I give permission for my final project to be made available
through the LIS Learning Showcase web server.
2.
Geomorphology is available both on the Web and in print, though its publisher, Elsevier, only makes one sample issue available in its entirety on the Web for free. They do, though, make available complete abstracts and lists of contents of all issues on the Web site back to volume 11 (1995). According to the publisher’s Web site, the journal was first published in 1987, since when the journal seems to have followed an irregular, but mostly monthly, publication schedule. Some missed months and some two-issue months in recent years are exceptions. Also, some issues have been published in a combined form, usually special issues.
The articles are peer reviewed and academic, and the online versions of the articles feature hyperlinks from attributed research in the text to the sources at the feet of the articles. The vast majority of the journal’s contents is articles. Other document types are sparsely represented, as shown in Table 1. Clearly, the journal’s emphasis is on new research and discussion about the theory, practice and technology of the study geomorphology.
Document Type |
# |
% |
|
Articles |
556 |
90 |
|
Editorial Material |
30 |
5 |
|
Reviews |
14 |
2.2 |
|
Bibliographic Items |
9 |
1.4 |
|
Items About an Individual |
9 |
1.4 |
Total |
618 |
|
This data, when considered alongside the information in Table 2, shows a discipline that is still young enough that its base of knowledge and research is still rapidly growing, feeding into and being fed by other related fields. The Table shows the total number of citations for Geomorphology’s most-cited authors, along with the number of those citations that were not from other Geomorphology articles. In some cases, Web of Science’s information was incomplete about the citations or seemed to duplicate other citations. Assumptions were made based on similarity, but in no case amounted to more than two cited references per author. The data shows either a large amount of interdisciplinary thinking among geomorphologists or significant contributions to other geological sciences made by researchers in the field of geomorphology.
Author |
#
of Citations (#
outside) |
#
of Documents Published |
|
Bierman PR |
32 (27) |
2 documents (1 article) |
|
Darmody RG |
29 (25) |
3 documents (3 articles) |
|
Bryan RB |
27 (20) |
3 documents (1 article) |
|
Wasson RJ |
25 (19) |
3 documents (2 articles) |
|
Dunne J |
19 (19) |
1 document (1 article) |
Further, articles in Geomorphology drew on a
relatively large number of sources. In a sample issue (vol. 49 no. 1-2),
articles referenced an average of 42 sources, with a median of 36 citations. The
journal, and by extension the discipline, seems to be attempting to synthesize
a new study out of its related disciplines, to discern patterns and meaning
where other perspectives may have overlooked them at other times and in other
places.
The author keywords for the articles in the selected issued showed, simultaneously, some variety and some emerging patterns. Specific place names are prevalent, pointing to a fair amount of field work and case studies. “Sediment” and “debris” recur, but surprisingly “geomorphology” only occurs in the keyword lists of two of the articles in the issue. Below is the list of author keywords listed for each article, followed by a parenthetical note that gives the number of references listed for each article.
The journal’s 1997-to-2001 average impact factor of 1.091 seems to put Geomorphology on about average footing with other journals. Neither ignored nor a Bible, Geomorphology makes at least a moderate impact on the research efforts of other scholarly writers. The journal’s immediacy index, averaging .193 over the time period, is rather low, though, suggesting that the most cutting-edge work in the broader geological field is not being done here yet.
Geomorphology seems to be more of a follower than a leader, as can probably be expected from even the preeminent journal in a young scientific field. Its articles employ a large number of references and reap relatively few in return. It seems that much of the work being done in geomorphology, if the journal is an indication, is in synthesizing data, conclusions and research from other related disciplines into a more unified understanding of geomorphology. Alternatively, geomorphology is a sufficiently interdisciplinary study to create a confluence of experts in a number of disciplines. Further bibliometric study of Geomorphology’s writers outside of the journal would be useful in deciding which is the most likely explanation.
