Who Gets Hired at the Top? The Academic Caste System Theory in the Planning Academy

This study is the first to examine detailed faculty demographics and impacts of elite hiring networks in the planning academy. Institutional prestige significantly shapes faculty placements. Nearly half of planning faculty graduated from Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Cornell, and University of North Carolina (UNC)-Chapel Hill. Faculty are predominantly hired in similar or lower ranking programs with little upward mobility, after accounting for demographics and program factors. While race and gender did not have a significant relationship to placements, the findings demonstrate how status-based inequities are perpetuated through elite programs and constrain faculty representation.YesLee, C. Aujean, Who Gets Hired at the Top? The Academic Caste System Theory in the Planning Academy, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Copyright © 2022 C. Aujean Lee DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X221121611

Graph-based Interactive Bibliographic Information Retrieval Systems

In the big data era, we have witnessed the explosion of scholarly literature. This explosion has imposed challenges to the retrieval of bibliographic information. Retrieval of intended bibliographic information has become challenging due to the overwhelming search results returned by bibliographic information retrieval systems for given input queries. At the same time, users’ bibliographic information needs have become more specific such that only information that best matches their needs is seen as relevant. Current bibliographic information retrieval systems such as Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar have become an unalienable component in searching bibliographic data. However, these systems have limited support of complex bibliographic queries. For example, a query- “papers on information retrieval, which were cited by John’s papers that had been presented in SIGIR” is an ordinary information need that researchers may have, but is not appropriately representable in these systems. In addition, these systems only support search for papers and do not support other bibliographic entities such as authors and terms as the final search results. Therefore, in this dissertation, we propose several bibliographic information retrieval systems that can address complex bibliographic queries. We propose form-, natural language-, and visual graph-based systems that allow users to formulate bibliographic queries in a variety of ways. The form-based system allows users to formulate queries by selecting forms and input values in those selected forms. In the natural language-based system, users formulate queries using a natural language. Users formulate queries by drawing nodes and links in the visual graph-based system. These systems are based on a graph model to enhance retrieval efficiency and provides interfaces for users to formulate queries interactively. Through a system-centered evaluation, we find that our graph-based system took less time to process complex queries than a relational-entity-based system (two secs vs. several mins on average). In addition, our visual graph-based system can deal with the representation of advanced queries such as bibliographic coupling, paper co-citation, and author co-citation, while current bibliographic information systems do not support these queries. A user-centered evaluation reveals that participants rated the natural language-based system the most useful, easy to use, and easy to learn. Participants also reported that the form-based system was easier to learn than the visual graph-based system. Based on the results of a usability evaluation, we find that the form-based system is preferred for low-complexity tasks while the visual graph-based system is preferred for high-complexity tasks. The strength of the natural language-based system is that no additional effort is needed to formulate more complex queries. The proposed systems are effective and efficient solutions for addressing complex bibliographic information needs. In addition, we believe the experimental design and results shown in this paper can serve as a useful guideline and benchmark for future studies.Ph.D., Information Studies -- Drexel University, 201

Evaluación de la actividad científica en ciencia de la información a partir de indicadores bibliométricos y altmétricos

La presente investigación es un análisis de la producción científica en Ciencia de la Informacion (CI), fundamentada en el contexto epistemológico e histórico de la disciplina, para identificar las tendencias de uso de la información en plataformas de publicación formales e informales. A partir de la implementación de indicadores bibliométricos e indicadores alternativos, se pretende establecer. ¿Como la integración de indicadores altimétricos en la evaluación científica, posibilita la identificación de tendencias en la investigación disciplinar? Y si es valido afirmar, que la altmetría es una herramienta confiable y útil para la evaluación de los dominios científicos. Se toma como referente la producción visible en Web of Science durante el periodo 2012- 2016, para identificar las dinámicas científicas de investigación en la CI, a partir de una muestra de 1224 registros en los cuales se utilizan indicadores bibliometricos de producción, citación o impacto e indicadores altimétricos recuperados de las plataformas ResearchGate (RG) y Plum Analytics (PlumX). Los resultados evidencian que los indicadores alternativos aun están en periodo de desarrollo y necesitan normalización; de lo cual se concluye, que la evaluación científica requiere la complementación de modelos métricos clásicos junto a métricas alternativas que permitan identificar las dinámicas sociales y de comunicación que se generan en la comunidad científica más allá del impacto y la citación.This research is an analysis of the scientific activity in Information Science (CI), based on the epistemological and historical context of the discipline, to identify trends in the use of information in formal and informal publishing platforms. Based on the implementation of bibliometric iand alternative indicators, it is intended to establish: How does the integration of altmetric indicators in scientific evaluation make it possible to identify trends in disciplinary research? And, if it is valid to say that altmetrics is a reliable and useful tool for the scientific evaluation of scientific domains. Visible production in Web of Science during the 2012-2016 period is taken as a reference to identify the scientific dynamics of research in the CI, from a sample of 1224 records in which bibliometric indicators of production, citation or impact and altmetric indicators recovered from the ResearchGate (RG) and Plum Analytics (PlumX) platforms are used. The results show that the alternative indicators are still under development and need to be standardized; from which it is concluded that scientific evaluation requires the complementing of classical metric models with alternative metrics that allow identifying the social and communication dynamics generated in the scientific community beyond the impact and citation.Profesional en Ciencia de la Información - Bibliotecólogo (a)Pregrad