WoW! Wouter over het Web

Did I post yesterday the recommended reading list for our 1/2 day course on citation analysis already. Herewith the slides that I used over the whole morning. It was quite intensive, but I really enjoyed the discussions we had with the participants. It was also great, to greet a really external course participant (and blogger) as well.

Labels: English

Introduction
The two most current ‘bibles’ for citation analysis

Moed, H. F. (2005). Citation analysis in research evaluation. Dordrecht (The Netherlands), Springer. 346 pp.
This book deals with the evaluation of scholarly research performance. Its principal question is: how can citation analysis be used properly as a tool in the assessment of such a contribution? In order to be used properly as a research evaluation tool, it is essential that all participants have insight into the nature of citation analysis, how its indicators are constructed and calculated, what the various theoretical positions state about what they measure, and what are their potentialities and limitations, particularly in relation to peer review. (from the cover)

Moed, H. F., W. Glänzel, et al., Eds. (2004). Handbook of Quantitative Science and Technology Research : The use of Publication and Patent Statistics in Studies of S&T Systems. Dordrecht (The Netherlands), Kluwer Academic Publishers. 800 pp.

And the most important journal on this subject:
Scientometrics ISSN 1588-2861, Springer.

Citation data
General
Roth, D. L. (2005). The emergene of competitors to the Science Citation Index and the Web of Science. Current Science 89(9): 1531-1535. http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/nov102005/1531.pdf
This article points to some interesting (free) resources for citation data.

Meho, L. I. and K. Yang (2007). Impact of data sources on citation counts and rankings of LIS faculty: Web of Science vs. Scopus and Google Scholar. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00008586/

Web of Science
Jacsó, P. (2007). Web of Science. Peter's digital reference shelf Retrieved. 24 January, 2007, from http://www.gale.com/reference/peter/200701/wos.htm.
A recent review highlighting the new Citation report features and the h-index

Scopus
Jacsó, P. (2006). Scopus revisted. Peter Digital Reference Shelf Retrieved 27 June, 2006, from http://projects.ics.hawaii.edu/~jacso/gale/scopus-revisited/scopus-revisited.htm.

Google Scholar
Jacsó, P. (2005). Google Scholar. Peter's digital reference shelf Retrieved Oct. 2005 http://www.galegroup.com/reference/archive/200412/googlescholar.html.

Benchmarking
ESI
Gerritsma, W. (2006). Wetenschappers gewogen : een systeem voor citatieanalyses in de praktijk. Informatie Professional 10(10): 12-17. (in Dutch)
http://library.wur.nl/wasp/bestanden/LUWPUBRD_00348170_A502_001.pdf

h-index
Hirsch, J. E. (2005). An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output. PNAS 102(46): 16569-16572. http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0508025

van Raan, A. F. J. (2006). Comparison of the Hirsch-index with standard bibliometric indicators and with peer judgment for 147 chemistry research groups. Scientometrics 67(3): 491-502.
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0511206

Journal quality
JCR
Seglen, P. O. (1997). Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research. BMJ 314(7079): 497-502.
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/314/7079/497

Opthof, T. (1997). Sense and nonsense about the impact factor. Cardiovascular Research 33(1): 1-7.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0008-6363(96)00215-5

Dong, P., M. Loh, et al. (2005). The "impact factor" revisted. Biomedical Digital Libraries 2(7).
http://www.bio-diglib.com/content/2/1/7

Ranking universities
Popular lists
Shanghai Jiao Tong University http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/ranking.htm

THES World University rankings http://www.thes.co.uk/worldrankings/

Newsweek http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14321230/

van Raan, A. F. J. (2005). Challenges in Ranking of Universities. First International Conference on World Class Universities, Shanghai Jaio Tong University, Shanghai, June 16-18, 2005.
http://www.cwts.nl/cwts/AvR-ShanghaiConf.pdf

Labels: English

He he, de bekisting staat dan eindelijk. Moesten we vorig weekend nog over slaan met het klussen, dit weekend konden we er weer volop tegenaan. De buitenkant van de bekisting gesteld. Alle gaten en kieren nagelopen. Gestut. Het lijkt al te staan als een huis. Laat de beton maar komen. Morgen, wanneer het volgens plan gaat, wordt er 6 m3 beton in gestort, dan kunnen we volgend weekend die hele bekisting weer slopen.

