ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (P&RS)

Final Bibliometric Analysis

SARAH KAUFMAN
May 7, 2004
 

I give permission for my final project to be made available through the LIS Learning Showcase web server. Thank you.

INTRODUCTION

Looking back on my original analysis of this journal I can understand why choosing a journal covered by the ISI-Web of Knowledge and the ISI-Journal Citation Reports was a necessity in order to collect journal data. I understand from White's "Authors as citers over time" article that ISI listings are not the end-all as to citation statistics, but for the purposes of my analysis papers, I am very grateful for the coverage ISI has provided me. After reading Schubert's "Webmetrics" and Koehler's "Information science" articles, I've tried to apply some of their bibliographic studies and observations to my own. This first section will feature a prior collection of my findings, but with added discussion and knowledge from my reading of these articles.

ISPRS JOURNAL OF PHOTOGRAMMETRY AND REMOTE SENSING

The ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing was originally named Photogrammetria. Photogrammetria was the official publication of the International Society for Photogrammetry. The name change was influenced by the society's decision to change its name to the  International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) in 1980. "The ISPRS Foundation is an independently registered entity and was established exclusively for providing financial assistance to advance the purposes of ISPRS, an international, non-profit, non-governmental organization (NGO) composed of 176 societies and organizations from more than 120 countries. The Foundation was designed to foster linked relationships with other foundations and trusts established in the ISPRS Member countries and regions to enable international sharing and administration for the common good of the sciences and disciplines represented by the ISPRS." (http://www.isprs.org/)  In Volume 20, Issue 1 of Photogrammetry, the editor mentions that the purpose of the journal is to "draw the attention of the greatest possible number of scientists and technicians all over the country to the latest achievements in photogrammetry. The "latest" must not in this case be judged from the point of view from one country but of the whole world."

GLOBAL AUDIENCE AND INTENTIONS

In other words, the journal's intention is to provide a means of communication for scientists and professionals all over the world whom study/utilize photogrammetry, remote sensing, spatial information systems, computer vision, and other related fields. The Journal is designed to serve as a source reference and archive of advancements in these academic areas. According to the ISPRS website,
the audience for this journal consists of scientists, engineers, researchers, developers and practitioners in Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing, Spatial Information Systems, Computer Vision, as well as in related areas of application, such as Geodesy, Surveying, Cartography, Geography, Natural, Earth, Engineering and Information Sciences, Environmental Monitoring and Protection, Industrial Design and Manufacturing, Medicine, Architecture and Monument Preservation.

This journal's objective is to publish high quality, peer-reviewed, preferably previously unpublished papers of a scientific/research, technological development or application/practical nature. P&RS will publish papers, including those based on ISPRS meeting presentations, which are regarded as significant contributions in the above mentioned fields. The journal encourages papers of broad scientific interest; on innovative applications, particularly in new fields; of an interdisciplinary nature; on topics that have not been dealt with (or to a small degree) by P&RS or related journals; and on topics related to new possible scientific/professional directions. It is preferred that theoretical papers include applications, and papers dealing with systems and applications should include theoretical background.
The scope of the journal is extensive and covers sensors, theory and algorithms, systems, experiments, developments and applications.

The ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing is published in one volume/year with six issues.
The journal states that, "It is expressly understood that the subscriptions by individuals will be for personal use only and may not be placed in institutional, or university libraries and/or organizations." Individual annual subscriptions for members of National Societies which are members of the ISPRS and for employees of ISPRS Sustaining Members are 40 US$ or 36 Euro. The journal has a discount rate for UN Defined developing countries as well: 50 US$ or 45 Euro. Full text articles are available online via DirectScience with subscription.

DOCUMENT TYPES

Upon doing an advanced search in the Web of Science and sorting by each document type available, I found the following breakdown of types of documents published by the IRSPS from 1945-2004 and then narrowed the date from 1999-2004 to find frequency by doc type for the last 5 years.

Articles and editorial material have historically been published with the highest frequency. About 90% of all documents published between 1999-2004 were articles. About 7% of the documents published were editorial material.

CITIVITY

JOURNAL CITATION REPORTS

The impact factor of this journal in 2002 was  0.389. The immediacy index was  0.081

AUTHORS

The top 5 most cited authors within the last 5 years are:

To find these authors I started by doing a full search of all databases from 1999-2004. Then I clicked on the advanced search button and typed in my source journal, limiting document type by article. I got 146 resulting authors and article titles. I then sorted by times cited to obtain the top 5 cited authors from 1999-2004.

