Is citation analysis used consistently across various disciplines as a method to evaluate scholarly journal articles?

surf sunday done
Originally uploaded by iblee....

3rd level concept?
As a third level concept (Information Seeking --> Information Retrieval --> Citation Analysis), we will look at citation analysis from the concept of information seeking and information retrieval. Since citations do matter (Baird, 1994) our focus is on the analysis of citations, where citations relate to the cognitive metaphor (CM). Specifically the purpose is looking at: how consistent as a method is citation analysis used in evaluation? While citation analysis seems only remotely interesting, citations are only rising in importance.

No citations will ever be analyzed without first seeking those citations and then, second, retrieving those citations for analysis. This two step process seems obvious but many barriers within libraries exist to make it very hard without first learning a large of amount of implicit navigation. Wayfinding takes on great significance here.

Across the disciplines
Like the study of sub-atomic particles at CERN particle collider in France, the study of citations is done indirectly. Only after a particle collision are relationships exposed; only after publishing an article can a cognitive-metaphor-architecture be found. In looking at the trails these sub-atomic particles leave behind, quantum physicists are learning about hidden relationships of our universe. This same cognitive metaphor holds true for citations. We will see citation analysis (CA) holds reservoirs of metadata --yet to be mined. Information seeking and information retrieval are only becoming more intimately linked to citation analysis.

In looking at the trails these reference particles leave behind, information scientists learn the soft, non-implicit relationships of a citation universe. Therefore the third level (or sub-sub-) concept: is citation analysis, among various types of scholars used consistently across unique, defined disciplines including information science as a method to evaluate scholarly journal articles? Several items need to be determined first.

Cognitive metaphors "Citation 2.0"
Cognitive metaphors seem to dominate the literature for citation analysis. There is talk of citation profiles, document identification elements, cognitive reasoning behind self-citation, purpose behind citing particular articles, and various other elements including problems with citation analysis. Note: there are very few citation elements representing physical substance or "socialness." Think no "Citation 2.0" as of yet.

An example of a citation element representing something physical is a person's name or the name of a place. Another scholar may counter that a person's name stands for a physical person. In reality, though, a person's name is cognitive metaphor representative of their physical nature. The author did not earn his present nickname as being a physical representative from hell with horns (Leecifer) but the fact that the author may mock orthodox religion a bit too much. Something he has changed out of respect for friends. Pseudonyms are great examples of the cognitive metaphor representing the physicality of some thing. Physical metaphors, while not always readily apparent, may offer insights.

Another example is in physical location. Research shows that physical location can have an effect on whether or not an article is valuable for analysis. Note this effect as the person reviewing the article recognizes a physical location, comments on this physicality and selects an embedded citation as an article to read.

A very clear example is most United States information scientists may preferentially select articles from University of California, over articles from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Physical location then serves as a physical metaphor for an information scientist to determine they may better understand the article's information from a same-language author. But, the cognitive metaphor takes precedence in the field of citation analysis.

Now for CA
Is citation analysis (CA) applied consistency across fields of research. The end/means here, as discussed, also looks at the cognitive metaphor, physical metaphor or some aggregation of both to place and to appropriately relate those concepts. CA seems a whirling dervish of mystery at present, not yet fully studied and is more aptly understood as a cognitive metaphor. Socialness is still hidden.

The Review
Qualitative research can be subjective. Qualitative research also belongs in the cognitive metaphor domain. A quantitative analysis would be representative more of a physical metaphor domain. Has enough citation analysis been done to solidify CA as a methodology? Does CA have a dominant paradigm as a guiding model and for that matter with the information explosion in recent years: has there been a paradigm shift? Has the research on CA been done proving its efficacy as qualitative or at least with enough determinacy to be effective in research use?