Labels: Dutch

When performing citation analysis to measure research impact of scientists, we still rely on data retrieved from Web of Science. When we report our findings back to researchers they often come up with their citation figures from Google Scholar, which are sometimes, but not always, higher. So now and then figures from Scopus are quoted. The citations from Scopus are normally not that widely different from WoS, but only marginally different. It depends on science field a bit, but given the nearly double journal base for Scopus compared to WoS it comes as a surprise to some people.
How come we are asked?.
It is actually quite simple to explain. Garfield (1997) showed already that 2,000 journals of the Science Citation Index generated over 80% of all citations. Web of Science as a whole covers some 8,700 journals (interesting to sort out how many exactly, since this appears a disguised number as well). Scopus nearly doubles the journal base compared to WoS. But considering the fact that WoS already covers the most prestigious, important, cited journals, the doubling in journals only increases the total number of citations a wee bit.
Some subject specific databases such as SciFinder Scholar for chemistry, or PsychInfo for Psychology/Psychiatry will find more citations for journal articles on their domain since they have an even wider journal base on their domain than either WoS or Scopus.
I have tried to indicate this in the following figure.

The WoS square has a journal base of 8700 journals and attract in total a certain amount of citations. The journal base of Scopus is nearly double that of WoS, but not overlapping. The CAS (SciFinder Scholar) has a smaller partly overlapping database with WoS and Scholar, but (not properly indicated) a substantial number of journal are unique to CAS. On that smaller domain you are likely to find a few more citations.
I am not yet happy with the figure, but I hope it helps to illustrate this whole explanation.


Literature
Garfield, E. (1997). The significant scientific literature appears in a small core of journals. The Scientist 10(17): 13. http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/papers/currscience.html

Labels: English

Recently I read two articles where figures were presented for the number of scholarly journals that are out there. Figures that are actually way off.
Dong et al. (2005) start their article as follows: "The number of periodical peer-reviewed scientific publications is conservatively estimated to exceed 16,000 worldwide; nearly 1.4 million articles are published every year". They based their number on studies by Mabe published in 2001 and 2003. Another article (Ioannidis, 2006) Starts as follows "Despite a very large number of scientific journals (probably exceeding 100,000 worldwide), the concentration of scientific information is skewed to a minority of journals that publish the majority of the articles (Bradford's law) and receive the majority of the citations." It is the unsubstantiated remark between brackets "probably exceeding 100,000 worldwide" that really struck me.
Way back in 2003 I started a discussion with Stevan Harnad on the number of peer reviewed journals that existed at that moment. Based on Ulrich I came to the conclusion that there were about 18,846 academic journals out there. In that same discussion a manager from Ulrich came up with the figure of 24,116 refereed serials. Refereed serials include refereed journals as well as refereed proceedings. The last one in the thread was Carol Tenopir who has kept track of these numbers quite regularly and showed that the numbers vary a lot according to search strategy. The most comprehensive number was at that moment 43,667 academic/scholarly periodicals.
Slightly later Carol Tenopir wrote a column on this subject in Library Journal where she highlighted this seemingly simple question. She concluded "I can say with confidence that as of the end of 2003, there are just under 50,000 scholarly journals and somewhere between one-third and just over one-half of them are in digital form."
Actually, since then Harnad uses 24,000-50,000, which is more than 16,000 and a lot less than 100,000.


Literature:
Dong, P., M. Loh, et al. (2005). The "impact factor" revisted. Biomedical Digital Libraries 2(7). http://www.bio-diglib.com/content/2/1/7
Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2006). Concentration of the Most-Cited Papers in the Scientific Literature: Analysis of Journal Ecosystems. PLoS ONE 1(1): e5. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0000005
Mabe, M. (2003). The growth and number of journals. Serials 16(2): 191-197. http://uksg.metapress.com/link.asp?id=f195g8ak0eu21muh
Mabe, M. and M. Amin (2001). Growth dynamics of scholarly and scientific journals. Scientometrics 51(1): 147-162.
Tenopir, C. (2004). Online scholarly journals: How many? Library Journal 129(2): 32. http://www.libraryjournal.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA374956