To find out out how many documents and articles they had published, I did a Cited Reference Search on each author's name and then counted the documents. I clicked on the blue link to count up how many articles they had written.

AUTHOR KEYWORDS: (I used the Web of Science and went into each article record to find these keywords. Most article records had both author keywords and keyword plus.)

interferometric SAR, LIDAR, built-up areas, building reconstruction, shape detection, linear spectral unmixing, hyperspectral image data, urban surface materials, road extraction, urban areas, aerial imagery, image understanding, multi-view imagery, road lanes, road markings, building detection, SAR images, optical images, edge extraction, fusion, SAR, polarimetric decomposition, segmentation, classification, annealing, satellite remote sensing, data fusion, land surface temperature, landcover classification, urban climatology, navigation, silhouettes, building detection, image registration, image orientation, augmented reality, 3D city models, mobile systems, location-based services, multi-sensor systems, hyperspectral, AVIRIS, TOPSAR, IHS transformation, image fusion, urban hazards, multiresolution analysis, multiscale analysis, image pyramid, wavelet, data fusion, remote sensing

APPLYING POINTS FROM SCHUBERT AND KOEHLER:

1. Danger of running a journal in a relatively narrow research field:

It is mentioned by Schubert in his analysis of Scientometrics, that a dwindling or sparse author population may be the result of publishing journals that focus on a narrow or limited research field. This can further lead to a kind of "inbred, clannish community." Schubert was able to check his journal for signs of this occurrence by researching the annual share of newcomers- first time publishing authors- from all other authors within a given year. Upon trying a method similar to this to determine the degree of clannish activity in my journal I found the following:

I went to general search within the years 1994-2003 and looked up all documents published from my journal from each year. Then sorted by times cited, thus listing the ten most productive authors from each year. To find what percentage of these authors were new, I divided the number of authors not published within the top 10 before from these years by those that had been published previously in the top 10 from this year range.

While the process of finding repeated authors was time consuming, I was curious to see if my journal would appear "clannish." I had not previously heard of the field of photogrammetry and assummed it would be a narrow research field as White mentioned. I was surprised to see that for the most part about 70-80% of the top authors each year had not been featured in the top 10 positions prior. The two most recent years 2002 and 2003 did feature several authors in the top 10 that had been in the top 10 before. It will be interesting to see how this trend continues. Following a trend like this may also be an indicator if, infact, the research field is narrowing or becoming less researched.

2.Co-authorship characteristics among topped cited authors

I decided to focus on the top cited authors from each year and see if there was a connection between the # of authors and the # of document citations.

* author in red indicates that they have published previously in the top 10 most cited from years 1994-2003.

Between the years of 1994-2003 the top cited documents had an average of 2-3 authors. In 2002, notice how Fraser and Baltsavias and Gruen all teamed up to work on the same document. In previous years they have all had top cited documents individually as well. It is clear by this data that collaboration is growing in in this field. Networking and collaboration between authors is another issue that will be discussed shortly.

3. Journal growth

Koehler discusses some "markers" that indicate the shift from little to big science in a particular scientific field. I decided to apply some of these markers to my journal. Here is an interpretation of the data I collected:

Issues: Koehler states that growth in the number of issues per year indicated a shift from little to big science. My journal has decreased from 6 issues per year to 4.

Articles: An increase in the number of articles per year is also indicative of journal growth. There was a decrease in the number of articles published between 1999-2001, but 2002 made a decent comeback with 37 articles.

Citations: Citations have increased steady through the past 6 years. 74.2% is the average increase in total cites each year.

 MISCELLANEOUS CITIVITY

JOURNAL CITATION REPORTS

The impact factor of this journal in 2002 was  0.389. The immediacy index was  0.081

When compared to other geoscience, mulit-disciplinary journals from 2002, The ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing ranks 105th in impact factor, 99th in total cites, 98th in cited half-life, 86th in immediacy index, and 73rd in # of 2002 articles. This is all out of 122 journals in the specified field. If productivity relates to these mentioned factors, then this journal can be considered less productive than similar journals in it's field. It seems difficult to draw conclusions solely based on these criteria. I want to consider the quality of the articles, but I know such a factor is difficult to evaluate as opinions and judgments vary from reader to reader. Counting the number of "cites" is a neat, clean, mathematical way to evaluate "quality and usefulness." We can equate the number of times an article was cited as "use." The more articles from a particular journal "used" in this manner, the more useful and productive the journal.