The scope here was limited to journal articles that reviewed citation analysis as a theory, as a tool uncovering discrete information about consistency across disciplines, and as a cognitive metaphor or physical metaphor. Since citation analysis itself is meaningless out of context and only in the context of determining a particular "x" variable, it is necessary to take this 3-pointed view. The particular "x" variable we are looking at would be, "Citation Analysis as a Tool in Journal Evaluation" (Garfield, 1978) --can CA actually tell scholars something profound?

As stated before, information seeking and retrieval are immediate nuclear family members of citation analysis. While citation analysis is the newest addition in the family, this scholar's information seeking was relegated to literature from various scholarly journal articles. Other publication types (Blogs) were excluded for the purpose of this post. The articles were not necessarily selected because they were directly in the field of Information Science. Rather the information sought and retrieved were articles that dealt with CA. The scholarly journal articles' subject content ranged from history to medical to economic citation analysis. All articles though were focused through the lens of Information Science. Included in this search and retrieval were also various Information Science journals where seminal articles on CA had been published.

Citation Analysis as Cognitive Metaphor:
Citation analysis means 1) looking at a group of writing to understand the impact this writing has on others scholars, and 2) as a prerequisite means that you must understand how to determine this impact through citations. Eugene Garfield, in an unprecedented, 1972 article titled "Citation Analysis as a Tool in Journal Evaluation" set the stage for serious inquiry into the field of CA. While prior research had been done in looking at citations, very little had been done in looking at the impact or cascading effect that citations may have. Garfield's research question was by reviewing citations can one determine what journals matter the most for research purposes.

The grounds for this research was seen as some articles are repeatedly cited and Garfield sought to confirm the hypothesis that this happened time and time again. Drawing the citations from Science Citation Index, Garfield proved a few journals and more specifically, the articles in those journals account for over half of all journal citations. Much research had been carried out on citations preceding Garfield's.

Garfield's research showed what only previous researchers could allude to: the circle of influence for citations is a small compact loop. Garfield effectively tightened what was a loosely held belief. Clinching up the loop, Garfield showed that many articles may tie off a core loop of journals which taken further meant a core loop of articles could be found in any research area. This was done through the methodology of a cognitive metaphor. This metaphor was the now confirmed cognitive structure of citation analysis. Scholars were shown that the majority of research articles are published in a small set of journals. Largely before this scholars were left to guess.

Garfield's article has been cited over 400 times since its publication. Much of the references pointing to Garfield's article make another point about citation analysis. The impact of citations for various reasons was only growing and is not slowing as more of these reasons are exhumed. Garfield reported that we are far from zero-population growth in world of information and are unlikely to ever be there (Garfield, 1972).

Citation analysis was yet to have a consistently used theory though. Leydesdorff states that "citations support the communication of specialist knowledge ...[and]... citation analysis reflects on citation practices" (Leydesdorff, 1998). Leydesdorff reviews many attempts at theories and incursions on citations, citation analysis, and the elements of relational operations that citations create. In short, Leydesdorff furthers a specific, substratic, notion: much information is hidden in citations and can be mined for valuable information. With this research three themes emerge. CA can be viewed from a I) socio-historical analysis, II) quantitative studies with foci of formalization or generalization, and III) policy or management studies who draw upon elements I, or II (Leydesdorff, 1998).

Furthering this thought to build a cognitive metaphor, research on CA must create a long enough continuity with the problem, apply cognitive framework to Information Science, create research projects that span across disciplines, and in the end develop concepts that are put to use (Kuhlthau, 2005). Pierce metaphorically plunges a shovel down into the information science soil to show that Kuhlthau's idea can be explained through CA. Pierce says CA shows information transfer crosses through three methods; borrowing, collaboration, and boundary crossing are these three. With boundary crossing being the most powerful form of information transfer through which CA can be applied, Pierce showed just how dynamic citations can be (Pierce, 1999). The work of Cameron and also Chudnov, Crooker, and Parker state boundary crossing CA is "so enormous and complex that librarians should cooperate to create one outstanding and highly functional database (Cameron, 1997; Pierce, 1999)" unifying the depth and breadth of CA. Case and Higgins in their review of CA find that while CA is used to study how productive scholars are, and unified databases may prove fruitful, what else is there to citation behaviors; what else can CA tell us about the cognitive relationships hidden in citations (Case, 1991; Case & Higgins, 2000)?

