3,005 research outputs found
Dynamic Animations of Journal Maps: Indicators of Structural Changes and Interdisciplinary Developments
The dynamic analysis of structural change in the organization of the sciences
requires methodologically the integration of multivariate and time-series
analysis. Structural change--e.g., interdisciplinary development--is often an
objective of government interventions. Recent developments in multi-dimensional
scaling (MDS) enable us to distinguish the stress originating in each
time-slice from the stress originating from the sequencing of time-slices, and
thus to locally optimize the trade-offs between these two sources of variance
in the animation. Furthermore, visualization programs like Pajek and Visone
allow us to show not only the positions of the nodes, but also their relational
attributes like betweenness centrality. Betweenness centrality in the vector
space can be considered as an indicator of interdisciplinarity. Using this
indicator, the dynamics of the citation impact environments of the journals
Cognitive Science, Social Networks, and Nanotechnology are animated and
assessed in terms of interdisciplinarity among the disciplines involved
Co-word Analysis using the Chinese Character Set
Until recently, Chinese texts could not be studied using co-word analysis
because the words are not separated by spaces in Chinese (and Japanese). A word
can be composed of one or more characters. The online availability of programs
that separate Chinese texts makes it possible to analyze them using semantic
maps. Chinese characters contain not only information, but also meaning. This
may enhance the readability of semantic maps. In this study, we analyze 58
words which occur ten or more times in the 1652 journal titles of the China
Scientific and Technical Papers and Citations Database. The word occurrence
matrix is visualized and factor-analyzed
Journal Maps, Interactive Overlays, and the Measurement of Interdisciplinarity on the Basis of Scopus Data (1996-2012)
Using Scopus data, we construct a global map of science based on aggregated
journal-journal citations from 1996-2012 (N of journals = 20,554). This base
map enables users to overlay downloads from Scopus interactively. Using a
single year (e.g., 2012), results can be compared with mappings based on the
Journal Citation Reports at the Web-of-Science (N = 10,936). The Scopus maps
are more detailed at both the local and global levels because of their greater
coverage, including, for example, the arts and humanities. The base maps can be
interactively overlaid with journal distributions in sets downloaded from
Scopus, for example, for the purpose of portfolio analysis. Rao-Stirling
diversity can be used as a measure of interdisciplinarity in the sets under
study. Maps at the global and the local level, however, can be very different
because of the different levels of aggregation involved. Two journals, for
example, can both belong to the humanities in the global map, but participate
in different specialty structures locally. The base map and interactive tools
are available online (with instructions) at
http://www.leydesdorff.net/scopus_ovl.Comment: accepted for publication in the Journal of the Association for
Information Science and Technology (JASIST
The communication of meaning in social systems
The sociological domain is different from the psychological one insofar as
meaning can be communicated at the supra-individual level (Schutz, 1932;
Luhmann, 1984). The computation of anticipatory systems enables us to
distinguish between these domains in terms of weakly and strongly anticipatory
systems with a structural coupling between them (Maturana, 1978). Anticipatory
systems have been defined as systems which entertain models of themselves
(Rosen, 1985). The model provides meaning to the modeled system from the
perspective of hindsight, that is, by advancing along the time axis towards
possible future states. Strongly anticipatory systems construct their own
future states (Dubois, 1998a and b). The dynamics of weak and strong
anticipations can be simulated as incursion and hyper-incursion, respectively.
Hyper-incursion generates "horizons of meaning" (Husserl, 1929) among which
choices have to be made by incursive agency
The revised SNIP indicator of Elsevier's Scopus
The modified SNIP indicator of Elsevier, as recently explained by Waltman et
al. (2013) in this journal, solves some of the problems which Leydesdorff &
Opthof (2010 and 2011) indicated in relation to the original SNIP indicator
(Moed, 2010 and 2011). The use of an arithmetic average, however, remains
unfortunate in the case of scientometric distributions because these can be
extremely skewed (Seglen, 1992 and 1997). The new indicator cannot (or hardly)
be reproduced independently when used for evaluation purposes, and remains in
this sense opaque from the perspective of evaluated units and scholars.Comment: Letter to the Editor of the Journal of Informetrics (2013; in press
On the calculation of percentile-based bibliometric indicators
A percentile-based bibliometric indicator is an indicator that values
publications based on their position within the citation distribution of their
field. The most straightforward percentile-based indicator is the proportion of
frequently cited publications, for instance the proportion of publications that
belong to the top 10% most frequently cited of their field. Recently, more
complex percentile-based indicators were proposed. A difficulty in the
calculation of percentile-based indicators is caused by the discrete nature of
citation distributions combined with the presence of many publications with the
same number of citations. We introduce an approach to calculating
percentile-based indicators that deals with this difficulty in a more
satisfactory way than earlier approaches suggested in the literature. We show
in a formal mathematical framework that our approach leads to indicators that
do not suffer from biases in favor of or against particular fields of science
Hyperincursive Cogitata and Incursive Cogitantes: Scholarly Discourse as a Strongly Anticipatory System
Strongly anticipatory systems-that is, systems which use models of themselves
for their further development-and which additionally may be able to run
hyperincursive routines-that is, develop only with reference to their future
states-cannot exist in res extensa, but can only be envisaged in res cogitans.
One needs incursive routines in cogitantes to instantiate these systems. Unlike
historical systems (with recursion), these hyper-incursive routines generate
redundancies by opening horizons of other possible states. Thus, intentional
systems can enrich our perceptions of the cases that have happened to occur.
The perspective of hindsight codified at the above-individual level enables us
furthermore to intervene technologically. The theory and computation of
anticipatory systems have made these loops between supra-individual
hyper-incursion, individual incursion (in instantiation), and historical
recursion accessible for modeling and empirical investigation.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1011.324
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