Scientometrics have become an essential element in the practice and evaluation of science and research, including both the evaluation of individuals and national assessment exercises. Yet, researchers and practitioners in this field have lacked clear theories to guide their work. As early as 1981, then doctoral student Blaise Cronin published "The need for a theory of citing" —a call to arms for the fledgling scientometric community to produce foundational theories upon which the work of the field could be based. More than three decades later, the time has come to reach out the field again and ask how they have responded to this call. This book compiles the foundational theories that guide informetrics and scholarly communication research. It is a much needed compilation by leading scholars in the field that gathers together the theories that guide our understanding of authorship, citing, and impact.
Scientometrics have become an essential element in the practice and evaluation of science and research, including both the evaluation of individuals and national assessment exercises. Yet, researchers and practitioners in this field have lacked clear theories to guide their work. As early as 1981, then doctoral student Blaise Cronin published "The need for a theory of citing" —a call to arms for the fledgling scientometric community to produce foundational theories upon which the work of the field could be based. More than three decades later, the time has come to reach out the field again and ask how they have responded to this call. This book compiles the foundational theories that guide informetrics and scholarly communication research. It is a much needed compilation by leading scholars in the field that gathers together the theories that guide our understanding of authorship, citing, and impact.
Open Access in Theory and Practice investigates the theory-practice relationship in the domain of open access publication and dissemination of research outputs. Drawing on detailed analysis of the literature and current practice in OA, as well as data collected in detailed interviews with practitioners, policymakers, and researchers, the book discusses what constitutes ‘theory’, and how the role of theory is perceived by both theorists and practitioners. Exploring the ways theory and practice have interacted in the development of OA, the authors discuss what this reveals about the nature of the OA phenomenon itself and the theory-practice relationship. Open Access in Theory and Practice contributes to a better understanding of OA and, as such, should be of great interest to academics, researchers, and students working in the fields of information science, publishing studies, science communication, higher education policy, business, and economics. The book also makes an important contribution to the debate of the relationship between theory and practice in information science, and more widely across different fields of the social sciences and humanities
This open access book addresses three themes which have been central to Leydesdorff's research: (1) the dynamics of science, technology, and innovation; (2) the scientometric operationalization of these concept; and (3) the elaboration in terms of a Triple Helix of university-industry-government relations. In this study, I discuss the relations among these themes. Using Luhmann's social-systems theory for modelling meaning processing and Shannon's theory for information processing, I show that synergy can add new options to an innovation system as redundancy. The capacity to develop new options is more important for innovation than past performance. Entertaining a model of possible future states makes a knowledge-based system increasingly anticipatory. The trade-off between the incursion of future states on the historical developments can be measured using the Triple-Helix synergy indicator. This is shown, for example, for the Italian national and regional systems of innovation.
We intend to edit a Festschrift for Henk Moed combining a “best of” collection of his papers and new contributions (original research papers) by authors having worked and collaborated with him. The outcome of this original combination aims to provide an overview of the advancement of the field in the intersection of bibliometrics, informetrics, science studies and research assessment.
Science is increasingly defined by multidimensional collaborative networks. Despite the unprecedented growth of scientific collaboration around the globe – the collaborative turn – geography still matters for the cognitive enterprise. This book explores how geography conditions scientific collaboration and how collaboration affects the spatiality of science. This book offers a complex analysis of the spatial aspects of scientific collaboration, addressing the topic at a number of levels: individual, organizational, urban, regional, national, and international. Spatial patterns of scientific collaboration are analysed along with their determinants and consequences. By combining a vast array of approaches, concepts, and methodologies, the volume offers a comprehensive theoretical framework for the geography of scientific collaboration. The examples of scientific collaboration policy discussed in the book are taken from the European Union, the United States, and China. Through a number of case studies the authors analyse the background, development and evaluation of these policies. This book will be of interest to researchers in diverse disciplines such as regional studies, scientometrics, R&D policy, socio-economic geography and network analysis. It will also be of interest to policymakers, and to managers of research organisations.
A call to redirect the intellectual focus of information retrieval and science (IR&S) toward the phenomenon of technology-mediated experience. In this book, Sachi Arafat and Elham Ashoori issue a call to reorient the intellectual focus of information retrieval and science (IR&S) away from search and related processes toward the more general phenomenon of technology-mediated experience. Technology-mediated experience accounts for an increasing proportion of human lived experience; the phenomenon of mediation gets at the heart of the human-machine relationship. Framing IR&S more broadly in this way generalizes its problems and perspectives, dovetailing them with those shared across disciplines dealing with socio-technical phenomena. This reorientation of IR&S requires imagining it as a new kind of science: a science of technology-mediated experience (STME). Arafat and Ashoori not only offer detailed analysis of the foundational concepts underlying IR&S and other technical disciplines but also boldly call for a radical, systematic appropriation of the sciences and humanities to create a better understanding of the human-technology relationship. Arafat and Ashoori discuss the notion of progress in IR&S and consider ideas of progress from the history and philosophy of science. They argue that progress in IR&S requires explicit linking between technical and nontechnical aspects of discourse. They develop a network of basic questions and present a discursive framework for addressing these questions. With this book, Arafat and Ashoori provide both a manifesto for the reimagining of their field and the foundations on which a reframed IR&S would rest.
This book provides its readers with an introduction to interesting prediction and science dynamics problems in the field of Science of Science. Prediction focuses on the forecasting of future performance (or impact) of an entity, either a research article or a scientist, and also the prediction of future links in collaboration networks or identifying missing links in citation networks. The single chapters are written in a way that help the reader gain a detailed technical understanding of the corresponding subjects, the strength and weaknesses of the state-of-the-art approaches for each described problem, and the currently open challenges. While chapter 1 provides a useful contribution in the theoretical foundations of the fields of scientometrics and science of science, chapters 2-4 turn the focal point to the study of factors that affect research impact and its dynamics. Chapters 5-7 then focus on article-level measures that quantify the current and future impact of scientific articles. Next, chapters 8-10 investigate subjects relevant to predicting the future impact of individual researchers. Finally, chapters 11-13 focus on science evolution and dynamics, leveraging heterogeneous and interconnected data, where the analysis of research topic trends and their evolution has always played a key role in impact prediction approaches and quantitative analyses in the field of bibliometrics. Each chapter can be read independently, since it includes a detailed description of the problem being investigated along with a thorough discussion and study of the respective state-of-the-art. Due to the cross-disciplinary character of the Science of Science field, the book may be useful to interested readers from a variety of disciplines like information science, information retrieval, network science, informetrics, scientometrics, and machine learning, to name a few. The profiles of the readers may also be diverse ranging from researchers and professors in the respective fields to students and developers being curious about the covered subjects.
"Bibliometrics and altmetrics are increasingly becoming the focus of interest in the context of research evaluation. The Handbook Bibliometrics provides a comprehensive introduction to quantifying scientific output in addition to a historical derivation, individual indicators, institutions, application perspectives and data bases. Furthermore, application scenarios, training and qualification on bibliometrics and their implications are considered"--Publisher's website.
In today’s globalized world, viable and reliable research is fundamental for the development of information. Innovative methods of research have begun to shed light on notable issues and concerns that affect the advancement of knowledge within information science. Building on previous literature and exploring these new research techniques are necessary to understand the future of information and knowledge. The Handbook of Research on Connecting Research Methods for Information Science Research is a collection of innovative research on the methods and application of study methods within library and information science. While highlighting topics including data management, philosophical foundations, and quantitative methodology, this book is ideally designed for librarians, information science professionals, policymakers, advanced-level students, researchers, and academicians seeking current research on transformative methods of research within information science.
