Rozprawy doktorskie na temat „Informetrics”

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts in accordance with the requirements for the Masters' Degree in Library and Information Science in the Department of Library and Information Studies, at the University of Zululand, 2019.
This research sought to explore informetrics education in Library and Information Science (LIS) departments in South Africa. This study adopted the pragmatic epistemology and pluralistic ontology. The abductive approach was considered appropriate for this study. The employed mixed research methods were survey and content analysis. The survey research methods, through questionnaire, were used to collect data from the LIS heads of departments (HODs) and informetrics lecturers. On the other hand, the content analysis was employed to analyse the content of course outlines. The study‟s population was all LIS departments in South Africa. Nine LIS departments were targeted and responses were received from eight LIS departments. Five of the eight departments were found to offer informetrics education. These were the LIS departments from the University of Cape Town, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, University of Limpopo, University of Western Cape, and the University of Zululand. The LIS department at the University of Zululand is the only department that offers informetrics education as autonomous module/course in the full programme. Other LIS departments offer it as a chapter/Unit in a module. Three LIS departments (University of Cape Town, University of Limpopo, and University of Western Cape) offer informetrics as module component at a Masters level. The LIS department at the University of Zululand offers informetrics education to level three and four undergraduate students in two programmes- BLIS and BIS. The University of Limpopo also offers it at an undergraduate level (level two, three and honours). The content analysis revealed that the scope of informetrics is broad in the essence that there is no uniformity in the content of informetrics across all LIS departments. The blended learning method is widely used: cased studies, group discussions, and online teaching and learning methods are commonly used for informetrics education. Numerous challenges that surround informetrics education were pointed out. Most of them are linked to the consideration that informetrics is broad, ICT reliant and dynamic. The solutions to the challenges were suggested. The study concluded that there is very limited informetrics education in South Africa. The study recommended that LIS departments create awareness about informetrics education, develop informetrics curricula, provide short courses on informetrics, and keep up with the trends in LIS education internationally.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona
Recommender systems are being widely applied in many application settings to suggest products, services, and information items to potential consumers. Collaborative filtering, the most successful recommendation approach, makes recommendations based on past transactions and feedback from consumers sharing similar interests. A major problem limiting the usefulness of collaborative filtering is the sparsity problem, which refers to a situation in which transactional or feedback data is sparse and insufficient to identify similarities in consumer interests. In this article, we propose to deal with this sparsity problem by applying an associative retrieval framework and related spreading activation algorithms to explore transitive associations among consumers through their past transactions and feedback. Such transitive associations are a valuable source of information to help infer consumer interests and can be explored to deal with the sparsity problem. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we have conducted an experimental study using a data set from an online bookstore. We experimented with three spreading activation algorithms including a constrained Leaky Capacitor algorithm, a branch-and-bound serial symbolic search algorithm, and a Hopfield net parallel relaxation search algorithm. These algorithms were compared with several collaborative filtering approaches that do not consider the transitive associations: a simple graph search approach, two variations of the user-based approach, and an item-based approach. Our experimental results indicate that spreading activation-based approaches significantly outperformed the other collaborative filtering methods as measured by recommendation precision, recall, the F-measure, and the rank score.We also observed the over-activation effect of the spreading activation approach, that is, incorporating transitive associations with past transactional data that is not sparse may “dilute” the data used to infer user preferences and lead to degradation in recommendation performance.

Bibliometric measures for evaluating research units in the book-oriented humanities and social sciences are underdeveloped relative to those available for journal-oriented science and technology. We therefore present a new measure designed for book-oriented fields: the â libcitation count.â This is a count of the libraries holding a given book, as reported in a national or international union catalog. As librarians decide what to acquire for the audiences they serve, they jointly constitute an instrument for gauging the cultural impact of books. Their decisions are informed by knowledge not only of audiences but also of the book world, e.g., the reputations of authors and the prestige of publishers. From libcitation counts, measures can be derived for comparing research units. Here, we imagine a matchup between the departments of history, philosophy, and political science at the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney in Australia. We chose the 12 books from each department that had thehighest libcitation counts in the Libraries Australia union catalog during 2000â 2006. We present each bookâ s raw libcitation count, its rank within its LC class, and its LC-class normalized libcitation score. The latter is patterned on the item-oriented field normalized citation score used in evaluative bibliometrics. Summary statistics based on these measures allow the departments to be compared for cultural impact. Our work has implications for programs such as Excellence in Research for Australia and the Research Assessment Exercise in the United Kingdom. It also has implications for data mining in OCLCâ s WorldCat.

This paper provides an overview of how technology has changed the relationships between the library catalogue, the catalogue user, alternative sources of bibliographic data, and the resources described in the catalogue. It looks--from a technical perspective--at what those changes mean for the way we support various interfaces to the catalogue, and it highlights changes in approach that will be needed in order to maintain and enhance the effectiveness of those interfaces in an evolving networked environment.

This study investigated the distribution of bibliographic records amongst online bibliographic databases. The topic of Fuzzy Set Theory over the period of 1965 to 1993 was chosen to provide the case study for this investigation. From the DIALOG database host, searches were conducted on 114 databases to determine the number of journal article records relating to the topic of Fuzzy Sets. Both the number of records in each database, as well as the overlap of coverage between the databases were calculated. Six counting techniques were developed to allocate records to databases based on different methods for handling records that were duplicated between databases. When duplicate records are included, the top database accounts for 19% of the records; when duplicates are removed, the top database was found to account for 37% of the records. The distribution of records in databases was found to conform to the Bradford-Zipf hyperbolic distribution. Various other analyses were undertaken including: the duplicate records themselves, the total size of the DIALOG database system over time and the density of Fuzzy Set records in databases over time. A secondary aim of this study was to perform an informetric study on the literature of Fuzzy Set Theory itself. Results obtained include an analysis of the growth of the Fuzzy Set literature, an analysis of the journals covering the topic of Fuzzy Sets, an analysis of the terminology used in describing topics related to Fuzzy Sets. Also, the Ulrich's database was used to provide a subject classification of the journals to analyse the diffusion of the topic of Fuzzy Sets into other disciplines. Apart from the discipline of mathematics, the top disciplines into which Fuzzy Sets have diffused were found to be applied physics, systems and computing. The third aim of the thesis was to refine and develop the methodology used to perform large scale informetric studies using data from a variety of online bibliographic databases. Commercially available software was used wherever possible, but where this was not possible or infeasible, custom written programs were developed to perform various steps in the methodology.

This is chapter 1 of the book (first 25 pages of a book with 392 pages). How can an economy based on something as volatile as knowledge be sustained? The urgency of improving our understanding of a knowledge-based economy provides the context and necessity of this study. In a previous study entitled A Sociological Theory of Communications: The Self-Organization of the Knowledge-based Society (2001) the author specified knowledge-based systems from a sociological perspective. In this book, he takes this theory one step further and demonstrates how the knowledge base of an economic system can be operationalized, both in terms of measurement and by providing simulation models. Loet Leydesdorff (Ph.D. Sociology, M.A. Philosophy, and M.Sc. Biochemistry) reads Science and Technology Dynamics at the Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam. He has published extensively in science and technology studies about the Triple Helix of university-industry-government relations, scientometrics, systems theory, social network analysis, and the sociology of innovation. He received the Derek de Solla Price Award for Scientometrics and Informetrics in 2003. In 2005, he held â The City of Lausanneâ Honor Chair at the School of Economics, Université de Lausanne, Switzerland. This interdisciplinary study provides both models of the knowledge base of an economy and instruments for its measurement, as applied to the German and Dutch economies in terms of regional and sectorial differences. The simulations introduce a set of algorithms for modeling various forms of anticipation in social networks. The knowledge base of an economy can be specified as a strongly anticipatory dynamic that operates at the supra-individual level.

The authors describe a large-scale, longitudinal citation analysis of intellectual trading between information studies and cognate disciplines. The results of their investigation reveal the extent to which information studies draws on and, in turn, contributes to the ideational substrates of other academic domains. Their data show that the field has become a more successful exporter of ideas as well as less introverted than was previously the case. In the last decade, information studies has begun to contribute significantly to the literatures of such disciplines as computer science and engineering on the one hand and business and management on the other, while also drawing more heavily on those same literatures.

[English abstract] The procedures by which library collections can be evaluated are quite diverse, and some are rather complex. The Cantor Set Theory is applied with a structuralist approach as a methodological aid to decision-making about the collections development. The methodology suggested here makes use of local holdings information based on an evaluative study of the Spanish university library collections.

Nel presente lavoro si introduce un nuovo indice per la valutazione dei prodotti della ricerca: l'indice di multidisciplinarieta`. Questa nuova metrica puo` essere un interessante parametro di valutazione: il panorama degli studi multidisciplinari e` vasto ed eterogeneo, ed all'interno di questo sono richieste necessarie competenze trasversali. Le attuali metriche adottate nella valutazione di un accademico, di un journal, o di una conferenza non tengono conto di queste situazioni intermedie, e limitano la loro valutazione dell'impatto al semplice conteggio delle citazioni ricevute. Il risultato di tale valutazione consiste in un valore dell'impatto della ricerca senza una connotazione della direzione e della rilevanza di questa nel contesto delle altre discipline. L'indice di multidisciplinarieta` proposto si integrerebbe allora all'interno dell'attuale panorama delle metriche di valutazione della ricerca, offrendo -accanto ad una quantificazione dell'impatto- una quantificazione della varieta` dei contesti disciplinari nei quali si inserisce.

