Purpose It aimed at assessing the current status of physics research in North Korea through a bibliographic and content analysis of the physics papers from North Korea indexed in the Scopus from 2005 to 2018.
Methods The Scopus was searched on January 18, 2019 by using the search option ‘Affiliation city’ with “Pyongyang OR Chongjin OR Hamhung OR Sariwon OR Wonsan OR Kimchaek” as the city name and 171 physics papers from North Korea written in English were identified. By performing supplementary searches based on the author names and the references, 46 papers belonging to physics were added and the total of 217 papers were identified. They were classified by publication year, co-authors’ country, institution, subfield, journal and author. Representative North Korean physicists and the active subfields of physics were identified.
Results The number of physics papers from North Korea has been growing rapidly in the recent years. Physics research activities in North Korea were extremely centralized in its capital, Pyongyang, where all major research institutions were located. Major research areas included condensed matter physics, optics and high energy physics and the large majority of papers were theoretical ones. From a bibliographic and content analysis, sixteen representative or notable physicists in North Korea were identified.
Conclusion It appears that the North Korean government is actively encouraging researchers to publish more papers in international journals. There is a strong growth potential in physics research in North Korea. In order to achieve balanced development in physics, it is an important task to build competitive experimental groups.
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Purpose Although North Korea invests in scientific research, few selected research results are published to international journals. However, the latest peaceful political developments around North Korea have increased concerns about how they will support international scientific cooperation. This study aims to analyze the scientific collaboration and intellectual structure of North Korean researchers.
Methods We conducted a co-word analysis with author keywords and author names using the Web of Science records for 1976–2018 to observe the changes in research trends in North Korea. The structure of the median centrality of words and the parallel nearest neighbor clustering methods were used to visualize the results.
Results The analysis of 55 final keywords confirms that the corresponding network is composed of 17 sub-clusters under four areas. As a result of the investigation of 56 final author names, the corresponding network is composed of 15 sub-clusters under four areas.
Conclusion As more accurate information is needed about collaboration partners to ensure successful cooperation, this analysis result can support getting an overview of North Korea’s research community and their research network.
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