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

The Impact Factor Fetishism

"One of the most popular indicators is the Impact Factor. This paper examines the coming into being of this highly influential figure. It is the offspring of Eugene Garfield’s experimentation with the huge amounts of data available at his Institute for Scientific Information and the result of a number of attempts to find appropriate measurements for the success ('impact') of articles and journals. The completely inductive procedure was initially adjusted by examining the data thoughtfully and by consulting with experts from different scientific disciplines. Later, its calculation modes were imposed on other disciplines without further consideration. The paper demonstrates in detail the inopportune consequences of this, in particular for sociology. Neither the definition of disciplines, nor the selection of journals for the Web of Science/Social Science Citation Index follows any comprehensible rationale. The procedures for calculating the impact factor are inappropriate. Despite its obvious unsuitability, the impact factor is used by editors of sociological journals for marketing and impression management purposes. Fetishism!" (author's abstract

There is no “East”: Deconstructing the idea of Asia and rethinking the disciplines working on it

This introduction summarises the steps which led the scholars grouped in the Coffee Break group to undertake the project and then accompanied them from the awareness of the need to deconstruct the idea of geographic boundaries and, consequently, of area studies such as “Indology” or “South Asian studies”, to the need to deconstruct disciplines such as “Philology” or “Literature” themselves, since they are also historically and culturally loaded and risk to tell one more about their subjects than about their alleged objects of study. This pars destruens is followed by a pars construens suggesting as an alternative a situated epistemology which refutes to essentialise the “Other” and, on a more practical level, by the constant implementation of team work

Between Westernization and Traditionalism: Central and Eastern European Academia during the Transformation in the 1990s

2021 saw the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and there is a growing interest in the historicization of the past 30 years of transformation. Taking this anniversary as a point of departure, we want to look into a specific area that has markedly changed in the last three decades – the scholarly community. The interest of analysing the academia in a period of transformation is not new, and the 1990s are amply covered by the literature scrutinising changes and forging plans for the future development, but we intend to enrich this discussion with approaches coming from the history of science and of scholarship. By looking at changes that happened in the decade following the end of the Socialist utopia, we propose to look into mechanisms of organizational and intellectual innovation and place them in the context of European and global integration. As we argue, looking at the 1990s in Central and Eastern Europe can help us to understand how scholarly systems change by oscillating between tradition and innovation, and we propose the notions of a selective Westernisation and an equally selective traditionalism for our case study

Investigating Iranian Information Gatekeepers in the Field of Medical Genetics Using Network Structure Analysis

Introduction: In the flow of information and scientific communication, two formal and informal relationships are measured through co-authorship. The present study aims to discover the gatekeeper nodes in both types of scientific communication and seek to strengthen the health cycle of medical genetics information. Methods: This research is applied in terms of purpose, and in terms of nature and method, it is a kind of mixed research, including survey method, scientometrics, and interview and social network analysis.  The research population was the researchers in the field of medical genetics in seven selected centers. First, using centrality indicators, gatekeepers were discovered in the formal communication structure. Then, interviewing formal gatekeepers, the gatekeeper's agents were identified in informal communication. The effectiveness of each gatekeeping factors in the informal scientific communication process was determined using the questionnaire. Results: The network size represents an average degree of 122. Opinion leaders were extracted based on centrality indicators.  By interviewing with leaders, 15 units were identified as target nodes in the centers. Among them, the educational deputy had the most positive effect, and the ethics committee had the least positive effect on the research process.  Conclusion: The low amount of degree indicators revealed that the medical genetic communication network is not efficient. Accordingly, most of the negative, informal communication issues are human communication factors such as professors' characteristics. In the research process, some institutions, such as the Ethics Committee, are an inhibitor of communication

