本研究利用Scientometrics期刊論文以及其參考文獻為研究資料，根據多種資訊判斷科學計量學領域是否已經是硬科學，並分析這個領域的其他特性。本研究所使用的科學計量學資訊有引用文獻的相對年齡(relative age of the cited literature)、論文作者間的關係、論文題名的詞語模式(patterns of words in the titles of these articles)等。
根據Price的知識增長理論(theory of knowledge growth)，科學家會引用本身領域的文獻，因此，如果有研究前沿(research fronts)存在於這個領域，便會產生立即效應。Price指標(Price index)可以測量立即效應(immediacy effect)，Price指標較大表示引用文獻的相對年齡較低，例如Price(1970)測得生物化學和物理的Price指標值約在60%到70%，社會科學大約在42%附近。Crane(1972)則認為科學會形成作者間彼此緊密相連的社群，因此本研究分析作者間的合著關係和引用的關係，並且利用網絡分析技術探討科學社群的凝聚程度，並且測量作者在網絡的位置連結性以及結構的相似性，根據這些資訊進行叢集，集結彼此間連結性強的作者形成一個叢集，或是形成位置相似的作者叢集。另外，Rip and Courtial (1984)和Leydesdorff (1989a)
指出題名上的詞語可視為是出版品的認知訊息(cognitive message)的指標，詞語在題名上的共現可視為是詞語間關係存在的紀錄，因此本研究也利用網絡分析技術探討詞語的共現網絡。
以作者資料來看， 779筆論文資料共計由669位不同的作者完成，有接近3/4的作者(488位)僅出現在一筆論文資料上，每位作者平均出現在1.8筆論文資料上，其作者生產力符合Lotka分布，並且大部分(61%)的論文是單一作者，平均每篇論文有1.6位作者。合著作者的論文資料中，大多數的作者都僅和一到兩位同事合作，合著網絡相當破散，但幾個較大的網絡與作者在同一機構任職、參與同一研究計畫或者具有共同的研究興趣有關。
Scientometrics期刊論文的作者引用網絡則呈現高度凝聚的狀態。779筆論文資料中有441筆被其他Scientometrics期刊論文引用，每筆Scientometrics期刊上的論文引用的論文平均有19.4%同樣是Scientometrics期刊的論文。發表超過1篇以上論文的作者共有181位，其中的130位作者有引用其他129位作者的資料，利用作者之間的彼此互相引用關係，發現形成的集團(clique)大多與作者任職機構有關，也有一個集團是成員間曾彼此辯論(debate)而產生。最後，題名上的詞語共現網絡也同樣有高度凝聚的情形。從上面的資訊可以判斷科學計量學領域已經由多種的學科背景在認知與社會性上整合而成，但並沒有發現研究前沿的現象。
In more than one respect, Scientometrics displays the characteristics of a social science journal. Its Price Index amounts to 43.0 percent, and is remarkably stable over time.
The majority of the published items in Scientometrics has been written by a single author. Moreover, the network of co-authorships is highly fragmented: most authors cooperate with no more than one or two colleagues.
Both the citation networks of the authors and the network of title words indicate that the field is nonetheless highly cohesive.
The characteristics of the publications in this journal, and the patterns of the bibliometric relations among them, may therefore indicate the type and extent of the cognitive and social integration of the various disciplinary backgrounds into scientometrics as a field.
The question, in other words, is how "hard" scientometrics is, and how strongly its knowledge is codified. These properties can be measured in terms of:
a) the relative age of the cited literature, the so-called "Price Index",
b) the relations among the authors of articles published in Scientometrics; and
c) the pattern of words in the titles of these articles.
According to Price's theory of knowledge growth (Price 1965), science distinguishes itself from other fields of study by the way scientists refer to their literature (Price 1970). The existence of "research fronts" in science supposedly leads to an "immediacy effect", which can be measured in terms of the so-called "Price Index".
The Price Index is defined as "the proportion of the references that are to the last five years of literature" (Price 1970). Price estimated that this index would vary between 22 and 39 percent if no immediacy effect were present. [1] A field that was all research front and with no general archive might have a Price Index of 75 to 80 percent.
