-Ortega J.I. Meriño-Stand L. Research trends in proton exchange membrane fuel cells during 2008–2018: a bibliometric analysis.Heliyon. 2019; 5: e01724Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (41) Google Scholar] such as 'Effective diffusivity and water-saturation distribution in single- and two-layer PEMFC diffusion medium' [[14]Nam J.H. Kaviany M. Effective diffusivity and water-saturation distribution in single- and two-layer PEMFC diffusion medium.Int. J. Heat Mass Tran. 2003; 46: 4595-4611Crossref Scopus (923) Google Scholar] and 'Visualization of water buildup in the cathode of a transparent PEM fuel cell' [[15]Tüber K. Pócza D. Hebling C. Visualization of water buildup in the cathode of a transparent PEM fuel cell.J. Power Sources. 2003; 124: 403-414Crossref Scopus (591) Google Scholar] were related to proton exchange membrane fuel cells. Therefore, most of the articles used in the original paper were irrelevant to 'proton exchange membrane fuel cells'.Table 4Top 16 articles with TC2018 > 300.Rank (TC2018)Article titleReference1 (2,030)Pd–Pt bimetallic nanodendrites with high activity for oxygen reduction[[16]Lim B. Jiang M.J. Camargo P.H.C. Cho E.C. Tao J. Lu X.M. Zhu Y.M. Xia Y.N. Pd-Pt bimetallic nanodendrites with high activity for oxygen reduction.Science. 2009; 324: 1302-1305Crossref PubMed Scopus (2650) Google Scholar]2 (886)Recent advances in non-precious metal catalysis for oxygen-reduction reaction in polymer electrolyte fuel cells[[17]Jaouen F. Proietti E. Lefevre M. Chenitz R. Dodelet J.P. Wu G. Chung H.T. Johnston C.M. Zelenay P. Recent advances in non-precious metal catalysis for oxygen-reduction reaction in polymer electrolyte fuel cells.Energy Environ. Sci. 2011; 4: 114-130Crossref Google Scholar]3 (774)Review of the proton exchange membranes for fuel cell applications[[9]Peighambardoust S.J. Rowshanzamir S. Amjadi M. Review of the proton exchange membranes for fuel cell applications.Int. J. Hydrogen Energy. 2010; 35: 9349-9384Crossref Scopus (1575) Google Scholar]4 (725)Electrocatalytically active graphene-platinum nanocomposites. Role of 2-D carbon support in PEM fuel cells[[18]Seger B. Kamat P.V. Electrocatalytically active graphene-platinum nanocomposites. Role of 2-D carbon support in PEM fuel cells.J. Phys. Chem. C. 2009; 113: 7990-7995Crossref Scopus (912) Google Scholar]5 (579)Hydrogen oxidation and evolution reaction kinetics on platinum: Acid vs alkaline electrolytes[[19]Sheng W.C. Gasteiger H.A. Shao-Horn Y. Hydrogen oxidation and evolution reaction kinetics on platinum: acid vs alkaline electrolytes.J. Electrochem. Soc. 2010; 157: B1529-B1536Crossref Scopus (1206) Google Scholar]6 (504)Synthesis and oxygen reduction activity of shape-controlled Pt3Ni nanopolyhedra[[20]Zhang J. Yang H.Z. Fang J.Y. Zou S.Z. 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Hasche F. Herranz J. Gasteiger H.A. New insights into the electrochemical hydrogen oxidation and evolution reaction mechanism.Energy Environ. Sci. 2014; 7: 2255-2260Crossref Google Scholar]13 (316)Low-temperature aqueous-phase methanol dehydrogenation to hydrogen and carbon dioxide[[27]Nielsen M. Alberico E. Baumann W. Drexler H.J. Junge H. Gladiali S. Beller M. Low-temperature aqueous-phase methanol dehydrogenation to hydrogen and carbon dioxide.Nature. 2013; 495: 85-89Crossref PubMed Scopus (555) Google Scholar]13 (316)High-performance alkaline polymer electrolyte for fuel cell applications[[28]Pan J. Lu S.F. Li Y. Huang A.B. Zhuang L. Lu J.T. High-performance alkaline polymer electrolyte for fuel cell applications.Adv. Funct. Mater. 2010; 20: 312-319Crossref Scopus (441) Google Scholar]15 (315)Multimetallic Au/FePt3 nanoparticles as highly durable electrocatalyst[[29]Wang C. van der Vliet D. More K.L. Zaluzec N.J. Peng S. Sun S.H. Daimon H. Wang G.F. Greeley J. Pearson J. Paulikas A.P. Karapetrov G. Strmcnik D. Markovic N.M. Stamenkovic V.R. Multimetallic Au/FePt3 nanoparticles as highly durable electrocatalyst.Nano Lett. 2011; 11: 919-926Crossref PubMed Scopus (407) Google Scholar]16 (308)A highly durable platinum nanocatalyst for proton exchange membrane fuel cells: Multiarmed starlike nanowire single crystal[[30]Sun S.H. Zhang G.X. Geng D.S. Chen Y.G. Li R.Y. Cai M. Sun X.L. A highly durable platinum nanocatalyst for proton exchange membrane fuel cells: multiarmed starlike nanowire single crystal.Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2011; 50: 422-426Crossref PubMed Scopus (336) Google Scholar]TC2018: Total number of citations from Web of Science Core Collection since publication to the end of 2018. Open table in a new tab TC2018: Total number of citations from Web of Science Core Collection since publication to the end of 2018. From the 7,694 articles in the result, the top 16 articles that were related to proton exchange membrane fuel cells with TC2018 > 300 were listed in Table 4. Furthermore, related results were also show in Figures 1, 2, 3, and 4.Figure 2Top six institutes with TP > 100.View Large Image Figure ViewerDownload Hi-res image Download (PPT)Figure 3Top seven countries with TP > 400.View Large Image Figure ViewerDownload Hi-res image Download (PPT)Figure 4Top seven articles with TC2018 > 400.View Large Image Figure ViewerDownload Hi-res image Download (PPT) Yonoff et al. published a bibliometric article in Heliyon using inappropriate methods. Therefore, results and discussion can be misleading to journal readers. In addition, citing the original paper does not only respect authors who have presented such novel idea in their research studies, but also allows the readers to read the original idea in detail [[31]Ho Y.S. Comments on "Adsorption characteristics and behaviors of graphene oxide for Zn(II) removal from aqueous solution".Appl. Surf. Sci. 2014; 301: 584Crossref Scopus (10) Google Scholar]. In my opinion, Yonoff et al. should have cited the original paper for what they mentioned in their paper and used accurate methods, thereby providing acceptable results and discussion in their paper. All authors listed have significantly contributed to the development and the writing of this article. The authors declare no conflict of interest. Research trends in proton exchange membrane fuel cells during 2008–2018: A bibliometric analysisYonoff et al.HeliyonMay 23, 2019In BriefA bibliometric analysis of proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) content from a total of 15.020 research publications was conducted between 2008 and 2018, the papers being detailed in the online version of SCI-Expanded, Thomson Reuters Web of Science. Data processing tools such as Hitscite, CiteSpace, ArcGIS and Ucinet 6 were used to process the information. The parameters analyzed in the analysis were: type of document; the language of publication; volume and characteristics of publication output; publication by journals; performance of countries and research institutions; research trends and visibility. Full-Text PDF Open Access