Labels: English

Walking this crispy morning through Hyde Park and along the closed shops of Oxford Street. It was London for real. A very early rise, and a late return. All this effort to attend the one-day conference for information specialists.
This post has not the usual number of links since, most of it was written at the airport, on the plain or train.
The conference was organized by Roger Mills from Oxford University Library Services. A fully packed day with eleven presentations. Was it worth it?
Yes.
My main goal to attend this conference was to establish contacts with the people from Intute and look at the possibilities to make use of the Wageningen UR Library resources by Intute. Now we have moved all of our systems to the oracle database in XML format it must be easy to think of services that could harvest our electronic resources, either from the catalog or our repository. After these initial contacts, meeting the right people, it should possible to pull this through. Intute is seriously looking into these new ways of sharing and re-use of information. Let's call it web 2.0ish.
There were also two presentations from Intute on the program. One from the people working of the Health and Lifesciences (formerly Biome) part of Intute, on the new site that launched in July 2006. Quite impressive they have catalogued currently about 31,000 Web resources. Most interesting I found the fact that they are harvesting other web resources as well. That is what I came for. The second presentation was a more exploratory presentation, attempting to sketch a possible road ahead, and the opportunities that are presented by web2.0 type solutions, technology and user participation. Intute is really looking at it, and with personalization within My Intute and RSS feeds they are making inroads. The discussion which followed exposed quite some hesitation on web2.0/library2.0 in the audience. Mostly female information professionals, perhaps not yet the next gen generation in these positions yet.
The British Library launched earlier this month the UK PubMedCentral. A site which mirror NLM PubMedCentral, and is aimed at adding UK content. Since the launch the first 250 British papers have been archived. This UK content is subsequently mirrored to the USA PMC. The presentation by the engagement officer for UK-PMC was a bit confusing at times, partly he was quite new to the subject, partly because it is also a brand new service that needs to create its niche. They hadn't thought about the question of institutional repositories versus subject specific repositories yet. Well at least he didn't have the answers but was willing to take back these questions. There were plenty ideas about the possible developments with UK PubMedCentral however. Where the British Library has really worked hard was to make it easy for the researchers to submit their articles, whether it are the scientists who actually deposit versus the lab assistants, departmental secretaries or librarians perhaps, who are left to do these jobs hadn’t sunk in yet.
Quite interesting was the presentation by M. Dvray from the Mann Library at Cornell. She was being relly proud at her background as a scientist, which enabled her to take up all kind of new roles for the library as a liason between the library and the scientist. Actually a sitatuation which is very much alike for the information specialists at our Library. But what I really liked was the the projects she pointed out she was working on like their VIVO website, which is in reality a service what our we@wur should be. They were a lot further already at Cornell.
A beautiful presentation by Sally Rumsey on the brand new Oxford repository. Well they call it Archive. Oxford Research Archive http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk/ in full. It had a soft launch last Monday. So this was actually real news. Sally pointed out that convincing the researcher to submit their work was their hardest, but most important job. The competition with UK PMC was not making things easier in that respect.
Roger Mills did a presentation on behalf of Michael Popham on the Google Book project. Interesting that Roger pointed out that they were going to link from the catalogue to their own copies in Google Books, but that wasn't working yet. Well actually the global library community is waiting for that one to happen. If they can do that from Oxford we can o it in principle from any library catalogue. More is to be found at http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/google/
The most interesting presentation for me personally was the one about curation of actual data. A subject that we were discussing at our department 15 years ago as well. But still can't get our grips on today. Those days I was working with crop growth simulation models. And these are really data hungry, to verify the models. So it is a really felt need, but there are no solutions. Unfortunately Chris Rusbridge didn't have the answers either, but in principle there is potentially an important role for libraries. We only have to develop the answers and craft our niche in this area. There is certainly room for us in that area. Worth thinking about.
There were three more presentations, one on evidence based forestry, where I really missed the small hint or step to evidence librarianship, a very new and important theme in our own profession. It was not mentioned at all. A bit strange. The last two presentation were actually sales pitches, one from CABI and the other from CSA. Just before that last presentation I had to leave. To catch the tube, train, plain etc…. to get home.