This study evaluates the data sources and research methods used in earlier studies to rank the research productivity of Library and Information Science (LIS) faculty and schools. In doing so, the study identifies both tools and methods that generate more accurate publication count rankings as well as databases that should be taken into consideration when conducting comprehensive searches in the literature for research and curricular needs. With a list of 2,625 items published between 1982 and 2002 by 68 faculty members of 18 American Library Associationâ (ALA-) accredited LIS schools, hundreds of databases were searched. Results show that there are only 10 databases that provide significant coverage of the LIS indexed literature. Results also show that restricting the data sources to one, two, or even three databases leads to inaccurate rankings and erroneous conclusions. Because no database provides comprehensive coverage of the LIS literature, researchers must rely on a wide range of disciplinary and multidisciplinary databases for ranking and other research purposes. The study answers such questions as the following: Is the Association of Library and Information Science Educationâ s (ALISEâ s) directory of members a reliable tool to identify a complete list of faculty members at LIS schools? How many and which databases are needed in a multifile search to arrive at accurate publication count rankings? What coverage will be achieved using a certain number of databases? Which research areas are well covered by which databases? What alternative methods and tools are available to supplement gaps among databases? Did coverage performance of databases change over time? What counting method should be used when determining what and how many items each LIS faculty and school has published? The authors recommend advanced analysis of research productivity to provide a more detailed assessment of research productivity of authors and programs.

This paper explores the potential for and progress of a gradual transition from a highly centralized model for cataloging to an iterative, collaborative, and broadly distributed model for electronic resource description. The author's purpose is to alert library managers to some experiments underway and to help them conceptualize new methods for defining, planning, and leading the e-resource description process under moderate to severe time and staffing constraints. To build a coherent library system for discovery and retrieval of networked resources, librarians and technologists are experimenting with team-based efforts and new workflows for metadata creation. In an emerging new service model for e-resource description, metadata can come from selectors, public service librarians, information technology staff, authors, vendors, publishers, and catalogers. Arguing that e-resource description demands a level of cross-functional collaboration and creative problem-solving that is often constrained by libraries' functional organizational structures, the author calls for reuniting functional groups into virtual teams that can integrate the e-resource description process, speed up operations, and provide better service. The paper includes an examination of the traditional division of labor for producing catalogs and bibliographies, a discussion of experiments that deploy a widely distributed e-resource description process (e.g., the use of CORC at Cornell and Brown), and an exploration of the results of a brief study of selected ARL libraries' e-resource discovery systems.

This research seeks an answer to the following question: what is the relationship between the structure of researchers' communication network and the structure of their collaborative output networks (e.g. co-authored publications, joint grant proposals, and joint patent applications), and the impact of these structures on their citation performance and the volume of collaborative research outputs? Three complementary studies are performed to answer this main question as discussed below. 1. Study I: A frequently used output to measure scientific (or research) collaboration is co-authorship in scholarly publications. Less frequently used are joint grant proposals and patents. Many scholars believe that co-authorship as the sole measure of research collaboration is insufficient because collaboration between researchers might not result in co-authorship. Collaborations involve informal communication (i.e., conversational exchange) between researchers. Using self-reports from 100 tenured/tenure-track faculty in the College of Engineering at the University of South Florida, researchers' networks are constructed from their communication relations and collaborations in three areas: joint publications, joint grant proposals, and joint patents. The data collection: 1) provides a rich data set of both researchers' in-progress and completed collaborative outputs, 2) yields a rating from the researchers on the importance of a tie to them 3) obtains multiple types of ties between researchers allowing for the comparison of their multiple networks. Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM) results show that the more communication researchers have the more likely they produce collaborative outputs. Furthermore, the impact of four demographic attributes: gender, race, department affiliation, and spatial proximity on collaborative output relations is tested. The results indicate that grant proposals are submitted with mixed gender teams in the college of engineering. Besides, the same race researchers are more likely to publish together. The demographics do not have an additional leverage on joint patents. 2. Study II: Previous research shows that researchers' social network metrics obtained from a collaborative output network (e.g., joint publications or co-authorship network) impact their performance determined by g-index. This study uses a richer dataset to show that a scholar's performance should be considered with respect to position in multiple networks. Previous research using only the network of researchers' joint publications shows that a researcher's distinct connections to other researchers (i.e., degree centrality), a researcher's number of repeated collaborative outputs (i.e., average tie strength), and a researchers' redundant connections to a group of researchers who are themselves well-connected (i.e., efficiency coefficient) has a positive impact on the researchers' performance, while a researcher's tendency to connect with other researchers who are themselves well-connected (i.e., eigenvector centrality) had a negative impact on the researchers' performance. The findings of this study are similar except that eigenvector centrality has a positive impact on the performance of scholars. Moreover, the results demonstrate that a researcher's tendency towards dense local neighborhoods (as measured by the local clustering coefficient) and the researchers' demographic attributes such as gender should also be considered when investigating the impact of the social network metrics on the performance of researchers. 3. Study III: This study investigates to what extent researchers' interactions in the early stage of their collaborative network activities impact the number of collaborative outputs produced (e.g., joint publications, joint grant proposals, and joint patents). Path models using the Partial Least Squares (PLS) method are run to test the extent to which researchers' individual innovativeness, as determined by the specific indicators obtained from their interactions in the early stage of their collaborative network activities, impacts the number of collaborative outputs they produced taking into account the tie strength of a researcher to other conversational partners (TS). Within a college of engineering, it is found that researchers' individual innovativeness positively impacts the volume of their collaborative outputs. It is observed that TS positively impacts researchers' individual innovativeness, whereas TS negatively impacts researchers' volume of collaborative outputs. Furthermore, TS negatively impacts the relationship between researchers' individual innovativeness and the volume of their collaborative outputs, which is consistent with `Strength of Weak Ties' Theory. The results of this study contribute to the literature regarding the transformation of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge in a university context.

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Analisa a produção científica brasileira (artigos nacionais, artigos internacionais, anais de eventos e livros) através dos Mínimos Quadrados Ordinários (MQO). Para tanto, discorre sobre o percurso histórico e de aplicação das metrias que a Ciência da Informação (CI) vem construindo, desde a mais primordial de todas, a bibliometria, oriunda da biblioteconomia, passando pelas visões modernas como a cienciometria até a informetria. Explica como a econometria constrói o seu modelo de análise, que é utilizado para pesquisas na economia e, ao mesmo tempo, reflete como esse método pode ser trazido para as metrias da informação. Explica e expõe o método de estimação por MQO para a análise de regressão, que é a proposta desta tese. Pesquisa aplicada descritiva com abordagem quantitativa com procedimentos baseados no tipo de pesquisa estudo de caso do levantamento de dados a partir do Portal do Plano Tabular do CNPq do ano de 2010. Os critérios para delineamento da pesquisa foram aprofundados, na revisão de literatura, em referências tanto da área da CI quanto da bibliometria, estatística e econometria. Este estudo, metodologicamente, conta com a abordagem conceitual da bibliometria e da CI em busca de teorias aplicáveis aos estudos em MQO e a aplicação empírica do MQO se aproxima da concepção econométrica. A tese conclui que a utilização de técnicas de análises das funções de regressão construída por meio de MQO possibilita a criação de um modelo de previsão da produção científica brasileira. Esse modelo é construído a partir da correlação e determinação detectada entre o número de doutores e a produção científica destes em cada estado do Brasil. Com a aplicação de estratégias econométricas (índice de correlação, índice de determinação, forma funcional de curva de regressão e cálculo dos parâmetros da função por MQO), foi possível construir um modelo de previsão.

The purpose of this thesis is to critically discuss methods to collect and analyse data related to the interaction and content on the social platform Twitter. The thesis contains examples of how networked communication can be studied on Twitter, based on the affordances of the platform considering interaction with interfaces and other users. The foundational problem is that social science Twitter research has been based on easily accessible data without introducing or discussing criteria for collecting appropriate samples for a given research task.The thesis builds on one literature review and four studies of political Twitter communication. The analyses are based on a view of the Twitter platform as a non-neutral filtering gatekeeper. On the one hand, Twitter treats content and users asymmetrically, by emphasising the popular. On the other hand, Twitter determines what data are available and how data can be accessed through the API (application programming interface). How Twitter provides access to the data in turn affects the analyses the researcher does. The central problem of the thesis is that researchers do not know what relevant data are not collected. Data collection based on keywords, hashtags or users creates data sets that contain fragments of conversations. To solve the problem, a new method was developed. By combining the hashtag and user-based methods, replies to collected tweets were stored, regardless if they contained a tracked hashtag or not.The four studies this thesis builds on show a complexity of collecting and analysing Twitter data. A key finding is that conversations beyond the hashtag can be quite extensive. As a consequence of this, communication networks based on hashtagged replies were found to be potentially very different from networks based on replies from a more complete data set, where non-hashtagged replies are also included. A network based on hashtagged communication is thus misleading compared to a complete communication network.Apart from that it is not entirely trivial to identify the parameters to define what should be studied; tests of the API showed that complete data sets cannot be obtained. Therefore, it is important to reflect on both the data collected and the data excluded, not only as a result of the sampling criteria but also what is not given access to. It is also important to be clear about the affordances for interaction that exist when the study is made, both in the user interface but also what API allows and permits.This research contributes with knowledge about how Twitter is used in the context being studied, but the main contribution is methodological. With the method developed, collection of more complete data sets is enabled, as is analysis of the conversations that take place on the platform. This results in more accurate measurements of the activity. Based on the results of this thesis, there are reasons to suspect that previous studies could differ in terms of results such as communication network size and shape, as well as the type of users that emerges as prominent in the material, compared to if replies that do not contain the studied hashtag had been collected.

Due to copyright, the articles included in this PhD thesis are not available in the digital version of the thesis. Find links to the published articles in the list of papers below.

The article: Lorentzen, D. G. (manuscript). Is it all about politics? A hashtag analysis of the activities of the Swedish political Twitter elite. Is not yet submitted to a journal and is only found in the printed version.

