Recent SLIS Research Published in Scientometrics – 94(3) and 95(1) - 2013
SLIS faculty members contributed articles to the March and April issues of Scientometrics – (a journal published by Springer.) SLIS Ph.D. student Chaoqun Ni and faculty members Cassidy Sugimoto and Blaise Cronin extended the framework for bibliometric analysis of scholarly communication. In the April issue, SLIS faculty member Staša Milojević and Loet Leydesdorff from the University of Amsterdam developed the idea of “information metrics” as the basis for understanding bibliometrics, scientometrics, informetrics, and webometrics.
Article abstracts are included below.
Ni. C., Sugimoto, C. R. & Cronin, B. (2013). Visualizing and comparing four facets of scholarly communication: Producers, artifacts, concepts, and gatekeepers. Scientometrics, 94(3), 2013, 1161-1173.
This paper extends Borgman’s (Communication Research 16: 583, 1989) three-facet framework (artifacts, producers, concepts) for bibliometric analyses of scholarly communication by adding a fourth gatekeepers. The four-facet framework was applied to the field of Library and Information Science to test for variations in the networks produced using operationalizations of each of these four facets independently. Fifty-eight journals from the Information Science and Library Science category in the 2008 Journal Citation Report were studied and the network proximity of these journals based on Venue-Author-Coupling (producer), journal co-citation analysis (artifact), topic analysis (concept) and interlocking editorial board membership (gatekeeper) was measured. The resulting networks were examined for potential correlation using the Quadratic Assignment Procedure. The results indicate some consensus regarding core journals, but significant differences among some networks. Holistic measures of scholarly communication that take multiple facets into account are proposed. This work is relevant in an assessment-conscious and metrics-driven age.
“Bibliometrics”, “scientometrics”, “informetrics”, and “webometrics” can all be considered as manifestations of a single research area with similar objectives and methods, which we call “information metrics” or iMetrics. This study explores the cognitive and social distinctness of iMetrics with respect to the general information science (IS), focusing on a core of researchers, shared vocabulary and literature/knowledge base. Our analysis investigates the similarities and differences between four document sets. The document sets are drawn from three core journals for iMetrics research (Scientometrics, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, and Journal of Informetrics). We split JASIST into document sets containing iMetrics and general IS articles. The volume of publications in this representation of the specialty has increased rapidly during the last decade. A core of researchers that predominantly focus on iMetrics topics can thus be identified. This core group has developed a shared vocabulary as exhibited in high similarity of title words and one that shares a knowledge base. The research front of this field moves faster than the research front of information science in general, bringing it closer to Price’s dream.
Posted March 19, 2013