From his analysis of 162 journals, Price (1970) concluded: "Perhaps the most important finding I have to offer is that the hierarchy of Price's Index seems to correspond very well with what we intuit as hard science, soft science, and nonscience as we descend the scale." Biochemistry and physics are at the top, with indexes of 60 to 70 percent, the social sciences cluster around 42 percent, and the humanities fall in the range of 10 to 30 percent.
Science is, on the whole, practised in tightly knit communities in which the authors address one another (Crane 1972).
Co-authorship relations can be considered as indicators of co-operation. [3]
The meaning of citation relations is less clear, given the ongoing citation debate (MacRoberts and MacRoberts 1989; Cozzens 1989; Luukkonen 1990; Leydesdorff and Amsterdamska 1990; Woolgar 1991). But whatever the precise meanings of citations may be, citations can be considered as sociometric data, and the resulting network can accordingly be analyzed (cf. Shrum and Mullins 1988).
We analyzed the extent to which the authors are connected to one another, i.e. the cohesiveness of the network, as well as the pattern displayed by each author in relation to all other authors, i.e. the position of authors in the network.
We also analyzed the similarities among authors in both these dimensions of the matrices, i.e. we clustered strongly connected authors as well as authors in similar positions. Direct as well as indirect linkages between the authors are involved in this analysis.
Strong cliques are sets of authors connected by relations in such a way that all members of the clique are connected to one another, and anyone for whom this holds is included in the clique. The inclusion criterion is less strong for weak cliques, in which all pairs within the clique must have relationships with all other pairs, and anyone with a relation to or from a member of the clique is included.
Strong structural equivalence clusters are sets of authors with completely identical positions in the network (the distance dP between them is zero). Weak structural clusters are sets of authors with a significant similarity in their patterns of relations (the distance dP is small).
As noted, we wished to know whether a structurally codified semantics of scientometrics exists or whether, on the contrary, the articles in Scientometrics use the different terminologies of the various disciplines surrounding scientometrics.
Given the functions of titles of articles, the words in these titles can be considered as indicators of the cognitive message of the publication (Rip and Courtial 1984; Leydesdorff 1989a). The co-occurrence of words in titles can be considered as an indication of the existence or non-existence of relations between these words (Callon et al. 1983).
Since 1978, 779 items have been published in Scientometrics. They contain 12,341 references to the scientific literature. [10]
The number of publications per year in the journal increases in a linear way (Fig. 1). [11] After a steep growth during the first three years, the number increases by 3.5 publications per year.
The number of references per year shows a comparable pattern, although somewhat more irregular. Every publication contains on average 15.8 references (cf. Yitzhala, 1991). Since 1986, this number has become stable at an average of 15 references per publication (Fig. 2).
The publications in Scientometrics were written by 669 different authors. On average, every author published 1.8 times and every paper was written by 1.6 authors. Nearly three-fourth of the authors (488 or 73 percent) published only once in Scientometrics. The distribution of productivity among the authors is a Lotka distribution (Fig. 4).
The average Price Index of Scientometrics is 43.0 percent. ... The Price Index varies between 34.0 and 51.4 percent (Fig. 5). The regression line is not significant. [12] Apparently, the index displays neither rise nor fall since 1978.
Recently, Schubert and Maczelka (1993) concluded from an analysis of Scientomettics in 1980-81 and 1990-91 that the journal has moved slightly from the "soft" (social) towards the "harder" (natural) sciences. They drew this conclusion from the rise of the Price Index from 35 percent to 42 percent between these measurement points. This observation is, however, based on only two measurements. Because of the statistical fluctuations in the value of the Price Index over time, any conclusion can be drawn regarding the development of the Price Index if one restricts oneself to only two measurement points.
In accordance with Price's theory, the number of references to literature of a specific age rises until the cited literature is two years older than the citing literature, and then falls off (Fig. 7). Note that this decline is gradual. Apparently, only a small "immediacy effect" is visible in scientometrics.
A general phenomenon in science is the growth of the number of co-authored scientific articles, relative to the total scientific production (Luukkonen et al. 1992; Abt 1992).
In Scientometrics, however, 61 percent of the articles have been written by a single author. This share is stable over time.
The network of co-authorships is highly fragmented. ... With the exception of three subgroups, most co-authors cooperate with no more than one or two colleagues.
