An Indicator of Research Front Activity: Measuring Intellectual Organization as Uncertainty Reduction in Document Sets

Fri May 8 15:09:59 EDT 2009

An Indicator of Research Front Activity: Measuring Intellectual Organization
as Uncertainty Reduction in Document Sets 

When using scientific literature to model scholarly discourse, a research
specialty can be operationalized as an evolving set of related documents.
Each publication can be expected to contribute to the further development of
the specialty at the research front. The specific combinations of title
words and cited references in a paper can then be considered as a signature
of the knowledge claim in the paper: new words and combinations of words can
be expected to represent variation, while each paper is at the same time
selectively positioned into the intellectual organization of a field using
context-relevant references. Can the mutual information among these three
dimensions-title words, cited references, and sequence numbers-be used as an
indicator of the extent to which intellectual organization structures the
uncertainty prevailing at a research front? The effect of the discovery of
nanotubes (1991) on the previously existing field of fullerenes is used as a
test case. Thereafter, this method is applied to science studies with a
focus on scientometrics using various sample delineations. An emerging
research front about citation analysis can be indicated. 

Diana Lucio-Arias & Loet Leydesdorff 

Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR), 
Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam. 

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** apologies for cross-postings