Search

PurposeAging research has traditionally been an important research topic in the field of Library and Information Science(LIS). The study of aging enables us to grasp the extent of development and the status of aging in LIS. The purpose of this paper is to explore the current law of aging in LIS and to research the impact of interdisciplinary citations on the aging of the discipline.Design/methodology/approachBy using citation analysis methods and fitting them using the Barnett aging model, the aging law of LIS is explored with the help of aging indicators such as citing half-life and Price Index. For interdisciplinary study, the authors explore the pattern of interdisciplinary citations distribution by distinguishing LIS and non-LIS citations by journal name.FindingsThe results show that LIS is currently aging slowly and has reached a relatively mature stage. It has a high reliance on archival literature. The interdisciplinary citations distribution is broadly consistent with the overall citation distribution, and interdisciplinary citations can increase the age of applicability of the literature.Originality/valueBased on LIS journal citation data, the paper validates the rationality of Barnett model applied in the field of literature aging research using nonlinear regression analysis, which can effectively reflect the aging law of literature and enable scholars to predict its development trend more accurately. In addition, according to the current trend of interdisciplinary citation, this paper explores the impact of interdisciplinary citations on the aging of the literature and provides a new idea for future aging research.

PurposeThe conditions that domain analysis becomes an academic school of information science (IS) are mature. Domain analysis is one of the most important foundations of IS. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and discuss metatheoretical and theoretical issues in the domain analytic paradigm in IS.Design/methodology/approachThis paper conducts a systematic review of representative publications of domain analysis. The analysis considered degree theses, journal articles, book chapters, conference papers and other materials.FindingsDomain analysis maintains that community is the new focus of IS research. Although domain analysis centers on the domain and community, theoretical concerns on the social and individual dimensions of IS are inherent in it by its using sociology as its important approach and socio-cognitive viewpoint. For these reasons domain analysis can integrate social–community–individual levels of IS discipline as a whole. The role of subject knowledge in IS is discussed from the perspective of domain analysis. Realistic pragmatism that forms the philosophical foundation of domain analysis is argued and the implications of these theories to IS are presented.Originality/valueThe intellectual evolving landscape of domain analysis during a quarter century is comprehensively reviewed. Over the past twenty-five years, domain analysis has established its academic status in the international IS circle. Being an important metatheory, paradigm and methodology, domain analysis becomes the theoretical foundation of IS research. This paper assesses the current state of domain analysis and shows the contributions of domain analysis to IS. It also aims to inspire further exploration.

PurposeThis study explores whether interdisciplinary components' citation intensity (ICCI) affects papers' scientific impact. In this study, the term “interdisciplinary components” refers to the disciplines that are different from the discipline to which the target research belongs. The citation intensity is the degree of density or sparseness of the paper citation network for a discipline. Previous studies have shown that the scientific impact of interdisciplinary research is influenced by interdisciplinarity and its properties, namely, variety, balance and disparity. However, the effect of ICCI on scientific impact has not been comprehensively explored.Design/methodology/approachThis study is based on the entire publication database of the Web of Science for the year 2000, where the authors provide an indicator to measure the ICCI of each publication. A tobit regression model is used to examine the effect of ICCI on scientific impact, controlling for a range of variables associated with the characteristics of the publications studied.FindingsThe results show that ICCI has a positive effect on scientific impact. The authors’ results further point out that ICCI displays a curvilinear inverted U-shape relationship with scientific impact. It means that including more citation-intensive interdisciplinary components can increase the scientific impact of interdisciplinary research. However, excessive use of citation-intensive interdisciplinary components may reduce the scientific impact of interdisciplinary research.Originality/valueThis study shows that, in addition to interdisciplinarity, the scientific impact of interdisciplinary research is also affected by the citation characteristics of interdisciplinary components, namely ICCI.

Disciplinary classification of science is essential to bibliometric analyses. Given the conceptual and technical difficulties in classifying individual papers into disciplines and specialties, most classifications systems are implemented at the journal level, which affects the classification of papers published in multidisciplinary journals. In order to investigate the effect of the different classification systems on bibliometric evaluations, this study compares the rankings of the most productive institutions and most productive authors using the two types of classifications. Results show that the classification of papers has less influence on rankings at the institutional level than at the individual level. Implications for bibliometric evaluations are discussed.

