The Impact of IJRB Articles Over the past 60 years

Andrej Rusin
The history of IJRB and its associated publications were explored using a graphical design technique which we have termed “Graphical Reference Mapping”. This method was conceived specifically as a means to graphically represent the impact of IJRB articles for its 60th anniversary issue which will be published later this year. A preliminary result of our analyses was included on the cover of this special issue. While potentially informative, it is our hope that such methods may be expanded to cover broader territory and to therefore represent a more complete picture of IJRB’s publication history.
 
A single article published in IJRB during a particular quarter of each year since 1959 was used to represent the impact of IJRB for that period. Using Google Scholar, this article was searched in the literature to determine how many times it was cited in the coming years. Each line in the center of the circle represents a future article, published in IJRB in the linked period, citing that representative article. This map of “internal citation history” for IJRB was creating using a Javascript program called “Hierarchical Edge Bundling” developed by Mike Bostock. This program utilizes a broader Javascript library, D3, used in the generation of interactive figures to represent many different forms of data, from population statistics to the local calls of a program library to defined functions in other libraries.
 
Preliminary analysis of IJRB articles

 This analysis was limited in its scope initially. Because of the widespread use of the internet in academia in the 1980s and 1990s and the consequently increased incidence overall of article citations, it was difficult to collect information on these years. As a result, representative papers were not analyzed after 1990. A second analysis using the same methods, but with a single paper championing each year, was conducted. These results included papers until 2018. 

 

A representation of highly cited IJRB articles and where they were cited in IJRB after publication

 A similar analysis was conducted on ICRP publications that cited IJRB publications. This was done to gain some insight into the contribution of historical IJRB articles to other organizations involved in the radiological sciences and radiation protection

A representation of all papers published in IJRB that were referenced by ICRP

 Additionally, an analysis was conducted on the same highly-cited IJRB articles and how many times they were cited in Radiation Research, and where in IJRB a representative article for each year from 1960-2018 from Radiation Research was cited.  This analysis provides an informative perspective of the impact of IJRB’s frequently-cited publications in newer IJRB articles, Radiation Research articles, and the impact of IJRB over the years on other organizations such as ICRP.

 

A: a representation of highly cited IJRB papers and where they were cited in Radiation Research. B: a representation of highly-cited Radiation Research papers and where they were cited in IJRB.

Published by Andrej Rusin

Andrej Rusin is a student at McMaster University specializing in Molecular Biology and Genetics. His areas of study include Genetics, Microbiology, Molecular Biology, and Radiobiology. His current area of research involves radiation induced bystander signalling and the p53 pathway.

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