Indo-Korean Co-Publications: An Analysis Using Asymmetric (α) Index

This paper concerns about the development and use of an asymmetric index (α) for the computation of the co-publications between two countries in a scientometric perspective. Korea and India are selected as assessing cases for illustrating the application of the ‘α’ index on co-publication analysis against several parameters such as growth in a number of the scholarly communications, document types, subject areas, and sources for the period 1994 to 2013. A total of 8823 co-publications were published by Indo-Korean researchers during the aforementioned period of time. The asymmetric index of Indo-Korean co-publications of India with Korea (αIndia-Korea) and vice versa (αKorea-India) were obtained and the values were 0.099 and 0.114, respectively. The results suggest that the overall efforts of Korean researchers have more effective co-operation with Indian researchers. In addition, a comparison with the best-known Salton’s (cosine) measures is provided and the results show that its value (0.11) is independent of the relative size of the collaborative systems.