Labels: English

A while back I posted on smart library use of Del.icio.us. But most of the examples only showed lists of interesting tags. Today I was pointed to the Influenza internet guide of the University of Michigan on Avian Influenza. It is constructed of a simple html page but all collections behind the links refer to collections on Del.icio.us.

Gives you at least some doubts about the inherently library eagerness to catalog all valuable resources.

Hattip: Gwen Harris

Labels: Avian influeza, delicious, English, Libraries, Portals

My favourite database reviewer still is Péter Jacsó. His digital reference shelf is a column to keep an eye on. This month he reviews Web of Science. Since the introduction of the Citation reports it was about time.
The review is very thorough and I really would love to learn some of his tricks which he uses in his database reviews as well. It was a pleasure to digest it all. One of those things that I never realized was the fact that abstracts were only included systematically from 1991 onwards. I knew they were more often lacking from the older material but this sharp demarcation line in the change of policy was not known by me. It should have been good if Jacsó had pointed out the changes in naming policy as well. Once it was 15 characters, later 18 and nowadays first names are indexed as well. All this makes comprehensive searches for long standing researchers sometimes difficult. Well, challenging at least. Especially when you're dealing with double names. "F.C.T. Penning de Vries" is one of my favourites. He can be found as DEVRIES P in the cited references. ISI has promised author disambiguation, but this has not reached the science commons yet. And Penning de Vries was not a bad scientist after all. On Author disambiguation Scopus does a better job.
The new citation reports in WoS are swell indeed. The h-index (not Hirsch index so Hirsch told us) implementation is good indeed, and very useful to apply to all kind of search results. Journals amongst others, as Jacsó did for some of the LIS journals. I also hope to see these results included in the Journal citation reports next year.
But after all this praise some grumps as well. It is a rather old one. Sloppy indexing by ISI. Jacsó came with the example of author names. Also issues, volumes and page numbers go wrong quite often. Although Moed (2005, p.175) has established that this is only in the order of about 7-8%.
We use WoS quite often within the library setting itself for collection development. We look at our authors and examine their reference lists. That runs quickly into the tens of thousands references, and we would love to see some uniformity in the journal names of those references. This is clearly illustrated when you do a search for a journal in the cited reference search. With the cited reference search you should use the abbreviated journal name (as opposed to the full search where full journal names are requested, but I am not complaining). Take for instance the AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH, the official abbreviation is AUST J AGR RES. But don't dare to think that on entering you have found all instances of this journal. Oh no!. You have found only 33,276 citations for this abbreviation. But you missed AUST J AGR RESEARCH (1), AUST J AGRIC RES (1158), AUST J AGRIC RS (23), AUST J AGRIS RES (1) AUSTR J AGR RES (11417) AUSTR J AGR RESEARCH (1) AUSTR J AGR RESER (6) AUSTR J AGR RS (2) AUSTR J AGRI RES (24) AUSTR J AGRIC RES (127) AUSTR J AGRIC RESEAR (1) AUSTR J AGRICULT RES (6) AUSTR J AGRICULTURAL (251?) AUS J AGR RES (35) AUS J AGRIC RES (3) AUS J AG RES (19) AUST J AG RES (90) AUST J AGIC RES (3) and there are probably a few other variations I missed. My point is however, if you analyze a large number of references you inevitably end up with a lots of variations of journal names. This doesn’t only apply for this particular instance. We try to monitor the usage of about 8000 journals. With sloppy data as in the above example it becomes a real tour de force, which I would love to see better facilitated on the side of ISI. Obvious corrections in the data should therefore be done on the primary data, rather than in the software which takes place to some extent.

But to end this post on a positive note, I quote Jacsó's conclusions in full

"ISI has kept adding new content and software features through regular updates. The latest services clustering of results set by several criteria, the instant calculation and superbly informative and compact visualization of new citation measures, such as the sum of times a paper was cited (including and excluding self-citation, the average citations per item, the Hirsch-index, the almost instant display of charts for the distribution of articles and citations per year by authors, journals, organizations or topic, the exporting of these details into a spreadsheet format, or downloading to a free Web version of EndNote, represent more than a series of evolutionary steps. It is a breakthrough for those interested in citation analysis, but did not have the resources to calculate key citation performance measures, or did not have the software to format them to the whims of the publishers' manuscript guidelines."

