Paper on scientometrics

Sat Jul 27 08:54:12 EDT 2013

Dear all,

The raise of scientometrics has different roots: the societal need for monitoring expenses in time of a growing science system and the emergence of knowledge-based societies; and  the need for efficient information retrieval and knowledge discovery as a service for the sciences themselves, and here I echo contributions of others.

Having as object of study scholarship, it is only naturally that with changes in this very scholarship also the topics and methods of scientometrics change. There has been a longer debate if digital scholarship presents a revolution or not. (see also Wouters et al. Virtual Knowledge, MIT 2013)

What of these changes should be called a revolution, for sure depends on the point of reference. I always find Galison's approach to scientific revolution helpful. He argues that breaks and changes occur in theoretical threads as well as in empirical one and in methodological one; sometimes this occurs in parallel, sometimes with a time delay; sometimes in one specialty only – sometimes affecting a whole field. So, instead of looking at a singular event, one better can talk of an accumulation of different changes. Galison uses often geological, geomorphological metaphors to describe this. (see his book: Image and Logic). I think one cannot talk about a revolution with defining the boundaries of the system of reference first.

As an observer of scientometrics from the periphery or better as an occasional visitor, I found remarkable how in the past the scientometrics community embraced and integrated the visual turn (science maps) and the turn towards the authors. The latter was very visible at the last ISSI just a week ago. (http://www.slideshare.net/paulwouters1/issi2013-wg-pw )

My impression is also that scientometrics managed to claim authority in the turn from "little bibliometrics" to "big bibliometrics" as Wolfgang Glaenzel called it in 2006, in a presentation I still find interesting to watch/read (see http://www.slideshare.net/inscit2006/the-perspective-shift-in-bibliometrics-and-its-consequences ). I'm not sure if Wolfgang would still support his statement from seven years ago that "bibliometrics evolved from a sub discipline of LIS to a evaluation and benchmarking tool". But, it seems that it is still the scientometrics community which discusses and defines indicators used broadly.

What concerns the digital revolution, and in particular the web, indeed scientometrics has incorporated altmetrics, taken up the challenge and made own original contributions (thanks to pioneers as Judit BarIlan, Mike Thelwall, Isidro Aguillo and many others). But, if I may say so, here scientometrics acted rather as a client, using the new data sources. Its behavior towards web-based information was and is very similar to the behavior towards the commercial bibliographic databases: namely to build indicators based on data export from them.

What I think is a challenge to be mastered in the upcoming years, is the semantic web and Linked Open Data. Here, I would like to back-up Clement's contribution, and actually reading his list and the thread as a whole triggered this now growing more lengthy comment ;-)

If the attempts of the semantic web community mature further, and if research information as a standard becomes available semantic referencable on the web, we talk about a profound change in the data source landscape for scientometrics. There is a possibility to eventually link between the 'old' input/expenditure statistics, human capital information and other institutional information and the traditional output – the scholarly communication – which for so many decades has dominated scientometrics, also just because of its availability in a standardized form. One example for this movement is VIVO, vivoweb.org. But, working in a research data archive I witness the raise of standards, API's, LOD in this area and it is obvious that the web of scholarly information is just before (in not in the middle) of another big change.

Semantic reasoning over research information in Linked Open Data (LOD) formats will enable services (including indicators) different from what we have now. It does not concern 'just another data base' or another social media one can harvest data from; it concerns a whole set of other techniques. Either scientometrics embraces this too, and learns to play on the "Klaviatur" (keyboard) of the semantic web, or the knowledge of the community might become obsolete.

Personally, I think the LOD and semantic web technologies are the future methodological innovation in scientometics, and I'm curious to hear comments on this. According to Lutz, this than would not count as a revolution, being 'just' another method. But, if it means that other communities could become the carrier for scientometric analysis, it might be a revolution – at least for the field of scientometics as we know it now.

Dr. Andrea Scharnhorst
Head of e-research at Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS)
Scientific Coordinator of the Computational Humanities Programme, e-Humanities group
Chair of the COST Action KnowEscape
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences

From: Clement Levallois <clement_levallois at YAHOO.FR<mailto:clement_levallois at YAHOO.FR>>
Reply-To: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics <SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU<mailto:SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU>>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2013 16:41:46 +0200
To: "SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU<mailto:SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU>" <SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU<mailto:SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU>>
Subject: Re: [SIGMETRICS] Paper on scientometrics

Difficult to say where we are going, but there is an expanding list of practices that are pushing for an evolution of scientometrics.

- open access

- open data (Figshare, etc.)

- semantic web / linked data

- science communication / science making on social media

- digital scholarship (see http://t.co/DCO7aPYxZM)

- networks (can we neglect relations between the units under measurement?)

- the altac movement

- and altmetrics (drawing on all the previous)

I'd be curious, what else do you see as "disruptive" (sorry for the buzz word) today in scientometrics?

Best regards,

Clement

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Clement Levallois, PhD
Erasmus University Rotterdam
The Netherlands

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