Comparison of the composition of the weak structural equivalence clusters with the relational cliques reveals that two clusters are identical: a group of authors from Leiden (Van Raan et al.) and a group of authors with various institutional affiliations, probably best characterized as the "co-word analysis group". So, these two groups have distinct identities, with respect both to their relations and to their positions in the network.
Some clusters seem constituted by the institutional affiliations of the authors. This holds for the Leiden group and for the authors around ISI (cluster 3). In other cases, nationality appears to be the binding force. This holds for the group in Hungary (cluster 5), the Belgian informetricians (cluster 10) and the Spanish scientometricians (cluster 6). However, cluster 1 can best be characterized by its research program (co-word analysis). Cluster 2 seems to consist of authors from Sussex together with CHI Research Inc. Thus, co-author relations are not only institutionally defined; shared interests and common intellectual goals play a role as well.
To sum up, scientometrics is a fragmentary field of co-authorships. The authors are highly selective in their co-authorship relations with one another. Co-authorships are defined neither exclusively by social nor only by intellectual factors. Both dimensions shape the pattern of co-authorships.
With respect to the number of solitary authors and the large number of isolated small clusters, scientometrics exhibits the pattern of a social science.
Of the 779 articles published in Scientometrics, 411 were subsequently cited one or more times in Scientometrics. The share of references to Scientometrics (as a percentage of all references) has stabilized around an average of 19.4 percent since 1987.
Of the 181 authors in the core set, 130 authors cite one another. So, 51 (or 28.2 percent) of the authors publishing more than one article in Scientometrics from 1978 till 1993 are neither citing nor cited within this group of authors.
The core set of authors in Scientometrics is found to be highly cohesive in terms of their mutual citation relations. All these authors are members of one single weak clique. Moreover, a majority of these authors (88) also belongs to one strong clique (Table 5).
The picture is different if we exclude all indirect relations from the analysis. This "fine structure" of the citation matrix is shown in Table 6, where 13 strong cliques and 6 weak cliques are revealed. Most strong cliques seem to coincide with shared institutional affiliations. The exception is clique 9, which indicates the existence of a debate among the members of this clique.
The most striking feature of the network of title words of articles published in Scientometrics is its cohesiveness. All words cluster together in a single strong component clique (Table 8). If only direct relations are included, all words cluster together in a single weak component clique. This means that all words are either used together in a title or share a common co-word.
Thus, the language of scientometrics is both strongly unified and weakly codified. This strong cohesiveness is a stable characteristic of the titles in Scientornetrics, from the very start of the journal. Perhaps a distinct discourse already existed before the journal was founded. In any case, it constitutes a textual identity of scientometrics as a field, one probably different from the various mother disciplines. Thus a process of de-differentiation seems to have occurred not only in the patterns of citing (and being cited) but also at the cognitive level.
The interpretation of the Price Index is complicated because of these variations within disciplines. If we, nevertheless, take the Price Index preliminary as an indicator of "hardness", scientometrics belongs to the group of relatively hard social sciences. At the same time, it stays unequivocally within the social science range. Taken literally, Price's dream has therefore not come true, since he postulated the emergence of a completely new type of social science with a natural science character. But if we reformulate his goal a posteriori in a more modest way, as the building of a relatively hard social science, it did come true.
The value of the Price Index appears stable over the years. Since a number of other indicators also exhibit stability, this seems to suggest the existence of some scientometric identity. For example, the journal expands at a regular rate, while the percentage of co-authored papers increases only very slowly. The origin of this stability can best be explained by the finding that the community of researchers who have published more than once in Scientometrics acts as a tightly knit network.
In addition to the co-authorships within various institutes, and partly overlapping with this structures, there are national co-authorship relations, like those among the Belgian informetricians, and programmatic co-authorship relations, like those among the users of the French co-word instrument. In general, co-authorship relations are firmly embedded in existing social structures, both at the national and at the community level.
These various strong graphs of co-authors, however, are structurally embedded in the communication structure as indicated by textual indicators. Both in terms of citation relations and in terms of title-words the network is very cohesive, while the structural dimensions of codification are less clear.
In summary, the community of authors publishing in Scientometrics is well integrated, while there are no indications of an exclusive paradigm or a research front.
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