References
Jacsó, P. (2007). "Web of Science." Peter's digital reference shelf Retrieved Jan 2007 from http://www.gale.com/reference/peter/200701/wos.htm.
Moed, H. F. (2005). Citation analysis in research evaluation. Dordrecht, Springer. 346p.

Labels: English

In the Netherlands there is a elaborate discussion about the involvement of companies in the blogosphere. Marketingfacts has taken Unilever as a case study. Last Thursday an interesting starting Dutch newspaper, NRC Next, had a really interesting example of the installation of a so called webcare team by UPC. UPC is a Dutch cable company that has a really pitiful reputation for service. The UPC webcare team takes part in discussions in the blogosphere, and has the capacity to rectify reported problems etc. UPC did not go as far as Microsoft to rent a top blogger to give UPC a more human face.
Interesting to point this discussion to Google (once again). Google had already for a long time the famous GoogleGuy who reacted on forum discussions and the blogosphere. Later Matt Cutts started its own blog and has organized some really great PR for Google. It is speculated that GoogleGuy and Matt Cutts are the same person. I don't know for sure and don't really care.
On my grumpy post yesterday on the erratic behaviour of Google Blogsearch, there was a prompt reaction from a Google engineer. Yes indeed, there was something wrong on the Blogsearch end of the spectrum. It had nothing to do with the tango from Blogger to Blogger Beta to New Blogger. He will investigate the matter into detail and will report back later. That's great. Jeremy I eagerly await the results.
It is also exemplary how Google tackles this whole complex marketing issue of blogs and virals. Interacting in blogs and forums was not sufficient anymore, so they had Matt Cutts starting his own blog with a strong voice. Matts' blog can also be effective in setting the stage, commanding the discussion, and in the worst case scenarios function as a lightning rod. Thereby is Matt a frequent keynote speaker or attendent of all kind of Search Engine Conferences.
In conclusion the UPC webcare team is not sufficient to improve their image. They are on the right track, but have to take it a step further.

Labels: English

At this moment I am really busy doing my homework for the state of the Dutch Biblioblogosphere. One of the measures I wanted to use is the number of posts written last year. Google Blogsearch is the ideal candidate since they have date limitations, and you can search for the blog version of the site: command, namely blogurl:. Checking two very regular blogs I got results I can't trust whatsoever. Edwin is a daily blogger, posts at least twice a day, perhaps three times. But the Google Blogsearch for the number of posts on his blogspot only gave 221 results, and that's without date limitations. I expected at least double that number. The other blog I checked, also a blogger hosted blog by Margreet van den Berg, yielded only 89 results. She has been Blogging for years already, one post a day. So there should have been heaps more. Checking my own Blog, managed by Blogger, but hosted on my own site gave only 385 results. Slightly better than the other 2 examples, but a few days ago I celebrated my 500th post.
The real pity is that at Ask Blogsearch there is no proper Site: like command, nor at Icerocket. With Technorati you can't limit easily on date ranges. And Feedster has to small a dataase to be meaningful for Dutch blogs.
So I got stuck.
I can only hypothesize that the indexing of Blogger posts in Google Blogsearch was somehow affected by changeover to the New Blogger.

Perhaps just a little, but that I would make the headlines in Wired News I had never imagined.

