Simulation in manufacturing and business: A review

Copyright @ 2009 Elsevier B.V.This paper reports the results of a review of simulation applications published within peer-reviewed literature between 1997 and 2006 to provide an up-to-date picture of the role of simulation techniques within manufacturing and business. The review is characterised by three factors: wide coverage, broad scope of the simulation techniques, and a focus on real-world applications. A structured methodology was followed to narrow down the search from around 20,000 papers to 281. Results include interesting trends and patterns. For instance, although discrete event simulation is the most popular technique, it has lower stakeholder engagement than other techniques, such as system dynamics or gaming. This is highly correlated with modelling lead time and purpose. Considering application areas, modelling is mostly used in scheduling. Finally, this review shows an increasing interest in hybrid modelling as an approach to cope with complex enterprise-wide systems

Diffusion of Latent Semantic Analysis as a Research Tool: A Social Network Analysis Approach

Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a relatively new research tool with a wide range of applications in different fields ranging from discourse analysis to cognitive science, from information retrieval to machine learning and so on. In this paper, we chart the development and diffusion of LSA as a research tool using Social Network Analysis (SNA) approach that reveals the social structure of a discipline in terms of collaboration among scientists. Using Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science (WoS), we identified 65 papers with “Latent Semantic Analysis” in their titles and 250 papers in their topics (but not in titles) between 1990 and 2008. We then analyzed those papers using bibliometric and SNA techniques such as co-authorship and cluster analysis. It appears that as the emphasis moves from the research tool (LSA) itself to its applications in different fields, citations to papers with LSA in their titles tend to decrease. The productivity of authors fits Lotka’s Law while the network of authors is quite loose. Networks of journals cited in papers with LSA in their titles and topics are well connected

A survey of simulation techniques in commerce and defence

Despite the developments in Modelling and Simulation (M&S) tools and techniques over the past years, there has been a gap in the M&S research and practice in healthcare on developing a toolkit to assist the modellers and simulation practitioners with selecting an appropriate set of techniques. This study is a preliminary step towards this goal. This paper presents some results from a systematic literature survey on applications of M&S in the commerce and defence domains that could inspire some improvements in the healthcare. Interim results show that in the commercial sector Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) has been the most widely used technique with System Dynamics (SD) in second place. However in the defence sector, SD has gained relatively more attention. SD has been found quite useful for qualitative and soft factors analysis. From both the surveys it becomes clear that there is a growing trend towards using hybrid M&S approaches

Methodology for profiling literature in healthcare simulation

The publications that relate to the application of simulation to healthcare have steadily increased over the years. These publications are scattered amongst various journals that belong to several subject categories, including Operational Research, Health Economics and Pharmacokinetics. The simulation techniques that are applied to the study of healthcare problems are also varied. The aim of this study is to present a methodology for profiling literature in healthcare simulation. In our methodology, we have considered papers on healthcare that have been published between 1970 and 2007 in journals with impact factors that belonging to various subject categories reporting on the application of four simulation techniques, namely, Monte Carlo Simulation, Discrete-Event Simulation, System Dynamics and Agent-Based Simulation. The methodology has the following objectives: (a) to categorise the papers under the different simulation techniques and identify the healthcare problems that each technique is employed to investigate; (b) to profile, within our dataset, variables such as authors, article citations, etc.; (c) to identify turning point (strategically important) papers and authors through co-citation analysis of references cited by the papers in our dataset. The focus of the paper is on the literature profiling methodology, and not the results that have been derived through the application of this methodology. The authors hope that the methodology presented here will be used to conduct similar work in not only healthcare but also other research domains

Cascading Citation Expansion

Digital Science's Dimensions is envisaged as a next-generation research and discovery platform for a better and more efficient access to cross-referenced scholarly publications, grants, patents, and clinical trials. As a new addition to the growing open citation resources, it offers opportunities that may benefit a wide variety of stakeholders of scientific publications from researchers, policy makers, and the general public. In this article, we explore and demonstrate some of the practical potentials in terms of cascading citation expansions. Given a set of publications, the cascading citation expansion process can be successively applied to a set of articles so as to extend the coverage to more and more relevant articles through citation links. Although the conceptual origin can be traced back to Garfield's citation indexing, it has been largely limited, until recently, to the few who have unrestricted access to a citation database that is large enough to sustain such iterative expansions. Building on the open API of Dimensions, we integrate cascading citation expansion functions in CiteSpace and demonstrate how one may benefit from these new capabilities. In conclusion, cascading citation expansion has the potential to improve our understanding of the structure and dynamics of scientific knowledge.Comment: 16 figure