[ES] Las patentes son documentos legales que describen el funcionamiento exacto de una invención, otorgando el derecho de explotación económica a sus dueños a cambio de dar a conocer a la sociedad los detalles de funcionamiento de dicha invención. Para que una patente pueda ser concedida debe cumplir tres requisitos: ser novedad (no haber sido expuesto o publicado con anterioridad), cumplir la actividad inventiva y tener aplicación industrial. Es por ello que las patentes son documentos valiosos, ya que contienen una gran cantidad de información técnica no incluida antes en otro tipo de documento (publicado o disponible). Debido a las características particulares de las patentes, los recursos que éstas mencionan, así como los recursos que mencionan a las patentes, contienen enlaces que pueden ser útiles y dar apoyo a diversas aplicaciones (vigilancia tecnológica, desarrollo e innovación, Triple-Helix, etc.) al disponer de información complementaria, así como de la creación de herramientas y técnicas que permitan extraerlos y analizarlos. El método propuesto para alcanzar los objetivos que definen la tesis se encuentra divido en dos bloques complementarios: Patent Outlink y Patent Inlink, que juntos conforman la técnica de Patent Link Analysis. Para realizar el estudio se selecciona la Oficina de Patentes y Marcas de Estados Unidos (USPTO), recogiendo todas aquellas patentes concedidas entre los años 2008 y 2018 (ambos incluidos). Una vez extraída la información a analizar en cada bloque se cuenta con: 3.133.247 de patentes, 2.745.973 millones de enlaces contenidos en patentes, 2.297.366 millones de páginas web de patentes enlazadas, 17.001 paginas únicas web enlazando a patentes y 990.663 patentes únicas enlazadas desde documentos web. Los resultados del análisis de Patent Outlink muestran como tanto la cantidad de patentes que contienen enlaces (20%), como el número de enlaces contenido en patentes (mediana 4-5) es todavía bajo, pero ha crecido significativamente durante los últimos años y se puede esperar un mayor uso en el futuro. Existe una diferencia clara en el uso de enlaces entre áreas de conocimiento (42% pertenecen a Física, especialmente Computación y Cálculos), así como por secciones dentro de los documentos, explicando los resultados obtenidos y la proyección de análisis futuros. Los resultados del análisis de Patent Inlink identifica una cantidad considerable menor de dominios webs que enlazan a patentes (17.001 frente a 256.724), pero existen más enlaces por documento enlazante (el número de enlaces total es similar para ambos bloques de análisis). Así mismo, los datos muestran una elevada dispersión, con unos pocos dominios generando una gran cantidad de enlaces. Ambos bloques muestran la existencia de una alta relación con empresas y servicios tecnológicos, existiendo diferencias relativas a los enlaces a Universidades y Gobiernos (más enlaces en Outlink). Los resultados muestran que el modelo de análisis propuesto permite y facilita el descubrimiento y evaluación de recursos web de calidad. Así mismo, se concluye que la cibermetría, mediante el análisis de enlaces, aporta información de interés para el análisis de los recursos web de calidad a través de los enlaces contenidos y dirigidos a documentos de patentes. El método propuesto y validado permite de un modo eficiente, eficaz y replicable la extracción y análisis de los enlaces contenidos y dirigidos a documentos de patentes. Permitiendo, a su vez, definir, modelar y caracterizar el Patent Link Analysis como un subgénero del Link Analysis que puede ser utilizado para la construcción de sistemas de monitorización de link intelligence, de evaluación y/o de calidad entre otros, mediante el uso de los enlaces entrantes y salientes de documentos de patentes aplicable universidades, centros de investigación, así como empresas públicas y privadas.
[CA] Les patents són documents legals que descriuen el funcionament exacte d'una invenció, atorgant el dret d'explotació econòmica als seus amos a canvi de donar a conéixer a la societat els detalls de funcionament d'aquesta invenció. Perquè una patent puga ser concedida ha de complir tres requisits: ser novetat (no haver sigut exposat o publicat amb anterioritat), complir l'activitat inventiva i tindre aplicació industrial. És per això que les patents són documents valuosos, ja que contenen una gran quantitat d'informació tècnica no inclosa abans en un altre tipus de document (publicat o disponible). A causa de les característiques particulars de les patents, els recursos que aquestes esmenten, així com els recursos que esmenten les patents, contenen enllaços que poden ser útils i donar suport a diverses aplicacions (vigilància tecnològica, desenvolupament i innovació, Triple-Helix, etc.) en disposar d'informació complementària, així com de la creació d'eines i tècniques que permeten extraure'ls i analitzar-los. El mètode proposat per a aconseguir els objectius que defineixen la tesi es troba dividisc en dos blocs complementaris: Patent Outlink i Patent Inlink, que junts conformen la tècnica de Patent Link Analysis. Per a realitzar l'estudi es selecciona l'Oficina de Patents i Marques dels Estats Units (USPTO), recollint totes aquelles patents concedides entre els anys 2008 i 2018 (tots dos inclosos). Una vegada extreta la informació a analitzar en cada bloc es compta amb: 3.133.247 de patents, 2.745.973 milions d'enllaços continguts en patents, 2.297.366 milions de pàgines web de patents enllaçades, 17.001 pàgines úniques web enllaçant a patents i 990.663 patents úniques enllaçades des de documents web. Els resultats de l'anàlisi de Patent Outlink mostren com tant la quantitat de patents que contenen enllaços (20%), com el nombre d'enllaços contingut en patents (mitjana 4-5) és encara baix, però ha crescut significativament durant els últims anys i es pot esperar un major ús en el futur. Existeix una diferència clara en l'ús d'enllaços entre àrees de coneixement (42% pertanyen a Física, especialment Computació i Càlculs), així com per seccions dins dels documents, explicant els resultats obtinguts i la projecció d'anàlisis futures. Els resultats de l'anàlisi de Patent Inlink identifica una quantitat considerable menor de dominis webs que enllacen a patents (17.001 enfront de 256.724), però hi ha més enllaços per document enllaçant (el nombre d'enllaços total és similar per a tots dos blocs d'anàlisis). Així mateix, les dades mostren una elevada dispersió, amb uns pocs dominis generant una gran quantitat d'enllaços. Tots dos blocs mostren l'existència d'una alta relació amb empreses i serveis tecnològics, existint diferències relatives als enllaços a Universitats i Governs (més enllaços en Outlink). Finalment, es verifica que el model d'anàlisi proposat i facilita l'extracció i anàlisi dels enllaços continguts i dirigits a documents de patents, així com facilitar el descobriment i avaluació de recursos web de qualitat. A més, es conclou que la cibermetría, mitjançant l'anàlisi d'enllaços, aporta informació d'interés per a l'anàlisi dels recursos web de qualitat a través dels enllaços continguts i dirigits a documents de patents. El mètode proposat i validat permet definir, modelar i caracteritzar el Patent Link Analysis com un subgènere del Link Analysis que pot ser utilitzat per a la construcció de sistemes de monitoratge de link intelligence, d'avaluació i/o de qualitat entre altres, mitjançant l'ús dels enllaços entrants i sortints de documents de patents aplicable a universitats, centres d'investigació, així com empreses públiques i privades.
[EN] Patents are legal documents that describe the exact operation of an invention, granting the right of economic exploitation to its owners in exchange for describing the details of the operation of said invention. For a patent to be granted, it must meet three requirements: be novel (not have been previously exhibited or published), comply with the inventive step, and have industrial application. That is why patents are valuable documents, since they contain a large amount of technical information not previously included in another type of document (published or available). Due to the particular characteristics of patents, the resources that they mention, as well as the resources that mention patents, contain links that can be useful and give support to various applications (technological surveillance, development and innovation, Triple-Helix, etc.) by having complementary information, as well as the creation of tools and techniques that allow them to be extracted and analyzed. The proposed method to achieve the objectives that define the thesis is divided into two complementary blocks: Patent Outlink and Patent Inlink, which together make up the Patent Link Analysis technique. To carry out the study, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is selected, collecting all those patents granted between 2008 and 2018 (both included). Once the information to be analyzed has been extracted in each block, there are: 3,133,247 patents, 2,745,973 million links contained in patents, 2,297,366 million linked patent web pages, 17,001 unique web pages linking patents and 990,663 Unique patents linked from web documents. The results of the Patent Outlink analysis show that both the number of patents that contain links (20%) and the number of links contained in patents (median 4-5) is still low, but has grown significantly in recent years and you can expect more use in the future. There is a clear difference in the use of links between areas of knowledge (42% belong to Physics, especially Computing and Calculus), as well as by sections within the documents, explaining the results obtained and the projection of future analyzes. The results of the Patent Inlink analysis identify considerably fewer web domains that link to patents (17,001 vs. 256,724), but there are more links per linking document (the total number of links is similar for both analysis blocks). Likewise, the data shows a high dispersion, with a few domains generating a large number of links. Both blocks show the existence of a high relationship with companies and technological services, with differences related to links to Universities and Governments (more links in Outlink). Finally, it is verified that the proposed model allows in an efficient, effective and replicable way the extraction and analysis of the links contained and directed to patent documents, as well as facilitating the discovery and evaluation of quality web resources. In addition, it is concluded that cybermetrics, through the link analysis technique, provides information of interest for the analysis of quality web resources through the links contained and directed to patent documents. The proposed and validated method allows defining, modeling and characterizing Patent Link Analysis as a subgenre of Link Analysis that can be used for the construction of link intelligence monitoring, evaluation and / or quality systems, among others, through the use of the inbound and outbound links of applicable patent documents universities, research centers, as well as public and private companies.
La presente tesis doctoral ha sido financiada por el Gobierno de España mediante el contrato predoctoral para la formación de doctores FPI BES-2017-079741 otorgada por el Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación.
Font Julián, CI. (2021). Descubrimiento y evaluación de recursos web de calidad mediante Patent Link Analysis [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/170640
TESIS