Labels: English

Een blogpost, een berichtje op Nedbib-L en we zijn vier biblioblogs verder. Klaas Jan Mollema was de eerste op mijn radar. Hij reageerde al op mijn blogpost net na middernacht (zoals een goed blogger betaamt). Blijkt dat zijn "blog" al sinds oktober 2003 bestaat. Het is een blog in de zin van een chronologisch georganiseerd verhaal, echter niet gemaakt met de bekende blogsoftware, geen RSS feeds, maar een ouderwets html/php product. Puur ambachtelijk werk bijna. Misschien dat er binnenkort een rss feed aan toegevoegd wordt. Onderwijl gewoon een rss-scraper gebruiken om zijn webstek te volgen.
De derde en vierde biblioblog voor vandaag pikte ik op omdat ik zag dat er een linkje naar een recente post van mij was. Ecobibl is een kersverse blog van Marianne van der Heijden die recent bij het NIOO (nog even een verassing welke vestiging) aan de slag is gegaan. Ze is een ervaren blogger, want daarnaast heeft zij al wat langer lopende een weblog over X-ref, het Zweedse bibliotheeksysteem dat populair is in medische kringen. Vooralsnog lijkt het alsof ze beide blogs in de lucht blijft houden. Dat lijkt mij een heksentour.
De laatste blog werd aan het eind van de middag door Edwin in het commentaar getipt. De nieuwe blog is de nieuwsbrief van de Overijsselse bibliotheken. De eerste set berichten duiden meer op een officieel mededelingen kanaal, dan een blog met een persoonlijke stem. De feed komt wel in mijn reader, maar ik moet nog even denken over het exacte mapje.

Labels: Dutch

Het is alweer bijna een jaar geleden dat ik het overzicht blogde van de Nederlandse biblioblogosphere. Tijd voor een Update. Ik heb net met dank aan Richard de linker kollom weer in orde gekregen en wat nog belangrijker is, de lijst is ook geupdatet. Ik had links en rechts verschillende lijstjes. Mijn readers liepen niet allemaal even synchroon, soms had ik over biblioblogs gepost maar de 'sidebar'niet geupdatet. Afijn, wat harken en er is weer een lijst. In totaal staan er nu 58 biblioblogs op. Bijna een verdrievoudiging van het aantal van vorig jaar.
Bij deze een oproep om biblioblogs die er niet op staan maar die er wel bij horen (of die er af moeten) via het commentaar op deze post door te geven.

Labels: Dutch

A day or two ago the sidebar on the main page of the blog went missing. It is still there, but all the way down the posts on the mainpage. It is published in the main collum of the blog. But when you open an individual blogpost at its permanent link, the sidebar is there where it should be.
Probably just another hiccup of the new Blogger.
What is badly missing though is a cure.
Has anybody any ideas?

Labels: English

"Libraries should aim to be uplifting, innovative and inspiring
cultural, social and intellectual spaces, encouraging debate and collaboration,
and desirable as places to be in, even in the age of ubiquitous internet
access."

Labels: English

September last we saw a new layout of the Tilburg University Library website. The new layout was part of the overhaul of the university Website. In December it was our Library of Wageningen UR website underwent a complete facelift. Wait, it was more. Also the underlying database for the library content managemet systems changed from a (outdated) minisis database to Oracle.
It was only last week that I noticed that the library website from Utrecht University also underwent some major changes, looking at the date of the Dutch news item announcing the changes it appears that the makeover took already place in November. On the English version of their website this newsitem announcing the new website design is still the first newsitem.
What is really striking are the two main entrances to the resources offered at the front page. The catalogue for the paper heritage collection next to Omega, the interesting database giving access to most of the electronic content. Most, since not all licensed content can be added at the moment yet. The user is apperently forced to search in either one or the other database. The remainder of the rich library resrouces are well hidden behind a simple text link indicating 'general collection'. There you find the Electronic databases (general) link, on the susbequent page you can select for either the alphabetical list of databases or a selection of databases per descipline, eg. medicine. When you're English speaking doctor and in the need to consult PubMed, attempting to browse to pubmed, he or she might end up with RSI. In the Dutch version there is a click less. Odd inconsitencies.
It is also interesting to visit the various faculty libraries when you are in for surprises. Have a quick look at Physics and Astronomy, Mathematics or veterinary science in comparison with Geosciences. Only the last one has a clear relation with the main library website.
What I misses most, are some decent library newsletters. I think I should start with some spies to be alerted on changes on their news pages.

