Scientometrics, Knowledge Management, and Social Network Analysis

In 2000, Ponzi and Koenig wrote a paper titled Knowledge management: another management fad? with the following abstract.

Abstract

Knowledge management is a subject of a growth body of literature. While capturing the interest of practitioners and scholars in the mid-1990s, knowledge management remains a broadly defined concept with faddish characteristics. Based on annual counts of article retrieved from Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, and ABI Inform referring to three previous recognized management fad, this paper introduces empirical evidence that proposes that a typical management movement generally reveals itself as a fad in approximately five years. In applying this approach and assumption to the case of knowledge management, the findings suggest that knowledge management is at least living longer than typical fads and perhaps is in the process of establishing itself as a new aspect of management. To further the understanding of knowledge management’s development, its interdisciplinary activity and breadth are reported and briefly discussed.

Ponzi and Koenig used article counting technique where the article counts were retrieved from Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index and ABI Inform. They counted the number of articles from 1991 to 2001 with the following result.

So, I was curious to know how the knowledge management field has evolved in the past 5 years from 2002 to 2006. Hence I retrieved article counts from both Science Citation Index and Social Science Citation Index (not ABI Inform). The result is as follows:

So, it can be seen that Ponzi and Koenig’s finding still holds now. However, it will be interesting to see whether the number of articles on knowledge management will stabilize around 500 (Article counts in 2007 as per 28 June 2007 is 153).

There are some most commonly used methods to count for an author’s productivity, namely:

1. First author counting: Only the first author receives the credit with a count of 1, other authors do not receive any credit.
2. Total author counting: Each author receive a credit with a count of 1.
3. Fractional counting: Here, if a publication is authored by N number of authors, each author receive credit with a count of 1/N.

Besides these three methods, there are also different methods such as proportional counting, pure geometric count, Noblesse oblige, etc which can be seen here.

Schubert A, Braun T, Small H, Sweeney E, and Narin F. Four out of the five authors were the recipient of Derek John de Solla Price award. Sweeney E is the only anomaly, and I couldn’t find information about him either. So, if you know about him, please leave a comment.

The following information about the other four authors are taken from the ISSI website.

Schubert A – András Schubert (Hungary) received the award in 1993. He is Senior Scientist at the Institute for Science Policy Research, Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest (Hungary). and also the Editor of the journal Scientometrics.

Braun T – Tibor Braun (Hungary) received the award in 1986. He is director of the Information Science and Scientometric Research Unit (ISSRU) at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is also Professor of Chemistry at the Loránd Eötvös University. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Scientometrics since its first appearance in 1978.

Small H – Henry Small (USA) received the award in 1987 together with Vasily V. Nalimov. He is Chief Scientist and Director of Research Service Group at Thomson ISI. Henry Small received several Awards including the JASIS Best Paper Award in 1987, and in 1998, the Award of Merit from the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIST). He has been named the sixth President of ISSI for the period of four years in 2003.

Narin F – Francis Narin (USA) received the award in 1988. He established CHI in 1968, an internationally recognized research consultancy specializing in developing evaluation tools and indicators for science and technology analysis. Narin is recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on science and technology analysis. He started with the analysis of science in the 1970s, before developing evaluations of patents in the 1980s and later, in the 1990s, analyzing linkage between science and technology.

So, that’s about some of the top scientometricians.

In relation to my previous post, I found out that Olle Persson has written an article ‘A bibliometric view of Scientometrics‘ using the data until 1999, which also listed the top cited publication in Scientometrics.

First, I need to clarify that the Scientometrics mentioned above is the journal Scientometrics, not scientometrics as a discipline.

This information was retrieved using the ISI Web of Knowledge on October 4, 2007.

