The Canadian Neutron Beam Centre (CNBC) has been winding down operations throughout 2018. As part of this process, the CNBC was seeking to summarize its research activity over the last several decades and mandated Science-Metrix to undertake a bibliometric study of its researchers’ publications. This study aimed to provide timely highlights of the benefits that neutron-scattering research has offered Canada’s scholarly communities and, to a lesser extent, industries.

This study used the bibliometric record to capture the outcomes and achievements of the CNBC’s teams and networks of collaborators from 1980 to 2017. It contextualized the CNBC’s activities through a comparison to three Canadian and five international benchmark institutions.

The following indicators were applied for the analysis:

• Publication output:
  
  • Number of publications
  • Growth in output
• Scientific impact:
  
  • Average of relative citations
  • Average of relative impact factors
  • Highly cited publications—publications falling in the top 10% most cited papers
  • Citation distribution index
  • Citation distribution chart
• Collaboration and co-authorship
  
  • International collaboration
  • Intersectoral collaboration

These indicators were produced on both the full period under study (1980–2017) and longitudinal time series with finer-grained periods. For many indicators, the use of shorter temporal intervals revealed signals that were otherwise obscured over the aggregate period. The CNBC’s performance between 1980 and 2017 was found to entail a steady output of papers of a high quality that incrementally improved over time.

Read the report here [PDF].

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