When Caroline was in high-school, parents and aptitude tests suggested that she should become either an engineer or a librarian. As it turns out, Caroline now engineers libraries of sorts, namely information and data-retrieval systems. While it is obvious, perhaps, that such systems are of central importance to the scientific enterprise, it is far less obvious what such systems tell us about the patterns of scientific communication. For example, a standard pattern of communication begins with an idea which is first expressed in an internal report, then presented at a conference, then becomes the subject of a peer-reviewed journal- paper, and finally makes it into a textbook. Such patterns are subject to change as technology advances. For example, the pamphlet or single-authored book took a much more prominent place some centuries ago, and today we post ideas on the Internet, inviting criticism and public discussion, circumventing the peer-review process.
As an engineer of libraries or data-retrieval-systems, Caroline is not just concerned with such general patterns but more closely involved with bibliometrics or scientometrics. Citation-indices provide opportunities for data-retrieval, especially subject-searches. They allow us to work ourselves backwards or forwards through the literature (and thus through research-traditions) from any scientific article. We can trace it back to previous articles which defined the methodology or set the research agenda, and we can trace it forwards to discover what more recent work has responded or built upon our original article. This is useful not only to the scientist who doesn't want to duplicate research that has already been done. It is useful also to the historian, sociologist, philosopher of science who can produce cognitive maps of a certain scientific discipline and how it changes over time: it can show us networks of scientists rallying around certain paradigmatic or agenda-setting pieces. Also, we can investigate relations between fields: how often do chemical engineers cite chemists or vice versa? One of the major advocates of citation-indexing, Eugene Garfield of the Institute of Scientific Information (and author of the seminal Citation Indexing: Its Theory and Application in Science, Technology, and Humanities Philadelphia: ISI Press, 1979) writes a regular column reflecting on so-called 'citation-classics.'
Citation-indices are also used for less-germane purposes, e.g., to judge the importance of a researcher in the context of tenure and promotion: if your stature in the field can be 'measured' by the number of citations to your work, slight improvements of method may have a bigger 'citation-pay-off' than substantive proposals, self-citations become ethically ambiguous, and corrections of your errors can work to your advantage.
Caroline also discussed keyword-indexing which (as in our USCAN catalogue) is usually based on a Boolean and/or system. As we all know, the keyword search often produces too many matches. New technologies create new requirements and allow for new approaches (or, as it happens, for the implementation - finally - of an old suggestion): some search engines on the Internet employ a vector-space-model where keywords are associated with the frequency of their occurrence in a text to create a ranking of matches. Again, there are possible applications to discourse analysis or Science Studies, allowing us to match articles by their use of a particular vocabulary or jargon. Also, we might be able to trace the development of a new term (or idea) through a series of articles, observing how it takes hold in the scientific community.
Here are some references to pertinent contributions by Caroline: "Research productivity and breadth of interest revisited," (Journal of the American Society for Information Science, vol. 40, No. 5, September 1989, pp. 359-360); with Robin M. Carter "Anthropological perspectives on classification systems," (Proceedings of the 5th ASIS SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop, Alexandria, Virginia, October 16, 1994, pp. 69-77); with Ziad Nakkouzi "Query formulation for handling negation in information retrieval systems" (Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Vol. 41, No. 3, April 1990, pp. 171-182); also look for a book under contract with Oxford University Press on Computational Information Retrieval.
Alfred Nordmann
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