PERSONAL BIBLIOMETRIC PROFILE

In searching from 1994 to the present, I found the most cited author to be Naesset, E. His most cited article is entitled "Determination of mean tree height of forest stands using airborne laser scanner data." It was published April 1997 and is 7 pages long. It have been cited 38 times. The following tables reflect this author's citation identity:

Author's cited by Naesset: (repeated citings in red) 

Cited Author           Cited Work                Volume      Page      Year       

                       SKOGBRUKSPLANLEGGING                            1995

ALDRED AH              PIX51 CAN FOR SERV P                            1985

BISHOP YMM             DISCRETE MULTIVARIAT                            1975

BRENNAN RL             EDUC PSYCHOL MEAS             41       687      1981 

COHEN J                EDUC PSYCHOL MEAS             20        37      1960 

CONGALTON RG           PHOTOGRAMM ENG REM S          49        69      1983 

CONGALTON RG           PHOTOGRAMM ENG REM S          49      1671      1983 

CONGALTON RG           REMOTE SENS ENVIRON           37        35      1991 

EID T                  81996 AGR U NORW DEP                            1996

FLEISS JL              STATISTICAL METHODS                             1981

FOODY GM               PHOTOGRAMM ENG REM S          58      1459      1992 

HUDSON WD              PHOTOGRAMM ENG REM S          53       421      1987 

LAWLIS GF              PSYCHOL BULL                  78        17      1972 

LECKIE DG              CAN J FOREST RES              20       464      1990 

LIGHT RJ               PSYCHOL BULL                  76       365      1971 

MACLEAN GA             CAN J REMOTE SENS             12         7      1986 

NAESSET E              SCAND J FOREST RES            11        76      1996 

NAESSET E              SKOGREGISTRERING SKO                     3      1992 

NAESSET E              IN PRESS INT J REMOT                            1995

NELSON R               REMOTE SENS ENVIRON           24       247      1988 

NELSON R               REMOTE SENS ENVIRON           15       201      1984 

NILSSON M              57 SWED U AGR SCI DE                            1994

OPSETH PE              THESIS U NORWAY DEP                             1996

MA ZK                  PHOTOGRAMM ENG REM S          61       435      1995 

MONSERUD RA            ECOL MODEL                    62       275      1992 

ROSENFIELD GH          PHOTOGRAMM ENG REM S          52       223      1986 

STORY M                PHOTOGRAMM ENG REM S          52       397      1986 

WAGNER MJ              EARTH OBSERVATION MA           4        51      1995

This data was retrieved by searching for all the articles Naessett had authored from 1994 to present. Within each of these 3 articles I was able to trace what authors he had cited. One element Howard White discussed in his articles "Authors as citers over time" and "Author-centered bibliometrics" was that of self-citing. At first glance I did feel it was a bit egotistical, but I agree with White that egocentric is a better way of viewing the process of self-citation. White explains that, "Egocentric might be better, in the Paisleyan sense that puts the authors head at the center of his or her universe, which makes the term neutrally descriptive citers in general." (JASIS p.103) While Naessett does cite himself, I don't view it as an ego trip. Like White mentions in JASIS, it all comes down to perceived relevance of information. The relevance a piece of information may have varies from the author to the reader.

Authors Citing Naesset

Out of 39 citations total these were the most frequent citing authors of Naesset's work. Notice that almost 13% of of those citations are made by Naesset himself.

Citation Image

All three of Naesset's articles have been authored dependently. He has not collaborated with any other author at this point: It is interesting to point out his earliest article, "Testing for Marginal Homogeneity..." has not been cited by any authors, nor does it include any cited references itself.

An additional idea to ponder is whether authors can be perfunctory citers of themselves? Or is that part of Egocentrism?

A CAMEO Approach

Howard White's CAMEO article and method of using a CAMEO for browsing prompted me to try one for Naesset. I was able to locate the INSPEC index from UofA's Sabio and compiled the following data by doing an author search:

While the terminology is slightly different, there are complementary words like mean-tree-height, forest surveys, tree-species-cover, and canopy-density.

EXAMINING SUBJECT KEY WORDS FROM ASSIGNMENT 1- (limited to "in title" and article in ISPRS)

BIBLIOMETRICS EVALUATION ESSAY

Scientists comprise a community that continuously formulates hypotheses and conducts research on them.  The outcome of the research is published for the sake of the continuation of knowledge.  Each scientist builds on the work previously performed by another.  If scientists cannot communicate to each other, then the time spent on research will be redoubled and wasted.

