A scientometric approach to communication research: the Marshall McLuhan case
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The application of the Cameo (Characterizations Automatically Made and Edited Online) bibliometric technique -one of the most advanced methodologies for the analysis and representation of information- to the research history of Marshall McLuhan allows us to create a scientific portrait of this Canadian communications expert. The Cameo portrait identifies McLuhan’s professional and academic interests, the authors that most heavily influenced his wave-breaking theories and the evolution of his line of thought in current trends of Communication. By analysing the relational information of citations contained in articles about McLuhan in the ISI Web of Science, we were able to create a map of his intellectual sojourns, including signposts of the most influential authors in his professional career, along with a second representation that shows the “footprints” his writings have left in the world.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.016 | 0.056 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.032 | 0.071 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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".