Boolean, bibliometrics, and beyond LIS 670 donna Bair-Mundy Part 2.

Boolean, bibliometrics, Boolean, bibliometrics, and beyondand beyond

LIS 670donna Bair-Mundy

Part 2

Bibliometrics

Bibliometrics – a defintion

Using quantitative analysis and statistics to examine patterns in academic publishing, now including information transmitted via the World Wide Web

Bibliometrics – what it looks at

• Author productivity

• Citation analysis – impact factors, indexing

• Obsolescence of information resources – half-life of articles

• Dispersion of articles in certain fields

• Word frequencies

Bibliometrics – Purposes (1)

Provide evolutionary models of science, technology, and scholarship

Invisible colleges

Structure of scholarly disciplines

Evolution of a discipline over time

Evolution of concepts

Physics

AstrophysicsBiophysicsSubatomic

particle physics

Global warming

Bibliometrics – Purposes (2)

Assist development of information retrieval methodologies

Provide tools for studying information use and impact

Assist in selection and deselection of resources

Properties of scientific literature

Fragmentary - each paper contributes a small piece to the puzzle under study

Derivative - scientific papers rely heavily on previous research (acknowledged in citations)

Edited - peer reviewed by anonymous referees

Evolution of a discipline

• Purpose: "to reduce to geometric form the activities of the corporate body of anatomical research, and the relative importances from time to time of each country and division of the subject"

• Looked at 6,436 publications dealing with animal anatomy for the period 1543 to 1860

Cole and Eales - 1917 - The history of comparative anatomy—a statistical analysis of the literature

Published in: Sci. Progr. 11:578-596.

Evolution of a discipline

• When were the periods of greater or less importance;

• Where were the centers of activity at any given time?

• As the field grew, how and when did it begin to be subdivided into narrower fields? Looking at publications

within a field to tell us about the field itself

Cole and Eales - 1917 - The history of comparative anatomy—a statistical analysis of the literature

Evolution of a discipline: IS

• Emergence and development of information science

• Relationships and roles of information science within potentially emergent suprasystem of knowledge

Harmon, Glynn - 1971 – On the evolution of information science. JASIS 22(4):235-241

Science, politics, and economics

First to use the term "statistical bibliography"

E. Wyndham Hulme 1923 - Statistical bibliography in relation to the growth of modern civilization

Published by Butler and Tanner Grafton (London)

Purpose: "to ascertain and illustrate by bibliographical data, various stages in the development of the mechanics of civilization"

Hulme (cont’d)Used 13 annual issues of The International Catalogue of Scientific Literature, from 1901 to 1913

Counted author entries for various subjects

Tabulated number of indexed journals by countries (which countries are highly productive in science?)

Hulme (cont’d)

Felt that subject division in a discipline was a sign of growth

Concluded that scientific publication output is influenced by population change and political and economic movements

Research output by countriesJ. Martin van Zyl 2013 – The generalized Pareto distribution fitted to research ouoputs of countries Scientometrics 94(3):1099-1109

Which continent (besides Antarctica) is not represented?

Why might that be?

Why might be the consequences?

Cost of research

Consequencesebola

722 results

ebolavirus

984 results

aids

122,722 resultshiv

196,414 results

Author productivity

Purpose: to "determine, if possible, the part which men of different calibre contribute to the progress of science"

Alfred J. Lotka 1926 - Statistics—the frequency distribution of scientific productivity

Published in: J. Washington Acad. Sci. 16:317-325.

Looked at Chemical Abstracts Index, then Geschichtstafeln der Physik

Lotka's Law

The total number of authors y in a given subject, each producing x publications, is inversely proportional to some exponential function n of x.

Lotka's Law - scientific publications

Inverse square law of scientific productivity

Where:x = number of publicationsy = number of authors credited with x publicationsn = constant (equals 2 for scientific subjects)C = constant

xn • y = C

1 publ. 2 publ. 3 publ. 4 publ.

Lotka's Law - scientific publications

xn • y = C

No

. of

auth

ors

Relative impacts of journals

Purpose: Select appropriate journals for a chemical library to provide good education for students

Gross & Gross - 1927 - College libraries and chemical education

Published in: Science 66:385-389

Tabulated 3,633 citations found in the 1926 volume of the Journal of the American Chemical Society

First use of citation analysis rather than publication counts

Which journals to collect?

