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

[Steven A. Morris]

Jesper,

I was not able to download the thesis using Netscape, but it worked when
I switched to Internet Explorer.

The thesis looks great, I liked the review of bibliometric methods in
Chapter 5.   Of course, the rest of the thesis (382 pages!) is not really
light reading, but I'm very enthusiastic about the idea of 'concept symbols'
and 'citation context analysis' as you've used them. Judging by your Summary
and Conclusions, you've been able to show that citation context analysis can
be used to identify candidate noun phrases for thesauri, that bibliographic
methods such as co-word analysis can help find thesaural relationships among
candidate terms, but you weren't able to detect changes in vocabulary over
time using bibliographic methods.

It would be interesting to see if your results, particularly those
pertaining to detection of vocabulary changes, will extend to other
specialties besides periodontology. Perhaps that field is sort of stuck in a
"puzzle solving" mode right now and is not really undergoing any fundamental
change.  Perhaps looking at some other field, like complex networks, or some
electronics specialties that are undergoing drastic change, would produce
different results that would lead you to different conclusions?

Regards,

S. Morris
Oklahoma State University




On Fri, 25 Feb 2005 09:28:26 +0100, Schneider, Jesper Wiborg <JWS at DB.DK> w
rote:

>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
>
>
>**********************************************
>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
>**********************************************
>
>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.