There is another way one must look at CA. If CA is being done consistently, (and here we now see consistent to mean the analysis of citations but we do not mean with the same cognitive focus of that analysis), what are the issues? In a series of retrieved articles, "The Use and Misuse of Citation Analysis in Research Evaluation," by Kostoff (1989), "Problems of Citation Analysis: A Critical Review," by MacRoberts and MacRoberts (1998), "A Compendium of Issues for Citation Analysis," by Phelan (1999), all review the consistent lack of attention paid to the problems of CA. MacRoberts and MacRoberts especially state while critics report upon the acknowledgment of the limitations of CA, they find that little work has been done to resolve this: a specific example they note, as this scholar mentioned earlier, is with scholars' names. What happens when a scholar gets married? How do citation analysts account for this seemingly simple and common social phenomenon? MacRoberts and MacRoberts answer, upon reviewing the literature, is that citation analysts cannot (MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 1989).

With, Garfield, CA was only beginning. Another shock-wave peeling back how far the scholars could go into citations analysis came from the explosion of the world wide web. With the birth of the Internet, new questions were raised about citation behaviors and what could be found from CA. In a paper cited 2,240 times, Kleinberg put forth an algorithmic formulation for the extraction of citation data into meaningful information. The articles impact was indubitably not missed. Research into citations, it showed, could be furthered by even more by heuristics that address other cognitive domains nested in citations. A point of interest here is that Kleinberg put as subject descriptors [Information Seeking], [Information Retrieval], tying citation analysis to these particular cognitive domains (Kleinberg, 1999). As for the future state of CA, Perkel (2005) reports that services like google scholar will ultimately mean a much deeper mining of data to include document elements beyond reference lists such as acknowledgments and that a paper like Kleinberg's will only be drawn upon even more for citation analysis (Perkel, 2005).

Why is it time for a renaissance?

We live in the time of a great renaissance. And, this slideshare thing is a great way to share your presentations. Sweeeeet.

Part 2: So I made mistake on a poster for my library: why?

Its :P right on.

What's funny is that I had read this before I chose to start posting mistakes, warts, guffaws, errors, idiocies, bleeps, and all.

Rather than make sure my blog entries are perfect, pictures are perfect, code is perfect, grammar is perfect -I thought: why not just push to get more stuff out of my head and up on the web --share my thoughts --push my creative limits-- be less worried about getting it right and be more worried about getting it done.

"Below average" as a writer accurately describes my writing abilities. I only wrote my first paper (shudder when I call it that) in 1996. Yes, 1996. While 11 years have passed, consistent writing still escapes me. To feel I mastered what I should have learned from grade school & high school in the same time I'm supposed to be writing at the graduate level is a joke --on myself. I'm still learning some basics now.

While I write "for" the graduate level and do a pretty good job, most times it is an arduous struggle to produce a work I am proud of. I had not wrote a single paper in high school, did very little in depth writing in the military (mostly short, bulleted, tech reports.) In fact, the very first paper I wrote in college was, ...hold your breath... 3 pages! And I got a "C" on that paper.

Now it's years later and I realize I'm missing critical writing skills. But, I am slowly picking them up. Being years behind in the basics doesn't make it easy. Working hard to develop my writing I feel the thoughts/ideas in my head & the words I see don't even come close to articulating what I want to say. Then I make mistakes -oh that's just great.

Now you add the horror of people thinking you are less intelligent +your mistakes +lack of ability to articulate +desire to produce thought provoking quality writing +the fact that you don't know most people go through or have gone thru this process and it = performance anxiety, that is, until you face it. The research on reading & writing prove this true.

