A multiple-perspective co-citation analysis method is introduced for characterizing and interpreting the structure and dynamics of co-citation clusters. The method facilitates analytic and sense making tasks by integrating network visualization, spectral clustering, automatic cluster labeling, and text summarization. Co-citation networks are decomposed into co-citation clusters. The interpretation of these clusters is augmented by automatic cluster labeling and summarization. The method focuses on the interrelations between a co-citation cluster's members and their citers. The generic method is applied to a three-part analysis of the field of Information Science as defined by 12 journals published between 1996 and 2008: 1) a comparative author co-citation analysis (ACA), 2) a progressive ACA of a time series of co-citation networks, and 3) a progressive document co-citation analysis (DCA). Results show that the multipleperspective method increases the interpretability and accountability of both ACA and DCA networks.

Understanding the nature and dynamics of conflicting opinions is a profound and challenging issue. In this paper we address several aspects of the issue through a study of more than 3,000 Amazon customer reviews of the controversial bestseller The Da Vinci Code, including 1,738 positive and 918 negative reviews. The study is motivated by critical questions such as: What are the differences between positive and negative reviews? What is the origin of a particular opinion? How do these opinions change over time? To what extent can differentiating features be identified from unstructured text? How accurately can these features predict the category of a review? We first analyze terminology variations in these reviews in terms of syntactic, semantic, and statistic associations identified by TermWatch and use term variation patterns to depict underlying topics. We then select the most predictive terms based on log likelihood tests and demonstrate that this small set of terms classifies over 70% of the conflicting reviews correctly. This feature selection process reduces the dimensionality of the feature space from more than 20,000 dimensions to a couple of hundreds. We utilize automatically generated decision trees to facilitate the understanding of conflicting opinions in terms of these highly predictive terms. This study also uses a number of visualization and modeling tools to identify not only what positive and negative reviews have in common, but also they differ and evolve over time.

Information science has often been recognized as an interdisciplinary field. The marriage between librarianship/documentation and computer science was a natural development in the United States in the post‐War period (Farkas‐Conn, 1991; Hahn & Barlow, 2012), while the development of information science in Europe has largely stayed close to the humanities and the social sciences, in particular, in relation to communication and media (Ibekwe‐SanJuan, et al., 2010). For many years, the interdisciplinary nature of information science has been applauded; until recently, we are warned that interdisciplinarinity may be harmful to the identity of the field. Buckland (2012) states that the claim of being “interdisciplinary” is to choose a position of weakness because “in times of economic crisis political power tends to reside in well‐established disciplines.” Cronin (2012) comments that “the field's sense of identity, arguably fragile at the best of times, is likely to be further weakened” for its “epistemic promiscuity.” This international panel aims to discuss the theoretical boundaries of information science in relation to disciplinarity and to the identity of information science with a special reference to the premises, promises and implications of diverging historical and contemporary traditions in different European countries and in the US. Is information science gaining strength by being more interdisciplinary or is “the basic problem for LIS seems at the moment to be a lack of sufficiently strong centripetal forces keeping the field together” as Hjørland (forthcoming) fears. Does IS risk disintegration or dilution if it is being pulled more by centrifugal forces towards neighbouring disciplines rather than by centripetal forces? Is the main problem of IS “epistemological promiscuity”? This panel will discuss how IS in their different geographical or cultural zones has grappled with these issues which are in essence issues of boundaries. In particular, we will discuss the following questions: How information science is affiliated with other disciplines (e.g. natural sciences, social sciences, or interdisciplinary fields) in different regions, countries and institutions represented by the panelists? How is interdisciplinarity perceived in the panelists' institution/country? What are the main theories, if any, that inform research in information science and the formation of research areas in different regions, countries and institutions? Why and how the identity and disciplinarity of information science matter in the context of the work of information science researchers and practitioners?

The field of LIS is beset by recurrent debates as to its disciplinary status. For decades, the interdisciplinary nature of information science has been upheld without much proof from the ground. But if LIS is not an interdiscipline, is it then a meta‐, a trans‐ a pluri‐, a multi‐ or simply a discipline? The different proposals for qualifying the nature of LIS or for delineating its frontiers suggest that its fundamental nature remains unclear for its community. But is LIS alone in this dilemma and does it really matter? Does it stop the field from progressing?