[Asis-l] JASIST, Volume 55, # 2. January 15, 2004 TOC

[Richard Hill]

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Volume 55, Number 2.  January 15, 2004

[Note: at the end of this message are URLs for viewing contents of JASIST 
from past issues.  Below, the contents of Bert Boyce's "In this Issue" has 
been cut into the Table of Contents.]
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CONTENTS

EDITORIAL
In This Issue
Bert R. Boyce
95

RESEARCH
Metadata-Based Modeling of Information Resources on the Web
S. Ayse Ozel, I. Sengor Altingovde, Ozgur Ulusoy, Gultekin Ozsoyoglu, and 
Z. Meral Ozsoyoglu
Published online 29 October 2003
97
         Ozel et al. suggest that small subsets of the Web may be accessed 
by the creation of so-called "expert advice repositories," which appear to 
be XML indexes created by experts in the field, who are creating metadata 
records in an area where topics and meta-link types (roles) have been 
predetermined by someone. They envision automatic extraction of the 
concepts and matching of different expert terminology through existing Web 
accessible ontology. User profiles are also maintained that include 
repositories favored, detail levels desired, and other information 
presumably collected from monitoring of system use. They have established a 
limited implementation on the 200,000 documents in the DPLB bibliography, 
which appears to allow searches using a small set of established relations.


Does Citation Reflect Social Structure? Longitudinal Evidence From the 
"Globenet" Interdisciplinary Research Group
Howard D. White, Barry Wellman, and Nancy Nazer
Published online 13 November 2003
111
         White, Wellman, and Nazer investigate the inter-citation patterns 
of the 16 international interdisciplinary members of a research group 
established in 1993 to study human development with the hope of determining 
whether citation is based on whom those who cite know, or upon what they 
know, i.e., whether the patterns are social or intellectual in structure. 
The members of the group are acquainted and the study of the 240 possible 
pairs indicates that half collaborate and read each other's work, and 74% 
consider themselves friends or colleagues. Inter-citation patterns were 
studied prior to 1989, from 1989 to 1992, 1993 to 1996, and 1997 to 2000. 
Co-citation is shown to predict inter- citation; one cites those with whom 
one is co-cited. As members became better acquainted, citation of one 
another increased. Inter-citation was not randomly distributed with a core 
group of 12 pairs predominating. Friends cited friends more than 
acquaintances, and inter-citers communicated more than non-inter- citers. 
However, intellectual affinity, as shown by co-citation, rather than social 
ties, leads to inter-citation.


The Real Stakes of Virtual Publishing: The Transformation of E-Biomed Into 
PubMed Central
Rob Kling, Lisa B. Spector, and Joanna Fortuna
Published online 6 November 2003
127
         Kling, Spector, and Fortuna review the process by which the 
National Institutes of Health's (NIH) proposed central Web-based electronic 
archive for all biomedical research papers, supported by scientists by a 
two-to-one margin, became PubMed, a facility without a preprint server and 
one in which content is determined by commercial and scientific society 
publishers. Their method is essentially historical; that is to say, based 
upon analysis of the documents produced by the process including the 
proposals themselves, stories concerning the proposals in the scientific 
press, and postings to two electronic forms, 269 items on NIH's "archive of 
comments on E-biomed," and 492 on the forum hosted by Sigma Xi, publisher 
of  _American Scientist _. The NIH archive was subjected to quantitative 
analysis. Official statements of professional societies had greater impact 
than individual comments. Scientific society officers and publication 
committee members did not express the opinions of readers and authors as 
observed. The society's economic interests seem to override the author's 
wishes for rapid dissemination and their communication channels with NIH 
are not the public forums and do not reflect public forum opinion although 
such public comment was clearly a very limited response. The Internet was 
not here a powerful transforming force, but rather its use was shaped by 
various groups to support their interests.