Tenure provides a permanent position to faculty in higher education institutions. In North America, it is granted to those who have established a record of excellence in research, teaching and services in a limited period. However, in China, research excellence (represented by the number of Web of Science publications) is highly weighted in the tenure assessment compared to excellence in teaching and services, but this has never been systematically investigated. By analyzing the tenure assessment documents from Chinese Universities, this study reveals the role of Web of Science publications in China’s tenure system and presents the landscape of the tenure assessment process in Chinese higher education institutions.

Objective: This study compares two maps of biomedical sciences using Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) term co-assignments versus MeSH terms of citing/cited articles and reveals similarities and differences between the two approaches. Methods: MeSH terms assigned to 397,475 journal articles published in 2015, as well as their 4,632,992 cited references, were retrieved from Web of Science and MEDLINE databases, respectively, which formed over 7 million MeSH co-assignments and nearly 18 million direct citation pairs. We generated six network visualizations of biomedical science at three levels using Gephi software based on these MeSH co-assignments and citation pairs.Results: The MeSH co-assignment map contained more nodes and edges, as MeSH co-assignments cover all medical topics discussed in articles. By contrast, the MeSH citation map contained fewer but larger nodes and wider edges, as citation links indicate connections to two similar medical topics. Conclusion: These two types of maps emphasize different aspects of biomedical sciences, with MeSH co-assignment maps focusing on the relationship between topics in different categories and MeSH direct citation maps providing insights into relationships between topics in the same or similar category.

Purpose Library science and information science, two subdisciplines of library and information science (LIS), are developed independently but interconnectedly. In this information age, LIS is in a special period of transformation and development, which has caused some changes in both library science and information science. By accurately capturing these changes and analyzing them, the authors can effectively map the development of LIS in the new century, thus providing a reference for the evolution and development of the field. The purposes of this paper are to explore the mainstream research fields and frontiers of library science and information science, respectively, since the new century, and to make a comparative analysis of the two subdisciplines. Design/methodology/approach By using CiteSpace to visualize LIS journals, this study draws knowledge maps of the two subdisciplines of LIS through the co-occurrence descriptors network. Using burst detection algorithm, this study detects words of high frequency variation by investigating the time frequency distribution. Findings The results show that the research focus of library science has experienced a change from traditional to digital library while information science has moved from information to data focus. This study also finds the similarities and differences between mainstream areas of library science and information science. Originality/value This study focuses on the evolution of library science and information science, and explores their mainstream research fields and frontiers in the 21st century. These findings will promote the transformation and development of LIS as well as provide research directions for scholars in the field.

The classification of science into disciplines is at the heart of bibliometric analyses. While most classifications systems are implemented at the journal level, their accuracy has been questioned, and paper-level classifications have been considered by many to be more precise. However, few studies investigated the difference between journal and the paper classification systems. This study addresses this gap by comparing the journal- and paper-level classifications for the same set of papers and journals. This isolates the effects of classification precision (i.e., journal- or paper-level) to reveal the extent of paper misclassification. Results show almost half of papers could be misclassified in journal classification systems. Given their importance in the construction and analysis of bibliometric indicators, more attention should be given to the robustness and accuracy of these disciplinary classifications schemes.

This study explores the relationship between interdisciplinarity and the citation impact of highly cited papers. In this paper, interdisciplinarity is investigated by comparing the dimensions of disciplinary diversity (variety, balance, and disparity) and the typical integration indicators (i.e., the Rao-Stirling index (RS) and the Leinster–Cobbold Diversity Index (LCDiv)) of all papers published in 2000 and indexed in Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. These papers are categorized into six percentile rank classes according to their citation rates, and the interdisciplinarity among these percentile rank classes is compared. Our results demonstrate that, whether control variables are considered or not, highly cited papers always exhibit higher variety and disparity, but they also exhibit lower balance. In terms of the integration interdisciplinarity indicators, the RS and LCDiv both have a positive effect on citation impact. From the perspective of effect size, our results suggest that the effect of variety on citation impact is most significant, followed by disparity and then balance. These results indicate that variety is likely the most important interdisciplinary factor for citation impact.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a bibliometric analysis of scientific output of the knowledge management (KM), the aim being to offer an overview of research activity in this field and characterize its most significant aspects. In addition, this study aims to quantitatively analyze KM research trends, forecasts, and citations from 1993 to 2012 in Web of Science (WOS). Design/methodology/approach – A total of 12,925 documents related to KM research were collected from following databases: Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Conference Proceedings Citation Index-Science, and Conference Proceedings Citation Index-Social Science & Humanities. These documents were carefully reviewed and subjected to bibliometric data analysis techniques. Findings – A number of research questions pertaining to patterns in scientific outputs, subject categories and major journals, author keywords frequencies, characteristics of the international collaboration, most cited papers and significant papers distribution of KM research were proposed and answered. In addition, there are five research sights on KM research are as follows: management science, computer science, information science, business, and engineering. Based on these findings, many implications emerged that improve one's understanding of the identity of KM as a distinct multi-discipline scientific field. Research limitations/implications – Comprehensiveness and inclusiveness of the analyzed KM-related data set in WOS because of some KM-centric journals are not indexed by Thomson Reuters. Originality/value – The paper offers an overview and evaluation of research activity into the KM viewed through the WOS during 1993-2012.