1. Schubert A, Glanzel W, Braun T
   Scientometric Datafiles – A Comprehensive Set Of Indicators On 2649 Journals And 96 Countries In All Major Science Fields And Subfields 1981-1985
   Scientometrics 16 (1-6): 3-& Jun 1989
   Times Cited: 131
2. Schubert A, Braun T
   Relative Indicators And Relational Charts For Comparative-Assessment Of Publication Output And Citation Impact
   Scientometrics 9 (5-6): 281-291 May 1986
   Times Cited: 87
3. Pavitt K
   Patent Statistics As Indicators Of Innovative Activities – Possibilities And Problems
   Scientometrics 7 (1-2): 77-99 1985
   Times Cited: 84
4. Small H, Sweeney E, Greenlee E
   Clustering The Science Citation Index Using Co-Citations .2. Mapping Science
   Scientometrics 8 (5-6): 321-340 1985
   Times Cited: 79
5. Small H, Sweeney E
   Clustering The Science Citation Index Using Co-Citations .1. A Comparison Of Methods
   Scientometrics 7 (3-6): 391-409 1985
   Times Cited: 78
6. Narin F, Noma E
   Is Technology Becoming Science
   Scientometrics 7 (3-6): 369-381 1985
   Times Cited: 72
7. Schubert A, Braun T
   International Collaboration In The Sciences, 1981-1985
   Scientometrics 19 (1-2): 3-10 Jul 1990
   Times Cited: 63
8. Narin F, Stevens K, Whitlow Es
   Scientific Cooperation In Europe And The Citation Of Multinationally Authored Papers
   Scientometrics 21 (3): 313-323 Jul-Aug 1991
   Times Cited: 62
9. Bjorneborn L, Ingwersen P
   Perspectives Of Webometrics
   Scientometrics 50 (1): 65-82 Jan 2001
   Times Cited: 61
10. Moed Hf, Debruin Re, Vanleeuwen Tn
    New Bibliometric Tools For The Assessment Of National Research Performance – Database Description, Overview Of Indicators And First Applications
    Scientometrics 33 (3): 381-422 Jul-Aug 1995
    Times Cited: 61

Six of the 10 most cited publication were published in the 1980s, three in the 1990s, and only one which was published in the 2000s.

Schubert A, Braun T, Small H, Sweeney E, and Narin F published more than one top 10 most cited publication in Scientometrics.

The next entry will be devoted to introduce the 5 ‘Scientometrician’.

I am just curious why Eugene Garfield did not publish in Scientometrics?

Published in: Conservation Biology, 20(3), 2006, 652-657(6)
Authors: Autumn-Lynn Harrison
Affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Long Marine Laboratory, University of California, Santa Cruz, 100 Shaffer Road, Santa Cruz, CA 95060, U.S.A.

The four previous papers have illustrated how scientometrics techniques being applied in the level of journals, fields, as well as countries. Harrison (2006) studied the authorship trends of a specific journal, Conservation Biology, from its inauguration in 1987 to 2005.

Over the 19-years period, there were more than 5,200 unique authors representing almost 1,500 organisations from 89 countries contributing to 2,060 papers. These data were obtained from Thomson Scientific bibliometric records.

Harrison first investigated the 25 most cited papers. It was found that 62 individuals were involved in the 25 papers. From the first author perspective, 21 of them are men and 4 are women.

From the total number of authors, 82.6% of them published only a single paper and only 6 of them published 10 or more papers, namely Dennis Murphy with 13 papers, Joel Berger 12 papers, Philip Hedrick and Mac Hunter with 11 papers, and Tim Clark and Kent Redford with 10 papers. Interestingly, the top 3 most cited papers do not include any of the most productive authors. The three most cited authors were all from Australia, Richard J. Hobbs received 1021 total citations from 5 papers, Chris Margules received 951 citations from 3 papers, and Denis Saunders received 857 citations from the only paper that he published in Conservation Biology. 82.6% of them published only a single paper.

Harrison also found that the number of single-authored papers decreased significantly over the years from 56.7% in 1987 to 17.8% in 2005. While the number of papers with 5 or more authors ranged from 0 in 1987 to 23% in 2005. Overall, the average number of authors per paper increased from 1.6 in 1987 to 3.3 in 2005.

Finally, Harrison investigated the affiliation of the authors. 62% of the total number of institutions contributed only a single paper. The U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service with its 63 papers was the most productive, while the University of Florida and University of California, Davis, were the two institutions with the highest number of first authors with 41 and 40.

Published in: Scentometrics, 50(3), 2001, 503-521
Authors: Mee-Jean Kim
Affiliation: Department of Library and Information Science, Jeonju University, Wansan-Gu, Chonju (Korea)

Kim (2001) conducted a research in the same level of aggregation as Cano, which was a specific discipline. However, Kim focused more on the research performance of the authors, which in this case were Korean physicists. Research publications data from 1994 to 1998 produced by Korean physicists were collected from the Science Citation Index CD-ROM Database.

Korean Physical Society and other physical society related in Korea published more than 10 journals in either English or Korean. However, Science Citation Index only included two Korean-published journals, namely Journal of the Korean Physical Society and Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society.

