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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2013

How to address the role of a journal as a knowledge transfer vector between disciplines ? A case study relying on citations analysis

Résumé

Science and technology (ST) journals are a usual diffusion support for scientific results, in which researchers submit their works to peer evaluation and supply them to reuse by a scientific audience. In this diffusion process, each journal plays the role of a knowledge transfer vector. If we hypothesize that a journal has an observed audience perimeter either limited to its own scope or bridging the gap between its scope and other disciplines, then we address the issue: can we formalize a typology in order to characterize its knowledge transfer vector role? Can the analysis of ex ante citations (bibliographies of the articles published in the journal) and ex post citations (reuse of the journal articles) help us to detect how wide the perimeter of the journal audience is? The approach we undertake in this work is directly inspired on the methodology we developed within the framework of the European project DBF1 (Hörlesberger et al., 2013), the goal of which was to support the selection process of research projects submitted for financing to the ERC (European Research Council). We have produced an analytical methodology based on the informetric modeling of criteria used by ERC scientific experts. For this purpose, indicators were elaborated in accord with the strategic definition of frontier research by the ERC. In particular, an indicator was devised to characterize any project that "...stands at the forefront of creating new knowledge... is responsible for fundamental discoveries... achieves occasional revolutionary breakthroughs...." (EC, 2005), that we defined as innovativeness. To this end, we studied the evolution of a scientific domain, using clustering techniques that generate a representation of the publication scientific landscape based on its extracted terminology, with a diachronic analysis of clustering results (Roche et al., 2011). In the present work, we do not focus anymore on the evolution of a particular scientific field but on the comparative analysis of two landscapes built from a given ST journal: the former consists of the cited references, extracted from the bibliography, of all its publications in a given year; the latter consists of any article, published in any journal, that cites articles of the studied journal published in the said given year. As with a "spot the difference" game, we aim at answering the question: is there a difference between those two landscapes in term of scientific field representation? Specifically: does the second landscape include only fields already present in the first one, or conversely, display new fields? This diachronic analysis will help us define if the journal plays its role of knowledge transfer vector either exclusively within the restricted perimeter of its original scope or also beyond the frontier defined by this perimeter. 1 This work was partially inspired by DBF (Development and Verification of a Bibliometric Model for the Identification of Frontier Research), a Coordination and Support Action of the IDEAS specific programme of the European Research Council (ERC). The authors wish to acknowledge this contribution. In the following we present the operated methodology, the extracted data and the tools used. The results of two case studies performed on two different journals are then discussed.
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hal-00959408 , version 1 (17-03-2014)

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  • HAL Id : hal-00959408 , version 1

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Ivana Roche, Nathalie Vedovotto, Dominique Besagni, Claire François, Marianne Hörlesberger, et al.. How to address the role of a journal as a knowledge transfer vector between disciplines ? A case study relying on citations analysis. 14th Collnet Meeting, Aug 2013, Tartu, Estonia. ⟨hal-00959408⟩

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