Tracing scientific influence

Scientometrics is the field of quantitative studies of scholarly activity. It has been used for systematic studies of the fundamentals of scholarly practice as well as for evaluation purposes. Although advocated from the very beginning the use of scientometrics as an additional method for science history is still under explored. In this paper we show how a scientometric analysis can be used to shed light on the reception history of certain outstanding scholars. As a case, we look into citation patterns of a specific paper by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton.Comment: 25 pages LaTe

The Evolution of the Science Citation Index

El Science Citation Index (SCI) va ser proposat fa més de 50 anys per facilitar la disseminació i recuperació de literatura científica. El seu cercador era únic pel fet de basar-se en una recerca per cites, però no va ser àmpliament adoptat fins que va estar disponible en la xarxa en l'any 1972. El Journal Citation Reports, que apareix com a conseqüència d'aquest en 1975, incloïa a més una classificació basada en el factor d'impacte. No era comú utilitzar els factors d'impacte fins a fa una dècada quan van començar a ser usats com una alternativa per a calcular les freqüències esperades de cites a articles publicats recentment—una aplicació molt polèmica de la cienciometria com eina per avaluar institucions i científics. L'inventor de l'SCI, i la seva base de dades companya, l'SSCI, examinarà la seva història i discutirà el seu ús més recent en la visualització gràfica de microhistories de temes acadèmics. Mitjançant HistCite, un programari patentat per a l'anàlisi historiogràfic algorítmic, es parlarà sobre la genealogia del descobriment de Watson-Crick de la estructura de la doble hèlix del DNA i la seva relació amb el treball de Heidelberger, Avery i altres.The Science Citation Index was proposed over 50 years ago to facilitate the dissemination and retrieval of scientific literature. Its unique search engine, based on citation searching, was not widely adopted until it was made available online in 1972. Its by product, Journal Citation Reports, became available in 1975 and included its rankings by impact factor. Impact factors were not widely implemented until about a decade ago, when they began to be used as surrogates for expected citation frequencies for recently published papers—a highly controversial application of scientometrics in evaluating scientists and institutions. Here, the inventor of both the SCI and its companion, Social Sciences Citation Index, review the history of these instruments and discusses their more recent use in graphically visualizing microhistories of scholarly topics. In an example thereof, the patented HistCite software for algorithmic historiographic analysis is used to follow the genealogy of the Watson-Crick discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA and its relationship to the work of Heidelberger, Avery, and others

Interview with Eugene Garfield

Svetla Baykoucheva, editor of the Chemical Information Bulletin, took this interview from Dr. Garfield by email on July 25, 2006. The interview was originally published in the Chemical Information Bulletin (Vol. 58, No.2, pp. 7-9)

1937 Ruby Yearbook

A digitized copy of the 1937 Ruby, the Ursinus College yearbook.https://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/ruby/1039/thumbnail.jp

An evaluation of Bradfordizing effects

The purpose of this paper is to apply and evaluate the bibliometric method Bradfordizing for information retrieval (IR) experiments. Bradfordizing is used for generating core document sets for subject-specific questions and to reorder result sets from distributed searches. The method will be applied and tested in a controlled scenario of scientific literature databases from social and political sciences, economics, psychology and medical science (SOLIS, SoLit, USB Köln Opac, CSA Sociological Abstracts, World Affairs Online, Psyndex and Medline) and 164 standardized topics. An evaluation of the method and its effects is carried out in two laboratory-based information retrieval experiments (CLEF and KoMoHe) using a controlled document corpus and human relevance assessments. The results show that Bradfordizing is a very robust method for re-ranking the main document types (journal articles and monographs) in today’s digital libraries (DL). The IR tests show that relevance distributions after re-ranking improve at a significant level if articles in the core are compared with articles in the succeeding zones. The items in the core are significantly more often assessed as relevant, than items in zone 2 (z2) or zone 3 (z3). The improvements between the zones are statistically significant based on the Wilcoxon signed-rank test and the paired T-Test

Report on the Lepidoptera of Arizona

p. 483-490 ; 24 cm