This is to certify that
Abdolreza Noroozi Chakoli
(Shahed University, Tehran, Iran)
attended the International Conference on Multidisciplinary Innovation in Academic Research
(MIAR-21)
Paris, 12
th-13
thNovember 2021
and presented the paper
Identifying and Analyzing the Multidisciplinary Aspects of Scientometrics in Academic Research
International Institute of Education, Research and Development (IIERD) Mail id: [email protected]
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Identifying and Analyzing the Multidisciplinary Aspects of Scientometrics in Academic Research
Abdolreza Noroozi Chakoli
Associate Professor, Department of Information Science and Knowledge Studies, Shahed University, Tehran, Iran, Phone: +982151215096, Fax: +982155228817, [email protected]
Abstract
Scientometrics is one of the effective fields that emerged in recent decades. Although scientometrics is categorized under the umbrella of Library and Information Sciences, it is considered a multidisciplinary field since it employed some skills, techniques, and foundations of a variety of fields. This paper intends to discuss the multidisciplinary dimensions of Scientometrics, and show how this field can be considered as a multidisciplinary field. The conclusions show there is a strong bond between Scientometrics and some other fields and disciplines such as sociology of science, history of science, science and technology policy and management, the economy of science, and related fields to knowledge and information science. In addition, the results show scientometrics has been changed to a multidisciplinary field employing these fields and effectively serves science, technology, and innovation policy-making and management.
Keywords
Scientometrics, multidisciplinary aspects, science and technology assessment, research evaluation
Introduction
Science is a social activity that affects society. While there may be some debate about the magnitude of the scientific community’s economic contribution to society there is no question that it is significant (Martin and Salter, 1996). There are some excellent sources of high-quality data about scientific publishing and citation activities in the science community and some power-law relationships have already been established. Since the librarians have known the data resources well and they have had some skills to analyze the science too, they have been able to establish the scientometrics to the science and technology evaluation. Scientometricians explore some general characteristics of the science system and its publishing process that are important for science and technology policy making (Measuring scientific performance for improved policy making, 2014).
This article attempts to define scientometrics and presents its evolution and multidisciplinary dimensions to support the science and technology. To play an effective role in these processes, knowledge & information science professionals must use a combination of skills and abilities which are mentioned in this article.
Subsequently, potentials of knowledge and information science in scientometrics are reviewed and it is compared with required skills in order to show how much they correspond with these skills. Finally, it concludes why the scientometrics deeply depends on the knowledge and information science professionals.
Library method is used in this article. Texts and papers about scientometrics, knowledge and information science were studied and analyzed. This article can be useful from two aspects:
a. It shows the multidisciplinary dimensions and abilities of knowledge and information science for performance of Scientometrics.
b. It considers the skills for effective role of knowledge & information science professionals to support the science and technology policy making. It can aware the librarians about the situation of their knowledge in scientometrics and science and technology policy making.
2 Scientometrics: evolution, concepts and Dimensions
According to Garfield (1979) scientometrics is "the study of the measurement of scientific and technological progress". Wilson (2001) believes Scientometrics includes all quantitative aspects of the science of science, communication in science, and science policy. Its origin is in the quantitative study of science policy research, or the science of science, which focuses on a wide variety of quantitative measurements, or indicators, of science at large (Chen; McCain; White & Lin, 2008). As the name would imply, scientometrics is mainly used for the study of all aspects of the literature of science and technology (Hood; Wilson, 2001, 299).
Van Raan believes "scientometrics research is devoted to quantitative studies of science and technology" (van Raan, 1997, 205). Main subjects of scientometrics are individual scientific documents, authors, scientific institutions, academic journals, and regional aspects of science. Scientometrics exceeds the boundaries of information science. In knowledge and information science oriented scientometrics, in contrast to economy, sociology or psychology of science, aspects of information and communication are examined. These aspects may include productivity (documents per year), subjects of the documents (words, co-words), reception (readers of the documents) and formal communication (references and citations, information flows, co- citations) (Juchem, Schlogl, & Stock 2006, 32).
The scientific literatures have a main role in scientometrics and bibliometrics studies. So, there is deep relationship between scientometrics and bibliometrics. After all, the immediate and tangible output of science and technology into the public domain is literature (papers, patents, etc.) (Vinkler, 2001, 541). In contrast, the focus of bibliometrics, despite many wide-ambit definitions, has always been preponderantly on the literature per se of science and scholarship, while there is more to science and technology for scientometricians to measure and analyze than its literature output; e.g., the practices of researchers, the socio-organizational structures, research and development management, the role of science and technology in the national economy, governmental policies (Wilson, 2001).
