iTSSe TSS ADVANCED MATERIALS & PROCESSES | JULY/AUGUST 2023 53 iTSSe TSS FEATURE 8 Thermal spraying was first invented at the beginning of the 20th century under the form of flame spray, but its development only took off in the 1960s and 1970s with the invention of plasma-spray systems and increasing interests from the aerospace industry. Alongside the development of industrial procedures and patents, a growing contribution from academia and research facilities has greatly contributed to the maturing of the field. In parallel, academia has seen an increasing use of scientometrics, i.e., metrics studying scholarly literature, and notably the impact of academic journals (impact factors), research papers (citations), or the authors themselves (h-index). These measurements face controversy in terms of providing a perverse environment that may focus on the metrics rather than the quality of research provided, yet they are often used to consider and/or compare scientific output of researchers, notably in recruitment processes. As a result, this brief article aims to draw a scientometric portrait of the contributions made by authors in the field of thermal spray during the past 40 years, to establish a baseline for what may be expected from thermal spray researchers, whether young or seasoned professionals. APPROACH Scientometric studies, as most data-based studies, largely depend on the data source. In this article, data was solely acquired from Scopus, the bibliographic database of Elsevier, that offers simple tools to recover manuscript information (e.g., author information, journal/source title, abstract, and citations). Notably, it is possible to quickly recover and download the list of references, which will be of interest for a future study on connections between research topics and research groups in thermal spray. A search query was developed, focused on all journal articles or conference proceedings relating to thermal spray, published in English between 1983 and 2022, thus covering a large majority of works contributed to the field. The query itself looked into all terms relevant to thermal spray and their derivatives: these concern “thermal spray*” (* designates alternative word endings such as “spraying” or “sprayed”), “plasma spray*” (which includes variants such as “suspension” or “air” plasma spray), “flame spray,*” “high-velocity oxy (gen)-fuel”/“HVOF,” “suspension spray,*” “cold (gas dynamic) spray,*” “detonation spray,*” “(wire/electric) arc spray,*” “warm spray,*” and “high-velocity air-fuel”/“HVAF.” This query rendered 36,164 documents. As databases such as Scopus are regularly updated, it is important to note that the query was searched and the corresponding document data were acquired on February 5, 2023, thus including a maximum of referenceable documents from 2022 and allowing the database to update references that would be associated with priorly published manuscripts. Scopus allows the full recovery of article information (notably references) for up to 2000 documents at a time. As a result, the article information was recovered on a year-byyear basis (with no more than 1980 thermal spray documents being published in a single year, in 2016), and this data was then imported into Excel via the Power Query tool, which allows the data to be sorted, “cleaned,” and formatted. Of notable interest, the recovered author names may present inconsistencies in how some authors may be referenced (e.g., A. Smith, A.B. Smith, or A.-B. Smith), or homonymous authors may co-exist within the community. This requires any data analysis to rely on author ID numbers that are given by Scopus and are author specific. In this way, 58,885 individual authors were identified for the chosen period. Data analysis was conducted by using the UNIQUE and FILTER functions of Excel to isolate unique instances of author ID numbers, as well as actively filter the full dataset to only show references relevant to a chosen author ID. In this article, only the h-index was determined, while in further work, other metrics (g-index, i10-index, etc.) will be studied. The h-index is defined as the number h of publications cited at least h times: this measures both the productivity and citation impact of the author’s publications. Finally, a «field input duration» was also calculated, defined as the time between the first and last referenced papers of a given author, within the dataset. This implies that authors who may have started publishing prior to 19831985, may have a lower input duration than the time during which they actually contributed to the field. Box-and-whisker plots were used to represent the analyzed data. By nature, these plots describe the data THERMAL SPRAY PUBLISHING: A SCIENTOMETRIC PORTRAIT OF 40 YEARS OF CONTRIBUTIONS A study of the metrics on thermal spray citations provides a picture of the industry’s research community. Andre C. Liberati* Concordia University, Montreal *Member of ASM International
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