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Chapter I

INTRODUCTION

“Soft Skill is utterly important for every individual to sustain and grow in any

work place and in life”

Soft Skills is a term used in the industry to denote a person’s EQ (Emotional

Quotient) rather than his technical or professional skills.

They are skills relating to one’s personal attributes and soft skill encompasses of

others, personal, communication, social and self-management behaviours. They cover

a wide spectrum of personal traits and abilities including but not restricted to being

reliable, trustworthiness, adaptability, personal integrity, leadership, social grace, time

management, awareness, likeability, attitude, team building, influencing skills, etc. It

talks about how a person reacts and interacts in the work place, and in life and how

effectively he deals with his managers, co-workers, subordinates and others in

general.

1.1 Importance of Soft skills

A soft skill has been there for ages, since the advent of human interaction. People

learn it on their own or learn it by seeing other’s success. Even about a decade ago,

soft skill was not something that people explicitly would talk about. Though

management people tell that ‘soft skill’ is nice to have, they do not give it the respect

or weight-age that it should be given. All this has been changing slowly. People

have started acknowledging the importance of soft skills.

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Soft skills are as important as traditional hard skills regardless of industry. Soft

skills do complement hard skills and needs to be clearly understood. At the same time

hard skills cannot be replaced with soft skills. Soft skills play very important role in

personal and professional life. Companies observe that they get people with definite

hard skills but fail to get people with good soft skills.

Companies have started understanding and acknowledging the importance of Soft

skills and are investing in training its people on soft skills. At workplace, they want to

see more people with the various soft skill traits. It is very important that everyone

learns and upgrade themselves on soft skills. A key soft skill is something that people

should follow as an ongoing process throughout their life. Identifying soft skills that

one has and enhancing them and upgrading on the other soft skills will help one grow

in life. Soft skills may be improved in various ways. Some of the methods may

include taking courses on specific skill set. Others would include seeking help from

peers and seniors or managers. Self training and reading books is another way to

improve on the soft skills. Soft skills should be practiced and improved on a regular

basis. Soft skill is not something that can be taught but must be learnt by oneself with

lots of practice. There are courses which can guide us on soft skills.

1.2 Attributes of soft skills

Employers are now looking for people who can do more than just perform a set of

tasks. Employers are increasingly searching for more than a qualification and

highlighting soft skills can put at a considerable advantage over similarly qualified

candidates. In addition to key competencies like strong analytical skills, reasoning

skills and a proven ability to manage complex information that employers are looking

for desirable soft skills which include:

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1.2.1 Interpersonal skills

Interpersonal skills of an individual are traits that include communication,

confidence in interacting with others, problem solving, decision making and personal

stress management. Strong interpersonal skill makes a person successful in personal

and professional life. One should be trustworthy and have pleasant manners and

appealing to others. Dealing with other people, be considerate of colleagues and

others be able to settle disputes amicably, be a good communicator, have great

problem solving skill are some of the important interpersonal skill traits. Judging

people is one of the ‘should NOT have’ traits.

1.2.2 Communication Skills

Communication Skills are very important to everyone and it is the most important

soft skill that needs to be taken care of. It tells about how one sends and receives

information, ideas, opinion and how one conveys their own thought process. It is very

important to communicate with others so that they rightly understand what we are

trying to tell them and also understand what others want to say or communicate to us.

1.2.3 Writing skills

Writing skills varies on what is being written. It asks for a different style while

writing research proposal, business letters, memos, personal letter. While writing, one

has to take care not to use slangs, abbreviations or symbols. Written communication

has a purpose which has to be understood clearly by the recipient. A simple write-up

with short sentences and easy to understand words without use of jargon is always

recommended.
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1.2.4 Time Management

Time management play a crucial factor in any work environment also in life. A

proper planning helps in proper execution. Every individual should be self

disciplined when it comes to time management. Basic principles of time management

may include preparing a charter of the work that needs to be performed, direct the

effort towards completing the work at hand in time, reduction of time wastage. Some

of the menace of ineffective time management includes poor prioritization, failing to

clarify what is required, underestimating the effort (time required to complete the

task. Etc. It is very important to manage time in one’s personal and professional life.

Upon managing time efficiently one would have enough or sufficient time to take up

other tasks.

Time management involves planning, organization, implementing and controlling.