-------
3a. Select one of the authors who was cited most from your Assignment 1 or
select a name from this list below.
P.R. Bierman
3b.
I used ISI’s Web of Science to seek out citations relevant to P.R. Bierman, skipping search results that didn’t contain expanded citation information, and not searching for variations on the author’s name. In all cases, I counted citations and articles only if they listed Bierman as the primary author; hence, a number of articles and citations were excluded from the results. In determining Bierman’s citation identity, I only used indexed articles written between 1998 and 2003. For the citation set, citations from articles published between 1998 and 2003 to Bierman articles from any time were included. For the citation image, I considered only co-citations with citations of articles written by Bierman and published during the specified time period.
It’s interesting to note that Bierman cites himself more frequently than any other author, which may account for the large number of total he’s received compared to other authors in Geomorphology.
Citation Identity:
(10 most frequently cited from 1998 to 2003):
|
Bierman, PR Gosse, JC Nishiizumi, K Twidale, CR Lal, D Brown, ET Granger, DE Clapp, EM Davis, PT Dyke, AS |
34 18 17 17 17 11 11 8 8 8 |
Citation Set: (most frequent citations [more than twice] from 1998 to 2003 referring to articles from any time by Bierman)
|
Bierman, PR 10 Watchman, AL 5 Briner, JP 4 Gosse, JC 3 Granger, DE 3 Heimsath, AM 3 Niedermann, S 3 Phillips, WM 3 |
10 5 4 3 3 3 3 3 |
Citation Image: (most frequently cited authors found
co-cited with Bierman-authored articles from 1998 to 2003)
|
Gosse, JC Twidale, CR Dyke, AS 7 Kleman, J 7 Lal, D 6 Ives, JD 6 Marsella, KA |
12 10 7 7 6 6 5 |
4.
The subject keywords seem most geared toward the discipline of geomorphology itself. Looking over the list, nearly all of them seem to be specific or general geological and geographical features, elements and minerals, phenomena, etc. Very few seem to refer to methods or tools for studying these things.
5.
There is a certain mechanistic drudgery to the process of gathering the data and calculating the bibliometrics, and it’s easy to get lost in the process and ‘do the math’, so to speak. But patterns begin to emerge slowly that certainly illuminate the picture of the accumulated knowledge and research of a given discipline or specific journal or author.
For instance, it wasn’t until I’d gathered all of the relevant data together to study Bierman’s various metrics that I realized that the chief reason he seem to be so frequently cited was that he was citing himself as a resource. Now, clearly he’s being frequently published in a number of journals and must necessarily have some prominence in the field. But further examination does indeed reveal him to be far less of a heavyweight than it seems at first. The sheer weight of unexamined numbers is on his side, but a little further digging and cross-referencing seems to show either a fairly big ego or someone who’s doing so much groundbreaking work in a field that he has no one’s work to build upon but his own.
In the larger sense, though, one gains an understanding of the flow of communication within a discipline and the place of its authors and journals within it. It was only though studying the journal Geomorphology and its contributors that I realized the somewhat hybrid or cross-disciplinary nature of the field. True, to a certain extent all scientific arenas are becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, but even without a full understanding of geomorphology, I can see from the gathered data that it touches on, and is touched by, several other geological sciences.
As I worked with the various different measures, I saw that certain measures I worked with early in the process were really insufficient to provide the kind of information I was seeking. It told me very little, for instance, that the most frequently cited author in Geomorphology for the time period I selected was P.R. Bierman. In calculating and constructing the citation image and citation set, I began to understand why indeed that was the case. Armed with this knowledge, if I were doing research into scholarly communication in the field of geomorphology, I might give Bierman’s works slightly less weight and seek out other frequently-cited authors, too.
It seems likely to me, too, that the most frequently co-cited authors would produce work that is of value to people interested in Bierman’s work. I was frankly surprised at how often some of the authors were listed, especially Gosse and Twidale. There is a confluence there, the knowledge of which could be extremely valuable. It’s also worthwhile to note that the two authors also appear on the other two charts, having frequently cited, and having frequently been cited by, Bierman.