It's just funny that the week I push myself to experiment more, I get vociferous feedback, indirectly, on a minor mistake. (I shared it for comments to be sure.) Here I am trying: to publish more of my work, to grow professionally, to challenge myself by exposing more of my raw creative process. I post something and the first thing people do, while compliment it, is criticize it. Seems backhanded. I like being criticized; as long as I know it's coming. I'm not opposed to it at all and produce my best work, usually, only after someone totally shreds it.

When you think it's such a horrible error why not contact me directly like one poster on my flickr account did. I found that admirable. And indirect comments show that we have a tendency to do one thing first: find fault. I'm not crying over it. I'm not hurt or sad or remiss. Actually, it's emboldening. I'm quite distant from the happenings & only know about it indirectly.

What I am doing is using this as a writing exercise. There are a lot of reasons but this helps. Sorry if you can't handle a wide swatch of language but: don't stomp on me because you are living in fear. I gave that up a long time ago. I wish to bring civility back, because it's not about the cell phone. I would like to see courtesy, respect, and dialogue, not discussion, rise.

Any and all mistakes are my own.

Is Wikipedia good enough?

can this be for real-1
Originally uploaded by iblee....

Recognizing that Wikipedia is "good enough" for the average user/patron/person/student/doctor/etc, stands as the most important point so-called information experts fail to accept. What!? How can we change this? We can't.

Why be so harsh on information experts?
i. Telling people you "know" what information holds the most truth is arrogant -and nearly impossible. While at times information can be verified, a solid open course of teaching information evaluation is better.

ii. We presume to tell people we know better than they do. Rather, we have just a few more years of driving on the open road that teaches us to be more cautious if even some of us learn that. We should teach healthy skepticism, coach, mentor, guide, lead when needed, . We should say: perhaps, consider other sources, look deeper, maybe, go further, don't take at face value, evaluate the legitimacy of everything, above all don't consume information like you're at McDonald's.

iii. Our new role is found working with people as the whole is smarter than the parts.

"How long long have you been driving? Are you an expert just because you've been driving a long time?"

What do most people do with information?
A. Most people don't evaluate information on the quality of the resource.
B. Most people evaluate information on its 1) usefulness to their immediate need in answering a question, 2) their desire to pursue their question further, 3) a decision-making framework based on prior knowledge, experience, and information.
C. Most people would listen to us if we first listened to them.
D. Really, we have a classic example here: librarians didn't create Google or wikipedia or ... and I think that burns most of the traditional information professionals;

Me, I'm informationally promiscuous & I represent how people pull together information for their needs. I will aggregate information as I go, fact-checking as I go, modifying as I go; I go deeper than some people -yes. Do others go deeper down into information trails than I do -yes.

Simply put, so much information is blindly accepted because:
1. we're too busy arguing on how important libraries & librarians are
2. we're too busy arguing the deeply hidden and arcane rules of OPACS, MARC, making research guides etc., --rather than illustrating Google scholar.
3. we're too busy responding to inaccurate observations. :)
4. we fail to accept the enormous hidden pressures people are under: lack of time, lack of care, lack of fluency...

Lesson:
Meredith's right. Think more like a person trying to get information, less like a guardian of the right information.

Rule:
Be steadfast by remaining open to changing your original belief as you evaluate the information you find. No text is infallible, not even the bible and the world is not flat.

Finally:
Anything taken out of context can be transformed.

Why not consultation cubicles instead of reference desk? oooohhh.

jennimi2iblee
Originally uploaded by iblee....

To create a space to work together is pretty neat -this recognizes the fact & returns to the value that: in libraries we are all equal.

Check out the size of the monitor and the space it's in.

Be sure to humanly advertise your services: we are supposed to be about people.


Let's finish with some signs that work, actively.

What’s 5tothenext?

What’s 5tothenext?
Just building on this idea from here.