            Bibliometrics is the statistical analysis of the methodology of scientific communication.  One intent of bibliometrics is to show how effective a scientist can be at communicating information or how effective the information being shared really is.  Citation analysis will show who is citing the author, who the author cites, who the author is being cited with, and the frequency of all the above.  Detecting patterns within these citations will offer clues to the effectiveness of the author’s scholarly communication.  As White states in his “Authors as Citers over Time” article for JASIS, “A major purpose of learning the frequencies of citations in functional categories has been to test their validity as indicators of the quality of cited items” (103).  In essence, White is stating that the volume of citations correlates directly with the importance of the writing—the more frequently an author is cited, the more import the work is, and the more frequently the author cites another source, the more important that source is to the author.

White later expands on this thought in the same article:

"High-quality work is signaled when someone is recited over time by other authors of quality, however the latter are decided.  Citation identities thus permit unobtrusive peer review: it is not just someone’s overall citation count, but who is responsible for it that merits consideration.  Recitation by one respected figure is good; recitation by many respected figures is better; recitation by hundreds of respected figures is world fame." (106)

To his point, volume is a good basis of validity; however, the reputation of the persons making the citations is just as important.  An author is who repeatedly cited by other scholars established in the field can assume to be established in his or her own reputation.

In terms of validating the integrity of an author, I do agree that citation analysis can be a useful indicator.  It is only sensible that someone of importance within a scientific field will be cited by many other scholars, as they seek to add validity to their own name.  This pattern would probably be typical of PhD candidates or other beginning scientists: they would seek to add to their citation lists persons of upstanding reputation so as to make their work seem on target.

I also agree with White’s three divisions of citation style: “scientific-paper style,” in which authors cite heavily and mechanically, adding to the thrust of their arguments; “bibliographic-essay style,” in which authors cite obscure and unconnected sources unitarily; and “literature-review style,” in which both methods are deployed (88).  I can see this even in my limited exposure to the realm of scholarly communication.  The authors with scientific-paper style I like to stereotype as lab rats: working all day and night, committed to their narrow research and little else.  Their publications seem to have a citation in every other sentence so as to asseverate their research.  These papers tend to be long and dull, but probably very important to advancing the research.  Bibliographic-essay authors, on the other hand, I think are more populist.  I think of writers like Stephen Jay Gould or even Sigmund Freud who have written on complicated scientific matters but always seem to write in a fashion understandable to the public, often using sources from outside science to relate the topic.  Bibliometric study of these writers would reveal a pot luck list of sources: literature, sports, etc.  In this case, a citation analysis may help to determine the “readability” of an author—if the author is of bibliographic-essay style, perhaps the writing will be comprehensible to a wider audience.

There are two caveats to the usefulness of bibliometric analysis.  First, citation analysis often assumes that an author is cited for real purposes.  While it is more likely that the journal or author is cited often because they promote important or controversial advances in their respective fields, it is possible that a journal or an author could be discussed frequently because their integrity and reputation as an academic research tool is outrageously unimpressive—that is, it is the laughingstock of the community.  Imagine if a scientist with a recognizable name suffered a stroke and in the ensuing mental breakdown published an article purporting a new theory on the earth’s flatness.  It is very possible that the scientist could be cited frequently over the next several months by many reputable sources.  However, most (if not all) of them will be citing the author negatively, demonstrating the preposterousness of his claim.  In this event, the author will show up all over the map of citation analysis, but the scientific importance of the publications will be minimal.

Second, an author could purport extremely novel and important ideas that go unnoticed for a great while, thus minimizing the author’s appearances on citation analysis reports.  In this case, if the author were judged by her bibliometric importance, she could lose her position within the community.  One example could be if the author writes in an uncommon language, like Swahili, that is not often translated in the West.  The author’s research on wildlife or some other matter may in fact be the most advanced in the field, but because of language barriers, it will not be transmitted across the scholarly community for a great while.  Another case would be if the author’s ideas were so different that it would take time for established scientists to realize their importance and communicate upon them.  I wonder how someone like Darwin would have been received by bibliometric analysis.  At first, his ideas were so far out there that he may have been initially dismissed by many figures of reputation.  Of course, decades later, his reputation is nearly infallible.