In working through the project, too, I gained an appreciation for both the power and the limitations of the software tools at our disposal for this work. I am thankful that the weeks and months and eyestrain that gathering this data once would have taken and caused can be boiled down into a matter of hours. Once again the Internet proves its worth. But it wasn’t until well into the data-collecting that I realized that, for instance, Bierman PR was also listed as Bierman P and perhaps other misspellings and partial spellings that I couldn’t account for.
On top of this there were numerous typographical and other errors in the citations, for which I tried to correct. I can’t, however, be certain I was entirely successful. Certainly the data is only as good as the effort put forth by the human creators of the database, but it almost seems natural to expect perfection from such an elegant and powerful tool. As such, I must claim joint credit along with the creators and maintainers of Web of Science for any errors in the data I presented in my bibliometric report. Certainly I could have been more diligent and creative in trying to allow for and compensate for the errors in the database, but at a certain point the Law of Diminishing Returns comes into play and I tried to strike the most prudent balance between accuracy and obsession.
I’m fairly confident the information presented above shows an accurate picture of the state of Geomorphology over the time period I studied. My interpretation of the data is surely another matter, as I’m undoubtedly hobbled by a lack of experience in bibliometric analysis. Surely a more practiced eye would look at the information I’ve gathered and reach somewhat, if not entirely, different conclusions.
Webometrics, to adopt a coined term, has the potential to be similarly revealing about scientific discourse in the medium of the World Wide Web. The volume of scholarly communication is immense, but so too is the amount of improperly researched or documented research and the amount of information that is just plain wrong.
Having seen the power of bibliometric analysis, though, I see the potential of webometrics to cut through the poor documents and reveal the sterling ones. Having seen the picture emerge from the application of what seems to be raw number crunching completely devoid of context, I’m reminded of a small piece of software I’ve recently started using on my computer whose foundation is a revolution of sorts in using computers to solve problems. It’s an e-mail sorter.
Most ‘spam filters’ on the market for computer users today are essentially dumb. They have a frequently updated list of servers and e-mail addresses and subject lines and such that come from known spammers. These pieces of software are reactive and not particularly effective. They can let a lot of spam through and discard messages from friends.
The software I discovered, however, is based on what’s known as Naïve Bayes classification. In essence, the program takes an incoming e-mail message, omits some very common words from consideration and compares the rest of the words against what starts out as a very small, but eventually becomes quite large, corpus of words it’s seen before. After doing some calculations of probability, it determines based upon the vocabulary in the e-mail, what kind of message it is. Not only is it useful for dividing spam from not-spam, but it can also divide ‘work’ e-mail from ‘personal’ e-mail from ‘joke’ e-mail from spam from sales pitches you don’t mind receiving. When it guesses wrong, you correct it and it correct itself and surprisingly soon it’s making next to no mistakes.
What I’m getting at, I suppose, is that I’ve been recently surprised at the power these seemingly dumb and blind digital solutions to map the complexities and subtleties of human endeavor. Webometrics has an added benefit. Since everything about it resides in the digital domain, there is the potential for all of the relevant data-gathering and compilation to be done automatically, in real time and on demand for a level of currency that would’ve been unbelievable not long ago. The potential for modern and future researchers is impressive.
True, it would not be terribly difficult for malicious misinformers to skew results intentionally by planting many reciprocal citations and such, but by triangulating several kinds of analysis it would be similarly easy to weed them out. And perhaps some kind of Bayesian analysis of scientific works published on the Internet might keep poor scholarship from even appearing in indexes and such. These things are possible, and even practical, in the new digital domain. The application of intelligent webometrics to open and public-domain systems for scholarly communication could bring about a level of discourse and discovery that is truly mind-boggling.