Empowering open science with reflexive and spatialised indicators

Abstract

Bibliometrics have become commonplace and widely used by authors and journals to monitor, to evaluate and to identify their readership in an ever-increasingly publishing scientific world. With this contribution, we aim to investigate the semantic proximities and evolution of the papers published in the online journal Cybergeo since its creation in 1996. We propose a dedicated interactive application that compares three strategies for building semantic networks, using keywords (self-declared themes), citations (areas of research using the papers published in Cybergeo) and full-texts (themes derived from the words used in writing). We interpret these networks and semantic proximities with respect to their temporal evolution as well as to their spatial expressions, by considering the countries studied in the papers under inquiry (Cybergeo being a journal of geography, most articles refer to a well-defined spatial envelope). Finally, we compare the three methods and conclude that their complementarity can help go beyond simple statistics to better understand the epistemological evolution of a scientific community and the readership target of the journal.

What do analyses of city size distributions have in common?

“…As a complement to previous meta-analyses, the present approach has shed light on the scientific text and context mobilized to report on city size distributions. As in Raimbault et al, 2019, it has used textual analysis and citation networks to reflect various proximities between articles of the corpus. The analysis of each network had produced insight in the wording, reference framework and disciplinary heritage demonstrated by the empirical literature on Zipf's law for cities.…”

An interdisciplinary bibliometric analysis of models for land-use and transport interactions

“…One of its application is to the scientific journal Cybergeo in a perspective of Open Science and reflexivity in [Raimbault, 2019a]. Combined with complementary bibliometrics methods into an interactive web application as described by [Raimbault et al, 2021], this allows journal authors and editors to better situate their work in the literature and thus enhance reflexivity. One other application to scientific reflexivity is done by [Raimbault, 2018a] on its own corpus of references, with the aim to reveal possible neglected research directions or novel issues.…”

Integrating and validating urban simulation models

“…Model coupling between disciplines is made simpler when a reflexive positioning is available, for example using scientometrics and literature mapping techniques. Therefore, [32] provides a framework to jointly explore interdisciplinary citation and semantic networks, while [33] develop open tools to explore scientific corpuses.…”