Boolean, bibliometrics, and beyond

1
Boolean, bibliometrics, and beyond
Part 2
LIS 670 donna Bair-Mundy
2
Bibliometrics
3
Bibliometrics a defintion
Using quantitative analysis and statistics to
examine patterns in academic publishing, now
including information transmitted via the World
Wide Web
4
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

5
Bibliometrics Purposes (1)
Physics ? Astrophysics Biophysics Subatomic
particle physics

• Provide evolutionary models of science,
  technology, and scholarship

Invisible colleges
Structure of scholarly disciplines
Evolution of a discipline over time
Global warming
Evolution of concepts
6
Bibliometrics Purposes (2)

• Assist development of information retrieval
  methodologies

Provide tools for studying information use and
impact
Assist in selection and deselection of resources
7
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
8
Evolution of a discipline
Cole and Eales - 1917 - The history of
comparative anatomya statistical analysis of the
literature

• 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

Published in Sci. Progr. 11578-596.
9
Evolution of a discipline
Cole and Eales - 1917 - The history of
comparative anatomya statistical analysis of the
literature

• 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
10
Evolution of a discipline IS
Harmon, Glynn - 1971 On the evolution of
information science. JASIS 22(4)235-241

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

11
Science, politics, and economics
E. Wyndham Hulme 1923 - Statistical bibliography
in relation to the growth of modern civilization

• First to use the term "statistical bibliography"

Purpose "to ascertain and illustrate by
bibliographical data, various stages in the
development of the mechanics of civilization"
Published by Butler and Tanner Grafton (London)
12
Hulme (contd)

• 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?)
13
Hulme (contd)

• 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
14
Research output by countries
J. 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?
15
Cost of research
16
Consequences
ebola
722 results
ebolavirus
984 results
aids
hiv
122,722 results
196,414 results
17
Author productivity
Alfred J. Lotka 1926 - Statisticsthe frequency
distribution of scientific productivity

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

Looked at Chemical Abstracts Index, then
Geschichtstafeln der Physik
Published in J. Washington Acad. Sci. 16317-325.
18
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.
19
Lotka's Law - scientific publications
Inverse square law of scientific productivity
Where x number of publications y number of
authors credited with x publications n constant
(equals 2 for scientific subjects) C constant
xn y C
20
Lotka's Law - scientific publications
No. of authors
xn y C
21
Relative impacts of journals
Gross Gross - 1927 - College libraries and
chemical education

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

Which journals to collect?
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
Published in Science 66385-389
22
Relative impacts of journals
Journal Citation Reports
JCR is still the only usable tool to rank
thousands of scholarly and professional
journals... PETER JACSO
23
Relative impacts of journals
Journal Citation Reports
24
Relative impacts of journals
Journal Citation Reports
25
Relative impacts of journals
Journal Citation Reports
26
Relative impacts of journals
Journal Citation Reports
27
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
Science Citation Index
Published in Science 122108-111.
28
Problems of indexing

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

The soil ecology of Kampuchea
1955
1995
29
Citation matrix
citing article
citing article
cited article
citing article
article
citing article
cited article
citing article
citing article
cited article
citing article
30
ISI Web of Science (1)
31
ISI Web of Science (2)
32
ISI Web of Science (3)
33
ISI Web of Science (4)
34
ISI Web of Science (5)
35
Science Citation Index
Association-of-ideas index
citing article
citing article
cited article
citing article
article
citing article
cited article
citing article
citing article
cited article
citing article
http//libweb.hawaii.edu/uhmlib/databases/er_title
.htmlWEB
36
Co-citation analysis
Articles that cite the same article are likely to
both be of interest to the reader of the cited
article
citing article
article
These two articles are likely to be related
citing article
37
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
First paper published on observations of
scattering
Bradford's Law
Published in Engineering 13785-86
38
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 "

39
Bradford's Law of Scattering (2)

• No. of
• source journals
• 1
• 2
• 1
• 2
• 2
• 4
• 10
• 7
• 5
• 5

No. of articles per source 60 35 30 25 9 8 6 5 4 3
Total no. of articles 60 70 30 50 18 32 60 35 20 1
5
130
3
9
130
27
130
40
Bradford's Law of Scattering (3)
3 sources 130 articles
9 sources 130 articles
27 sources 130 articles
41
George Kingsley Zipf 1935
The psycho-biology of language an introduction
to dynamic philology
Frequency distributions of words
Two laws Less frequently occurring
words Frequently occurring words
Published by MIT Press
42
Zipf's Law of High Frequency Words
Proposed in 1949 by George Kingsley Zipf
Where r rank (in terms of frequency) f freq
uency (no. of times the given word is used in the
text) c constant for the given text r f c

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

43
Application of Zipf's laws
William Goffman - automatic indexing

• Determine transition point between high- and
  low-frequency words

Collect equal number of words above and below the
transition point
Eliminate trivial words using stop list
Remaining content-bearing words indicate document
contents
44
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. 5115-125
45
Curve of obsolescence
Number of users
Age at time of use
46
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
47
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 Bradfords Law of
Scattering see...
48
Google
Treating links as citations to compute PageRank
high-weight linkage
low-weight linkage
49
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.
50
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.
51
(No Transcript)
52
Adding bibliometric visualizations to digital
library search results
53
Adding bibliometric visualizations to digital
library search results