An interesting offshoot of bibliometrics is webmetrics—the application of bibliometric measurements to the web.  Most people who surf are familiar with counters—those small bars or buttons, usually at the bottom of the home page, that keep track of the total number of “hits” or visits that a web page receives.

By the very nature of networking, data like these are kept automatically by servers.  Webmetrics is the scientific assessment of these data.  For instance, 20,000 hits may be recorded to a certain cite.  But when did they occur?  How many of the hits are unique (that is, did unique individuals saw the page or were a few clicking on it many times)?  Did the visitors click on any link on the home page or navigate away?  What brought the visitors to the site?  What types of software are the visitors using to view the functions of the web page?  These are the sorts of questions that webmetrics is involved with.

Webmetrics will only grow as it becomes a central factor in commerce, scholarship, and privacy.  First, many sites are on the web in order to make money.  Whether through direct sales or content subscriptions or indirectly through advertisement or exposure to “real world” product, several of the most popular web sites are money-makers.  ESPN.com, for instance, has much free content; however, there is a subscription-only section that offers more.  Additionally, ESPN sells its promotional ware through the site, offers advertisements to other products, sells sporting goods through auctions, and promotes its cable network.  ESPN would be interested in the webmetrics analysis of its pages in order to make it a more profitable product.  Webmetrics could tell where its customers come from, what pages they visited, what browser graphically displays their pages, and what patterns subscription users have.  While a sheer page count can be helpful in tracking the popularity of the site, webmetrics would also provide perhaps more informative data, such as how long the visitor stayed on the site and whether or not they clicked on the button for ESPN sweatshirts for sale.

Academic web sites can also be affected by webmetrics.  Citation analysis, from the university perspective, can be a cold report on the usefulness of publishing professors.  Likewise, webmetrics can give perspective to the importance of certain products of information that a university spends much money to make available.  For instance, a university will determine how extensive its digital information will be available—whether or not the university libraries archive up to a certain year, maintaining dissertations electronically, etc.  Webmetrics would help to analyze which record are most important, and to whom.  By tracking the use of areas of intranet and other electronic publications, the administration could see what is being used for research, and whether it is undergraduate students fulfilling an assignment or if professors, graduate students, and adjuncts are advancing scholarship.  Universities are always pressed on budgets, and webmetrics may be a useful way to determine what needs to be expensed for electronic record-keeping.

Finally, webmetrics will be increasingly relevant in discussions on privacy rights.  Much of webmetrics works on the assumption that it is okay to collect information on the end-user who is clicking on web sites.  Increasingly, users want their personal information to remain with them only.  Drawing the line on what are obtainable data and what should remain confidential is difficult.  In one regard, a user should not have to feel that clicking on a web site has surrendered her privacy, allowing a company to know where her computer is and where else she is navigating on the web.  On the other hand, the company publishing the web site may feel it is their right to know their clientele, because the user knowingly and willingly clicked on the site and thus entered their business.  No one forced the user to come to the page, and as mentioned before, webmetrics can help a company to be more profitable by creating a profile of its current customer base.

It is hard to know where a consumer’s privacy stops and where a company’s right to recognize its own customers begins.  Perhaps one compromise could be an opt-out statement not unlike the windows that pop up while installing software.  Usually I am now forced to click on a “I agree” button to some long and legal statement before I can install a product on the computer.  I am surprised that more web sites do not have a similar disclosure, acknowledging to the user that certain webmetric information will be tracked during their visit.  Of course, this will be a nuisance to many surfers, as not only is there another pop-up window to navigate through, but they will be left with little choice but to surrender their privacy in order to view the content they wish.  

In conclusion, I feel that having knowledge of how bibliometrics and webmetrics work can be very empowering. I had never given so much thought to all the processes, collaboration, and connections that can be made within scholarly work. This is helpful to me as a future librarian as I have more tools now to effectively select and evaluate materials for my patrons. As a student myself, I can use my knowledge of bibliometrics and citation analysis to help promote my personal research as well. I am very excited about the future of information science and how the internet continues to make information readily available and accessible to the public.

While I feel everyone can benefit from knowing how to use scholarly communication tools (ie. citational anaylisis, webmetrics, bibliometrics, author citation identity, etc) to sort out information, I would definitely hope that all librarians would have some exposure and experience with these tools. Having taken this class I feel I have a definite advantage over those library science students who have not. The ISI Web of Science is like a dear, old friend to me now.