An Overview on the South Korean Scientific Production in the Field of Chemistry (1993-2012)

The present review seeks to take stock of the South Korean publication activity on the field of chemistry by analyzing systematically all chemistry-related scholarly communications collected in the Web of Science (WOS) database published by at least one Korean author or Korean instituteor university-affiliated author from 1993 to 2012. The studied parameters included the growth in number of the communications, as well as the language-, document-, category-, source-, organization-, and collaboration-wise distribution of the South Korean communications. A total of 5660 communications on chemistry were found to be published by South Korean researchers during the aforementioned period of time, and South Korea was the 15th country (1.77%) in the world in terms of informational communication activity in chemistry.