theorywatch

I am delighted to say that ARIST volume 42 with the chapter on “Mapping Research Specialties” that I co-authored with Steve Morris has now been published.

Here’s a link to Steve Morris’s home page with his other papers and patents. (Steve, if there’s ever a webfestschrift in your honor, I’m planning to tell our inside story of the very first cartoon ever published in ARIST. Never let it be said that bibliometricians lack a sense of humor!)

An abstract of the chapter follows.

Research specialties consist of relatively small self-organizing groups of researchers that tend to study the same research topics, attend the same conferences, publish in the same journals, and also read and cite each others’ research papers. Specialties are important in science because of their crucial role in the creation and validation of scientific knowledge.

This chapter is divided into two sections. The first section reviews in detail the science of modeling research specialties, recounts the history of the study of specialties from Daryl Chubin’s seminal work of three decades ago, and then discusses current work in the study of specialties in terms of his original categories of the “bibliographical, cognitive, communicative, and sociological” approaches

In the second section the mapping of specialties is reviewed in terms of a simple working model of a specialty that includes the network of researchers, base knowledge, and the specialty’s formal literature. We review goals and processes of mapping, and using a network model of a specialty-specific collection of papers, discuss bibliometric methods of extracting information about the specialty: 1) researchers and research teams, 2) experts and authorities, 3) research subtopics, 4) groups of references representing base knowledge, 5) research vocabularies, 6) archival journals for research reports, and 7) archival journals for base knowledge. We review methods of characterizing individual bibliographic entities: authors, papers, journals, references, and index terms. We further review methods to identify and characterize entity groups in a specialty and methods to visualize those groups and the overlapping relations among them.