Bibliometrics & Social Networks

Some efforts to reveal the invisible college.

Yes, there is Garfield’s impact factor and other applications that attempt to assess importance, or prominence, but I think it’s even more interesting to think about it as a way to improve successive searches in information retrieval. It’s a way to point the user to related information. Such as Trudi Bellardo pointed out concerning co-citation analysis, “the greater the number of times a pair of documents are cited together the more likely it is that they are related in content.” (Library Research, 2, 231-237)

Yes I know it sounds obvious, but it seems like I don’t see many digital libraries taking advantage of it. Citation analysis in general has a long history, but other than the traditional citation indexes (social science & science), where is it being used? Citeseer takes advantage of it. Is it just more obvious in Citeseer? Are others using it in more subtle ways for query expansion or something?

These bibliographic couplings add up to large scale conversations(pdf) when viewed as scholarly discourse. It’s a small world when viewed in the context of social networks.

There are LIS courses examining it such as this course from U 0f I Urbana-Champaign.

Peter Morville taps an SN to learn about SNA.