Bibliometrics have become commonplace and widely used by authors and journals to monitor, to evaluate and to identify their readership in an ever-increasingly publishing scientific world. With this contribution, we aim to investigate the semantic proximities and evolution of the papers published in the online journal Cybergeo since its creation in 1996. We propose a dedicated interactive application that compares three strategies for building semantic networks, using keywords (self-declared themes), citations (areas of research using the papers published in Cybergeo) and full-texts (themes derived from the words used in writing). We interpret these networks and semantic proximities with respect to their temporal evolution as well as to their spatial expressions, by considering the countries studied in the papers under inquiry (Cybergeo being a journal of geography, most articles refer to a well-defined spatial envelope). Finally, we compare the three methods and conclude that their complementarity can help go beyond simple statistics to better understand the epistemological evolution of a scientific community and the readership target of the journal.
The increase in the number of publications has made more difficult for authors to situate their work within previous literature, especially on subjects studied from different disciplinary viewpoints. Besides, new data analysis techniques and new bibliometrics data sources provide an opportunity to map and navigate scientific landscapes. We introduce here an open-source and open-access web application designed for the multi-dimensional exploration of a journal content, including the mapping of geographical, semantic and citations networks. The application is profiled and implemented for the geography journal Cybergeo, a generalist geography journal which receives contributions from multiple sub-disciplines. We suggest that such initiatives are crucial to promote open science and reflexivity.
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