The research on energy in Spain: A scientometric approach

This work describes the features of the contributions made by the Spanish institutions to the specialized literature in the energy field in the period 1957-2012. The source considered has been the Scopus Elsevier database, together with bibliometric analysis techniques. All items provided by Scopus have been taken into account in the analysis (journal papers, conference proceedings, etc.). The results of this work show that the Spanish contribution is more that significant in the light of the obtained data, being the keywords power, energy, system, wind and solar the most used terms. Different aspects of the publications are analyzed, such as publication type, field, language, subcategory and journal type, as well as the keyword occurrence frequency. The contributions are geographically and institutionally broken down, with Madrid and Catalonia the main researching regions. At an international level, Spain mainly works jointly with France, USA, Germany and the United Kingdom. The most active categories in the Energy field are Engineering, Materials Science and Chemistry. It can be stated that the Spanish research enjoys good health and is an important and relevant player in the international scientific scene. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.