In Praise of Interdisciplinary Research through Scientometrics

International audienceThe BIR workshop series foster the revitalisation of dormant links between two fields in information science: information retrieval and bibliometrics/scientometrics. Hopefully, tightening up these links will cross-fertilise both fields. I believe compelling research questions lie at the crossroads of scientometrics and other fields: not only information retrieval but also, for instance, psychology and sociology. This overview paper traces my endeavours to explore these field boundaries. I wish to communicate my enthusiasm about interdisciplinary research mediated by scientometrics and stress the opportunities offered to researchers in information science

Citations: Indicators of Quality? The Impact Fallacy

We argue that citation is a composed indicator: short-term citations can be considered as currency at the research front, whereas long-term citations can contribute to the codification of knowledge claims into concept symbols. Knowledge claims at the research front are more likely to be transitory and are therefore problematic as indicators of quality. Citation impact studies focus on short-term citation, and therefore tend to measure not epistemic quality, but involvement in current discourses in which contributions are positioned by referencing. We explore this argument using three case studies: (1) citations of the journal Soziale Welt as an example of a venue that tends not to publish papers at a research front, unlike, for example, JACS; (2) Robert Merton as a concept symbol across theories of citation; and (3) the Multi-RPYS ("Multi-Referenced Publication Year Spectroscopy") of the journals Scientometrics, Gene, and Soziale Welt. We show empirically that the measurement of "quality" in terms of citations can further be qualified: short-term citation currency at the research front can be distinguished from longer-term processes of incorporation and codification of knowledge claims into bodies of knowledge. The recently introduced Multi-RPYS can be used to distinguish between short-term and long-term impacts.Comment: accepted for publication in Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analysis; doi: 10.3389/frma.2016.0000

ANTHROPONYMIC STRUCTURE OF ACADEMIC DISCOURSE

Purpose of the study: The article aims to study the anthroponymy structure of academic discourse based on the material of astronautical corpora. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to solve a number of specific tasks: to define the terms “anthroponym” and “eponym”, to reveal the structural types of astronautical eponyms, and to identify the functional significance of anthroponyms and eponyms. Methodology: The method of componential analysis and the descriptive method have been used as the primary research methods applying such techniques as observation, comparison, interpretation, and generalization. The methodological basis of the research includes discourse theory, the theory of precedence, achievements of cognitive linguistics, and studies on problems of terminology. Main findings: The authors propose to consider anthroponyms and eponymous terms as precedents, which are points of reference in the change of the scientific paradigm, help to systematize scientific knowledge, and navigate in its fund. The results of the study suggest that the anthroponymy structure of academic discourse provides information compression that makes the text concise without reducing information and performs a memorial function. Applications of this study: The research attempts to contribute to the further study of the academic discourse structure and the analytical description of its components using a cognitive-pragmatic approach. Higher education teachers can use the results of the article in lectures on the theory of academic discourse. Novelty/originality of this study: Few researchers have addressed astronautical academic discourse, investigating its structural and functional features. This study is the first to analyze the astronautical eponyms as super compressed signs of the precedent research

Hidden Citations Obscure True Impact in Science

References, the mechanism scientists rely on to signal previous knowledge, lately have turned into widely used and misused measures of scientific impact. Yet, when a discovery becomes common knowledge, citations suffer from obliteration by incorporation. This leads to the concept of hidden citation, representing a clear textual credit to a discovery without a reference to the publication embodying it. Here, we rely on unsupervised interpretable machine learning applied to the full text of each paper to systematically identify hidden citations. We find that for influential discoveries hidden citations outnumber citation counts, emerging regardless of publishing venue and discipline. We show that the prevalence of hidden citations is not driven by citation counts, but rather by the degree of the discourse on the topic within the text of the manuscripts, indicating that the more discussed is a discovery, the less visible it is to standard bibliometric analysis. Hidden citations indicate that bibliometric measures offer a limited perspective on quantifying the true impact of a discovery, raising the need to extract knowledge from the full text of the scientific corpus