Das Ziel der Digital Intelligence bzw. datengetriebenen Strategischen Frühaufklärung ist, die Zukunftsgestaltung auf Basis valider und fundierter digitaler Information mit vergleichsweise geringem Aufwand und enormer Zeit- und Kostenersparnis zu unterstützen. Hilfe bieten innovative Technologien der (halb)automatischen Sprach- und Datenverarbeitung wie z. B. das Information Retrieval, das (Temporal) Data, Text und Web Mining, die Informationsvisualisierung, konzeptuelle Strukturen sowie die Informetrie. Sie ermöglichen, Schlüsselthemen und latente Zusammenhänge aus einer nicht überschaubaren, verteilten und inhomogenen Datenmenge wie z. B. Patenten, wissenschaftlichen Publikationen, Pressedokumenten oder Webinhalten rechzeitig zu erkennen und schnell und zielgerichtet bereitzustellen. Die Digital Intelligence macht somit intuitiv erahnte Muster und Entwicklungen explizit und messbar. Die vorliegende Forschungsarbeit soll zum einen die Möglichkeiten der Informatik zur datengetriebenen Frühaufklärung aufzeigen und zum zweiten diese im pragmatischen Kontext umsetzen. Ihren Ausgangspunkt findet sie in der Einführung in die Disziplin der Strategischen Frühaufklärung und ihren datengetriebenen Zweig – die Digital Intelligence. Diskutiert und klassifiziert werden die theoretischen und insbesondere informatikbezogenen Grundlagen der Frühaufklärung – vor allem die Möglichkeiten der zeitorientierten Datenexploration. Konzipiert und entwickelt werden verschiedene Methoden und Software-Werkzeuge, die die zeitorientierte Exploration insbesondere unstrukturierter Textdaten (Temporal Text Mining) unterstützen. Dabei werden nur Verfahren in Betracht gezogen, die sich im Kontext einer großen Institution und den spezifischen Anforderungen der Strategischen Frühaufklärung pragmatisch nutzen lassen. Hervorzuheben sind eine Plattform zur kollektiven Suche sowie ein innovatives Verfahren zur Identifikation schwacher Signale. Vorgestellt und diskutiert wird eine Dienstleistung der Digital Intelligence, die auf dieser Basis in einem globalen technologieorientierten Konzern erfolgreich umgesetzt wurde und eine systematische Wettbewerbs-, Markt- und Technologie-Analyse auf Basis digitaler Spuren des Menschen ermöglicht.

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Analisa a produção científica brasileira (artigos nacionais, artigos internacionais, anais de eventos e livros) através dos Mínimos Quadrados Ordinários (MQO). Para tanto, discorre sobre o percurso histórico e de aplicação das metrias que a Ciência da Informação (CI) vem construindo, desde a mais primordial de todas, a bibliometria, oriunda da biblioteconomia, passando pelas visões modernas como a cienciometria até a informetria. Explica como a econometria constrói o seu modelo de análise, que é utilizado para pesquisas na economia e, ao mesmo tempo, reflete como esse método pode ser trazido para as metrias da informação. Explica e expõe o método de estimação por MQO para a análise de regressão, que é a proposta desta tese. Pesquisa aplicada descritiva com abordagem quantitativa com procedimentos baseados no tipo de pesquisa estudo de caso do levantamento de dados a partir do Portal do Plano Tabular do CNPq do ano de 2010. Os critérios para delineamento da pesquisa foram aprofundados, na revisão de literatura, em referências tanto da área da CI quanto da bibliometria, estatística e econometria. Este estudo, metodologicamente, conta com a abordagem conceitual da bibliometria e da CI em busca de teorias aplicáveis aos estudos em MQO e a aplicação empírica do MQO se aproxima da concepção econométrica. A tese conclui que a utilização de técnicas de análises das funções de regressão construída por meio de MQO possibilita a criação de um modelo de previsão da produção científica brasileira. Esse modelo é construído a partir da correlação e determinação detectada entre o número de doutores e a produção científica destes em cada estado do Brasil. Com a aplicação de estratégias econométricas (índice de correlação, índice de determinação, forma funcional de curva de regressão e cálculo dos parâmetros da função por MQO), foi possível construir um modelo de previsão.

The main purpose of this bachelor thesis is to analyse the publication- and citation patterns of the articles concerning bibliometrics, informetrics, scientometrics, and webometrics which can be found on Web of Science, and give a brief description of how the definition of the four terms has developed. I have looked at how the number of published papers have developed over the years and to what extent they have been quoted by other researchers. I have also briefly adressed what other research fields are referring to articles published in the four areas. The material I looked at includes articles that can be found on Web of Science with one (or more) of the four terms as topic and are categorised under library- and information science starting with the first bibliometrics article which was published in 1969, and ending in 2013. The results show that the publications in all four fields are continuously increasing. For bibliometrics and scientometrics it shows a slow increase up until 2005, then increasing exponentially. Informetric seems to be a comparatively small topic and webometrics is increasing, but is still a relatively young topic which makes it hard to make any concrete conclusions Regarding the citations, it shows that citations for the bibliometrical articles have had a steady curve increasing up until 2005, and then decreasing, the informetric- and scientometrical articles have rather scattered results and the webometrics have decreasing results, which I deduce is based on the fact that it is a new field and citations do not appear until after a few years. Finally I recommend future research, based on the related research I have found.

Insbesondere die Reihenfolge und Struktur der gelisteten Ergebnisse (Ranking) spielt, neben dem direkten Volltextzugriff auf die Dokumente, inzwischen eine entscheidende Rolle beim Design von Suchsystemen. Ziel der Forschung/Doktorarbeit von Philip Mayr ist es, zu untersuchen, ob das vorgestellte alternative Re-Rankingverfahren „Bradfordizing“ im Anwendungsbereich bibliographischer Datenbanken operabel ist und voraussichtlich gewinnbringend in Informationssystemen eingesetzt und dem Nutzer angeboten werden kann. Die Evaluation von Bradfordizing zeigt, dass die Dokumente der Kernzone (Kernzeitschriften) für die meisten Testreihen eine signifikant höhere Precision als Dokumente der Zone 2 und Zone 3 (Peripheriezeitschriften) ergeben. Sowohl für Zeitschriften als auch für Monographien kann ein Relevanzvorteil nach Bradfordizing auf einer sehr breiten Basis von Themen und Fragestellungen an zwei unabhängigen Dokumentkorpora empirisch nachgewiesen werden.

Fields of techno-science like biotechnology develop in a network mode: disciplinary insights from different backgrounds are recombined and university-industry relations are continuously reshaped. The ongoing process of integration at the European level generates an additional network of transnational collaborations. Using the title words of scientific publications in five core journals of biotechnology, multi-variate analysis enables us to distinguish between the intellectual organization of the publications in terms of title words (variables) and the institutional structure in terms of addresses of documents (cases). The interaction among the networks in the case of biotechnology documents with European addresses is compared with the document sets with American and Japanese addresses. A complex network system of innovations is sensitive to policy interventions in ways that differ from national systems of innovation.

Cybermetric methodologies can be expected to reveal dimensions of communication other than those shown by scientometric operationalizations. In a previous study entitled â The organization of the semantic space of an author,â [1] I studied the use of words in titles of articles by Professor Tibor Braun as a scientific author. This was on the occasion of his 60th birthday. This year, on the occasion of his 70th birthday, the Internet has become available as another domain. Among other things, the Internet enables us to study the â globalizationâ of an author. Techniques and methodologies similar to the ones used in the previous (p)scientometric study will be used for the analysis of the semantic space of â Tibor Braunâ as a search term. The globalization of â Tibor Braunâ can then be visualized by using a simulation.

India's contribution to research in agriculture and related fields is assessed from an analysis of publications indexed in CAB Abstracts. CAB Abstracts indexed 51,761 papers, including about 48,300 journal articles, from more than 3,330 addresses in over 800 locations, spread over 30 states/ union territories of India, in the five years 1990-1994. CAB Abstracts has classified these papers into 22 major research areas and about 250 subfields. Plants of economic importance is the leading area of research in India, followed by Animal science. The largest number of papers published are in the three subfields, viz. Pests, pathogens and biogenic diseases of plants (8,898 papers), Plant breeding and genetics (5,675 papers) and Plant production (5,231 papers). A little over 63% of these papers were published by academic institutions. Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, and the Haryana Agricultural University, Hissar, have contributed more than 2370 papers each, not including papers published from other centres of these universities. Agricultural universities have published 16,555 papers and general universities 9,933. The Indian Council of Agricultural Research has accounted for 7,856 papers. Indian researchers have used more than 1950 journals from over 65 countries. About 77% of all journal articles were published in 483 Indian journals. In no other field did Indian researchers publish such a large percent of papers in Indian journals. Unlike in physics and materials science, Indian agricultural scientists have used letters journals only infrequently. Delhi, Ludhiana, Hissar and Bangalore are the leading centres of agricultural research, while Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra. Tamil Nadu, Haryana and Karnataka are the states accounting for the largest number of papers. This report was prepared by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Institute and was submitted to NISSAT, Department of Scientific & Industrial Research, Government of India in July 1998.