A proper time chart is a must to be followed to efficiently track and time. The task

may be organized properly keeping the time planed in mind to achieve or complete

the task. Organizing involves scheduling the time for the various tasks leading to the

goal. Efficient time management may include good planning, efficient time estimate

prioritization of task. Maintaining and abiding by calendar and using check list.

1.2.5 Team Work

A Team or group is essential to complete any task. Be it in a sports field or work

place, a good team with great teamwork can create wonders. They would succeed in

many of the work taken up. Like in a team sport wherein the bonding of the team and

team work plays crucial part in winning any game, the same applies to work place and

also in personal life. A good team would work in coordination towards a common
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goal and help each other whenever required. One member of the team would put in

extra effort and help another team member when wanted. It is an important trait

expected in each one of us. One should have the ability to work in a team. The

members in a team should not have ego and should be ready to help one another when

required and expected. Each individual in a team should be aware of his/ her

responsibility towards the team, should be cooperative, able to understand the issues

of other members of the team, value their importance in the team.

Soft skills are also categorised in the following manner. They are:

Communication skills

Interpersonal skills

Positive attitude

Values

Perception

Etiquette

Creativity

Problem solving

Decision-making

Coping with time

Coping with stress

Coping with emotions

Teamwork
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1.3 Exhibiting soft skills

The demonstration of key skills should be an ongoing process throughout the

working career. It is essential to demonstrate the strengths by finding an example of

when certain skills are used and to think about what, when, why and how of every

situation and this should help to enhance the credibility.

1.4 Identifying soft skills

It is required to think about which soft skills are in use in day-to-day life. These

personal traits make a man unique. Asking friends, family or colleagues to write

down the good and not-so-good traits and have a look at consistencies in their

responses will help identify the strengths and allow working towards removing

weaknesses. Looking into the skills and experiences that would be required in the

type of job a person is seeking / performing. It could be done this by contacting a

recruitment consultancy asking what the fundamental requirements are. Job postings

and vacancy specifications would also give an idea of what personal qualities are

desirable.

1.5 Methods of improving soft skills

Having identified certain skills to improve and develop to match the job, a plan

could be developed. Identifying the goals and the steps needed to achieve it which are

put in a time frame will define how the things are known, when the goals are reached

and how that goals are used to measure the success.

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1.6 Bibliometrics

The branch of library science concerned with the application of mathematical and

statistical analysis to bibliography; the statistical analysis of books, articles, or other

publications.

E.W Hulme the pioneer of the study of statistical bibliography stated the purpose

of bibliometrics as "To shed light on the processes of written communication and of

the nature and course of development of a discipline. By means of counting and

analyzing the various facts of written communication Pritchard also interpreted its

purpose in a slightly different version by Hulme. Scharder (1981) says, "The objective

of bibliometrics as a scientific study is to produce ideas that is, theory about recorded

discourse and its various important properties."

O'connor and Voos (1981) have pointed out: "The scope of bibliometrics includes

studying the relationship within a literature of describing a literature. Typically, these

descriptions focus on consistent patterns involving authors, monographs, journals or

subject/language"

1.7 Bibliometrics : Scope

Bibliometric is the technical name for a range of analytical methods using

information-quo-information found organised in bibliographic description of reading

materials such as books, periodical article, reports, patents, software, designs,

prototypes and blueprints to develop descriptive statistics, multidimensional analyses

ad graphical representations of the output of science. Bibliometrics is often used to

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Clarify and assist in the analysis and formulation of science policy by

highlighting the networks of players or subjects that make up scientific research;

Provide strategic analysis of the relative position of research performers;

Sketch profiles of the activities and performance of individual centers;

Graphically present studies of strategic or innovative subjects;

Publication counts, involving counting of scientific publications published by a

researcher or a research group;

Citation counts, involving identifying the number of times a specific article is

cited in other scientific journal publications; these measures are considered to

address questions of quality, influence, and the transfer of knowledge;

Co-citation analysis, identifying pairs or groups of articles that are cited

together in other articles or publications; from these pairs or groups of articles a

‘cognitive structure’ can be derived, providing information on the direction and

flow of scientific thought;

Co-word analysis, involving assigning keywords to a paper or article by a

professional reader; papers which have the same keywords and sets of words are

linked to each other via a clustering techniques;

Scientific mapping, involving developing a visual model or ‘map’ of the realm

of scientific fields representing the structure of literature output of particular

scientific fields”.

