The definition and calibration of biomedical subfields

Abstract

This paper first explains the need to define subfields of science by means of "filters" that selectively retrieve papers from a database, and then describes how such filters are constructed and calibrated. Good filters should have precision and recall of the order of 90% so as to be representative of a subfield; they are created by an interactive partnership between an expert in the subject and a bibliometrician. They are based primarily on the use of title keywords, often in combination rather than singly, and specialist journals. Their calibration depends on experts marking lists of papers extracted by the filter as relevant, don't know or not relevant. This allows the actual size of a subfield to be estimated and hence the relative importance accorded to it within a major field of science. It permits organisations and countries to see their contributions to individual scientific subfields in detail.

Evaluation of books as research outputs in history of medicine

“…For some time now the Wellcome Trust's Policy Unit has been defining filters for the 90 Research Evaluation Auf!USt 2001 selective retrieval from bibliographic databases of papers in various biomedical subfields (Lewison. 1996;Lewison, 1999). These filters nearly always consist of two parts, one a list of specialist journals and one a list of title keywords, often in combination, and papers are taken if they satisfy either condition.…”

Atlas of Spanish science: proposal of a scientific information system

“…Aunque la información departamental está incompleta y poco normalizada y no siempre se corresponde con los departamentos, unidades o centros (24), hay trabajos que estudian la definición de los campos científicos a través de la denominación de los departamentos en el campo address word (25) (26) (27). Este método no parece ofrecer de una manera consistente una conexión entre los límites que define el nombre del departamento y la disciplina temática, y la depuración que se requiere para tal objetivo excede las pretensiones de este proyecto.…”

“…Doc. Cient., 27,1,2004 de base de datos relacional, por lo que el hospedaje del web se hará en una plataforma NT como Windows 2000 Server, y como servidor el IIS (Internet Information Server). La conexión con la base de datos se realizará mediante ODBC (Object Data Base Connection) a través de la tecnología ASP (Active Server Pages).…”

Are finance, management, and marketing autonomous fields of scientific research? An analysis based on journal citations

“…Such methodologies provide tailormade delimitations of scholarly and technological fields, often on a paper-by-paper basis, based on co-citation analysis (Small 1977;Small and Sweeney 1985;Schwechheimer and Winterhager 2001), co-word analysis (Callon et al 1983;Bhattacharya and Basu 1998;Noyons et al 1999;Lewison 1999), combined co-citation and co-word analysis (Braam et al 1991), and author co-citation analysis (White and McCain 1998). More recently, domain visualization has emerged as a powerful tool for representing the internal structure of a field (Garfield 1986;Noyens and van Raan 1998;Börner et al 2003;Borgman 2007).…”