Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

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

  • Published:
Scientometrics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

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.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4

Similar content being viewed by others

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).

References

  • Baccini, A., & Barabesi, L. (2011). Seats at the table: the network of the editorial boards in information and library science. Journal of Informetrics, 5(3), 382–391.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bakker, P., & Rigter, H. (1985). Editors of medical journals: who and from where. Scientometrics, 7(1), 11–22.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Barzilai-Nahon, K. (2009). Gatekeeping: a critical review. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 43(1), 1–79.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Beaver, D., & Rosen, R. (1978). Studies in scientific collaboration Part I. The professional origins of scientific co-authorship. Scientometrics, 1, 65–84.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Beaver, D., & Rosen, R. (1979a). Studies in scientific collaboration Part II. Scientific co-authorship, research productivity and visibility in the French scientific elite, 1799–1830. Scientometrics, 1, 133–149.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Beaver, D., & Rosen, R. (1979b). Studies in scientific collaboration Part III. Professionalization and the natural history of modern scientific co-authorship. Scientometrics, 1, 231–245.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bedeian, A. G., Van Fleet, D. D., & Hyman, H. H. (2009). Scientific achievement and editorial board membership. Organizational Research Methods, 12(2), 211.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blei, D. M., Ng, A. Y., & Jordan, M. I. (2003). Latent dirichlet allocation. The Journal of Machine Learning Research, 3, 993–1022.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Borgman, C. L. (1989). Bibliometrics and scholarly communication. Communication Research, 16(5), 583.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Braun, T. (2005). Keeping the gates of science journals. Handbook of Quantitative Science and Technology Research, p. 95–114.

  • Braun, T., & Bujdosó, E. (1983). Gatekeeping patterns in the publication of analytical chemistry research. Talanta, 30(3), 161–167.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Braun, T., & Dióspatonyi, I. (2006). Gatekeeping in the international journal literature of chemistry. Information Processing and Management, 42(6), 1652–1656.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Budd, J. M. (2000). Scholarly productivity of US LIS faculty: an update. The Library Quarterly, 70, 230–245.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Callon, M., Courtial, J. P., Turner, W. A., & Bauin, S. (1983). From translations to problematic networks: an introduction to co-word analysis. Social Science Information, 22(2), 191.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cole, F. J., & Eales, N. B. (1917). The history of comparative anatomy: part 1-a statistical analysis of the literature. Science Progress, 11, 587–596.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cronin, B. (2009). Editorial. A seat at the table. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(12), 2387.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ding, Y. (2011). Topic-based PageRank on author cocitation networks. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62(3), 449–466.

    Google Scholar 

  • Egghe, L., & Rousseau, R. (1990). Introduction to informetrics. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fox, M. F. (2008). Collaboration between science and social science: issues, challenges, and opportunities. Research in Social Problems and Public Policy, 16, 17–30. doi:10.1016/S0196-1152(08)16001-X.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Garfield, E. (1955). Citation indexes for science. A new dimension in documentation through association of ideas. Science, 122, 108–111.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Glogoff, S. (1988). Reviewing the gatekeepers: a survey of referees of library journals. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 39(6), 400–407.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gross, P. L. K., & Gross, E. M. (1927). College libraries and chemical education. Science, 66(1713), 386.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • He, T. (2009). International scientific collaboration of China with the G7 countries. Scientometrics, 80(3), 571–582.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jarneving, B. (2007). Complete graphs and bibliographic coupling: a test of the applicability of bibliographic coupling for the identification of cognitive cores on the field level. Journal of Informetrics, 1(4), 338–356.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kessler, M. (1963a). Bibliographic coupling between scientific papers. American documentation, 14(1), 10–25.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kessler, M. (1963b). Bibliographic coupling extended in time: ten case histories* 1. Information storage and retrieval, 1(4), 169–187.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kessler, M. (1965). Comparison of the results of bibliographic coupling and analytic subject indexing. American documentation, 16(3), 223–233.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lawler, E. L. (1963). The quadratic assignment problem. Management Science, 586–599.

