by Philip Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen, Oct. 13, 2008
Excerpt:
Earlier this year, Davis reported on a study by sociologist James Evans suggesting that online access to scientific journals is leading to more recent citations and a narrowing of the diversity of those articles which are cited.
This study was not taken at face value, and three information scientists (Vincent Larivière, Yves Gingras, and Éric Archambault) all at the University of Quebec in Montreal have released a new analysis taking aim at the diversity claim.
Their manuscript, “The decline in the concentration of citations, 1900-2007,” deposited September 30th in the arXiv, uses a simpler methodology. They report the percentage of papers that received at least one citation, the percentage of papers needed to account for 20%, 50%, and 80% of total citations, and the Herfindahl-Hirschman index, a measure used to estimate market concentration.
. . . What makes this controversy interesting is that both studies make theoretical sense. A narrowing of science conforms to attention economics and preferential attachment (why the cited get more citations and the rest get ignored); a broadening of science conforms to information foraging theory, the principle of least effort, and the increasing ease of retrieving relevant articles. The results of both studies imply something different about the state of science, whether scientific information is being disseminated efficiently, and whether the literature is reflecting more diversity of opinion or more conformity.
Read the entire post at: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2008/10/13/citation-controversy/
Read more commentary on the topic at:
Great minds think (too much) alike. Economist; 7/19/2008, Vol. 387 Issue 8589, p89-89, 2/3p (available to UI affliates only)