Bibliometric studies fall mainly into two broad groups

Those describing the characteristics or features of literature (descriptive

studies), and
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Those examining the relationships formed between components of literature

(behavioural studies, sometimes referred to as citations studies, but not

restricted to them)

The descriptive studies are probably the most easily understood, and can be

thought of as resembling in many ways – population census. Both have to provide

comprehensive and accurate data about rapidly changing population in one case, of

people and in other, of literature. Literature descriptions are assembled from the

bibliographic study those that provide data on the condition or character of the

literature as a whole. The present study falls under the category of Descriptive Study

since it is based on the mapping of the subjects.

1.8 Bibliometrics: Definitions

Alan Pritchard (1969)1 defines bibliometrics as, "the application of mathematical

methods to books and other media of communication."

According to Fairthorne (1969)2 "Bibliometrics is the quantitative treatment of

properties of recorded discourse and behavior appertaining to it."

Potter (1981)3 defined bibliometrics as "the study and measurement of the

publication pattern of all forms of written communication and their authorship."

Sengupta (1990)4 defines it as the "organisation, classification and quantitative

evaluation of publication patterns of all macro and micro communications along with

their authorships by mathematical and statistical calculus."

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1.9 Bibliometric Laws

Bibliometric Laws are statistical expressions which seek to describe the working of

science by mathematical means. The three basic laws in bibliometrics are:

1. Lotka's inverse square law of 'Scientific Productivity'

2. Bradford's 'Law of Scattering of Scientific Papers'

3. Zipf's 'Law of Word Occurrence'

1.9.1 Lotka's Law5

In 1926, Alfred J Lotka proposed his Inverse Square Law correlating contributors

of scientific papers to their number of contributions. His law provided fundamental

theoretical base for bibliometric studies invoking authorships. He was interested in

determining "the part which men of different calibre contribute to the progress of

science". For this, he checked the decennial index of 'Chemical Abstracts' 1907-1916

and counted the number of names against which appeared 1, 2, 3 etc., entries. He

tabulated the data for 6,891 names, beginning with letter 'A' and ‘B’ Similarly the data

from the Auerbach's Geschietftafein der physik was also collected for the 1325

physicists. Lotka then plotted the graph on a logarithmic scale, the number of authors

against the number of contributions made by each author and he found that in each

case the points were closely scattered about a straight line, having a slope of

approximately two to one. On the basis of these data, Lotka decided a general

equation, for the relation between the frequency ‘y’ of persons making 'x'

contributions as follows xn y = constant and for the special case n=2, the constant is

0.6079. Further he summarized the results as follows:

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"In the case examined it is found that the number of persons making 2 contributions is

about one fourth of those making one contribution, the number making 'n'

contributions is about 1/n2 of those making one and the proportion of all contributions

about 60 percent".

In other words, for every 100 authors contributing one article, 25 will contribute two

articles, about 11 will contribute 3 articles and 6 will contribute 4 articles and so on.

Though, the law was based on the study of chemistry and physics literature later it has

generated much interest and attracted the attention of researchers and it has been

applied and tested in many other fields.

1.9.2 Bradford's Law of Scattering 6

Samuel Clement Bradford, another pioneer of bibliometrics should be considered

for his classic paper “Source of Information on Specific Subjects", which is the first

paper published on observations on scattering. Bradford examined two bibliographies

prepared in the Science Library (Britain) on Applied Geophysics (192831) and

lubrication (193132) and he prepared lists of journals arranged by decreasing order of

source items contributed by the journals to the bibliographies. He noticed that in each

subject there were a few very productive sources, large number of sources of

constantly diminishing productivity. The whole range of periodicals was thus seen as

"a family of successive generations of diminishing kinship, each generation being

greater in number than the preceding, and each constituent of generation producing

inversely according to its degree of remoteness".