Purpose – This paper aims to solve the disadvantages of content-based domain ontology (CBDO) and metadata-based domain ontology (MDO) and improve organization and discovery efficiency of library resources by resource ontology (RO). Design/methodology/approach – The paper constructed an RO model. Methods of informetrics are utilized to reveal semantic relationships among library resources. Methods of ontology, ontology-relational database mapping (O-R mapping) and relational database modelling are utilized to construct RO. Take author co-occurrence for example, the paper demonstrated the capability of RO model. Findings – RO not only revealed the deep-level semantic relationships of metadata of library resources but also realized totally computer-automated processing. RO improved the efficiency of knowledge organization and discovery. Research limitations/implications – Semantic relationships revealed by RO are limited to simple metadata, which makes it difficult to reveal fine-grained semantic relationships. Ongoing research focuses on the revelation of semantic relationships based on the title and abstract. Practical implications – The paper includes implications for utilizing methods of Informetrics to construct ontology. Originality/value – This paper proposed a standardized process of ontology construction in library resources. It may be of potential interest for anyone who needs to effectively organize library resources.

This paper introduces author-level bibliometric co-occurrence network by discussing its history and contribution to the analysis of scholarly communication and intellectual structure. The difference among various author co-occurrence networks, which type of network shall be adapted in different situations, as well as the relationship among these networks, however, remain not explored. Five types of author co-occurrence networks were proposed: (1) co-authorship (CA); (2) author co-citation (ACC); (3) author bibliographic coupling (ABC); (4) words-based author coupling (WAC); (5) journals-based author coupling (JAC). Networks of 98 high impact authors from 30 journals indexed by 2011 version of Journal Citation Report-SSCI under the Information Science & Library Science category are constructed for study. Social network analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis are applied to identify sub-networks with results visualized by VOSviewer software. QAP test is used to find potential correlation among networks. Cluster analysis results show that all the five types of networks have the power for revealing intellectual structure of sciences but the revealed structures are different from each other. ABC identified more sub-structures than other types of network, followed by CA and ACC. WAC result is easily affected and JAC result is ambiguous. QAP test result shows that ABC network has the highest proximity with other types of networks while CA network has relatively lower proximity with other networks. This paper will provide a better comprehension of author interaction and contribute to cognitive application of author co-occurrence network analysis.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to further explore the co-citation and bibliographic-coupling relationship among the core authors in the field of Chinese information science (IS), to expose research activity and author impact, and to make induction analyses about Chinese IS research patterns and theme evolution. Design/methodology/approach – The research data include 8,567 papers and 70,947 cited articles in the IS field indexed by Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index from 2000 to 2009. Author co-citation analysis, author bibliographic-coupling analysis, social network analysis, and factor analysis were combined to explore co-citation and bibliographic-coupling relationships and to identify research groups and subjects. Findings – Scholars with greatest impact are different from the most active scholars of Chinese IS; there is no uniform impact pattern forming since authors’ impact subjects are scattered and not steady; while authors’ research activities present higher independence and concentration, there is still no steady research pattern due to no deep research existing. Furthermore, Chinese IS studies can be delineated by: foundation or extension. The research subjects of these two parts, as well as their corresponding/contributing authors, are different under different views. The general research status of core authors is concentrated, while their impact is broad. Originality/value – The combined use of some related methods could enrich the development and methodology research of the discipline, and the results establish a reference point on the development of IS research.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to construct a Chinese information science resource ontology and to explore a new method for semiautomatic ontology construction. Design/methodology/approach – More than 8,290 articles indexed in the Chinese Social Science Citation Index (CSSCI), covering the years 2001 to 2010, were included in this study. Statistical analysis, co-occurrence analysis, and semantic similarity methods were applied to the selected articles. The ontology was built using existing construction principles and methods, as well as categories and hierarchy definitions based on CSSCI indexing fields. Findings – Seven categories were found to be relevant for the Chinese information science resource ontology, which, in this study, consists of a three-tier architecture, 78,291 instances, and 182,109 pairs of semantic relations. These results indicate the following: further improvements are required in ontology construction methods; resource ontology is a breakthrough concept in ontology studies; the combination of semantic similarities and co-occurrence analysis can quantitatively describe relationships between concepts. Originality/value – This study pioneers the resource ontology concept. It is one of the first to combine informetric methods with semantic similarity to reveal deep relationships in textual data.

