PhD thesis: Verification of bibliometric methods' ap plicability for thesaurus construction

[Schneider, Jesper Wiborg]

Dear Colleagues;

I've finished my PhD work on bibliometrics and thesaurus construction. If
someone is interested in the thesis, it's freely available at:
http://biblis.db.dk/uhtbin/hyperion.exe/db.jessch04


Kind regards Jesper Schneider


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Jesper Wiborg Schneider, PhD, Assistant Professor
Department of Information Studies
Royal School of Library & Information Science
Sohngårdsholmsvej 2, DK-9000 Aalborg, DENMARK
Tel. +45 98773041, Fax. +45 98151042
E-mail: jws at db.dk
Homepage:http://www2.db.dk/jws/home_dk.htm
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ABSTRACT:
The present doctoral dissertation work concerns the development and
exploration of a
semi-automatic thesaurus construction approach based on bibliometric
methods.
The main objective of the dissertation is to reintroduce, and further
extend, the
theoretical and methodological aspects of bibliometric methods to the
research area of
knowledge organization for the purpose of semi-automatic thesaurus
construction.
Thesaurus construction approaches are typically separated into manual
approaches
and automatic approaches. Albeit, some form of manual thesaurus construction
is
mandatory due to the relational complexities, semantic ambiguities, and
dynamics,
inherent in languages. Manual construction and maintenance are complex and
time
consuming. It is therefore beneficial and necessary to combine manual
approaches
with automatic approaches due to the complementarity of the two approaches
(e.g.,
Soergel, 1974; Anderson & Pérez-Caraballo, 2001a; 2001b). When automatic
approaches are used as a tool for thesaurus constructers, and not as a mean
in itself,
then we speak of semi-automatic thesaurus construction (Soergel, 1974). This
is the
foundation for the approach explored in the present dissertation.
In order to pursue the main objective of semi-automatic thesaurus
construction, a
proposed bibliometric-based methodology of five components is explored as a
supplement to manual intellectual thesaurus construction. The methodology is
used as
a framework for the investigation of the ability of bibliometric methods to
identify
candidate thesaurus terms and thesaural relationships, as well as to monitor
potential
terminological and conceptual changes within a specialty area. The
bibliometric
methods investigated include document co-citation analysis, citation context
analysis,
co-word analysis, and bibliometric ageing methods. The methodology is
explored in a
case study of periodontology, a specialty area within dentistry.
The main contributions of the dissertation work are 1) an overall
verification of the
applicability of co-citation analysis, citation context analysis, and
co-word analysis for
semi-automatic thesaurus construction; 2) demonstration of the ability of
co-citation
analysis and citation context analysis to specifically identify important
candidate
thesaurus terms among a number of potential noun phrases, such terms are
important
because they are contextual and agreed upon in the scientific community; and
3)
demonstration of the ability of co-citation analysis and co-word analysis to
detect
thesaural relationships between terms that do not, or rarely, co-occur
directly with each
other in citation contexts. These results are a direct consequence of the
applied
bibliometric based methodology.
Consequently, the research reported on in the present doctoral dissertation
is a
contribution to the development of 'automatic methods' as tools for manual
intellectual thesaurus construction.