SIGMETRICS Digest - 14 Jan 2000 to 15 Jan 2000 (#2000-8)

[Betsy V. Martens]

Dear Drs. Davis and Katz,

You might also be interested in some findings of a related nature (power
laws as exemplified in a study of use of precedents in judicial opinions)
by David G. Post and Michael B. Eisen) to be published in a forthcoming
issue of The Journal of Legal Studies (special issue edited by Fred
Shapiro). A draft of the paper itself can be found at:

http://www.temple.edu/lawschool/dpost/fractals.pdf

Betsy Van der Veer Martens
Ph.D. Student
School of Information Studies
Syracuse University

On Sun, 16 Jan 2000, Automatic digest processor wrote:

> There is one message totalling 93 lines in this issue.
>
> Topics of the day:
>
>   1. Feedback on research requested
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Date:    Sat, 15 Jan 2000 12:06:05 -0500
> From:    "Charles H. Davis" <davisc at INDIANA.EDU>
> Subject: Re: Feedback on research requested
>
> Dear Dr. Katz:
>
> Your communication was most welcome.  I've been trying for some time to
> call power curves to the attention of the information science community.
>
> When I spoke with late Derek Price at an ASIS meeting in Banff in 1979, he
> told me that he had "...thrown out a number of 'outliers'."
>
> See:
>
> D.J. de S. Price, "A General Theory of Bibliometric and Other Cumulative
> Advantage Processes," JASIS 27:292-306 (1976).
>
> As a fellow physical scientist, I knew this was standard operating
> procedure, but it worried me as he used the plural, not the singular.  It
> has since come to my attention that acknowledgments follow a power curve
> rather than an "ordinary" exponential distribution.  I'm now suspicious
> about citation analysis generally and believe you or someone else should
> pursue this idea.
>
> See also:
>
> Davis, Charles H. and Blaise Cronin, "Acknowledgments and Intellectual
> Indebtedness: A Bibliometric Conjecture," Journal of the American
> Society for Information Science 44(10):590-592 (December 1993).
>
> All this has has implications for how scientists actually do their work:
> They may be as guilty of appeal to authority as historians.  What an
> appalling thought!
>
> Please keep up the good work and stay in touch.  Thanks to the Internet,
> we can now do such things easily.  Like you, I welcome observations from
> all our colleagues.
>
> It's a new age.
>
> Cordially,
>
> Charles Davis
> ========================================================================
> Charles H. Davis, Ph.D., Senior Fellow          | Professor Emeritus
> School of Library and Information Science       |        GSLIS
> Indiana University at Bloomington               | University of Illinois
> (812) 331-1322  Fax: (812) 855-6166             |    Urbana-Champaign
> http://memex.lib.indiana.edu/davisc/davisc.html |
> ========================================================================
>