803 research outputs found
The effect of multidisciplinary collaborations on research diversification
This work verifies whether research diversification by a scientist is in some
measure related to their collaboration with multidisciplinary teams. The
analysis considers the publications achieved by 5300 Italian academics in the
sciences over the period 2004-2008. The findings show that a scientist's
outputs resulting from research diversification are more often than not the
result of collaborations with multidisciplinary teams. The effect becomes more
pronounced with larger and particularly with more diversified teams. This
phenomenon is observed both at the overall level and for the disciplinary
macro-areas
Untangling the Web of E-Research: Towards a Sociology of Online Knowledge
e-Research is a rapidly growing research area, both in terms of publications
and in terms of funding. In this article we argue that it is necessary to
reconceptualize the ways in which we seek to measure and understand e-Research
by developing a sociology of knowledge based on our understanding of how
science has been transformed historically and shifted into online forms. Next,
we report data which allows the examination of e-Research through a variety of
traces in order to begin to understand how the knowledge in the realm of
e-Research has been and is being constructed. These data indicate that
e-Research has had a variable impact in different fields of research. We argue
that only an overall account of the scale and scope of e-Research within and
between different fields makes it possible to identify the organizational
coherence and diffuseness of e-Research in terms of its socio-technical
networks, and thus to identify the contributions of e-Research to various
research fronts in the online production of knowledge
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
Betweenness and Diversity in Journal Citation Networks as Measures of Interdisciplinarity -- A Tribute to Eugene Garfield --
Journals were central to Eugene Garfield's research interests. Among other
things, journals are considered as units of analysis for bibliographic
databases such as the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. In addition to
disciplinary classifications of journals, journal citation patterns span
networks across boundaries to variable extents. Using betweenness centrality
(BC) and diversity, we elaborate on the question of how to distinguish and rank
journals in terms of interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity, however, is
difficult to operationalize in the absence of an operational definition of
disciplines, the diversity of a unit of analysis is sample-dependent. BC can be
considered as a measure of multi-disciplinarity. Diversity of co-citation in a
citing document has been considered as an indicator of knowledge integration,
but an author can also generate trans-disciplinary--that is,
non-disciplined--variation by citing sources from other disciplines. Diversity
in the bibliographic coupling among citing documents can analogously be
considered as diffusion of knowledge across disciplines. Because the citation
networks in the cited direction reflect both structure and variation, diversity
in this direction is perhaps the best available measure of interdisciplinarity
at the journal level. Furthermore, diversity is based on a summation and can
therefore be decomposed, differences among (sub)sets can be tested for
statistical significance. In an appendix, a general-purpose routine for
measuring diversity in networks is provided
The structural role of the core literature in history
The intellectual landscapes of the humanities are mostly uncharted territory.
Little is known on the ways published research of humanist scholars defines
areas of intellectual activity. An open question relates to the structural role
of core literature: highly cited sources, naturally playing a disproportionate
role in the definition of intellectual landscapes. We introduce four indicators
in order to map the structural role played by core sources into connecting
different areas of the intellectual landscape of citing publications (i.e.
communities in the bibliographic coupling network). All indicators factor out
the influence of degree distributions by internalizing a null configuration
model. By considering several datasets focused on history, we show that two
distinct structural actions are performed by the core literature: a global one,
by connecting otherwise separated communities in the landscape, or a local one,
by rising connectivity within communities. In our study, the global action is
mainly performed by small sets of scholarly monographs, reference works and
primary sources, while the rest of the core, and especially most journal
articles, acts mostly locally
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