Some Strong Bibliometric Patterns

Prof. em. Howard D. White
Drexel University, Philadelphia/USA
Zeit: Donnerstag, 31. Mai 2012, 10 Uhr
Ort: GESIS – Leibniz Institut für Sozialwissenschaften, Raum Ost I
Unter Sachsenhausen 6-8
50667 Köln

Am Donnerstag, den 31. Mai, wird Gastwissenschaftler Prof. em. Howard White zum Abschluss seines Forschungsaufenthaltes bei GESIS einen Vortrag zum Themenbereich "Bibliometrie" halten. 

“In line with my recent work on cognitive explanations of the bibliometric distributions, I will show that the core terms in such distributions tend to have highly interpretable semantic associations with the seed term, while scatter terms do not. This appears to be a general phenomenon. Moreover, when a simple weighting formula from information retrieval (tf*idf) is applied to all terms in a distribution, an interesting partition results: terms in the revised core have highly specific associations with the seed term, while those in the revised scatter zone are associated with it more broadly and vaguely, and are harder to interpret. This helps explain the popularity of tf*idf weighting. To illustrate, I will use the technique I call “pennant diagrams” to display data such as journals contributing articles to a subject, indexing terms applied to a seed author, and authors co-cited with a seed author.” Howard D. White Howard D. White is Prof. emeritus at Drexel University’s College of Information Science and Technology. In 1993 he won the Research Award of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) for distinguished contributions in his field. In 2004 he won ASIST’s highest honor for career achievement, the Award of Merit. In 2005 the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics honored him with the biennial Derek de Solla Price Memorial Medal for contributions to the quantitative study of science. He has published numerous works on bibliometrics and co-citation analysis, evaluation of reference services, expert systems for reference work, innovative online searching, social science data archives, library publicity, American attitudes toward library censorship, and literature retrieval for meta-analysis and interdisciplinary studies.