Labels: English

ISIhighlyCited.com is a free database from ISI in which they list all of the 250 most cited scientists, over the last 10 years, in the world for each of the 22 major subfields of science. These fields range from Agriculture to Social sciences and everything in between.
Once a scientist is selected for this database they are notified by ISI (Thomson Scientific) and are kindly requested to complete their scientific CV which is listed in the database. So the researchers themselves are in charge in the way they are presented in this database. For instance when Martijn Katan moved from Wageningen University to the VU in Amsrerdam he changed his address in that database.

Labels: Affiliations, English, ISI, isihighlycited.com, University rankings

That Library and information science is not exactly big science should come as a surprise. Sometimes I complain about the lack of scholarly discourse in this field in the Netherlands. On the other hand when looking at table of contents of the LIS scholarly journals I am sometimes very disappointed as well. I do see a lot of journals in this field on a week to week basis. The lack of any data supporting articles, proper testing or statistical analyses are sometimes lacking entirely.
Perhaps the sub-field of scientometrics has advanced the most in theory formation and testing of quantifiable hypotheses. I am still struggling with fully comprehending the dense article by van Raan (2005) on the statistical properties of bibliometric indicators.
Who sketched my surprise when I noted a commentary in the last issue of 2006 of Nature by Lehmann et al. (2006). Who simply write "there have been few attempts to discover which of the popular citation measures is best and whether any such measure is statistically reliable." In their paper, they go on and demonstrate, based on an analysis of papers by theoretical physicists deposited in Spires, that average number of citations is a superior indicator for the scientific quality, in terms of both accuracy and precision, of an individual scientist than Hirsh's h-index. Another quote from their paper "The best that can be said of publication frequency is that it measures industry rather than ability." Followed by "The widespread use of publication frequency — with or without an impact factor — is disturbing and requires further study."
This paper should gain a lot of attention by scientometricians, and open up new research into the foundations of the statistical properties of bibliometric indicators.
Interesting note about this commentary in Nature (which is only available to subscribers) , is that this commentary is based on a slightly longer article deposited more than a year ago in ArXiv which is freely available. According to Citebase this papers has only been downloaded 8 times to date. I assume this will increase considerably after this publication in Nature.

Literature
Lehmann, S., A.D. Jackson & B.E. Lautrup (2005). Measures and mismeasures for scientific quality. Arxiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0512238.
Lehmann, S., A.D. Jackson & B.E. Lautrup (2006). Measures for measures. Nature 444: 1003-1004. 10.1038/4441003a.
van Raan, A.F.J. (2005). Statistical properties of bibliometric indicators: Research group indicator distributions and correlations. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 57(3): 408-430. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.20284 .

Labels: English

Vorige week alleen nog een hoop grond na alle graafwerkzaamheden. Ondertussen is er afegelopen dinsdag 6 kuub beton in de fundering gestort. Zaterdag zijn we begonnen met het maken van de bekisting voor de muur. Hier zie je de binnenkant van de bekisitng en het betonijzer. Nu maar hopen dat het volgend weekend weer zulk mooi weer is, dan staat er over anderhalve week een stevig muurtje.
Op de grote ruimte in de voorgrond komt de trap.
Ach het is weer eens wat anders dan het dagelijks werk.

It was through Dutch Libraries who was linked by Library Mistress that I was reminded about the Blogging Librarians on Frappr. I once joined that Frappr as well. But when I looked around again today, no trace left anymore. The Netherlands was pretty much empty. I know that Gerard was on the Frappr once as well. So I joined the map again.

11 januari 2007

 

Een voorbeeld om in het regeerakkoord op te nemen

 

Why I get a kick out of this

10 januari 2007

 

Best free reference Web sites for 2006 anounced

 

Google voor kinderen

09 januari 2007

 

Google Tool Bar Page Rank update underway (updated and confirmed)

08 januari 2007

 

De Google datacenters en PageRank

07 januari 2007

 

500th post

 

Voor de komende en gaande hoofdredacteur van de IP

 

Graafwerkzaamheden in de kerstvakantie

 

Google Scholar still 5 months behind with PubMed indexing

 

Uncontrolled wildcard searches in Google

04 januari 2007

 

Waarom ik te veel Google, en er wel eens heel erg moe van word

02 januari 2007

 

"Search" on the banished word list for 2007

 

New reference management software for mac lovers

01 januari 2007

 

Cooperation between cinema and library

 

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