Theories of Informetrics and Scholarly Communication
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Theories of Informetrics and Scholarly Communication Theories of Informetrics and Scholarly Communication | Edited by Cassidy R. Sugimoto A Festschrift in honor of Blaise Cronin An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libra- ries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access. More information about the initiative can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License, as of February 23, 2017. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. ISBN 978-3-11-029803-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-030846-4 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-038823-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: © Rafael Cronin Typesetting: PTP-Berlin, Protago-TEX-Production GmbH, Berlin Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Foreword I would not want to miss the opportunity to acknowledge my old comrade-in- arms, Blaise Cronin, on the occasion of this Festschrift. There are very few the- oreticians that I have known and admired amongst the community of citationists. Blaise is one of them. However, I believe that this volume contains contributions from most if not all of those living scholars who deserve similar recognition. I consider my own work more a contribution by a pragmatist, constantly jug- gling the exigencies of meeting payrolls and weekly deadlines. Well, those mun- dane concerns were over when ISI was sold to Thomson Reuters over twenty years ago. I am amazed that colleagues would still be seeking commentary from me. My 1979 book, “Citation Indexing: Its theory and application in science, tech- nology, and humanities”, was published before we heard of the Internet. In the early days we lived with the constraints of the printed versions of the Science Ci- tation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index. Later on we added the Arts and Humanities Citation Index. Keeping up with rapidly changing technology we moved into the eras of the CD-Rom and online. From there we moved into the age of the Internet. By then bibliometrics became more than just the obsession of a few citation analysts like myself and the growing informetrics community. During all these decades of change Blaise Cronin was there and played a key role as constant critic and gatekeeper. While many publishers and scientists are preoccupied with journal impact factors we must always remind them that the SCI was invented as a solution to the problem of information retrieval. And as early as 1965 it was already providing alerting services (selective dissemination of information) even before SDI became a dirty word. And in spite of their suspicions and doubts about citation analysis, administrators and editors know that high citation counts are justifiably associ- ated with work of Nobel class. Given the ubiquitous use of these metrics in higher education and science policy, it is only fitting that a body of work be collected addressing the stateof theories in the field. Eugene Garfield Founder & Chairman Emeritus Institute for Scientific Information (now Thomson Reuters Scientific) President & Founding Editor The Scientist Prologue This Festschrift is compiled for Blaise Cronin upon the occasion of his retirement. Unlike some Festschrifts, you will not find in these pages honorific essays or deeply intimate recollections of the man. This is not an opportunity for his coevals to wax eloquent on his legacy. Such a Festschrift would not befit an individual of such professionalism and scholarship. Rather, the objective is to demonstrate Cronin’s deep contextualization in the areas of informetrics and scholarly com- munication and to explore the ways in which he shaped a theoretical foundation for the field through his work, both critical and empirical (thus demonstrating Hjorland’s notion of critical informetrics). We honor the man by honoring his scholarship—what White terms the “au- thor as person”. However, we would be remiss were we to forget the “somatics of science” (Ekbia)—that this, to ignore the physicality of scientific practice. Cronin’s position as Dean of the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana Uni- versity allowed him the opportunity to bring together and mentor some of the most active scholars in informetrics and scholarly communication. He collabo- rated with a number of faculty members and students and his presence indelibly altered the scholarship of these individuals. He hired, inspired, and provoked and, in doing so, created a vibrant center of scientometric activity in Middle America. Two of his hires (Ekbia and Börner) are featured as contributors, and the editor of this volume was in the last cohort of hires for the School. In the Festschrift Cronin edited on the occasion of Eugene Garfield’s 75th birth- day, he commented: “It is all too clear that a second volume could have been mustered without much additional effort or any loss of quality. All those whomwe approached were heartily supportive of the idea and keen to show their affection and respect for the man and his multifarious accomplishments.” Much the same could be said for the present Festschrift—there was no shortage of potential con- tributors and only I am blame if highly relevant authors were overlooked. I offer my apologies to these individuals here. To those who were able to contribute, I offer my thanks. The authors represent some of the foremost scholars in scientometrics—among the contributors to this volume are nine awardees of the coveted Derek de Solla Price award (including, of course, the honoree of this volume). I am grateful that these authors offered their time and expertise. I would also like to express gratitude to my students, Nora Prologue | VII Wood, Andrew Tsou, Maureen Fitz-Gerald, and Bradford Demarest, who assisted in the production of the Festschrift. Finally, I am deeply indebted to Blaise Cronin, without whom, none of this would have been possible. Cassidy R. Sugimoto Associate Professor School of Informatics and Computing Indiana University Bloomington Contents Foreword | V Prologue | VI Cassidy R. Sugimoto Introduction | 1 Part I: Critical informetrics Blaise Cronin The Incessant Chattering of Texts | 13 Birger Hjørland Informetrics Needs a Foundation in the Theory of Science | 20 Part II: Citation theories Henry Small Referencing as Cooperation or Competition | 49 Paul Wouters Semiotics and Citations | 72 Christine L. Borgman Data Citation as a Bibliometric Oxymoron | 93 Part III: Statistical theories Jonathan Furner Type–Token Theory and Bibliometrics | 119 Ronald Rousseau and Sandra Rousseau From a Success Index to a Success Multiplier | 148 X | Contents Wolfgang Glänzel and András Schubert From Matthew to Hirsch: A Success-Breeds-Success Story | 165 David Bawden and Lyn Robinson Information’s Magic Numbers: The Numerology of Information Science | 180 Part IV: Authorship theories Howard D. White Authors as Persons and Authors as Bundles of Words | 199 Nadine Desrochers, Adèle Paul-Hus, and Vincent Larivière The Angle Sum Theory: Exploring the Literature on Acknowledgments in Scholarly Communication | 225 Hamid R. Ekbia The Flesh of Science: Somatics and Semiotics | 248 Part V: Knowledge organization theories Wolfgang G. Stock Informetric Analyses of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs) | 261 Loet Leydesdorff Information, Meaning, and Intellectual Organization in Networks of Inter-Human Communication | 280 Michael Ginda, Andrea Scharnhorst, and Katy Börner Modeling the Structure and Dynamics of Science Using Books | 304 Part VI: Altmetric theories Michael Thelwall Webometrics and Altmetrics: Home Birth vs. Hospital Birth | 337 Contents | XI Lutz Bornmann Scientific Revolution in Scientometrics: The Broadening of Impact from Citation to Societal | 347 Henk F. Moed Altmetrics as Traces of the Computerization of the Research Process | 360 Stefanie Haustein, Timothy D. Bowman, and Rodrigo Costas Interpreting ‘Altmetrics’: Viewing Acts on Social Media through the Lens of Citation and Social Theories | 372 Biographical information for the editor and contributors | 407 Index | 414 Cassidy R. Sugimoto Introduction It has been suggested that crafting a theory of citation is a “Sisyphean undertak- ing” (Cronin & Sugimoto, 2015, p. 25) and one that might be best avoided (Cronin, this volume). Yet, while there may be no single unifying theory, there are a mul- titude of theories that are employed in informetrics and the study of scholarly communication. The chapters in this Festschrift—compiled on the occasion of Blaise Cronin’s retirement—describe, extend, and propose several theories of informetrics and scholarly communication. One might question the coupling of informetrics and scholarly communica- tion in the title of the Festschrift: it could be argued that informetrics is a domain, while scholarly communication is merely an object of study. However, Cronin’s oeuvre is an ideal justification for the pairing of these terms. As noted by a number of contributors to this volume (e.g., Glinda, Scharnhorst, Börner;