The characteristics and impact of non-source items in the social sciences

Publikationen, die nicht in Web of Science bzw. Scopus indexiert sind, werden als sogenannte „non-source items“ bezeichnet. Bislang wurden sie in bibliometrischen Studien vernachlässigt. Das zentrale Anliegen dieser Studie ist die Untersuchung der Publikations- und Zitationscharakteristika von Dokumenten in den Sozialwissenschaften unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von non-source items, unabhängig vom jeweiligen Dokumenttyp. Indem die Publikationen zweier führender deutscher politikwissenschaftlicher Universitätsinstitute ausgewertet werden, werden die Auswirkungen der Berücksichtigung von non-source items in bibliometrischen Evaluationen in den Sozialwissenschaften untersucht und die folgenden drei Forschungsfragen beantwortet: FF1: Was sind die Charakteristika von Publikationen in den Politikwissenschaften? FF2: Was sind Charakteristika von non-source-items und wie ist deren Impact in der Politikwissenschaft? FF3: Wie können non-source items in bibliometrische Evaluation eingeschlossen werden? Kurz gefasst lässt sich festhalten, dass non-source items in bibliometrischen Evaluationen berücksichtigt werden sollten, unabhängig von ihrem Impact oder ihrer Zitationen. Eine umfassendere Zitationsdatenbank ist notwendig, um qualitativ hochwertige Evaluationen in den Sozialwissenschaften zu ermöglichen. Die Autorin schlägt verschiedene Möglichkeiten vor, den Impact von non-source items in der Politikwissenschaft zu untersuchen und macht einen Vorschlag zur alternativen Evaluation basierend auf Publikations- und Zitationsmustern. Die Strukturen der hier erörterten Formel, Datenbank und des Evaluationssystems können gleichermaßen in anderen sozialwissenschaftlichen Disziplinen angewendet werden. Allerdings sind weitere empirische Untersuchungen in anderen Disziplinen notwendig, um die entsprechenden Faktoren und Werte bestimmen zu können, da die Disziplinen stark heterogen sind.Publications that are not indexed by Web of Science or Scopus are named “non-source items”. These have so far been neglected by most bibliometric analyses. The central issue of this study is to investigate the publication and citation characteristics of items in the social sciences with special attention to non-source items of all document types. By analyzing the publications of two top-ranking political science university departments in Germany, this study explores the effect of the inclusion of non-source items in bibliometric evaluations in the social sciences, and answers the following three research questions: RQ1: What are the characteristics of publications in political science? RQ2: What are the characteristics and impact of non-source items in political science? RQ3: How to include non-source items into bibliometric evaluation in political science? In short, the results of this study show that non-source items should be included in bibliometric evaluations, regardless of their impact or the citations from them. The demand for a more comprehensive coverage of bibliometric databases in the social sciences for a higher quality of evaluations is shown. The author proposes several approaches to investigate the impact of non-source items in political science and suggests an alternative to evaluate German political scientists according to their publication and citation patterns. The empirical findings of this study can serve as valuable information to investigators of the social sciences. However, further empirical studies in different fields are needed, due to the significant heterogeneity among fields in the social sciences

The Tourist-based Formation of Destination Loyalty from the Perspective of Qualitative Research Approach

Shan Ju Christine Chi studied and graduated from Department of Marketing, University of Strathclyde, Scotland in 2012 and has been working for Department of International Tourism Management, Tamkang University Lanyang Campus in Taiwan since 2013. Her research interests are destination loyalty, destination marketing and branding, and destination management.Oral Presentation, Qualitative Researc

Against Natural Kind Eliminativism

It has recently been argued that the concept of natural kinds should be eliminated because it does not play a productive theoretical role and even harms philosophical research on scientific classification. We argue that this justification for eliminativism fails because the notion of ‘natural kinds’ plays another epistemic role in philosophical research, namely, it enables fruitful investigation into non-arbitrary classification. It does this in two ways: first, by providing a fruitful investigative entry into scientific classification; and second – as is supported by bibliometric evidence – by tying together a research community devoted to non-arbitrary classification. The question of eliminativism then requires weighing off the benefits of retaining the concept against its harms. We argue that the progressive state of philosophical work on natural kinds tips this balance in favour of retaining the concept

Hidden Trends in 90 Years of Harvard Business Review

In this paper, we demonstrate and discuss results of our mining the abstracts of the publications in Harvard Business Review between 1922 and 2012. Techniques for computing n-grams, collocations, basic sentiment analysis, and named-entity recognition were employed to uncover trends hidden in the abstracts. We present findings about international relationships, sentiment in HBR's abstracts, important international companies, influential technological inventions, renown researchers in management theories, US presidents via chronological analyses.Comment: 6 pages, 14 figures, Proceedings of 2012 International Conference on Technologies and Applications of Artificial Intelligenc

Against Natural Kind Eliminativism

It has recently been argued that the concept of natural kinds should be eliminated because it does not play a productive theoretical role and even harms philosophical research on scientific classification. We argue that this justification for eliminativism fails because the notion of ‘natural kinds’ plays another epistemic role in philosophical research, namely, it enables fruitful investigation into non-arbitrary classification. It does this in two ways: first, by providing a fruitful investigative entry into scientific classification; and second – as is supported by bibliometric evidence – by tying together a research community devoted to non-arbitrary classification. The question of eliminativism then requires weighing off the benefits of retaining the concept against its harms. We argue that the progressive state of philosophical work on natural kinds tips this balance in favour of retaining the concept