This paper analyzes the tagging patterns exhibited by users of del.icio.us, to assess how collaborative tagging supports and enhances traditional ways of classifying and indexing documents. Using frequency data and co-word analysis matrices analyzed by multi-dimensional scaling, the authors discovered that tagging practices to some extent work in ways that are continuous with conventional indexing. Small numbers of tags tend to emerge by unspoken consensus, and inconsistencies follow several predictable patterns that can easily be anticipated. However, the tags also indicated intriguing practices relating to time and task which suggest the presence of an extra dimension in classification and organization, a dimension which conventional systems are unable to facilitate.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona
We propose a methodology to collect, quantify and visualize qualitative consumer data. We employ a Web-based Group Support System (GSS), GSw,b, to elicit free-form comments and a prototype comment analysis support system to facilitate comment classification, categorization and visualization to measure attitudes. We argue that such a methodology is needed due to the proliferation of qualitative data, the limitations of qualitative data analysis and the dearth of methods to measure attitudes contained within free-form comments. We conducted two experiments to compare our methodology with two long-established traditional methods, Likert scale evaluations and first-week box office sales records. We found that our methodology provides equivalent and superior affective and evaluative attitude information, compared to Likert scale ratings. We also found that comment analysis more accurately reflected actual first-week box office sales than did Likert scale ratings. Comment analysis with the prototype tool was seventy-five percent more efficient than manual coding. We designed the prototype to generate visualizations to make sense of multiple attitude dimensions through at-a-glance understanding and comparative presentation. The methodology we propose overcomes drawbacks often associated with qualitative data analysis and offers marketers and researchers a method to measure attitudes from free-form comments. The results indicate that qualitative data in the form of freeform comments may be quantified and visualized to provide meaningful attitude assessment. Finally, we present future research directions to enhance data collection and the comment analysis support system.

UWO Intellectual Property Workshop, London, ON, January 20-22, 2005
This study examined the growth pattern, authorship and publication characteristics of the professional and academic library and information science literature on the subject of copyright from 1984 to 2003 based on a subject search of the descriptor field in the Library Literature database. The literature was found to have a non-linear growth pattern which appears to be strongly affected by significant moments in copyright legislation over the 20 year period of the study. Authorship trends did not follow Lotka's law, with a significantly higher proportion of authors contributing only 1 article. The spread of authorship suggests that the most prolific authors in this area tend to be professional librarians or academics who publish extensively in the professional literature. The majority of documents in this area are journals, suggesting an emphasis on rapid dissemination of knowledge. Journal publication trends followed Bradford's law with the majority of journals contributing fewer than 1 article per year of the study.

Connections 2006 in Syracuse, NY, May 20-21
This study analyses the tagging patterns exhibited by users of del.icio.us and citeulike. Frequency data, coword analysis and thesaural comparisons are used to examine tagging practices and determine where they are continuous or discontinuous with traditional classification and indexing. Results show many commonalities and some intriguing differences.

碩士
國立政治大學
圖書資訊與檔案學研究所
107
Due to the rapid improvement of information technology and the influence of globalization, enhancing English capabilities has consequently become one of the national development policies in Taiwan, and the government has promoted a number of English education policies to cultivate the English communication skills of people. However, fewer quantitative analysis methods are used in this field. The main purpose of this study was to analyze journals and theses so as to observe the features of the researches in teaching English as a foreign language in Taiwan. The English teaching literatures from 1923 to 2018 were extracted from three databases: PerioPath Index to Taiwan Periodical Literature System, Taiwan Citation Index - Humanities and Social Sciences (TCI-HSS), and National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations in Taiwan (NDLTD). In order to provide an overview of the English teaching literature in Taiwan, Informetrics was used in this study to explore core journals, productive authors and universities, the literature growth, and common research topics; in addition, citation analysis was used to find out the most frequently cited journals, articles, and books. The results showed that (1) The distribution of literature on teaching English as a foreign language in Taiwan only approximately fit Bradford’s Law. Moreover, by observation on Bradford’s Law and Bradford-Zipf Law graph, seven core journals were found. (2) The growth pattern of literature on teaching English as a foreign language in Taiwan was relatively close to linear growth. (3) Research productivity was mainly focused on single author. (4) National normal universities published the most theses and dissertations on teaching English as a foreign language in Taiwan. (5) The top research topic of literature on teaching English as a foreign language in Taiwan was language skills. (6) The topical domains of the most frequently citations were education and linguistics. (7) English books were the most frequently cited by English teaching researchers. The suggestions for databases and future related researches were also made.

碩士
國立臺灣師範大學
圖書資訊學研究所
101
The study investigated publishing behaviors of high productivity authors who have ever published papers in biomedical open access journals (OAJ). In this study, 2,927 academic papers published by 30 high productivity authors were collected from Web of Science (WOS) database. 　The ratio and distribution of the papers in OAJ from the 30 high productivity authors were calculated. The citations of papers published in OAJ are compared with papers published in non-OAJ as well. Finally, the academic performance of these high productivity authors was studied for speculating the reasons why the percentage of the articles they published in OAJ is almost 36 %. 　The results of this study showed that: 1) the categories of the academic journals and in which the number of the 30 productivity authors’ papers are displaying power law distribution;2) the percentage of the 2,927 papers in OAJ is 36% and is increasing year by year;3) the correlation between journal impact factor and the number of the papers is modestly positive correlated; 4) with regard to the number of paper citation, the correlation between the mean journal impact factor and the citation of the papers is highly positive correlated; it’s notable that, in this study, to be compared with non-OAJ, OAJ has no citation advantage to these high productivity authors, and this result differs from the predecessors’ researches; 5) the academic contribution defined in this study, ranges between4.42 and 20.41, which is mainly influenced by the authorship order in academic articles; and 6) the range of h-index is between 5 and 82, which is influenced by the numbers of the author’s published papers. 　Based on the above findings, to make a comparison of the publishing behaviors of the high productivity authors between the selection of submitting papers in OAJ and non-OAJ, and study the impact on the academic performance, it’s more objective to use purposive sampling of high productivity authors in this study than using conventional extensive sampling. Moreover, to make such comparison by adopting the objective data, which are collected by infometrics method, is more able to be as a basis to promote OAJ as well.

This project was created in response to the need for research into web links: including web link mining, and the creation of link metrics. It is aimed at providing the raw data and software for researchers to analyse link structures without having to rely upon commercial search engines, and without having to run their own web crawler. This site will contain all of the following. *Complete databases of link structures of collections of academic web sites. *Files of summary statistics about the link databases. *Software tools for researchers to extract the information that they are particularly interested in. *Descriptions of the methodologies used to crawl the web so that the information provided can be critically evaluated. *Files of information used in the web crawling process.

Authors: E. Bassecoulard, D. deB. Beaver, H.-J. Czerwon, M. Davis, K. Fuchs-Kittowski, L. Fuglsang, S. Gerasimova, W. Glänzel, J. Gläser, Y. Guo, F. Havemann, H. Kretschmer, R. Kundra, L. Lange, G. Laudel,,L. Liang, Z. Liu, U. Matzat, à . Must, Y. Okubo, R. Rousseau, S.L. Sangam, D. Tomov, R. Wagner-Döbler, Y. Wang, V. Wenzel, C.S. Wilson, Y. Wu, M. Zitt

Since computers have become widely used, programming has become a critical skill, as indicated by a recent push by many governments to make it a core part of the secondary school curriculum. Programming languages are built upon English language words and phrases like “for” and “while”, as well as concepts framed in English, like the idea of an “if” statement, representing a choice. It is possible that this could make learning an English-based programming language for non-English language speakers especially challenging. So, what solutions could be developed to solve the problem? With this question in mind, this research investigates non-English language speakers’ grasp of programming. This research started with the question of whether or not needing to understand English would be an extra challenge for students learning programming. Experience from the researcher’s own practice suggested that this was the case; however, what did the literature indicate? An extensive literature review revealed that, in actuality, the literature did not say much. While many focused on solutions to teaching programming, and some researchers focused on the problems that led to these solutions, very few researchers made any distinction between the language capabilities of novices. Even among those projects that were conducted in non-English speaking countries, little attention was given to the demographics of the cohort of participants, and what this meant to the results presented. Based on the literature, this research study highlights issues that directly influence beginners learning programming, looking particularly at the difficulties faced by those that do not have English as a first language. So, the task became to determine whether English was an issue in learning programming or not. A major contribution of this work to the theory and the literature is the observation that issues with programming are different for English language speakers and non-English language speakers. This is something that has not been sufficiently highlighted in the literature in the past. The other contribution of this work is to practice, with the suggestion that strategies such as guidebooks and block programming can help to solve the problems with error messages and syntax for all students. Future work in the area should build upon this contribution, looking to expand experiments on how to solve this issue for non-English language speakers through interventions like those that were trialled. In this way, a greater uptake of programming by all students, both English language speakers and non-English language speakers, can be achieved.

The paper Fundamental methodologies and tools for the employment of webometric analyses defines the most important rules to keep in mind before performing webometric analyses. The paper deals with the two basic elements, that constitutes the foundation for webometric analyses: the documents being analysed, and the tools that are applied for the data collection. The concepts of a citation theory and a link theory are discussed through a study of the current litterature. Different methodologies for uncovering motivations for making references in scientific articles are reviewed and discussed. A methodology for uncovering motivations for making links on webpages is proposed and applied on six researchers' websites at the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Denmark, and on all the institutes at the same institution and at selected institutes at The Technical University of Denmark. The paper further contains a review on the linktopology of the Internet and the current status for the tools available for data collection. Finally, alternative possible tools for applying webometric analyses are proposed. The alternative tools are the Researchindex invented by Lawrence and Giles (Lawrence, Bollacker & Giles, 1999b; Giles, Bollacker & Lawrence, 1998), Kleinberg's HITS algorithm employed in the Clever search engine (The Clever Project, n.d.; Kleinberg, 1998), Proposals for possible extensions to the HTTP protocol to facilitate the collection and navigation of backlink information in the world wide web made by Chakrabarti, Gibson and McCurley (Chakrabarti, Gibson & McCurley, 1999c) and finally Link Agent, a program we have developed for this paper. The program makes it possible to uncover the reciprocal linking webpages, that exist in relation to the outgoing links from a chosen webpage. Keywords: Informetrics, Webometrics, Citation theory, Link theory, Motivations for links, Motivations for references, Search engines, Webometric tools

This study examines the differences between Scopus and Web of Science in the citation counting, citation ranking, and h-index of 22 top human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers from EQUATOR--a large British Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration project. Results show that Scopus provides significantly more coverage of HCI literature than Web of Science, primarily due to coverage of relevant ACM and IEEE peer-reviewed conference proceedings. No significant differences exist between the two databases if citations in journals only are compared. Although broader coverage of the literature does not significantly alter the relative citation ranking of individual researchers, Scopus helps distinguish between the researchers in a more nuanced fashion than Web of Science in both citation counting and h-index. Scopus also generates significantly different maps of citation networks of individual scholars than those generated by Web of Science. The study also presents a comparison of h-index scores based on Google Scholar with those based on the union of Scopus and Web of Science. The study concludes that Scopus can be used as a sole data source for citation-based research and evaluation in HCI, especially if citations in conference proceedings are sought and that h scores should be manually calculated instead of relying on system calculations.