Scientometrics is focused on scientific information only (Stock; Weber, 2006, p. 386). There are other kinds of special information, above all patent information and news information are very important. Quantitative studies of patent information can be called "patentometrics" or "patent bibliometrics" (Narin, 1994), empirical studies of news "news informetrics". Patentometrics, scientometrics and news informetrics are able to produce some interesting indicators for economics (for patentometrics, see Griliches, 1990).
Typically input and output of science programs correspond to two major categories of indicators. Input indicators include the amount of research grants awarded to institutions and the number of people receiving scientific degrees; output indicators include the number of scientific articles published, the number of citations to each article, and the number of patents granted. Science policy and program evaluation studies have used such indicators to measure the scientific strength of various countries, regions, or research institutions (Persson, 2000). Domain analysts have used such indicators to describe the intellectual structure of a knowledge domain. Scientometrics is the demographics of the worldwide scientific community. As Garfield put it, "One can follow the growth or decline of various fields or identify where the action is."
Scientometrics research has a strong application-oriented tradition (Garfield, 1979; Raan, 1997). For example, scientometrics studies may help governments and private sectors identify their competitive edges and make strategic plans for future research areas and allocate research funding to key research areas. Garfield (1979) identified several publications appeared in the 1970s and contributed to the development of scientometrics, namely, the first Science Indicators published by the National Science Board in 1972 (Board, 1977), the Evaluative Bibliometrics: The Use of Publication and Citation Analysis in the Evaluation of Scientific Activity by Francis Narin and Computer Horizons, Inc. (CHI) in 1976 (Narin, 1976), which has been regarded as a good review source for anyone interested in scientometrics (Garfield, 1979). Derek Price’s 1965 article
‘Network of Scientific Papers’ (Price, 1965; quoted from: Hood; Wilson, 2001) has been also regarded as a key event in the development of the field of scientometrics. Research in scientometrics has also been reflective.
A number of studies have analyzed the field of scientometrics itself in order to identify trends in this interdisciplinary subject matter. Moravcsik (1977; quoted from: Hood; Wilson, 2001) presented a review of scientometrics literature. Van Raan (1997) analyzed the state of the art of scientometrics and characterized its application-oriented tradition. He envisaged that scientometrics could benefit significantly from a greater integration with knowledge discovery and data mining. Leydesdorff (2001) identified some challenges of scientometrics and suggested that the state of the art of science studies is ‘pre-paradigmatic:’ it is an interdisciplinary area integrated at the level of its subject matter and science & technology dynamic &
structure, and an application area for various contributing disciplines.
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Nagpaul, et al. (1999; quoted from: Hood; Wilson, 2001) present 13 papers on the emerging trends in scientometrics, categorized in three parts: scientometrics and science and technology policy, including an introduction to the subject of, scope of and methodology used in scientometrics; the structure and dynamics of science, including individual level up to international level of collaboration among scientists; and regional aspects of science in India.
Now, the question is that how one is able to study the dynamics of science & technology studies as a differentiated field of science. From an evolutionary perspective, one would expect the emergence of the following sub-dynamic perspectives in an increasingly differentiated system (Leydesdorff; Basselaar, 1997, p.
10):
1. The construction and emerging stabilization of new structures by interactions among lower-level units;
2. The use of knowledge contents and expertise in other subsystems;
3. The reproduction and modification of structures which contain codification.
Hitherto, scientometrics has had the programmatic ambition to focus on the latter perspective of "mapping the structure of science" in order to understand the dynamics of the systems under study (e.g., Elkana et al.; Small et al.). From the second perspective, scientometrics results can be used as legitimation for S&T policy decisions. With reference to the sciences and technologies under study, however, this perspective ("utilization") has been the focus of fields like R&D management in private corporations and Technology Assessment in the public arena. These assessments are in need of indicators which remain functional in developing their perspective. Therefore, we witness a continuous effort to extend scientometrics with patent statistics and social indicators. Thirdly, in the sociology of scientific knowledge the perspective of the construction of the systems under study has been programmatic.
This is a fact that while scientometrics can study the scientific patterns and science dynamic and structures that it knows concepts and evidences of science such as scientific products and citations first and knows scientific communication channels, scientific influenced resources, scientific environments and communities, secondly. There is all of this knowledge in knowledge and information science and the professionals contribute it to scientometrics for the aims of science policy.
