Case Study in Interdisciplinary Scientific Communication: A Decade of the INDECS Journal (original) (raw)

Interdisciplinary Communication

2013

Communication is fundamental in scientific practice and an integral part of academic work. The practice of communication cannot be neglected by those who are trying to advance scientific research. Effective means should continuously be identified in order to open channels of communication within and among disciplines, among scientists and between scientists and the general public.The increasing importance of interdisciplinary communication has been pointed out by an increasing number of researchers and scholars, as well as in conferences and roundtables on the subject. Some authors even estimate that “interdisciplinary study represents the future of the university.” Since interdisciplinary study is “the most underthought critical, pedagogical and institutional concept in modern academy” it is important to think and reflect, and even do some research, on this concept or notion. Research and practice based reflections with regards to this issue are important especially because the inc...

The Differences Among Disciplines in Scholarly Communication: A Bibliometric Analysis of Theses

Libri, 2009

The purpose of this paper is to express the differences and similarities of inter-disciplinary scholarly communications through the citation analysis of theses. For this purpose, a total of 29,289 citations from 391 theses between years 1968-2007 were investigated using citation analysis. Samples were chosen according to layer-sampling techniques from 16 disciplines of four basic subject areas (social sciences, pure science, engineering, and arts and humanities).

The delineation of an interdisciplinary specialty in terms of a journal set: The case of communication studies

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2009

A journal set in an interdisciplinary or newly developing area can be determined by including the journals classified under the most relevant ISI Subject Categories into a journal-journal citation matrix. Despite the fuzzy character of borders, factor analysis of the citation patterns enables us to delineate the specific set by discarding the noise. This methodology is illustrated using communication studies as a hybrid development between political science and social psychology. The development can be visualized using animations which support the claim that a specific journal set in communication studies is increasingly developing, notably in the "being cited" patterns. The resulting set of 28 journals in communication studies is smaller and more focused than the 45 journals classified by the ISI Subject Categories as "Communication." The proposed method is tested for its robustness by extending the relevant environments to sets including many more journals.

Diversity of references as an indicator of the interdisciplinarity of journals: Taking similarity between subject fields into account

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2015

The objective of this article is to further the study of journal interdisciplinarity, or, more generally, knowledge integration at the level of individual articles. Interdisciplinarity is operationalized by the diversity of subject fields assigned to cited items in the article's reference list. Subject fields and subfields were obtained from the Leuven-Budapest (ECOOM) subject-classification scheme, while disciplinary diversity was measured taking variety, balance, and disparity into account. As diversity measure we use a Hill-type true diversity in the sense of Jost and Leinster-Cobbold. The analysis is conducted in 3 steps. In the first part, the properties of this measure are discussed, and, on the basis of these properties it is shown that the measure has the potential to serve as an indicator of interdisciplinarity. In the second part the applicability of this indicator is shown using selected journals from several research fields ranging from mathematics to social sciences. Finally, the oftenheard argument, namely, that interdisciplinary research exhibits larger visibility and impact, is studied on the basis of these selected journals. Yet, as only 7 journals, representing a total of 15,757 articles, are studied, albeit chosen to cover a large range of interdisciplinarity, further research is still needed.

Twenty-Two Years of Science Communication Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

Journal of Baltic Science Education, 2023

In recent years, the number of academic studies in the field of science communication has increased. It is important to make a general examination of the studies on science communication and to reveal their distribution according to years and countries in order to draw the framework of science communication studies. The main aim of this study was to analyze the science communication-based articles published in journals in the Web of Science (WoS) index in the last 22 years. Within the scope of the study, articles were scanned by typing keywords such as "topic", "title", "keywords" science communication from the WoS database and 322 articles were examined by bibliometric analysis method. As a result of the study, the articles published between 2000 and 2022 were examined according to years, countries, funding organizations, research area, publishing houses, country scores and citations. According to the results, most articles were published in 2022(N = 58); USA, UK, Australia, Germany ranked first with the number of articles and SAGE (N = 74) ranked first in publisher distributions. This study offers a global perspective on science communication and proposes a vision for future research.