Environment and Planning B (forthcoming)
To be published in Environment and Planning B (2007; forthcoming). Abstract: The citation impact of Environment and Planning B can be visualized using its citation relations with journals in its environment as the links of a network. The size of the nodes is varied in correspondence to the relative citation impact in this environment. Additionally, one can correct for the effect of within-journal â selfâ -citations. The network can be partitioned and clustered using algorithms from social network analysis. After transposing the matrix in terms of rows and columns, the citing patterns can be mapped analogously. Citing patterns reflect the activity of the community of authors who publish in the journal, while being cited indicates reception. Environment and Planning B is cited across the interface between the social sciences and the natural sciences, but its authors cite almost exclusively from the domain of the Social Science Citation Index.

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology [JASIST] (forthcoming)
To be published in Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology 57(12) (2006) 1616-1628. Abstract: Co-occurrence matrices, such as co-citation, co-word, and co-link matrices, have been used widely in the information sciences. However, confusion and controversy have hindered the proper statistical analysis of this data. The underlying problem, in our opinion, involved understanding the nature of various types of matrices. This paper discusses the difference between a symmetrical co-citation matrix and an asymmetrical citation matrix as well as the appropriate statistical techniques that can be applied to each of these matrices, respectively. Similarity measures (like the Pearson correlation coefficient or the cosine) should not be applied to the symmetrical co-citation matrix, but can be applied to the asymmetrical citation matrix to derive the proximity matrix. The argument is illustrated with examples. The study then extends the application of co-occurrence matrices to the Web environment where the nature of the available data and thus data collection methods are different from those of traditional databases such as the Science Citation Index. A set of data collected with the Google Scholar search engine is analyzed using both the traditional methods of multivariate analysis and the new visualization software Pajek that is based on social network analysis and graph theory.

New Media & Society, 8(6), 2006 (forthcoming).
To be published in New Media & Society, 8(6), 2006 (forthcoming). Abstract: Internet search engines function in a present which changes continuously. The search engines update their indices regularly, overwriting Web pages with newer ones, adding new pages to the index, and losing older ones. Some search engines can be used to search for information at the internet for specific periods of time. However, these â date stampsâ are not determined by the first occurrence of the pages in the Web, but by the last date at which a page was updated or a new page was added, and the search engineâ s crawler updated this change in the database. This has major implications for the use of search engines in scholarly research as well as theoretical implications for the conceptions of time and temporality. We examine the interplay between the different updating frequencies by using AltaVista and Google for searches at different moments of time. Both the retrieval of the results and the structure of the retrieved information erodes over time.

Many online retailers monitor visitor traffic as a measure of their storesâ success. However, summary measures such as the total number of visits per month provide little insight about individual-level shopping behavior. Additionally, behavior may evolve over time, especially in a changing environment like the Internet. Understanding the nature of this evolution provides valuable knowledge that can influence how a retail store is managed and marketed. This paper develops an individual-level model for store visiting behavior based on Internet clickstream data. We capture cross-sectional variation in store-visit behavior as well as changes over time as visitors gain experience with the store. That is, as someone makes more visits to a site, her latent rate of visit may increase, decrease, or remain unchanged as in the case of static, mature markets. So as the composition of the customer population changes (e.g., as customers mature or as large numbers of new and inexperienced Internet shoppers enter the market), the overall degree of visitor heterogeneity that each store faces may shift. We also examine the relationship between visiting frequency and purchasing propensity. Previous studies suggest that customers who shop frequently may be more likely to make a purchase on any given shopping occasion. As a result, frequent shoppers often comprise the preferred target segment. We find evidence supporting the fact that people who visit a store more frequently are more likely to buy. However, we also show that changes (i.e., evolution) in an individualâ s visit frequency over time provides further information regarding which customer segments are more likely to buy. Rather than simply targeting all frequent shoppers, our results suggest that a more refined segmentation approach that incorporates how much an individualâ s behavior is changing could more efficiently identify a profitable target segment.

==Background== In most academic disciplines journals play an important role in disseminating findings of research among the disciplinary community members. Understanding a discipline's body of journals is therefore of grave importance when looking for previous research, compiling an overview of previous research and and in order to make a decision regarding the best place for publishing research results. Furthermore, based on Bradford's Law of scattering, one can assume that in order to be able to compile a satisfying overview of previous research a wide range of journals has to be scanned, but also that there are some 'core' journals which are of more importance to specific disciplines than others. ==Aim== This thesis aims to compile a comprehensive master list of journals which publish articles of relevance to Library and Information Science (LIS). A method to rank journals by their importance is introduced and some key characteristics of the disciplines body of journals are discussed. Databases indexing the disciplines journals are also compared. ==Method== The master list of LIS journals was created by combining the journal listings of secondary sources indexing the field's literature. These sources were six databases focusing on LIS literature: INFODATA, Current Contents, Library and Information Science Abstracts, Library Information Science Technology Abstracts, Information Science and Technology Abstracts, and Library Literature and Information Science, the LIS subsection in three databases with a general focus: Social Science Citation Index, Academic Search Premier, and Expanded Academic ASAP, and the listing of LIS journals from the Elektronische Zeitschriften Bibliothek. Problems related to editorial policies and technical shortcomings are discussed, before comparing: predominant publication languages, places of publication, open access, peer review, and the ISI Journal Impact Factors (JIF). Journals were also ranked by the number of occurrences in multiple databases in order to identify 'core' publications. The number of journals overlapping between databases are estimated and a matrix giving the overlap is visualized using multi dimensional scaling. Lastly, the degree of journals overlapping with other disciplines is measured. ==Results== A comprehensive master list of 1,205 journals publishing articles of relevance to LIS was compiled. The 968 active journals are mostly published in English, with one third of the journals coming from the US and another third from the UK and Germany. Nearly 16% of all journals are open access, 11% have a ISIJIF, and 42% are peer reviewed. Fifteen core journal could be identified and a list of the top fourteen journals published in Germany is introduced. Databases have between five to 318 journals in common and the journal collection shows an substantial overlap with a wide range of subjects, with the biggest journal overlap with Computing Studies, and Business and Economics. ==Conclusion== The aim of compiling a comprehensive list of LIS journal was achieved. The list will contribute to our understanding of scholarly communication within the LIS discipline and provide academics and practitioners with a better understanding of journals within the discipline. The ranking approach proved to be sufficient, showing good similarity with other studies over the last 40 years. The master list of LIS journals has also potential use to further research.

The Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) citation databases have been used for decades as a starting point and often as the only tools for locating citations and/or conducting citation analyses. ISI databases (or Web of Science [WoS]), however, may no longer be sufficient because new databases and tools that allow citation searching are now available. Using citations to the work of 25 library and information science faculty members as a case study, this paper examines the effects of using Scopus and Google Scholar (GS) on the citation counts and rankings of scholars as measured by WoS. Overall, more than 10,000 citing and purportedly citing documents were examined. Results show that Scopus significantly alters the relative ranking of those scholars that appear in the middle of the rankings and that GS stands out in its coverage of conference proceedings as well as international, non-English language journals. The use of Scopus and GS, in addition to WoS, helps reveal a more accurate and comprehensive picture of the scholarly impact of authors. WoS data took about 100 hours of collecting and processing time, Scopus consumed 200 hours, and GS a grueling 3,000 hours.

The paper Fundamental methodologies and tools for the employment of webometric analyses defines the most important rules to keep in mind before performing webometric analyses. The paper deals with the two basic elements, that constitutes the foundation for webometric analyses: the documents being analysed, and the tools that are applied for the data collection. The concepts of a citation theory and a link theory are discussed through a study of the current litterature. Different methodologies for uncovering motivations for making references in scientific articles are reviewed and discussed. A methodology for uncovering motivations for making links on webpages is proposed and applied on six researchers' websites at the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Denmark, and on all the institutes at the same institution and at selected institutes at The Technical University of Denmark. The paper further contains a review on the linktopology of the Internet and the current status for the tools available for data collection. Finally, alternative possible tools for applying webometric analyses are proposed. The alternative tools are the Researchindex invented by Lawrence and Giles (Lawrence, Bollacker & Giles, 1999b; Giles, Bollacker & Lawrence, 1998), Kleinberg's HITS algorithm employed in the Clever search engine (The Clever Project, n.d.; Kleinberg, 1998), Proposals for possible extensions to the HTTP protocol to facilitate the collection and navigation of backlink information in the world wide web made by Chakrabarti, Gibson and McCurley (Chakrabarti, Gibson & McCurley, 1999c) and finally Link Agent, a program we have developed for this paper. The program makes it possible to uncover the reciprocal linking webpages, that exist in relation to the outgoing links from a chosen webpage.