A total of 4,665 publications produced by Korean physicists or researchers affiliated with physics departments or laboratories were found. These publications were spread over 224 journals produced by 19 different countries. US journals accounted for 37.5% while, followed by Korean and Dutch journals which accounted for 22.0% and 20.1% respectively. There were 33 journals where more than 30 papers had been published in the journals. These 33 journals accounted for 77% of the total number of publications. The top journal, Journal of the Korean Physical Society, accounted for 21.6% of publications.

Out of the 4.665 publications, 31.9% were authored collaboratively by Korean physicists or researchers with other researchers from other countries. Kim also noted that most Korean-authored papers were more likely to be published in Korean, Japanese, or UK journals, while internationally collaborated papers had a tendency to be published in German, Dutch or Swiss journals.

Kim identified the top 15 Korean institutions with more than 100 publications. These top 15 institutions contributed 86.4% of the total publications, with Seoul National University, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and Korea University as the top 3 institutions.

Kim further investigated the impact of the publications by looking at the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) of the journals where the papers were published and also at the citation rates of the papers. First, 62.7% of the total publications appeared in the journals with a JIF (1998) greater than 1. Both Korean journals, which accounted for 22% of the total number of publications, had a JIF of less than 1. Secondly, based on the first authors of the publications, 18 authorships countries were identified. Kim found that US and French publications tend to get more citations with an average 15.9 and 16.4 citations per paper respectively, while Korean publications averaged 4.0 citations per paper. However, French publications had a significantly higher self-citations rate in comparison with US and Korean publications. 24.6% of the total number of citations received by the French publications was self-citations, whereas for Korea and US, only 14.1% and 8.2% are self-citations. Among the 18 authorship countries, papers authored by China’s researchers were the least cited with an average of 2.2 citations per paper and 25% of the citations received were self-citations.

Published in: Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50(8), 1999, 675 – 680
Authors: V. Cano
Affiliation: Department of Communication and Information Studies, Queen Margaret College, Clerwood Terrace, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom

Cano (1999) reviewed the research in Library and Information Science in Spain from 1977 to 1994. Two journals, Revista Espanola De Documentacion Cientifica (RevDoc) and Documentacion de las Ciencias de la Informacion (Documentacion), which publications were mostly in Spanish were selected to be analysed. In the 17 years period, the two journals had a total of 354 articles.

The articles were then categorised into 11 classes, namely (1) The profession and LI&S Education; (2) Library History; (3) Publishing (Book History); (4) Education in L&IS; (5) Methodology; (6) Analysis of L&IS; (7) L&IS Service Activities; (8) Information Storage and Retrieval; (9) Information Seeking; (10) Scientific and Professional Communication; and (11) Other L&IS Aspects. The most popular topics were L&IS Services with 19.5% of the total publications, followed closely by Information Retrieval and Scientific and Professional Communication with 18.9% and 18.6% respectively. Cano mentioned that the popularity of topics was caused by the influence of Belgian and French documentalists such as Suzanne Briet, Paul Otlet, and La Fontaine. Briet emphasised on information retrieval, scientific communication and description of services, while Otlet and La Fontaine focused on .information technology, information retrieval, search strategies, and scholarly communication networks.

The methods used in producing the papers were also examined by Cano. The most commonly used method was empirical method with 119 articles, followed by discussion, literature review, and bibliography with 55, 30 and 29 papers. While mathematical methods were only used in 4 of the papers.

Cano also investigated the authorship patterns in both journals, and found out that 68% of the papers studied were single-authored papers. Cano noted that this tendency might be caused by the need for getting personal recognitions in order to get a permanent employment in Spanish civil service. A search in LISA database indicated that 77.7% of a total of 205 authors never published in any of the journals indexed in LISA. According to Cano, this does not mean that the Spanish L&IS researchers are not productive, but it might be caused by language barriers which affect the choices of journals.

Interestingly, there were only 7 authors who published in both journals. Cano argued that this was caused by the existence “gatekeepers” in each editorial board whose task was to maintain the continuity of their respective invisible colleges. This argument was supported by the fact that 109 out of 119 articles using empirical method were published in RevDoc, where most of the editors hold PhDs in sciences. While 31 out of 59 articles using literature review and bibliography methods were published in Documentation, where most of the editors hold PhDs in humanities, linguistics and literature.

Published in: Journal of Economic Psychology, 27(2006), 793–804
Authors: Erich Kirchler, Erik Hölzl
Affiliation: University of Vienna, Faculty of Psychology, Universitaetsstrasse 7, A-1010 Vienna, Austria

Similar to what Dutt, Garg, and Bali had studied, Kirchler and Hölzl (2006) also studied a specific journal. They studied publications in the first twenty-five years of Journal of Economic Psychology, which is from 1981 to 2005. All the publication data were retrieved using the ISI Web of Science. In the 25 years period, there were 1032 publications, however only 854 were analysed. The 854 publications were exclusively research articles, excluding book review, errata, etc.

