Scientometrics and communication theory: Towards theoretically informed indicators

Abstract

The theory of citations should not consider cited and/or citing agents as its sole subject of study. One is able to study also the dynamics in the networks of communications. While communicating agents (e.g., authors, laboratories, journals) can be made comparable in terms of their publication and citation counts, one would expect the communication networks not to be homogeneous. The latent structures of the network indicate different codifications that span a space of possible "translations". The various subdynamics can be hypothesized from an evolutionary perspective. Using the network of aggregated journal-journal citations in Science & Technolo~,~r Studies as an empirical case, the operation of such subdynamics can be demonstrated. Policy implications and the consequences for a theory-driven type of scientometrics will be elaborated.

Mapping interdisciplinarity at the interfaces between the Science Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index

“…The latter can be considered as a leading journal in the sociology of scientific knowledge, while the former is the leading journal at the interface between technology studies and evolutionary economics. LEYDESDORFF & VAN DEN BESSELAAR (1997) noted already that these two journals no longer maintain citation traffic between them although they originated in the 1970s and 1980s from the same community (LEYDESDORFF, 1989;VAN DEN BESSELAAR, 2001). Social Studies of Science is not included in the complete citation environment of Research Policy (zero citations), and the latter journal is cited in the former's citation environment only thirteen times (of a total of being cited 428 times in this environment).…”

“…For example, Research Policy, which can be considered a leading journal in technology studies (LEYDESDORFF & VAN DEN BESSELAAR, 1997), is covered by the Scientometrics 71 (2007) Social Science Citation Index, while Technology Analysis & Strategic Management which belongs substantively to the same specialty, is included in the Science Citation Index. While journals with "information" in their titles are usually included in both indices, journals in library and information sciences (LIS) that do not have the term "information" in their title are contained only in the Social Science Citation Index.…”

Mapping the backbone of science

“…Published journal-based maps have typically been focused on single disciplines, and have used a Pearson correlation on co-citation counts with multidimensional scaling (MDS). [11][12][13][14][15][16] Other discipline-level studies not using the Pearson/MDS technique include the use of relative inter-citation counts with MDS by Leydesdorff,17,18 the use of a self-organizing map by Campanario,19 and the work by Tijssen and van Leeuwen to include non-ISI journals in their maps using journal content mapping. 20 Several more recent works have mapped journals on a larger scale.…”

Caveats for the use of citation indicators in research and journal evaluations

“…Two other core journals of STS-Social Studies of Science and Research Policy-have hardly any citation traffic between them. As increasingly an interdiscipline, STS is oriented toward and cited by journals in a variety of other disciplines (Leydesdorff & Van den Besselaar, 1997;Van den Besselaar, 2001;Leydesdorff, 2007b). Table 2 provides the values of the impact factors and the externally cited impact factors-corrected for within-journal self-citations-for the 20 journals in the citation impact environment of SPP.…”