Cumulation of knowledge in a specialty

[Stephen J Bensman]

One easy way to handle this problem would be to analyze the importance of
review journals in various fields.  This is easily done through looking at
the ranking of journals by the standard ISI impact factor.  If there are
review journals at the top of the hierarchy, you can assume that the
fielding is cumulating and codifying knowledge.  If not, then the field is
probably not doing so.  Once again I suspect that there may be a sharp
dichotomy in this between the hard sciences, on the one hand, and the
social sciences and humanities, on the other.

I recently did an analysis of this phenomenon for information science.  Of
great interest is the sudden jump of ARIST in impact factor rankings with
the change of editorship.  I do not know how to interpret this.  It could
be that the change in editorship has caused ARIST to start playing it
proper role.  It could also be a fluke due to a single important article.

For your edification I am attaching the spreadsheets with the data.

SB


(See attached file: JCR 1999 IS Ranks.xls)(See attached file: JCR 2001 IS
Ranks.xls)(See attached file: JCR 2002 IS Ranks.xls)(See attached file: JCR
2004 IS Ranks.xls)




Steven Morris <samorri at OKSTATE.EDU>@LISTSERV.UTK.EDU> on 11/30/2005
10:14:28 AM

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Subject:    [SIGMETRICS] Cumulation of knowledge in a specialty


The level of activity on this list in the last few days has been
dizzying....

I am wondering if anyone knows of any studies that compare
literatures of different specialties or fields on the basis of their
'cumulation of knowledge'.

For example: medical and engineering fields quickly build up bodies
of knowledge on a topic, this knowledge is relatively undisputed
after an short shake-out period and researchers build on this
knowledge to further advance the topic. Compare to fields like
psychology where the topics are rehashed over and over and the
knowledge doesn't seem to cumulate very much.

Are there any papers out there that describe the phenomenon of
cumulation of knowledge and how that cumulation is manifested in
journal literature?

Has anyone studied this in terms of Kuhnian paradigms?  For
example,  maybe a specialty with cumulating knowledge is in a state
of paradigmatic "puzzle solving", and a specialty that doesn't
cumulate knowledge is in a "pre-paradigm" state.

I'd be happy to hear from anyone that has any ideas on the topic, or
can point me to some relevant papers.

Thanks kindly,

Steven Morris
Oklahoma State University

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