Kirchler and Hölzl divided the research articles into 5 blocks of time window, 1981-1985, 1986-1990, 1991-1995, 1996-2000, and 2001-2005. They found that the number of articles published increased from 127 in the earliest time window to 220 in the latest. The number of references per article also increased over the years, from 23.22 in the earliest time window to 38.35 in the latest. They also noted that the number of single-authored articles had decreased significantly from 52.0% to 34.1% over the time windows. On average, an article was written by 1.77 authors.

The 854 research articles were categorised into 15 topics, namely Theory and history; Individual decision making; Cooperation and competition; Socialization and lay theories; Money, currency and inflation; Financial behaviour and investment; Consumer attitudes; Consumer behaviour; Consumer expectations; Firm; Marketplace behaviour, marketing and advertising; Labour market; Tax; Environmental behaviour; Government and policy; and others. Over 25 years, the top four topics ─consumer behaviour, individual decision making, financial behaviour and investment, and cooperation and competition─ constitute 41.2% of the publications.

Having analysed the topics of the research articles, Kirchler and Hölzl proceeded in analysing the sources of the publications. The 854 research articles made a total of 28,456 references. However, only 4% of the sources were cited more than 3 times. 84% of the sources were cited once, 9% twice and 3% thrice. Kirchler and Hölzl further short listed the 20 most-cited journals with Journal of Economic Psychology, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and American Economic Review as the top 4. The 4 most-cited journals contributed 11.0% of the references, but Kirchler and Hölzl noted that for every research article 35.7% of the references were from the 4 most-cited journals. This finding indicated that the perspectives of social psychology, social economics, and consumer research dominated the study of economic psychology.

Kirchler and Hölzl also indicated the 20 most-cited articles. The most-cited article received 132 citations, and on average the 20 most-cited articles received 37.95 citations. Finally, the self-citation rate of Journal of Economic Psychology was analysed which indicated 3.6% of self-citation rate.

Published in: Scientometrics, 56(1), 81–93
Authors: Bharvi Dutt, KC Garg, Anita Bali
Affiliation: National Institute of Science Technology and Development Studies, New Delhi (India)

In this paper, 1317 publications in the first 50 volumes of Scientometrics from 1978 to 2001 were examined. The authors focused on research articles and excluded letters to the editor, bibliographies, meeting abstracts, news and notes, editorials, obituaries, and commentary to Derek De Solla Price awards.

Data about year and volume of the publication, author, total number of authors, institutional affiliation, number of institutions, country, number of countries, type of collaboration, and theme of each research article were collected. All of the research articles were the classified into 7 groups, namely (1) scientometrics assessment; (2) citation and cluster analysis; (3) scientometrics distribution; (4) history of science; (5) scientific collaboration; (6) theoretical studies on scientometrics; and (7) others. In their analysis, Dutt, Garg, and Bali divided the research articles into 3 blocks of time window, 1978-1986, 1987-1994 and 1994-2001.

Dutt, Garg, and Bali found that the most common theme in Scientometrics is scientometrics assessment which constitutes 447 out of the 1317 publications, followed by theoretical studies and citation and cluster analysis with 186 and 165 publications respectively.

The authors also found that USA contributed the most publications in Scientometrics. There were 233 publications originated from USA, followed with 121 from Netherlands and 97 from India. However, in the three blocks of time window, publications originated from USA shows significant decrease with only 49 publications from 1994 to 2001. On the contrary, publications originated from India had increased significantly from 7 publications in the earliest time window to 60 in the last time window. Publications originated from Netherlands, India, France, Spain and Japan were also on the rise.

Next, Dutt, Garg, and Bali also examined the co-authorships pattern in Scientometrics. They found that 53.4% of the publications were single-authored papers, and 28.6% were two-authored papers. Although most publications were produced by a single author, multiple-authored papers are gaining momentum. Domestic and international collaborations were also gaining momentum, out of the 1317 publications 209 were the result of domestic collaboration and 77 were the result of international collaboration.

Finally, Dutt, Garg, and Bali noted that scientometrics research had been conducted in over fifty countries in many publishing institutions. The average number of papers per institution is 0.85. This indicated that scientometrics research were highly scattered.