Research fields in scientometrics and its multidisciplinary relationship with knowledge & information science and other related fields
In 1990s, scientometrics entered into a stage of rethinking and reviewing (Yan, 2006). Scientometricians all over the world put forward serials of disputed issues about evolution of the intellectual structure, the main research fields, and collaboration and communication. In order to clarify these issues, it is important to investigate the whole situation of scientometrics to reveal the skeleton the development of scientometrics. The integrated methods of mapping knowledge domains, social network analysis and frequency analysis of title words reveal that there are 3 main sub-disciplines in scientometrics (Yan, 2006): evaluative scientometrics, structural scientometrics, and dynamic scientometrics. Scientometrics is the bridge of science and technology policy and management and social studies of science in the field of science studies. Moreover, scientometrics is also the bridge of information science and other sub-disciplines of science studies. The relative disciplines of scientometrics are sociology of science, history of science, science and technology policy and management, economy of science, and related fields to knowledge and information science (such as bibliometrics, informetrics, webometrics & etc.) (Noroozi Chakoli, 2011, p. 169). Among these relative disciplines, scientometrics mainly serves for science and technology policy and management.
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Furthermore, the document co-citation map of scientometrics indicates that the 7 main research fronts of scientometrics are citation theory, science communication, basic research assessment; mapping of science, webometrics; collaboration in science and technology; scientometric distribution, bibliometric law, informetrics; scientific indicator and evaluation of national research performance; new production of knowledge: dynamics of science and technology; Linkage between science and technology (Yan, 2006).
From 1978, the theoretical and methodological oriented research in scientometrics dominate all the time, but during the recent years, the theoretical and methodological oriented research began to blend with the application oriented research, which indicates that scientometrics begin to put attention to use the theory and methods in application fields, especially in the field of science and technology policy and management.
Analysis of the scientific collaboration network in scientometrics at the level of scientists shows that from 1978, the scientific collaboration network in scientometrics has become a complicated big network connected with each other from few separated small sub-networks, and it will become an international collaborative network in the near future (Yan, 2006). The main collaborative field of scientometrics is science and scientific activity and the main methods include scientometrics and bibliometrics analysis, especially citation analysis and mapping knowledge domains.
So, as mentioned earlier, scientometrics depends on knowledge and information science and its related fields especially bibliometrics. In knowledge and information science, bibliometrics usually refers to the analysis of patterns of data and information as it pertains to literature—especially scholarly authorship, publication, and communication—by employing certain methods and “laws.” It has a significant impact in the area of information retrieval, and now scientists are using bibliometrics to study link structures in the Internet, also known as webometrics.
Ultimately, all applications of bibliometrics help to make meta-information explicit in the paradigm of information science.
Conclusion
The above-mentioned discussion helps us to conclude that:
The multidisciplinary dimensions of Scientometrics has a great importance in the evaluation of science, technology and innovation and beyond it and its importance have been emphasized in the current age. Since both knowledge and information science and scientometrics deal with scientific information, the knowledge and information science play a significant role in advancing scientometrics.
This article shows the scientometrics was established to provide the services to science & technology policy.
Scientometrics as a multidisciplinary field is affected from the some fields, but it directly depends on the skills and abilities of knowledge and information science professionals. In fact, scientometrics origins refer to the same activities that the librarians did for library objectives under umbrella of bibliometrics.
Since the scientific community and especially S&T policy makers needed such skills and abilities, the same skills, methodologies and tools exceeded the boundaries of libraries and were used by them. Now, skills and methodologies such as identification and selection of influenced scientific resources, analysis of science patterns, Data mining of literatures, evaluating the usage, information retrieval and organizing, analyzing
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scientific processes, web making, scientific mapping, Prioritizing of research fronts and document management and tools such as Indexes and Abstracts, and information technology and databases that the librarians were employed to library objectives serve scientometrics objectives. Nowadays, the skills, methodologies and tools are as competencies of scientometrics and it applies them to S&T planning, scanning, monitoring, analyzing, evaluating. Also, scientometrics uses them as its own competency for recognizing of scientific relations, such as knowledge growth models, specialization, similarity, research fronts, scientific effectiveness, efficiency, productivity, correlation, collaboration, mobility, influence, quality, competency, communications, and etc.
So, scientometricians depend on the services of knowledge and information science professionals. In the same way, the competencies of knowledge and information science professionals to enter scientometrics are more than other fields. It have to be emphasized knowledge and information science professionals that improve their special skills, abilities and knowledge and become up-to-date permanently, can play an important role in this area.
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