Relative impacts of journalsJournal Citation Reports

“JCR is still the only usable tool to rank thousands of scholarly and

professional journals...”PETER JACSO

Relative impacts of journalsJournal Citation Reports

Relative impacts of journalsJournal Citation Reports

Relative impacts of journalsJournal Citation Reports

Relative impacts of journalsJournal Citation Reports

Citation Indexing

Eugene Garfield 1955 - Citation indexes for science: a new dimension in documentation through association of ideas

Impact factor Influence of an article based on citations to it

Published in: Science 122:108-111.

Science Citation Index

Problems of indexing

The interrelationship between the chemistry and the biological organisms of the soils of Cambodia.

The soil ecology of Kampuchea

1955 1995

citedarticle

Citation matrix

citedarticle

citedarticle

article

citingarticle

citingarticle

citingarticle

citingarticle

citingarticle

citingarticle

citingarticle

ISI Web of Science (1)

ISI Web of Science (2)

ISI Web of Science (3)

ISI Web of Science (4)

ISI Web of Science (5)

citedarticle

Science Citation Index

citedarticle

citedarticle

article

citingarticle

citingarticle

citingarticle

citingarticle

citingarticle

citingarticle

citingarticle

Association-of-ideas index

http://libweb.hawaii.edu/uhmlib/databases/er_title.html#WEB

Co-citation analysisArticles that cite the same article are likely to both be of interest to the reader of the cited article

article

citingarticle

citingarticle

These two articles are likely to be related

Selecting productive journals

Samuel Clement Bradford 1934 - Sources of information on specific subjects

Purpose: to develop a means by which librarians could select the most usable periodicals

Published in: Engineering 137:85-86

First paper published on observations of scattering

Bradford's Law

Bradford's Law of Scattering (1)

"If scientific journals are arranged in order of decreasing productivity of articles on a given subject, they 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 numbers of periodicals in the nucleus and succeeding zones will be as a : n : n2 : n3 …"

Bradford's Law of Scattering (2)

No. of source journals

121224

10755

No. of articles per source

60353025986543

Total no. of articles

60703050183260352015

9

27

130

130

1303

Bradford's Law of Scattering (3)

3 sources 130 articles

9 sources 9 sources 130 articles130 articles

27 sources 27 sources 130 articles130 articles

George Kingsley Zipf 1935

The psycho-biology of language: an introduction to dynamic philology

Frequency distributions of words

Published by MIT Press

Two lawsLess frequently occurring

wordsFrequently occurring words

Zipf's Law of High Frequency Words

For a given text the rank of a word multiplied by the frequency is a constant.

Proposed in 1949 by George Kingsley Zipf

Where:r = rank (in terms of frequency)f = frequency (no. of times the given word is used in the text)c = constant for the given text

r • f = c

Application of Zipf's laws

Determine transition point between high- and low-frequency words

William Goffman - automatic indexing

Collect equal number of words above and below the transition point

Eliminate trivial words using stop list

Remaining content-bearing words indicate document contents

Obsolescence of resources

Charles F. Gosnell 1944 - Obsolescence of books in college libraries

Purpose: "to discover lines of trend or curves of distribution by means of which this rate of obsolescence may be expressed in mathematical form"

Published in: College Res. Libr. 5:115-125

Curve of obsolescenceN

um

ber

of

use

rs

Age at time of use

Alan Pritchard 1969

Statistical bibliography or bibliometrics?

Coined the term "bibliometrics""the application of mathematics and statistical methods to books and other media of communication"

Published in: Journal of Documentation 25(4):348-349

Google indexing criteria

Text within page being indexed to determine topic

Links to page being indexed

Anchor text of links to page being indexed (indication of topic)

Weight links to page being indexed by links to the linking pages

“For a good explanation of Bradford’s Law of Scattering see...”

GoogleTreating links as citations to compute PageRank

high-weight linkage

low-weight linkage

Citation tree rings represent the citation history of an article. The color of a citation ring denotes the time of corresponding citations. The thickness of a ring is proportional to the number of citations in a given time slice. Chen, C. 2006. CiteSpace II: detecting and visualizing emerging trends and transient patterns in scientific literature. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 57(3):359-3787.

Bibliometrics in Action

A time-zone view of mass-extinction research. Chen, C. 2006. CiteSpace II: detecting and visualizing emerging trends and transient patterns in scientific literature. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 57(3):359-3787.

Adding bibliometric visualizations to digital library search results

Adding bibliometric visualizations to digital library search results