Purpose – The paper aims to develop a new method for potential relations retrieval. It aims to find common aspects between co-occurrence analysis and ontology to build a model of semantic information retrieval based on co-occurrence analysis. Design/methodology/approach – This paper used a literature review, co-occurrence analysis, ontology build and other methods to design a model and process of semantic information retrieval based on co-occurrence analysis. Archaeological data from Wuhan University Library's bibliographic retrieval systems was used for experimental analysis. Findings – The literature review found that semantic information retrieval research mainly concentrates on ontology-based query techniques, semantic annotation and semantic relation retrieval. Moreover most recent systems can only achieve obvious relations retrieval. Ontology and co-occurrence analysis have strong similarities in theoretical ideas, data types, expressions, and applications. Research limitations/implications – The experiment data came from a Chinese university which perhaps limits its usefulness elsewhere. Practical implications – This paper constructed a model to understand potential relations retrieval. An experiment proved the feasibility of co-occurrence analysis used in semantic information retrieval. Compared with traditional retrieval, semantic information retrieval based on co-occurrence analysis is more user-friendly. Originality/value – This study is one of the first to combine co-occurrence analysis with semantic information retrieval to find detailed relationships.

The paper studied 211,946 articles indexed in Thomson Reuters's Web of Science from January 1st 2002 to December 31st 2011, in order to describe the growth and distribution of Chinese international research collaboration (IRC), from the perspective of amount, authors, countries, discipline fields and journals. By applying bibliometric and social network methods, this study provided the collaboration network of countries and fields. The main results were as follow: the number of article increased faster comparing with the stable growth in average annual of IRC degree; the articles collaborated with SAC are 80 % more than all IRC's; as to the fields, collaboration in Social science is at disadvantage, while the largest field is physics and the fastest field is molecular biology and genetics; mathematics, physics, multidisciplinary and space science had more in fluencies than others in corresponding respective journals; as to the network, USA, as the largest and most important partner, had 30 % IRC articles, and collaborated with China in all 22 ESI fields.

Generally speaking, citation relationship among authors can be divided into 3 types: co-citation, coupling and cross-citation. Since author co-citation analysis was first introduced in 1982, it has been widely applied to study discipline structure, research state and research trends. Afterwards, conception of author bibliographic-coupling analysis was put forward and related empirical studies provided a method for mapping active authors in a research field for a more realistic picture of the current state of its research activities. Additionally, if one of author A's papers has a citation from one of author B's, there is cross-citation relationship between A and B. However, studies based on author cross-citation relationship mainly describe citation behaviors themselves using citation identity and citation image; they rarely involve any implicit knowledge communication, author research correlation or discovering academic communities. Author cross-citation analysis infers to both citing and cited phenomenon, which can be roughly correspond to citation identity and citation image. The study will further explore the author cross-citation relationship with core authors in scientometrics field as study object in order to provide reference for development of scientometrics field and in-depth application of citation analysis.

As indicator weights obtaining is often difficult in all types of evaluation, this paper describes an approach to improve the indicator weights of scientific and technological competitiveness evaluation of Chinese universities. As a public institution funded by Chinese government, the research center for Chinese science evaluation of Wuhan University has completed five annual evaluations for the scientific and technological competitiveness of Chinese universities since 2005, whose abundant and reliable data motivated us to try to improve the weights obtained by the AHP (analytical hierarchy process). Based on these data, we calculated the objective weights of the indicator using the representative mathematical methods of the least square and the variation coefficient. As the weights of AHP can be influenced by the knowledge, experience and preference of experts and the calculated objective weights neglect the subjective judgement information, we integrated the subjective and objective weights by respectively using the additive and multiplicative model to reflect both the subjective considerations of experts and the objective information, and obtained three kinds of integrative weights. Finally, we selected the integrative weights of multiplicative model as the best weights by comparing and analyzing the evaluation results in 2005 and 2009 of each kind of weights. The results show that the evaluation effect of the weights of multiplicative model is indeed the best for all types of Chinese universities among these kinds of weights, and the experts and university principals enquired also basically reached a consensus on the university rankings of the integrative weights of multiplicative model.

