An evaluation of information behaviour studies through the Scholarly Capital Model

Abstract

Influence and capital are two concepts used to evaluate scholarly outputs, and these can be measured using the Scholarly Capital Model as a modelling tool. The tool looks at the concepts of connectedness, venue representation, and ideational influence using centrality measures within a social network. This research used co‐authorships and h‐indices to investigate authors who have published papers in the field of information behaviour between 1980 and 2015 as extracted from Web of Science. The findings show a relationship between the authors’ connectedness and the venue (journal) representation. It could be seen that the venue (journal) influences the chance of citation, and equally, the prestige (centrality) of authors probably raises the citations of the journals. The research also shows a significant positive relationship between the venue representation and ideational influence. This means that a research work that is published in a highly cited journal will find more visibility and will receive more citations.

Who is who in library and information science research? The integrative application of scholarly influence indicators

“…The closeness centrality shows how quickly an author is able to access other authors in the collaboration network since a node with a higher closeness centrality needs to take fewer steps on average to reach the other nodes of the network. This potentially indicates an association between the closeness centrality value of authors and the number of citations that they receive (Soheili et al, 2018). The effectiveness of nodes having a high centrality score is that such nodes have far faster access to other nodes and can access short paths to more entities.…”