Accepted for publication in Physics World (January 2007)
With the vast majority of scientific papers now available online, this paper (accepted for publication in Physics World) describes how the Web is allowing physicists and information providers to measure more accurately the impact of these papers and their authors. Provides a historical background of citation analysis, impact factor, new citation data sources (e.g., Google Scholar, Scopus, NASA's Astrophysics Data System Abstract Service, MathSciNet, ScienceDirect, SciFinder Scholar, Scitation/SPIN, and SPIRES-HEP), as well as h-index, g-index, and a-index.

碩士
國立政治大學
圖書資訊學數位碩士在職專班
106
The purpose of the study is to understand the development and trends between various disciplines of “bibliotherapy journal literature.” This study analyzes the characteristics of bibliotherapy journal literature during 1916-2017 by informetric approach, collecting analytical components such as the frequencies of the publication, publication languages, countries of publications, journal sources, cited times, disciplines of subject categories from three major sub-databases of Web of Science services: SCIE, SSCI, and A&;HCI and from two major sub-databases of ProQuest: SciTech Premium Collection, Social Science Premium Collection and one classic literature from Crothers in 1916. A total of 1345 bibliographic records were retrieved from the databases. The results of the present study are as follows. (1) The growth pattern of bibliotherapy journal literature during 1916-2017 generally fits exponential growth, but the growth has been slowed down since 2017. (2) United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Poland and Netherlands are five major countries of bibliotherapy journal publications. (3) English is the most often used language. (4) The development of bibliotherapy journal literature during 1916-2017 can be divided into four periods. From 1916 to 1974, it is the period of birth; From 1975 to 1986, it is the period of rise. From 1987 to 2004, it is the period of development. From 2005 to 2017, it is the period of blossom. (5) The most four subjects of bibliotherapy journal literature are methods of bibliotherapy, education of bibliotherapy, bibliotherapy applications in libraries and bibliotherapy for children and adolescents. (6) In the period of birth, the main focus is bibliotherapy applications in libraries. In the period of rise and development, it shifts to education of bibliotherapy. In the period of blossom, the focus goes to methods of bibliotherapy. (7) Despite of the scattered distribution of bibliotherapy journal literature, core journals of women’s studies still can be identified. (8) The core journals can be highly recommended. (9) Author distribution is counted by single authorship and collaborative authorship; the results show that author distribution does not fit Lotka’s law. (10) Highly recommend of the most productive authors in LIS are Sheih, Chen Su-May, Pardeck John T., Hynes, Arleen McCarty, Cohen Laura J., Brewster Liz, Pehrsson, Dale-Elizabeth & McMillen, Paula S. The findings of the study may provide better understanding of the past, current and future of bibliotherapy journal literature, and serve as references to identify more suitable, popular and influential journals and literature for both research purposes and library collection development and management.

Background. In most academic disciplines journals play an important role in disseminating findings of research among the disciplinary community members. Understanding a discipline's body of journals is therefore of grave importance when looking for previous research, compiling an overview of previous research and and in order to make a decision regarding the best place for publishing research results. Furthermore, based on Bradford's Law of scattering, one can assume that in order to be able to compile a satisfying overview of previous research a wide range of journals has to be scanned, but also that there are some 'core' journals which are of more importance to specific disciplines than others. Aim. This thesis aims to compile a comprehensive master list of journals which publish articles of relevance to Library and Information Science (LIS). A method to rank journals by their importance is introduced and some key characteristics of the disciplines body of journals are discussed. Databases indexing the disciplines journals are also compared. Method. The master list of LIS journals was created by combining the journal listings of secondary sources indexing the field's literature. These sources were six databases focusing on LIS literature: INFODATA, Current Contents, Library and Information Science Abstracts, Library Information Science Technology Abstracts, Information Science and Technology Abstracts, and Library Literature and Information Science, the LIS subsection in three databases with a general focus: Social Science Citation Index, Academic Search Premier, and Expanded Academic ASAP, and the listing of LIS journals from the Elektronische Zeitschriften Bibliothek. Problems related to editorial policies and technical shortcomings are discussed, before comparing: predominant publication languages, places of publication, open access, peer review, and the ISI Journal Impact Factors (JIF). Journals were also ranked by the number of occurrences in multiple databases in order to identify 'core' publications. The number of journals overlapping between databases are estimated and a matrix giving the overlap is visualized using multi dimensional scaling. Lastly, the degree of journals overlapping with other disciplines is measured. Results. A comprehensive master list of 1,205 journals publishing articles of relevance to LIS was compiled. The 968 active journals are mostly published in English, with one third of the journals coming from the US and another third from the UK and Germany. Nearly 16% of all journals are open access, 11% have a ISIJIF, and 42% are peer reviewed. Fifteen core journal could be identified and a list of the top fourteen journals published in Germany is introduced. Databases have between five to 318 journals in common and the journal collection shows an substantial overlap with a wide range of subjects, with the biggest journal overlap with Computing Studies, and Business and Economics. Conclusion. The aim of compiling a comprehensive list of LIS journal was achieved. The list will contribute to our understanding of scholarly communication within the LIS discipline and provide academics and practitioners with a better understanding of journals within the discipline. The ranking approach proved to be sufficient, showing good similarity with other studies over the last 40 years. The master list of LIS journals has also potential use to further research.

A thesis submitted to the Department of Library and Information Science for the award of a Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Library and Information Science Facultv of Arts at the University of Zululand, 2007.
HIV/AIDS is said to be a new type of global emergency - an unprecedented threat to human development requiring sustained action and commitment over a long term. Nowhere is its impact felt more than in Sub-Saharan Africa, even more so in Eastern and Southern Africa. HIV/AIDS, in all its dimensions, demands novel alliances between the social and biological sciences, particularly when it comes to designing effective interventions to prevent or treat the complications of HTV transmission. This study therefore sought to provide decision makers and other stakeholders with a tool to use when formulating policies on HIV/AIDS intervention programs. To that end, the study set out to examine the research output and impact of HIV/AIDS by identifying and determining its nature, types, and trends in Eastern and Southern Africa as indexed and reflected in the MEDLINE, Science Citation Index (SCI) and the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) databases. Specifically, the study's focus was: ♦ To examine the nature, trend and type of HIV/AIDS research collaboration in E&S Africa between 1980 and 2005 with a view to recommend ways of improving or strengthening such collaborative activities. ♦ To examine the growth, productivity and scientific impact of HIV/AIDS sources of information [source publications] as they relate to E&S Africa between 1980 and 2005 in order to assess the visibility and coverage of HTV/AIDS sources and to provide relevant information so as to assist information providers, users in general, and more specifically, collection development librarians, particularly in the two regions, in their decision making processes regarding the identification, selection and development of relevant HIV/AIDS resources •> To evaluate the performance of individual authors, institutions and countries in terms of their productivity and scientific impact with a view to: (a) identify the most prolific and influential researchers, countries and institutions that conduct HIV/AIDS research in and about E&S Africa and (b) to compare the productivity and scientific impact of domestic/regional authors, institutions, and countries with their foreign counterparts. ♦ To assess the publishing activity in the fields/topics of HTV/AIDS research in order to: (a) distinctly bring out a clear picture on the efforts made in the various sub-fields of HIV/AIDS research and (b) to find out the relatedness of the risk factors, opportunistic infections, pre-disposing factors, sexually transmitted diseases and other tropical diseases that are common in Africa to HIV/AIDS. Using informetrics (as a research method) and more specifically publications count and citations count and analyses, relevant data was extracted from three key bibliographic databases (i.e. MEDLINE, SCI and SSCI) through an advanced search strategy which was employed to search and download HIV/AIDS documents specific to Eastern and Southern Africa using the Title, Abstract, Authors address and Subject Fields. This was accomplished by combining the names of the countries and 26 HTV/AEDS-specific terms which included the terms by which HIV/AIDS was known at the beginning of the epidemic. The downloaded data was analyzed using various computer-aided bibliographic software that included Sitkis version 1.5 ©2005, Microsoft Office Access ©2003, Microsoft Office Excel ©2003, Bibexcel ©2005, Citespace version 2.0.1 ©2005, TI, UCESTET for Windows ©2002, and Pajek version 1.08 ©1996. The findings show that HTV7AIDS research in E&S Africa is largely conducted through collaboration, as illustrated by the number of co-authored papers, which accounted for over 70% of the total number of papers in each country. Research collaboration between E&S African countries is rninimal when compared to the collaborative activities between these and foreign countries (i.e. countries outside Africa). This type of collaboration was predominant, and collaboration between E&S African countries and the rest of Africa was found to be almost non-existent, with the countries in West Africa recording a comparatively higher pattern than North African countries. Institutional collaboration is mainly between universities. Nevertheless, industry-university collaboration was visible, especially between government laboratories, ministries or teaching hospitals and the university, which to a large extent was responsible in the day-to-day running of the hospital teaching facilities/programs. It was also observed that there has been a remarkable growth in the number of HIV/AIDS researchers' networks between 1980 and 2005. The composition of these networks shows a high pattern of collaboration between local and foreign researchers. Finally, it was noted that research collaboration increases the average impact by 12.75 citations, while research conducted by individual researchers increases the average impact by only 3.48 citations. Concerning the sources of HTV7AIDS research, it was noted that the coverage of sources published in E&S African countries in key bibliographic databases is minimal, with the MEDLINE database indexing only 14 (1.01%) serials, while SCI and SSCI respectively covered 23 (1.65%) and 4 (0.29%) of the total 1393 serials published in the regions. Furthermore, sources that publish HIV/AIDS research on E&S Africa are evenly distributed in the MEDLINE and ISI databases, although about 50% of the total research output is unique in each database. Other observations were as follows: (a) journals are the most commonly used sources and channels in publishing and disseminating HIV/AIDS research on E&S Africa. The second most preferred source and channel was that of newspapers; (b) the number of sources publishing HIV/AIDS research on E&S Africa has exponentially increased over the period under study, i.e. 1980-2005, thereby posing serious challenges to collection development librarians and researchers/authors; (c) sources that publish HIV/AIDS research on E&S Africa are largely published in foreign countries. Out of the total 804 and 823 HIV/AIDS sources in MEDLINE and ISI, respectively, 92.54% and 97.57% were published in foreign countries, while locally published sources accounted for 3.73% and 2.19% of the total source publications in MEDLINE and ISI, respectively; (d) most HIV/AIDS research on E&S Africa is published in relatively low impact factor journals. Out of the total 823 sources in ISI, only 11 sources had an impact factor of more than 10.0; (e) HIV/AIDS research on E&S Africa is largely published in medical science-specific source publications, and more particularly, in general medical sources; and (f) there are about 13 core sources of HIV/AIDS research, namely, AIDS, LANCET, J INFECT DIS, NEW ENGL J MED, J VIROL, J ACQ IMMUN DEF SYND, JAMA, AIDS RES HUM RETROV, SCIENCE, BRIT MED J, S AFR MED J, SOC SCI MED, and J CLIN MICROBIOL. An analysis of the data according to the producers of HIV/AIDS research yielded the following findings: (a) a relatively high number of countries (i.e. 120) have been or are engaged in conducting HIV/AIDS research about E&S Africa; (b) HTV7AIDS research is evenly conducted in and/or by regional and foreign countries. Counting the frequencies of occurrence of each country in the address field yielded a total sum of 7041 occurrences for foreign countries and 6161 for African countries; (c) most HIV/AIDS research about E&S Africa is published in foreign countries, which accounted for approximately 83% and 88% of the total research papers in MEDLINE and ISI, respectively; (d) HIV/AIDS research is largely conducted by or at universities; and (e) the impact of HIV/AIDS research in and about E&S Africa has continued to increase as illustrated by the continued growth of the number of citations between 1980 and 2005. Nevertheless, a relatively huge amount of HIV/AIDS research (26.2%) remains uncited. Concerning the subject content of HIV/AIDS research, the following were the main observations: (a) the number of keywords/terms that are used to index HIV/AIDS research outputs has exponentially grown, thus providing a number of options for accessing HTV/AIDS research findings; (b) HTV/AIDS-specific terms (i.e. HIV infections and Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) are the major keywords by which HIV/AIDS research findings can be accessed in the indexing services/databases; (c) HIV/AIDS research in E&S Africa is mostly on the sub-fields of epidemiology, prevention & control, transmission, complications, and Drug therapy; (d) drug therapy and Anti-Retrovirals (ARVs) are quickly emerging as the main areas of HIV/AIDS research in E&S Africa; and (e) HIV/AIDS is strongly associated with opportunistic infections, pre-disposing factors, risk factors, sexually transmitted diseases and other tropical diseases that are common in Sub-Saharan African countries. Finally, the study, while commending researchers in the region for their collaborative efforts, recommends that research collaboration, both at the national and international level, should be encouraged through such means as organizing international conferences within E&S Africa where researchers can exchange ideas and in so doing they can identify researchers from other countries with whom they can collaborate. Regarding the dissemination of HIV/AIDS research through publications, it was recommended that researchers be encouraged by way of incentives to present the findings in regionalized conferences as well as publish them in both print and electronic conference proceedings while publishing the papers in foreign sources. For purposes of visibility and impact, local journal publishers should endeavor to publish their journals both electronically and in print. In this way, both researchers and sources that publish HIV/AIDS research would receive a wider visibility and produce higher impact. In conclusion, it is hoped that the findings of this study will support HTV/AIDS researchers, funding organizations, AIDS prevention and control institutions, public health professionals, information service professionals, and government health ministries, among others, looking for information which can improve the quality of their decision making and/or increase their competitive intelligence.
University of Eastern Africa; and The research committee of the University of Zululand