Content‐based and algorithmic classifications of journals: Perspectives on the dynamics of scientific communication and indexer effects

Journal of the American Society for …, 2009

The aggregated journal-journal citation matrix-based on the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) of the Science Citation Index-can be decomposed by indexers and/or algorithmically. In this study, we test the results of two recently available algorithms for the decomposition of large matrices against two content-based classifications of journals: the ISI Subject Categories and the field/subfield classification of . The content-based schemes allow for the attribution of more than a single category to a journal, whereas the algorithms maximize the ratio of within-category citations over between-category citations in the aggregated category-category citation matrix. By adding categories, indexers generate between-category citations, which may enrich the database, for example, in the case of inter-disciplinary developments. The consequent indexer effects are significant in sparse areas of the matrix more than in denser ones. Algorithmic decompositions, on the other hand, are more heavily skewed towards a relatively small number of categories, while this is deliberately counter-acted upon in the case of content-based classifications. Because of the indexer effects, science policy studies and the sociology of science should be careful when using content-based classifications, which are made for bibliographic disclosure, and not for the purpose of analyzing latent structures in scientific communications. Despite the large differences among them, the four classification schemes enable us to generate surprisingly similar maps of science at the global level. Erroneous classifications are cancelled as noise at the aggregate level, but may disturb the evaluation locally.

Communication research. Bibliometric Analysisof the most-cited ISI indexed Journals

This article examines some of the most common methodological problems in the evaluation of academic journals in the field of communication, based on the content analysis of the ten journals with the highest impact factors in the Social Sciences Citation Index. The analysis focuses on establishing the academic and research origins and links of the authors of the articles published by these scientific publications, as well as the most predominant subject matters, genres and methodologies among the articles of these publications. This research aims to achieve two objectives: On the one hand, to analyse the role of the evaluation of communication journals in the assessment of research, which will allow us to show the difficulties of applying the bibliometric methods used by Thomson Scientific to determine the impact of journals and, on the other hand, to establish a development framework for those Spanish communication journals that meet some of the requirements of the Social Sciences Citation Index but are not yet indexed in it, either because their impact factor is still low or because of their lack of international dissemination. This research has been financed by the

A Bibliometric Study of Communications Published in Journal of Informetrics from 2012 to 2016

2019

This research work exemplifies a bibliometric study of communications published in the Journal of Informetrics from 2012 to 2016. The main schema and source used for this study is the Web of Science domain. A bibliometric analysis of 459 records was conducted using MS Excel. The study indicated that the maximum number of articles were in the year 2016, representing 23% of total contributions. Top contributing organizations during the study period were Max Planck Society of Germany, Indiana University of USA, and University Roma Tor Vergata of Italy. Top contributing authors included Lutz Bornmann, Mike Thelwall, and Ludo Waltman. China led top contributing countries followed by the United States of America and Italy. Authorship collaboration was dominated by multi-authored contributions as 72.11% of the communications were multi-authored while 27.89% of communications were single-authored. The degree of collaboration of JOI communications was found to be 72.1%. The average number of authors for JOI communications was 2.44. The highest number of references and tables/figures were appended to the communications published in JOI during 2016. Most of the papers (76%) accepted for publication in JOI were published within two months. This study investigated papers published in the Journal of Informetrics during 2012- 2016 only. This paper is valuable for teachers, researchers, and librarians who want to see the contemporary trends of published articles in the Journal of Informetrics and seek possible areas for further research.

The construction of interdisciplinarity: The development of the knowledge base and programmatic focus of the journalClimatic Change, 1977-2013

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2015

Climate change as a complex physical and social issue has gained increasing attention in the natural as well as the social sciences. Climate change research has become more interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary as a typical Mode-2 science that is also dependent on an application context for its further development. We propose to approach interdisciplinarity as a co-construction of the knowledge base in the reference patterns and the programmatic focus in the editorials in the core journal of the climate-change sciences-Climatic Change-during the period 1977-2013. First, we analyze the knowledge base of the journal and map journal-journal relations on the basis of the references in the articles. Second, we follow the development of the programmatic focus by analyzing the semantics in the editorials. We argue that interdisciplinarity is a result of the co-construction between different agendas: The selection of publications into the knowledge base of the journal, and the adjustment of the programmatic focus to the political context in the editorials. Our results show a widening of the knowledge base from referencing the multidisciplinary journals Nature and Science to citing journals from specialist fields. The programmatic focus follows policy-oriented issues and incorporates public metaphors.