Quantification 2.0? Bibliometric Infrastructures in Academic Evaluation

Due to developments recently termed as ‘audit,’ ‘evaluation,’ or ‘metric society,’ universities have become subject to ratings and rankings and researchers are evaluated according to standardized quantitative indicators such as their publication output and their personal citation scores. Yet, this development is not only based on the rise of new public management and ideas on ‘the return on public or private investment.’ It has also profited from ongoing technological developments. Due to a massive increase in digital publishing corresponding with the growing availability of related data bibliometric infrastructures for evaluating science are continuously becoming more differentiated and elaborate. They allow for new ways of using bibliometric data through various easily applicable tools. Furthermore, they also produce new quantities of data due to new possibilities in following the digital traces of scientific publications. In this article, I discuss this development as quantification 2.0. The rise of digital infrastructures for publishing, indexing, and managing scientific publications has not only made bibliometric data become a valuable source for performance assessment. It has triggered an unprecedented growth in bibliometric data production turning freely accessible data about scientific work into edited databases and producing competition for its users. The production of bibliometric data has thus become decoupled from their application. Bibliometric data have turned into a self-serving end while their providers are constantly seeking for new tools to make use of them.Peer Reviewe

In response to 'Celebrate citation: flipping the pedagogy of plagiarism in Qatar'

In her article (http://uobrep.openrepository.com/uobrep/handle/10547/335947) Molly McHarg makes several points that I agree with, particularly that for the majority of students the plagiarism is not deliberate but is due to a lack of understanding of how to reference correctly

A Better understanding of Interdisciplinary research in Climate Change

This paper is divided into two main parts, the first of which reviews some of the literature on interdisciplinary research collaboration and categorises articles according to their contribution. The second part of the paper reviews the development of the field of climate change and examines the increasing importance of collaboration both between scientific disciplines, between physical and social scientists and with other stakeholders

Metacognition and Reflection by Interdisciplinary Experts: Insights from Cognitive Science and Philosophy

Interdisciplinary understanding requires integration of insights from different perspectives, yet it appears questionable whether disciplinary experts are well prepared for this. Indeed, psychological and cognitive scientific studies suggest that expertise can be disadvantageous because experts are often more biased than non-experts, for example, or fixed on certain approaches, and less flexible in novel situations or situations outside their domain of expertise. An explanation is that experts’ conscious and unconscious cognition and behavior depend upon their learning and acquisition of a set of mental representations or knowledge structures. Compared to beginners in a field, experts have assembled a much larger set of representations that are also more complex, facilitating fast and adequate perception in responding to relevant situations. This article argues how metacognition should be employed in order to mitigate such disadvantages of expertise: By metacognitively monitoring and regulating their own cognitive processes and representations, experts can prepare themselves for interdisciplinary understanding. Interdisciplinary collaboration is further facilitated by team metacognition about the team, tasks, process, goals, and representations developed in the team. Drawing attention to the need for metacognition, the article explains how philosophical reflection on the assumptions involved in different disciplinary perspectives must also be considered in a process complementary to metacognition and not completely overlapping with it. (Disciplinary assumptions are here understood as determining and constraining how the complex mental representations of experts are chunked and structured.) The article concludes with a brief reflection on how the process of Reflective Equilibrium should be added to the processes of metacognition and philosophical reflection in order for experts involved in interdisciplinary collaboration to reach a justifiable and coherent form of interdisciplinary integration. An Appendix of “Prompts or Questions for Metacognition” that can elicit metacognitive knowledge, monitoring, or regulation in individuals or teams is included at the end of the article

The effects of infotainment on public reaction to North Korea using hybrid text mining: Content analysis, machine learning-based sentiment analysis, and co-word analysis

This study proposes alternative measures of infotainment’s effects on audience perception and reception of news on social media, focusing on infotainment coverage of North Korea. We determine the elements of framing strategies and narrative styles in facilitating public attention, positive and negative responses, and engagement in news content. We used the YouTube application programming interface to collect data from VideoMug, Korea’s most popular YouTube channel, run by the Seoul Broadcasting System. We examined 23,774 replies commenting on North Korea-related video clips from July 1, 2018, to May 17, 2019. The findings show that entertainment and human interest frames were effective in drawing public attention to news coverage about North Korea. Using humor and colloquial language facilitated public attention (both positive and negative) and public engagement. Over half (59.55%) of the comments generated positive emotions; less than one-third generated negative emotions (31.41%); and a few generated neutral ones (9.03%). The infotainment approach helped make South Koreans’ attitudes toward North Korea and inter-Korean relations more positive. A small number of users who served as top authorities were extremely partisan and conducted intense debates about infotainment practices. This study’s hybrid analytical framework using computerized text mining techniques offers both theoretical and methodological insights into the function of infotainment in the context of social media