Over the past 30 years, the research behavior of Chinese scholars has continually evolved. This paper studied the citing behavior of Chinese scholars by employing three indicators of citation concentration from the perspective of citation breadth analysis. All the citations from 2,338,033 papers from the Chinese Citation Database (1979---2008) covering four disciplines--Chemistry; Clinical Medicine; Library, Information and Archival Science; and Chinese Literature and World Literature--were analyzed. Empirical results show a general weakening tendency towards citation concentration: (1) decreasing percentage of uncited published papers within a given year; (2) a higher percentage of papers required to account for the same proportion of citation than before; and (3) the steady decline in the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI) of citation distribution. All three measures indicate a decline in citing concentration or an increase in citation breadth. This phenomenon may be the result of increased access to materials, perhaps because of the ease with which scholarly materials can be accessed through the Internet.

In this era of a rapid change in the way people finding and using information resources, despite that the academic communication and using patterns for people in the traditional print environment have been studied for many years, the Internet media presents a new and relatively unexplored area for such study. In this article, we explored the distribution and utilization of web recourses in humanities and social sciences based on web citations. We collected 1,421,731 citations listed in 148,172 articles from 493 journals published during the period of 2006–2007 in the CSSCI, which resulted in 44,973 web citations. We counted the amount and types of web resources used in various disciplines, analyzed the URLs frequency from the host-level, fitted the frequency distribution into the regression models with SPSS, and perform the disciplines coupling analysis based on the web citations. We found out that: (a) The distributions of web citations by years or by websites and webpage types are selective and regular; (b) Great disparity exists among various disciplines in terms of using web information, and the high-frequency websites; (c) The frequency distribution of web citations is similar to the Garfield’s citation distribution curve; (d) Some relationships between disciplines are detected, based on the utilization of web information.

SCI has been popular all over the world since it was published by Garfield in 1963. Researches on evaluating a researcher’s output with SCI have always been continuous. In recent years, a great breakthrough has been made since the h-index was put forward in 2005. In this paper, we also advance a new method — Paper Quality Index (PQI) to evaluate the output of a researcher. The main purpose of our method is to solve two problems that consist in the method of h-index: one is that the h-index can’t compare the outputs of researchers in different fields; the other is that it is unsuitable for evaluating the outputs of young researchers. A simple mathematical expression is constructed to eliminate the difference of citation among different fields and makes the evaluation of short-term outputs of researchers possible.

Since the term “co-link” was put forward, many scholars have done exploratory investigations to prove the applicability and validity of co-link analysis used in mapping internet structure and mining relationships among internet colonies. All of these studies are based on the whole links in the web called “total co-link analysis”. However, there are both substantive and non-substantive links in the web, and the number of the latter outweights that of the former, which makes the preconditions of total co-link analysis untenable. In this paper, we present “substantive co-link analysis”, and believe it is more sound and valid than “total co-link analysis”. Then exploratory investigations on both total and substantive co-link analysis are carried out with the sample of 20 academic blogs on Library and Information Science, the results of which testify our assumption that “substantive co-link analysis” is more efficient and reasonable than “total co-link analysis”.

This article evaluates the scientific research competitiveness of world universities in computer science. The data source is the Essential Science Indicator (ESI) database with a time span of more than 10 years, from 01/01/1996 to 08/31/2006. We establish a hierarchical indicator system including four primary indicators which consist of scientific research production, influence, innovation and development and six secondary indicators which consist of the number of papers, total citations, highly cited papers, hot papers, average citations per paper and the ration of highly cited papers to papers. Then we assign them with proper weights. Based on these, we obtain the rankings of university and country/territory competitiveness in computer science. We hope this paper can contribute to the further study in the evaluation of a certain subject or a whole university.

Journal impact factors (JIFs) as determined by the Institute for Scientific and Technological Information of China (ISTIC) of forty-two Chinese engineering journals were compared with external Web link counts, obtained from Lycos, and Web Impact Factors (WIFs) of corresponding journal Web sites to determine if any significant correlation existed between them. The results showed that the correlation between the JIF and external link counts was borderline significant or inconclusive while the correlation between the JIF and the WIF was statistically significant.

This article aims to study the total backlink counts, external backlink counts and the Web Impact Factors (WIFs) for Chinese university websites. By studying whether the backlink counts and WIFs of websites associate with the comprehensive ratings and the research ratings for Chinese universities, the article demonstrates that the external backlink count can be a better evaluation measure for university websites than WIF. The study also investigated issues about data collection by using different search engines. It shows that data collected by Alta Vista are more stable than AllTheWeb.