Can citation analysis of Web publications better detect research fronts?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We present evidence that in some research fields, research published in journals and reported on the Web may collectively represent different evolutionary stages of the field, with journals lagging a few years behind the Web on average, and that a “two‐tier” scholarly communication system may therefore be evolving. We conclude that in such fields, (a) for detecting current research fronts, author co‐citation analyses (ACA) using articles published on the Web as a data source can outperform traditional ACAs using articles published in journals as data, and that (b) as a result, it is important to use multiple data sources in citation analysis studies of scholarly communication for a complete picture of communication patterns. Our evidence stems from comparing the respective intellectual structures of the XML research field, a subfield of computer science, as revealed from three sets of ACA covering two time periods: (a) from the field's beginnings in 1996 to 2001, and (b) from 2001 to 2006. For the first time period, we analyze research articles both from journals as indexed by theScience Citation Index(SCI) and from the Web as indexed byCiteSeer. We follow up by an ACA ofSCIdata for the second time period. We find that most trends in the evolution of this field from the first to the second time period that we find when comparing ACA results from theSCIbetween the two time periods already were apparent in the ACA results fromCiteSeerduring the first time period.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.078 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.052 | 0.054 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".