This doctoral thesis develops informetric methods for determining cognitive distance between publication portfolios of evaluators and evaluees in research evaluation. In a discipline specific research evaluation, when an expert panel evaluates research groups, it is an open question how one can determine the extent to which the panel members are in a position to evaluate the research groups. This thesis contributes to the literature by proposing six different informetric approaches to measure the match between evaluators and evaluees using their publications as a representation of their expertise. An expert panel is specifically appointed for the research evaluation. Experts are typically selected in one of two ways: (1) straightforward selection: the person(s) in charge of the research evaluation has access to a list of acknowledged experts in specific fields, and limits its selection process to ensuring the experts’ independence regarding the program under evaluation; and (2) gradual selections: preferred profiles of experts are developed with respect to the specialization under scrutiny in the evaluation. Both ways leave some freedom for an “old boys’ network” to appoint someone without properly evaluating their qualifications. There are also other ways for expert selection, for example, inviting open application or the research groups that will be evaluated can propose their choice of experts. In research evaluation, an expert panel usually comprises independent specialists, each of which is recognized in at least one of the fields addressed by the unit under evaluation. The expertise of the panel members should be congruent with the research groups to ensure the quality and trustworthiness of the evaluation. All things being equal, panel members who are credible experts in the field are also most likely to provide valuable, relevant recommendations and suggestions that should lead to improved research quality. However, there was an absence of methods to determine the cognitive distance between evaluators and evaluees in research evaluation when we started working in July 2013. In this thesis, we develop and test informetric methods to identify the cognitive distances between the (members of) an expert panel on the one hand, and the (whole of the) units of assessment (typically research groups) on the other. More generally, we introduce a number of methods that allow measuring cognitive distances based on publication portfolios. In academia, publications are considered key indicators of expertise that help to identify qualified or similar experts to assign papers for review, and to form an expert panel. Our main objective is to propose informetric methods to identify panel members who have closely related expertise in the research domain of the research groups based on their publications profile. The main factor that we have taken into account is the cognitive distance between an expert panel and research groups. We consider the publication portfolio of the involved researchers to reflect the position of the unit in cognitive space and, hence, to determine cognitive distance. Expressed in general terms we measure cognitive distance between units based on how often they have published in the same or similar journals. Our investigations lead to the development of new methods of expert panel composition for the research evaluation exercises. We explore different ways of quantifying the cognitive distance between panel members and research group's publication profiles. We consider all the publications of the research groups (during the eight years preceding their evaluation) and panel members indexed in Web of Science (WoS). We pursue the investigation at two levels of aggregation: WoS subject categories (SCs) and journals. The aggregated citation relations among SCs or journals provide a matrix. From the matrix, one can construct a similarity matrix. From the similarity matrix, one can construct a global SCs or journal map in which similar SCs or journals are located more closely together. The maps can be visualized using a visualization program. During the visualization process, a multi-dimensional space is reduced to a projection in two dimensions. In this process, similar SCs or journals are positioned closer to each other. We propose three methods, namely the use of barycenters, of similarity-adapted publication vector (SAPV) and of weighted cosine similarity (WCS). We take into account the similarity between WoS SCs and between journals, either by incorporating a similarity matrix (in the case of SAPV and WCS) or a 2-dimensional base map derived from it (in the case of barycenters). We determine the coordinates of barycenters using a 2-dimensional base map based on the publication profiles of research groups and panel members, and calculate the Euclidean distances between the barycenters. We also identify SAPV using the similarity matrix and calculated the Euclidean distances between the SAPVs. Finally, we calculate WCS using the similarity matrix. The SAPV and WCS methods use a square N-dimensional similarity matrix. Here N is equivalent to 224 WoS SCs and 10,675 journals. We used the distance/similarity between panel members and research groups as an indicator of cognitive distance. Small differences in Euclidean distances (both between barycenters and SAPVs) or in cosine similarity values bear little meaning. For this reason, we employ a bootstrapping approach in order to determine a 95% confidence interval (CI) for each distance or similarity value. If two CIs do not overlap, difference between the values is statistically significant at the 0.05 level. Although it is possible for two values to have a statistically significant difference while having overlapping CIs, the difference is less likely to have practical meaning. Two levels of aggregation and three methods lead to six informetric approaches to quantify the cognitive distance. Our proposed approaches hold advantages over a simple comparison of publication portfolios. Our approaches quantify the cognitive distance between a research group and panel members. We also compare our proposed approaches. We examine which of the approaches best reflects the prior assignment of main assessor to each research group, how much influence the level of aggregation (journals and WoS SCs) plays, and how much the dimensionality matters. The results show that, regardless of the method used, the level of aggregation has only a minor influence, whereas the influence of the number of dimensions is substantial. The results also show that the number of dimensions plays a major role in the case of identifying shortest cognitive distance. While the SAPV and WCS methods agree at most of cases at both the levels of aggregation the barycenter approaches yield different results. We find that the barycenter approaches score highest at both levels of aggregation to identify the previously assigned main assessor. When it comes to uniquely identifying the main assessor, all methods score better at the journal level than at the WoS SC level. Our approaches, but of course not the numerical result, are independent of the similarity matrix or map used. All six approaches give the opportunity to assess the composition of the panel in terms of cognitive distance if one or more panel members are replaced and compare the relative contribution of each potential panel member to the panel fit as a whole, by observing the changes to the distance between the panel’s and the groups’. In addition, our approaches allow the panel composition authority to see in advance about the panel’s fit to the research groups that are going to be evaluated. Therefore, the concerned authority will have the opportunity to replace outliers among the panel members to make the panel fit well with the research groups to be evaluated. For example, the authority can find a best-fitting expert panel by replacing a more distant panel member with a potential panel member located closer to the groups.