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In the list of periodicals ranked by diminishing productivity, Bradford identified three

groups of periodicals that produced approximately the same number of articled on the

subject, but the number of periodicals in these three equiproductive zones increased

by a constant factor. Based on this he stated his law as follows: "If scientific

periodicals are arranged in order of decreasing productivity of articles on a given

subject that may be divided into a nucleus of periodicals more particularly devoted to

the subject and several groups or zones containing the same number of articles as the

nucleus when the number of periodicals in the nucleus and succeeding zones will be

as 1: n: n2 Bradford also plotted graphs of the cumulative number of source items

R(n) versus the logarithm of the cumulative number of journals (log n). The resulting

graphs for Applied Geophysics and Lubrication were similar to the graph shown in

figure. Such a graph is sometimes called as Bradford bibliograph.

The graph begins with a rising curve AP1 and then continues as a straight line. The

rising part of the graph represents the nucleus of highly productive journals. The

points P1 and P2 and P3 on the bibliography are the boundaries of three

equiproductive zones in which the same number of articles as the nucleus (represented

by 0y1y2=y2y3) derived from an increasingly larger number of journals (represented

by 0x1 ,x2 and x2,x3).The law attracted the attention of many researchers in the field

and has been the main topic of many articles in the literature.

1.9.3 Zipfs Law of Word Occurance7

G.K Zipf developed and extended an empirical law, as observed by Estoup,

governing a relation between the rank of a word and the frequency of its appearance
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in a long text. If V is the rank of a word and 'f is its frequency, then mathematically

Zipfs law can be stated as follows:rf = c, where 'c' is a constant.

His law states that in a long textual matter if words are arranged in their decreasing

order of frequency, then the rank of any given word of the text will be inversely

proportional to the frequency of occurrence of the word. Thus, these three laws are

respectively based on (i) number of authors contributing in a discipline or other field

(ii) distribution of articles in a set of journals and (iii) ranking word frequency in a

particular set of documents.

1.10 Need for Study

The need of soft skills depends very much on the context and one’s personal

perception. However, there is one property that immediately comes to most people’s

mind when soft skills are mentioned: those are the communication skills. Certainly, it

is the talent of communication skills, which is mostly lacking. When asking people

what exactly they understand to be communication skills, one will receive a wide

range of answers, because communication skills include a lot of different aspects.

Since the researcharies a library professional have taken this study by accepting the

fact that there is a need to study the trends of various prominent facets which are

highly required for any manager.

1.11 Statement of Problem

Research in social science has resulted in enormous growth of reports, articles,

conference proceedings, technical reports, research notes, research reviews and

monographs. A Statistical analysis of such literature produced in the different form is

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required to quality to know the nature of published literature, which is the sum of

current knowledge. A bibliometric study is one such approach which can be aid in

doing so. Therefore, bibliometric analysis can be carried out on any form of

quantitative analysis relating to production, distribution and use of published or semi

published literature. In the present study an attempt has been made to know research

trend in soft skills by applying simple biliometric measurement.

The researcher projected to carry out as it was observed that there was no study in

the literature about the publication productivity of soft skills. The Research topic of

the present study is on “Research Productivity in Soft Skills: A Biliometric

Study”. The main aim of the study is determine the growth of literature,

geographical and year wise distribution, authorship pattern, core journals, prolific

author, publication type etc. by the research publication of web of knowledge for the

period of 1999 to 2012. The appropriate bibliometric laws has been analysed in this

research.

1.12 Objectives of the study

The researcher has framed the following objectives by keeping the content and

meaning of the study:

1. To identify and analysis growth rate of soft skills;

2. To assess the forms of publications in which the soft skills is communicated;

3. To measure and calculate the relative growth rate and doubling time for

publications and pages using exponential growth model;

4. To analyse the type of co-authorship pattern and examine the extent of

research collaboration among soft skills;

5. To examine the continent-wise research performance of soft sills;

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6. To identify the different subfields of soft skills;

7. To apprehend and test the applicability of various bibliometrics laws;

8. To compare the soft skills output of various continents with world output

using Science productivity index and Author productivity index;

9. To identify the geographic distribution of journals from which the

contributions of soft skills got published;

10. To suggest a rational strategy for research and development in soft skills based

on the findings of the study;

1.13 Hypotheses

The following hypotheses were formulated and tested with appropriate statistical

tools:

1. There is an inverse relationship in the number of authors and the number of

papers published in the field of soft skills.

2. There is variation in authorship pattern among the scholars of different

geographical locations.

3. There is distribution of research literature in the field of soft skills confined

with the Bradford Law.

4. There is an inverse relationship in the number of papers published and number

of journals in the field of soft skills.

