Bibliometrics & Social Networks

I've been reviewing some efforts to reveal the invisible college.

Garfield’s impact factor similar approaches attempt to measure prominence. More useful, citation signals can strengthen information retrieval by improving successive searches and pointing people to nearby work. Trudi Bellardo, writing on co-citation analysis, noted “the greater the number of times a pair of documents are cited together the more likely it is that they are related in content.” (Library Research, 2, 231-237)

Obvious, yes. Still few digital libraries use it well. Citation analysis has a long history, but outside the classic citation indexes in science and the social sciences, where does it show up in everyday search? Citeseer takes advantage of it. Maybe the implementation is simply more visible there. Other systems may hide it inside query expansion, related-article panels, or ranking logic.

These bibliographic couplings scale into large conversations(pdf) when you read it as scholarly discourse. It’s a small world when viewed in the context of social networks.

LIS courses cover this including offerings at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Peter Morville taps an SN to learn about SNA.