Science studies are persistently challenged by the elusive structures of their subject matter, be it scientific knowledge or the various collectivities of researchers engaged with its production. Bibliometrics has responded by developing a strong and growing structural bibliometrics, which is concerned with delineating fields and identifying thematic structures. In the course of these developments, a concern emerged and is steadily growing. Do the sets of publications, authors or institutions we identify and visualise with our methods indeed represent thematic structures? To what extent are results of topic identification exercises determined by properties of knowledge structures, and to what extent are they determined by the approaches we use? Do we produce more than artefacts? These questions triggered the collective process of comparative topic identification reported in this special issue. The introduction traces the history of bibliometric approaches to topic identification, identifies the major challenges involved in these exercises, and introduces the contributions to the special issue.
Enhancing publications has a long history but is gaining acceleration as authors and publishers explore electronic tablets as devices for dissemination and presentation. Enhancement of scholarly publications, in contrast, more often takes place in a Web environment and is coupled with presentation of supplementary materials related to research. The approach to enhancing scholarly publications presented in this article goes a step further and involves the interlinking of the “objects” of a document: datasets, supplementary materials, secondary analyses, and post-publication interventions. This approach connects the user-centricity of Web 2.0 with the Semantic Web. It aims at facilitating long-term content structure through standardized formats intended to improve interoperability between concepts and terms within and across knowledge domains. We explored this conception of enhancement on a small set of books prepared for traditional academic publishers. While the project was primarily an exercise in development, the conclusion section of the article reflects on areas where conceptual and empirical studies could be initiated to complement this new direction in scholarly publishing.
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