> Open your mind. The greatest power you can develop in your life is the ability to keep an open mind about everything while understanding there are some things not open to interpretation. What’s the first rule here? Life is a paradox. Some things change. Others like “I’m sorry, how can I help you, please forgive me, I forgive you, how can I love you better”, don’t change.

> Enrich your spirit. Know that the only religion is kindness. Peace is the goal. Contentment with the outcome along the way is the practice. And acting compassionately brings all this into our world.

> Mind the earth. This space is not for you but for those coming after you. Imagine all the people who will thank you long after you’re gone.

> Challenge your body. Unlock the depths of who you are through exhaustion of your impermanent body; realizing we all have limits reminds us of our humanity. You can work out for that chocolate chip cookie too –but think bigger.

> Know what success is not.
1. Understand the only control you have in life is control over your self.
2. Understand the only constant is change & that this is good. One day your up, one day your down. Through all the changes, be content.

Links:

Wired Cover (+my own photoshop additions)

And further inspiration.

"Who was shot in Dallas?" [op ed question]

"Who was shot in Dallas?" [op ed question]
Here's a great op ed piece.

Who does the future belong to?

Who does the future belong to?
Maybe the future belongs to those who create it?

Why do we have to wait?

Why do we have to wait?

"One of the conversations was about "paying one's dues." I said that my weakness was maintaining a patience level that would pace me with my organization...I retorted that I did not want to wait 10 years! I am here now!"

All the field is aflame with change, why don't more people see, like this, that the time we really have for relevancy is: now. The world isn't going to wait for us to acquiesce to our colleagues who don't want to change, innovate, and create the future. If you look around and don't like what you see, then you haven't participated. Sometimes that's very hard for so many reasons; but you must try. This is the era of inclusion -not exclusion.

There are three types of people: (1) those who have a job, (2) those who come to work & think they can separate out their private persona from their work persona (they can't), and (3) those who want to go bed exhausted everyday because everyday they worked to make profound changes in their own life, the lives of others they know, and the lives of people they will never know and they keep on doing this everyday.

While experience is valuable it has nothing to do with paying one's dues; that's something from an arcane era where maps warned of dragons. Now, the dragons stand for a place of creativity & not something to be feared as unknown.

Perhaps if the gatekeeping dues-collectors realized they are more effective as mentors they could take proud ownership of what we could accomplish for them.

hey, it's just a thought. relax. i'm not advocating information anarchy -or am i? and i love all my mentors who are brilliant and mean not a lick of disrespect to them.

By the way, the reference desk is dead, yet reference lives on. The book is so ubiquitous it's barely visible, yet more important than ever, and the library has been blown to bits while becoming a focal point in people's lives, (hopefully more so, not less so.)

What won't change?

What won't change?
This is a great idea. Along with permanent innovation, we should see change as the metronome, chaos as the pace-setter, and relinquishment (you have no control save the control over one's self) as the cadence.

Can you visually represent the connections?

Content Analysis Day 1
Originally uploaded by mstephens7.

Can you visually represent the connections?
Yes, I take pics of the documents( that's a tametheweb.com pic by Michael Stephens) I create too; there are many reasons but in a way the pics capture some of the organic feel of information plus serve as a back-up copy, allow for sharing. Also, it's nice to know what came out of the research; visual representations of information/data often help with this. But, I'm a graphic novel fan and became a passionate reader because of comic books. So, I like the visuals.

How do I stay current?

How do I stay current?
I use googleReader keep up with some of the trend finders in my field.
Perhaps of interest? It's not that exciting of a screenshot because I already read my feeds.

What's one new way to do your school work?

What's one new way to do your school work?

Here's several. Buy your textbooks a different way; advocate for a better online course experience; doesn't it make sense to understand the rational behind why BlackBoard delivers such a poor online experience? Most other free online course management systems explain their design. Then, there's buying your textbooks? Why should that cost so much?

Remember: above all else don't get kicked in the face.