Do the Web Sites of Higher Rated Scholars Have Significantly More Online 
Impact?
Mike Thelwall and Gareth Harries
Published online 28 October 2003
149
         Thelwall and Harries measure Web site impact in terms of the 
number of external links pointing to a site, in order to determine if 
higher-rated scholars produce higher-rated Web sites. They cluster together 
all pages with the same domain name and count only unique links to each 
domain found by a crawler applied to Web sites of universities in the 
United Kingdom. High- rated scholars are determined by their institution's 
place in the United Kingdom's 2001 Research Assessment Exercise, a peer 
review based study, normalized for staff size. There were 7,493 domains 
identified with 82,672 links. Spearman's rho was .082, significant at the 
.1% level, between RAE rankings and inlink counts. Total domains for each 
university correlate with research productivity at .762, significant at 
.1%, indicating high productivity universities produce more domains. When 
normalized by staff size, this falls to .509, still significant at .1%, 
suggesting higher quality means more domains per staff member. It appears 
that higher-rated scholars produce more Web content but of only slightly 
higher quality (impact) and thus online impact is suspect as a quality 
assessment measure.


Visible, Less Visible, and Invisible Work: Patterns of Collaboration in 
20th Century Chemistry
Blaise Cronin, Debora Shaw, and Kathryn La Barre
Published online 3 November 2003
160

         Cronin, Shaw, and LaBarre continue their investigation of the 
place of acknowledgment and co-authorship in learned communication with a 
study of the literature of chemistry as found in the  _Journal of the 
American Chemical Society _, from which a 2.6% random sample of research 
papers was drawn from volumes 22 to 121. Extracted acknowledgments were 
classified as conceptual 18%, editorial 1%, financial 46%, instrumental 
34%, moral 0%, and unknown 1%, with 90% inter-coder reliability. Three 
quarters of the 2,866 papers contained an acknowledgment of some kind, 29% 
from 1930 to 1939, and 96% from 1990 to 1999. Co- authored papers 
constituted 88% of the sample, rising from 44% in the first decade to 99% 
in the last. Fourteen chemists received five or more acknowledgments, six 
of whom were in the ISI's 10,858 most-cited chemists list. Acknowledgment 
increases over time, is more intense in chemistry than in psychology or 
philosophy, and co-authorship is more prevalent. Individual agency appears 
to be a fading phenomenon in chemistry.

Non-Word Identification or Spell Checking Without a Dictionary
Donald C. Comeau and W. John Wilbur
Published online 28 October 2003
169
         Comeau and Wilbur use a measure of the strength of context of a 
word, that is, how strongly it associates with other words in a document, 
to detect misspellings. Misspellings are less frequent and appear to appear 
randomly, while associated context words appear more frequently with the 
correct version. The measure and frequency counts are computed for each 
word and alternative word lists are generated for candidates by choosing 
those words that differ by an instance of deletion, insertion, 
substitution, or transposition. A classifier is then trained to use this 
data to predict misspellings. From MEDINE 40,000 words with low context 
measures were selected and 2,000 selected randomly were evaluated by judges 
to determine if they were or were not misspellings. Half were used to train 
classifiers and half were used as a test set. Data indicate that the more 
frequently an alternative appears, the more likely the candidate is a 
misspelling, and the log of the number of times alternatives appear is the 
most important feature. The number of alternatives was the second most 
important feature. The log of the frequency of the candidate itself has 
little impact. The log of the probability of a word appearing in MEDLINE 
verses in _The Wall Street Journal_ had some effect indicating a 
misspelling. The use of trigrams was not useful alone, but was helpful in 
combination with frequency of alternatives. The more common trigrams in a 
word, the more likely it is misspelled. The context measure of alternative 
words is not useful. Of the four categorization methods utilized, the CMLS 
wide margin classifier out-performed the Mahalanobis distance method, a log 
linear model, and linear boosting with an eleven point average precision of 
.881.

BOOK REVIEWS
Introduction to Digital Libraries, by G. G. Chowdhury and Sudatta Chowdhury
Reviewed by Min-Yen Kan
Published online 29 October 2003
178

Exploring Artificial Intelligence in the New Millennium, edited by Gerhard 
Lakemeyer and Bernhard Nebel
Reviewed by Jessie Walker
Published online 28 October 2003
180

Internet Entrepreneurship in Europe: Venture Failure and the Timing of 
Telecommunications Reform, by Niko Marcel Waesche
Reviewed by Jochen Scholl
Published online 29 October 2003
181

LETTER TO THE EDITOR     183

CALL FOR PAPERS     185
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