Research fronts in library and information science in Spain (1985–1994)

Abstract

Publications and author cocitations in library and information science in Spain during the period from 1985 to 1994 were analyzed as a measure of the structure, specificity and composition of research fronts in this country. A cocitation matrix developed from an ad hoc database was subjected to cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling and principal components analysis, The resulting cocitation maps identified specific areas of r~search and their knowledge bases. We inferred the degree of consolidation of the discipline of library and information science, and of the subdisciplines informetrics, librarianship and university affiliation, from the research activities revealed. In this respect, the conclusions from the study show the existence of several research fronts in Spanish literature the contents of which are in most cases difficult to compare with those in other countries. A lesser degree of maturity of research in this field is shown. IntroductionMo~t researchers are familiar with the authors, specialties, and literature produced in their own field; however, the conceptual and methodological framework that makes it possible to objectively elucidate the structure of different fields of science has been available only since the 1960s. Analyses of these concepts and methods have been aimed at tracing the development of scientific activity and improving its efficiency. The first half of the 1960s saw the establishment of a nexus between the network of relations among scientific papers through references and citations, and the structure of specialities within a given field (Pricel). This relationship led to the development of concepts such as research fronts, invisible colleges, and science maps; current data representation techniques based on multivariate analysis for reducing the number of + To whom correspondence should be addressed.

A connectionist and multivariate approach to science maps: the SOM, clustering and MDS applied to library and information science research

“…We described them in a previous study [13] Among the methodologies of a connectionist nature, the artificial neural networks (ANN) are now the most widely used, in particular the model called the self-organizing map (SOM, also known as the Kohonen model). It is based on the principle of the self-organization and grouping of n-dimensional vectors in a bidimensional space [14], and has been used to reduce dimensions in a wide variety of document spaces of diverse nature [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23].…”

A new approach to institutional domain analysis: Multilevel research fronts structure

“…Unlike the disciplinary domain studies in which one of the main difficulties reported resides in the selection of the entities (authors, journals, etc.) to include in the analysis [6,14,26], in institutional domains these entities are indeed given. For institutions with a multidisciplinary profile, the difficulties lie both in determining the boundaries between subject groupings that arise in the disciplinary structure, and in establishing the cutoff point for citation and cocitation frequency in order to guarantee the validity of the representations obtained.…”

The academic–practitioner gap in Spanish library and information science: An analysis of authorship and collaboration in two leading national publications

“…However, some of the aforementioned papers substantiate academicpractitioner separation in Spain, in particular the study on research fronts through co-citation analysis by Moya-Anegón et al (1998), which identifies the practitioner community as a clearly segregated cluster with its own personality. Despite the passage of time, data collected in the cited works continue to be reflected in the current trend, a phenomenon the present study sets out to demonstrate.…”