Bibliometric approximation of a scientific specialty by combining key sources, title words, authors and references

Abstract

Bibliometric methods for the analysis of highly specialized subjects are increasingly investigated and debated. Information and assessments well-focused at the specialty level can help make important decisions in research and innovation policy. This paper presents a novel method to approximate the specialty to which a given publication record belongs. The method partially combines sets of key values for four publication data fields: source, title, authors and references. The approach is founded in concepts defining research disciplines and scholarly communication, and in empirically observed regularities in publication data. The resulting specialty approximation consists of publications associated to the investigated publication record via key values for at least three of the four data fields. This paper describes the method and illustrates it with an application to publication records of individual scientists. The illustration also successfully tests the focus of the specialty approximation in terms of its ability to connect and help identify peers. Potential tracks for further investigation include analyses involving other kinds of specialized publication records, studies for a broader range of specialties, and exploration of the potential for diverse applications in research and research policy context.

Comparison of publication-level approaches to ex-post citation normalization

“…A partial explanation for the observation that reference values given by the item-oriented approach that incorporate terms in the calculation of similarity estimates tend to perform worse than just using cited references might simply be that terms introduce more noise when publications from the same scientific problem area are to be identified compared with the case when cited references are used. While terms are connected to the communicative aspect of fields and specialties as it captures specific terminology, cited references connects to the cognitive aspects of a given scientific problem area as they mirror a shared body of theories, methods and important papers (Rons 2018). Subject matter mismatch is probably more likely to happen when terms (as are far less specific than cited references) are used compared to when cited references are used for similarity estimation, especially using a quite simple and straightforward bag-of-terms approach as we do here.…”

Technological Innovation in the Food Industry: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…Bibliometric methods are used to help making important decisions on specialized topics (Rons, 2018). This is because it allows the monitoring and tracking of systems of scientific development (Benavides-Velasco et al, 2013) and provide useful information for researchers (Albort-Morant & Ribeiro-Soriano, 2016;Rey-Marti et al, 2016).…”

Obtención de documentos de investigación sobre la competitividad de las pequeñas y medianas empresas: un enfoque basado en las redes de autores

“…To provide an overview of the developed work, the presentation of results concerning publications used two approaches: one employing quantitative bibliometric indicators, and the other employing scientometric analysis based on maps of authors' networks, drawn up using a computational tool. Computational tools may be helpful in circumstances such as extending collaborations toward less familiar areas or in interdisciplinary research (Rons, 2018). Quantitative bibliometric indicators, such as number of articles published, number of citations and h-index allow the analysis of scientific performance of authors and their works (Cobo et al, 2015;Baier-Fuentes et al, 2018).…”