Profiling a decade of information systems frontiers’ research

This article analyses the first ten years of research published in the Information Systems Frontiers (ISF) from 1999 to 2008. The analysis of the published material includes examining variables such as most productive authors, citation analysis, universities associated with the most publications, geographic diversity, authors’ backgrounds and research methods. The keyword analysis suggests that ISF research has evolved from establishing concepts and domain of information systems (IS), technology and management to contemporary issues such as outsourcing, web services and security. The analysis presented in this paper has identified intellectually significant studies that have contributed to the development and accumulation of intellectual wealth of ISF. The analysis has also identified authors published in other journals whose work largely shaped and guided the researchers published in ISF. This research has implications for researchers, journal editors, and research institutions

Software tools for conducting bibliometric analysis in science: An up-to-date review

Bibliometrics has become an essential tool for assessing and analyzing the output of scientists, cooperation between universities, the effect of state-owned science funding on national research and development performance and educational efficiency, among other applications. Therefore, professionals and scientists need a range of theoretical and practical tools to measure experimental data. This review aims to provide an up-to-date review of the various tools available for conducting bibliometric and scientometric analyses, including the sources of data acquisition, performance analysis and visualization tools. The included tools were divided into three categories: general bibliometric and performance analysis, science mapping analysis, and libraries; a description of all of them is provided. A comparative analysis of the database sources support, pre-processing capabilities, analysis and visualization options were also provided in order to facilitate its understanding. Although there are numerous bibliometric databases to obtain data for bibliometric and scientometric analysis, they have been developed for a different purpose. The number of exportable records is between 500 and 50,000 and the coverage of the different science fields is unequal in each database. Concerning the analyzed tools, Bibliometrix contains the more extensive set of techniques and suitable for practitioners through Biblioshiny. VOSviewer has a fantastic visualization and is capable of loading and exporting information from many sources. SciMAT is the tool with a powerful pre-processing and export capability. In views of the variability of features, the users need to decide the desired analysis output and chose the option that better fits into their aims

Editorial for the First Workshop on Mining Scientific Papers: Computational Linguistics and Bibliometrics

The workshop "Mining Scientific Papers: Computational Linguistics and Bibliometrics" (CLBib 2015), co-located with the 15th International Society of Scientometrics and Informetrics Conference (ISSI 2015), brought together researchers in Bibliometrics and Computational Linguistics in order to study the ways Bibliometrics can benefit from large-scale text analytics and sense mining of scientific papers, thus exploring the interdisciplinarity of Bibliometrics and Natural Language Processing (NLP). The goals of the workshop were to answer questions like: How can we enhance author network analysis and Bibliometrics using data obtained by text analytics? What insights can NLP provide on the structure of scientific writing, on citation networks, and on in-text citation analysis? This workshop is the first step to foster the reflection on the interdisciplinarity and the benefits that the two disciplines Bibliometrics and Natural Language Processing can drive from it.Comment: 4 pages, Workshop on Mining Scientific Papers: Computational Linguistics and Bibliometrics at ISSI 201

Eugene Garfield's Scholarly Impact: A Scientometric Review

The concept of citation indexing has become deeply involved in many parts of research itself and the broad environment in which research plays an integral role, ranging from research evaluation, numerous indicators, to an increasingly wider range of scientific disciplines. In this article, we pay tribute to Eugene Garfield and present a scientometric review of the intellectual assets that he brought to us. In addition, we explore the intellectual landscape that has subsequently evolved in connection to many of his ideas. We illustrate what systematic reviews of the scientific literature may reveal and what we may learn from the rich information conveyed through citation-induced patterns. The study is conducted with CiteSpace, one of many science mapping tools based on data from the Web of Science and Scopus. Without Garfield's inventions, none of these would be possible.Comment: 24 pages, 19 Figures, 15 Table