A Review of Theory and Practice in Scientometrics

Scientometrics is the study of the quantitative aspects of the process of science as a communication system. It is centrally, but not only, concerned with the analysis of citations in the academic literature. In recent years it has come to play a major role in the measurement and evaluation of research performance. In this review we consider: the historical development of scientometrics, sources of citation data, citation metrics and the “laws" of scientometrics, normalisation, journal impact factors and other journal metrics, visualising and mapping science, evaluation and policy, and future developments

On the analogy between the evolution of thermodynamicand bibliometric systems: a breakthrough or justa bubble?

This paper presents an in depth study of an interesting analogy, recently proposed by Prathap (Scientometrics 87(3):515-524, 2011a), between the evolution of thermodynamic and bibliometric systems. The goal is to highlight some weaknesses and clarify some ‘‘dark sides'' in the conceptual framework of this analogy, discussing the formal validity and practical meaning of the concepts of Energy, Exergy and Entropy in bibliometrics. Specifically, this analogy highlights the following major criticalities: (1) the definitions of E and X are controversial, (2) the equivalence classes of E and X are questionable, (3) the parallel between the evolution of thermodynamic and bibliometric systems is forced, (4) X is a non-monotonic performance indicator, and (5) in bibliometrics the condition of ‘‘thermodynamic perfection'' is questionable. Argument is supported by many analytical demonstrations and practical example

A review of the literature on citation impact indicators

Citation impact indicators nowadays play an important role in research evaluation, and consequently these indicators have received a lot of attention in the bibliometric and scientometric literature. This paper provides an in-depth review of the literature on citation impact indicators. First, an overview is given of the literature on bibliographic databases that can be used to calculate citation impact indicators (Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar). Next, selected topics in the literature on citation impact indicators are reviewed in detail. The first topic is the selection of publications and citations to be included in the calculation of citation impact indicators. The second topic is the normalization of citation impact indicators, in particular normalization for field differences. Counting methods for dealing with co-authored publications are the third topic, and citation impact indicators for journals are the last topic. The paper concludes by offering some recommendations for future research

Finding Academic Experts on a MultiSensor Approach using Shannon's Entropy

Expert finding is an information retrieval task concerned with the search for the most knowledgeable people, in some topic, with basis on documents describing peoples activities. The task involves taking a user query as input and returning a list of people sorted by their level of expertise regarding the user query. This paper introduces a novel approach for combining multiple estimators of expertise based on a multisensor data fusion framework together with the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence and Shannon's entropy. More specifically, we defined three sensors which detect heterogeneous information derived from the textual contents, from the graph structure of the citation patterns for the community of experts, and from profile information about the academic experts. Given the evidences collected, each sensor may define different candidates as experts and consequently do not agree in a final ranking decision. To deal with these conflicts, we applied the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence combined with Shannon's Entropy formula to fuse this information and come up with a more accurate and reliable final ranking list. Experiments made over two datasets of academic publications from the Computer Science domain attest for the adequacy of the proposed approach over the traditional state of the art approaches. We also made experiments against representative supervised state of the art algorithms. Results revealed that the proposed method achieved a similar performance when compared to these supervised techniques, confirming the capabilities of the proposed framework

Identifying collaborations among researchers: a pattern-based approach

In recent years a huge amount of publications and scientific reports has become available through digital libraries and online databases. Digital libraries commonly provide advanced search interfaces, through which researchers can find and explore the most related scientific studies. Even though the publications of a single author can be easily retrieved and explored, understanding how authors have collaborated with each other on specific research topics and to what extent their collaboration have been fruitful is, in general, a challenging task. This paper proposes a new pattern-based approach to analyzing the correlations among the authors of most influential research studies. To this purpose, it analyzes publication data retrieved from digital libraries and online databases by means of an itemset-based data mining algorithm. It automatically extracts patterns representing the most relevant collaborations among authors on specific research topics. Patterns are evaluated and ranked according to the number of citations received by the corresponding publications. The proposed approach was validated in a real case study, i.e., the analysis of scientific literature on genomics. Specifically, we first analyzed scientific studies on genomics acquired from the OMIM database to discover correlations between authors and genes or genetic disorders. Then, the reliability of the discovered patterns was assessed using the PubMed search engine. The results show that, for the majority of the mined patterns, the most influential (top ranked) studies retrieved by performing author-driven PubMed queries range over the same gene/genetic disorder indicated by the top ranked pattern