5. The productivity of authors in soft skills research confined with Lotka Law.

6. There is a significant association between the most prolific authors and

number of citations.

7. There is an association between the GDP and research productivity of the

country.
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1.14 Significance of the study

This study provides the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the progress of Soft

Skills, as reflected in its publications output reported in the mainstream of national

and international journals. The main objective of the present study is to examine the

status of Soft Skills at the global, its strong and weaker areas of research, quantity and

quality of research output and dynamics of research across institutions, sectors and

geographical regions and subjects.

Therefore, a clear understanding of the characteristics of the subject literature is

one of the prerequisites and has paramount importance in planning and designing of

information systems and services. Under these circumstances, the results of the study

will add to the body of the knowledge within information science, help and promote

research within the studies of soft skills and supply information providers such as

librarians and information professionals with a better understanding of the needs of

the research expertise as they exercise bibliographic control and plan for research and

development. Such a study may prove useful for International Skills planners and

developments and policy-makers for gaining macro insights into the global

development of Soft Skills.

Also this study attempts to explain to emergence of research area in soft skills such

as growth rate, areas of research concentration, research performance of various

institutions and author productivity. The published literature in soft skills is taken as

a yardstick to measure the knowledge in a discipline. The growth rate analysis of

publication could yield some useful results regarding growth pattern of literature and

scientific productivity of authors in the discipline.

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1.15 Limitation of the Study

The study covers a period of fourteen years only spanned between 1999 and 2012,

both years inclusive. Records for the analysis of this investigation have been extracted

from Web of Knowledge. Database of records taken for analysis is exclusively from

Web of Knowledge which follows its own standard for the inclusion or exclusion of

sources. Though the data may exist outside Pure Science and allied subject are in

ample, this investigation has not included any from other sources or online database.

1.16 Organisation of the Study

The research thesis of the present study has been divided into five chapters. A

brief description about these chapters is given below:

Chapter - I

The first chapter ‘Introduction’ highlights on various characteristic related to the

study of Soft skills, bibliometric, background and statement of problem, objectives,

hypothesis, significance of the study, limitations and organisation of the study.

Chapter - II

The Second chapter on ‘Review of Related Literature’ is to bring out the facts and

figures of the previous studies that have been carried out in this area. The various

kinds of literature reviewed for the present study includes theoretical as well as

empirical.
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Chapter - III

This chapter on ‘Research Design’ provides a details outline of Scope of the Study,

data collection source, method of data collection, various bibliometric indicators and

statistical tools used in this study.

Chapter - IV

This chapter is ‘Analysis of Data’ highlights on the evaluation of research

productivity in soft skills. The facts and figures of the quantitative data analysed

using various bibliometric indicators have been presented in detail and systematic

manner.

Chapter - V

The most important chapter findings and Conclusion discusses the entire range of

the study in a complete manner. This chapter provides the findings, implications and

suggestions. It is given nearby of the areas to be determined in future.

The study is also appended with a select bibliography and the publications

published in the journals.

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REFERENCES

1. Pritchard, Alan (1969). Statistical bibliography or bibliometrics, Journal of

Documentation, 25(4): 348-349.

2. Fairthorne, R. A (1969). Empirical hyperbolic distributions for bibliometric

description and prediction, Journal of Documentation, 25 : 319-343.

3. Potter, W. G (1981). Introduction to bibliometrics, Library Trends, 30 : 5-7.

4. Sengupta, I. N (1990). Bibliometrics and its applications in Pushpa Dhyani,

ed., Information Science and Libraries, New Delhi, Atlantic.

5. Lotka Alfred J (1926). The frequency distribution of scientific productivity,

Journal of the Washington Academy of Science, 16 : 323.

6. Bradford, S. C (1934). Sources of Information on specific sciences,

Engineering, 137 : 85-86.

7. Zipf, G. K (1949). Human Behavour and the principle of least efforts : An

introduction to human ecology, mass, Addison Wesley.

8. Hariharan S and etc. (2010). Soft Skills, Neha Publication.

9. Gopalaswamy Ramesh and Mahadevan Ramesh (2011). The ACE of Soft

Skills: Attitude, Communication and Etiquette for Success, Pearson

Publication.

10. Alex K (2012). Soft Skills: Know Yourself and Know the World, S.Chand

Publication.