Practical potentials of Bradford's law: a critical examination of the received view

Nicolaisen, Jeppe; Hjørland, Birger

doi:10.1108/00220410710743298

Cited by 54 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…1b). This is an expected trend in scientific literature (Nicolaisen and Hjørland 2007), highlighting that our dataset is a good representation of the overall pattern of citation in ecology.…”

Section: Dataset Usedmentioning

confidence: 83%

“…To assess the academic performance of individual researchers, institutes, universities and even countries, for several purposes such as funding and selection of applicants for a position, decision makers can use citation frequency as a surrogate for publication quality (Aksnes 2003a; Leimu and Koricheva 2005a). However, a small number of scientific journals publish most of the ''relevant'' articles (a pattern known as Bradford's law) and, thus, receive more citations (Nicolaisen and Hjørland 2007). Indeed, approximately 20% of articles account for 80% of all citations (known as the 20/80 phenomenon), and the majority of publications are never or rarely cited (Garfield 2006).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Weak evidence for determinants of citation frequency in ecological articles

et al. 2010

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Citation frequency has been considered a biased surrogate of publication merit. However, previous studies on this subject were based on small sample sizes and were entirely based on null-hypothesis significance testing. Here we evaluated the relative effects of different predictors on citation frequency of ecological articles using an information theory framework designed to evaluate multiple competing hypotheses. Supposed predictors of citation frequency (e.g., number of authors, length of articles) accounted for a low fraction of the total variation. We argue that biases concerning citation are minor in ecology and further studies that attempt to quantify the scientific relevance of an article, aiming to make further relationships with citation, are needed to advance our understanding of why an article is cited.

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Section: Dataset Usedmentioning

confidence: 83%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Weak evidence for determinants of citation frequency in ecological articles

et al. 2010

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“…As such, they are better known within the LIS community than the other numbers described in this chapter, and need less exposition. An appreciation of these laws, and the numbers which come from them, informs practice in areas such as collection management, information retrieval, institutional bibliometrics and the assessment of impact of social media; see, as examples, Corby (2003), Nicolaisen & Hjørland (2007), Bhavnani & Peck (2010), Åström & Hansson (2012) and Hoffman & Doucette (2012).…”

Section: The Distribution Numbers: 90 9 Andmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information’s Magic Numbers: The Numerology of Information Science

Bawden¹,

Robinson²

2016

Theories of Informetrics and Scholarly Communication

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regularities of nature can be captured by simple mathematical relationships is a long way from Blair's (1976, p. 81) notion that "numbers, quite distinct from their empirical use, become a language, as full of metaphor and dimension as poetry". However, before sneering at the idea that numbers in themselves can have a significance, we should remember that the long-standing, and still influential, Platonic tradition within science views numbers as having their own objective existence, and indeed that the physical universe and everything in it is, at root, a mathematical structure made of numbers (see Tegmark [2014] for a recent and accessible account of this position).As well as numbers per se, numerology is often also taken, usually critically, to mean an enthusiasm for simple numerical formulae, usually involving integers, capturing some significant aspect of reality. These have been seen in both the sciences and the social sciences: notoriously, the British physicist and astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington spent many years seeking simple integer relationships as the clue to the universe (Kilmister, 2005). It is clear that there are strong relations between numbers, the physical world and cultural issues, as is clearly shown by the sequence of "kissing numbers," the number of spheres which in any space exactly bound a further identical sphere (Weisstein, n.d.); two points on a one dimensional line bound a third point, six circles circumscribe a seventh, and twelve balls circumscribe a thirteenth. The resultant sequence-three, seven, thirteen-captures the principle significant/lucky/unlucky numbers in numerous cultures, and is numerologically present in the 'leader with twelve followers' meme of Christ, Osiris, King Arthur, and others (Blair, 1976). 4 Therefore, despite the dangers of slipping into a facile numerology, simple numbers and integer relations may still be worth investigating, in science, in the social sciences, and specifically in LIS.There are, in fact, relatively few such simple numbers and number relations in our discipline and what there are have come in from adjacent disciplines. We will consider seven, a suitably magic number in itself, of these. In truth, they are not all very simple: one is very large, some have alternatives, one is a sequence, and one is infinite. These numbers encapsulate a variety of issues: how much information there, or could be; the optimal size of communicating groups; the structure of information networks; the distribution of information activities; and the 4 It would have been nice if the four-dimensional kissing number, which was not known until 2003 (Pfender & Ziegler, 2004) and cannot be intuitively grasped like the small dimension equivalents, had also related to some culturally significant number. Disappointingly, it was shown to be 24, and 25 does not appear to have significance in any culture.

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“…Como reconoció Cronin (2008), la cienciometría no estuvo exenta del giro sociológico del estudio de la ciencia; sin embargo, si somos más precisos cabría afirmar que desde sus orígenes la cienciometría estuvo influenciada por una idea externalista que postula que la sociedad y la historia son determinantes en el desarrollo de la ciencia (Cronin, 2008;Eller, 2016 A esta primera fase la denominaremos fase normativa de la cienciometría (Cronin, 2004). Durante esta etapa se concibieron las principales leyes de la cienciometría, a saber: la ley de Zipf, la Ley de Lotka y la ley de Bradford (Nicolaisen & Hjørland, 2007). La ley de Zipf, describe la relación entre las palabras de un texto y el orden de serie de estas palabras.…”

Section: Introductionunclassified

La cienciometría, su método y su filosofía: Reflexiones epistémicas de sus alcances en el siglo XXI

Millán

Polanco

Ossa

et al. 2017

Rev. Guillermo Ockham

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Este artículo discute las teorías implícitas y epistemológicas en los diferentes momentos del desarrollo de la cienciometría. Identificamos tres momentos en la historia de la cienciometría a saber: Big science y fase normativa, Sociología Funcionalista y Cienciometría sin científicos. Nuestra tesis es que la cienciometría terminó siendo usada para apalancar el empirismo práctico necesario para generar los indicadores avasallados a imperios editoriales y a rankings que no develan ni descubren nada significativo de la producción científica. Además, sostenemos que la cienciometría olvido su legado de la filosofía y sociología. La cienciometría está en deuda y más que una justificación pragmática debe contar con una propuesta teórica y/o una fundamentación conceptual. Los estudios cienciométricos requieren de una formación y especialización técnica y conceptual, que permitan explicar el desarrollo de la ciencia y sus consecuencias.

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Practical potentials of Bradford's law: a critical examination of the received view

Cited by 54 publications

References 31 publications

Weak evidence for determinants of citation frequency in ecological articles

Weak evidence for determinants of citation frequency in ecological articles

Information’s Magic Numbers: The Numerology of Information Science

La cienciometría, su método y su filosofía: Reflexiones epistémicas de sus alcances en el siglo XXI

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