The role of handbooks in knowledge creation and diffusion: A case of science and technology studies

Genre is considered to be an important element in scholarly communication and in the practice of scientific disciplines. However, scientometric studies have typically focused on a single genre, the journal article. The goal of this study is to understand the role that handbooks play in knowledge creation and diffusion and their relationship with the genre of journal articles, particularly in highly interdisciplinary and emergent social science and humanities disciplines. To shed light on these questions we focused on handbooks and journal articles published over the last four decades belonging to the research area of Science and Technology Studies (STS), broadly defined. To get a detailed picture we used the full-text of five handbooks (500,000 words) and a well-defined set of 11,700 STS articles. We confirmed the methodological split of STS into qualitative and quantitative (scientometric) approaches. Even when the two traditions explore similar topics (e.g., science and gender) they approach them from different starting points. The change in cognitive foci in both handbooks and articles partially reflects the changing trends in STS research, often driven by technology. Using text similarity measures we found that, in the case of STS, handbooks play no special role in either focusing the research efforts or marking their decline. In general, they do not represent the summaries of research directions that have emerged since the previous edition of the handbook.Comment: Accepted for publication in Journal of Informetric

RETROTEXT-E 2.0 maximising teachers’ professional development.

RETROTEXT-E is a recent invention which attempts to benefit teachers as much as possible, perhaps to make their lives better. It is a tool for teachers to add more variety to their otherwise predictable life in schools. Most teachers teach and spend the rest of their day working on marking exercise books or doing administrative work. On-going evaluation of the materials that they use for teaching has probably never been a consideration. RETROTEXT-E is aimed to change all that. At present there are two ways in which books, especially for English Language Teaching (ELT) are evaluated, the first way is to evaluate them impressionistically, while the second is by using an instrument, commonly known as a textbook evaluation checklist. While ELT textbooks can be evaluated efficiently through impression by experienced teachers, this may not be the case for novice teachers. Besides that, if more than one teacher is involved, impressionistic evaluation may not be feasible. Most teachers would then resort to the checklist. Although there are numerous checklists developed throughout the world, most of them have been tested for neither reliability nor validity. Another important point to be made is that checklists have been known to have very little capability of helping teachers evaluate important aspects of textbooks, especially with regard to the evaluation of vocabulary and structures, hence the need for some form of assistance from computers

Ecotourism, past, current and future perspectives : a bibliometric review between 2001 to 2018

Abstract: Ecotourism is natural based travel that conserves the environment, sustains the well-being of the local communities, and involves environmental interpretation and education. A number of literature reviews have been published focusing on specific aspects of the ecotourism market segmentation, ecological impacts of wildlife viewing, and community-based ecotourism, but there has been minimal attention to critical areas such as quality control, the industry, external environments or institutions. In order to further promote related studies, it is important to conduct a comprehensive review on ecotourism so that recent research progresses can be summarized and future research directions can be identified. Accordungly, this paper aims to conduct a bibliometric review on ecotourism to glean the past, current and future perspectives on ecotourism. Based on 1,889 articles published from 2001 to 2018 and searched from Web of Science, a systematic method combining bibliometric analysis and network analysis is applied to uncover the dynamic trends, academic collaboration and research hotspots. Results show that the overall publication quantity had been gradually improved. The key journals include Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, Annals of Tourism Research, Conservation Biology and Biological Conservation. Authors from USA have the most publications and international co-authorships, followed by Australia and England, while the most influential institution is the Chinese Academy of Science followed by Griffith University. Moreover, research keywords have been identified, including ecotourism, management, biodiversity, national park, sustainability and sustainable tourism. In order to further improve research in this field, it is crucial to combine different methods so that more innovative perspectives can be presented. Research findings from this study will provide limitations, and suggestions for future research