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Visualizing and comparing four facets of scholarly communication: producers, artifacts, concepts, and gatekeepers

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Abstract

This paper extends Borgman’s (Communication Research 16: 583, 1989) three-facet framework (artifacts, producers, concepts) for bibliometric analyses of scholarly communication by adding a fourth gatekeepers. The four-facet framework was applied to the field of Library and Information Science to test for variations in the networks produced using operationalizations of each of these four facets independently. Fifty-eight journals from the Information Science and Library Science category in the 2008 Journal Citation Report were studied and the network proximity of these journals based on Venue-Author-Coupling (producer), journal co-citation analysis (artifact), topic analysis (concept) and interlocking editorial board membership (gatekeeper) was measured. The resulting networks were examined for potential correlation using the Quadratic Assignment Procedure. The results indicate some consensus regarding core journals, but significant differences among some networks. Holistic measures of scholarly communication that take multiple facets into account are proposed. This work is relevant in an assessment-conscious and metrics-driven age.

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Notes

  1. There are 61 journals categorized as Information Science and Library Science journals in the 2008 Journal Citation Report, but three of them were excluded as they are in languages other than English. The use of a non-English language would have invalidated the results of the topic modeling.

  2. The only modification to the model is the use of journals rather than conferences. Please refer to Tang et al. (2008) for details.

  3. In each of the following network views, cosine similarity was used as a proximity measure between journals. Some network views only display lines with values larger than 0.2 to make them more readable.

  4. Detailed analysis of the reason why these ten journals do not share editorial board members is not included due to space. Please refer to Ni and Ding (2010).

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to two anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, 1320 East Tenth Street, Bloomington, IN, 47401, USA

    Chaoqun Ni, Cassidy R. Sugimoto & Blaise Cronin

Authors
  1. Chaoqun Ni
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  2. Cassidy R. Sugimoto
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  3. Blaise Cronin
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Correspondence to Chaoqun Ni.

Additional information

This paper is extended from a poster presented at the 2011 Annual Meeting of American Society for Information Science and Technology (Ni and Sugimoto 2011).

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Ni, C., Sugimoto, C.R. & Cronin, B. Visualizing and comparing four facets of scholarly communication: producers, artifacts, concepts, and gatekeepers. Scientometrics 94, 1161–1173 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0849-8

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