  • Leydesdorff, L. (1997). Why words and co-words cannot map the development of the sciences. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 48(5), 418–427.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Liu, X., Bollen, J., Nelson, M. L., & Van de Sompel, H. (2005). Co-authorship networks in the digital library research community. Information Processing and Management, 41(6), 1462–1480.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Luukkonen, T., Persson, O., & Sivertsen, G. (1992). Understanding patterns of international scientific collaboration. Science, Technology and Human Values, 17(1), 101.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McCain, K. W. (1991). Mapping economics through the journal literature: an experiment in journal cocitation analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 42(4), 290–296.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Milojević, S., Sugimoto, C. R., Yan, E., & Ding, Y. (2011). The cognitive structure of library and information science: analysis of article title words. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62(10), 1933–1953.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ni, C., & Ding, Y. (2010). Journal clustering through interlocking editorship information. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 47(1), 1–10.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ni, C., & Sugimoto, C. R. (2011). Four-facets of scholarly communities: artifact, producer, concept and gatekeeper. New Orleans: In the Proceedings of Annual Meeting for the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ni, C., Sugimoto, C. R., & Jiang, J. (to appear). Venue-author-coupling: a novel measure of identifying disciplines through author communities. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

  • Paisley, W. (1990). The future of bibliometrics. In C. L. Borgman (Ed.), Scholarly communication and bibliometrics (pp. 281–299). Sage.

  • Rip, A., & Courtial, J. P. (1984). Co-word maps of biotechnology: an example of cognitive scientometrics. Scientometrics, 6(6), 381–400.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sengupta, I. (1992). Bibliometrics, informetrics, scientometrics and librametrics: an overview. Libri, 42(2), 75–98.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Small, H. (1973). Co-citation in scientific literature: a new measure of the relationship between two documents. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 24, 265–269.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Small, H., & Koenig, M. (1977). Journal clustering using a bibliographic coupling method. Information Processing and Management, 13(5), 277–288.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sugimoto, C. R., Li, D., Russell, T. G., Finlay, S. C., & Ding, Y. (2011). The shifting sands of disciplinary development: analyzing North American library and information science dissertations using latent Dirichlet allocation. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

  • Sugimoto, C. R., Pratt, J. A., & Hauser, K. (2008). Using field cocitation analysis to assess reciprocal and shared impact of LIS/MIS fields. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(9), 1441–1453.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tang, J., Jin, R., & Zhang, J. A topic modeling approach and its integration into the random walk framework for academic search. In ICDM 2008 (pp. 1055–1060). IEEE.

  • Teichert, T., Heyer, G., Schöntag, K., & Mairif, P. (2011). Co-word analysis for assessing consumer associations: a case study in market research. Affective Computing and Sentiment Analysis, 115–124.

  • Thijs, B., & Glänzel, W. (2010). A structural analysis of collaboration between European research institutes. Research Evaluation, 19(1), 55–65.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Van Rijnsoever, F. J., Hessels, L. K., & Vandeberg, R. L. J. (2008). A resource-based view on the interactions of university researchers. Research Policy, 37(8), 1255–1266.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wagner, C. S. (2005). Six case studies of international collaboration in science. Scientometrics, 62(1), 3–26.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • White, H. D., & Griffith, B. C. (1981). Author cocitation: a literature measure of intellectual structure. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 32, 163–171.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yan, E., & Ding, Y. (2012). Scholarly network similarities: How bibliographic coupling networks, citation networks, co-citation networks, topical networks, coauthorship networks, and co-word networks relate to each other. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

  • Yan, E., Ding, Y., Milojević, S., & Sugimoto, C. R. (2012). Topics in dynamic research communities: an exploratory study for the field of information retrieval. Journal of Informetrics, 6(1), 140–153.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhao, D., & Strotmann, A. (2008a). Author bibliographic coupling: another approach to citation based author knowledge network analysis. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 45(1), 1–10.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhao, D., & Strotmann, A. (2008b). Evolution of research activities and intellectual influences in information science 1996–2005: introducing author bibliographic coupling analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(13), 2070–2086.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zsindely, S., Schubert, A., & Braun, T. (1982). Editorial gatekeeping patterns in international science journals. A new science indicator. Scientometrics, 4(1), 57–68.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

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

Author information

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
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Cassidy R. Sugimoto
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Blaise Cronin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

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).

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

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

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0849-8

Keywords

Search

Navigation