The interdisciplinary engineering knowledge genome

Parallel to the concept of the human genome and its impact on biology and other disciplines, we revealed a similar concept in engineering sciences, termed the ??Interdisciplinary Engineering Knowledge Genome??, which is an organized collection of system and method ??genes?? that encode instructions for generating new systems and methods in diverse engineering disciplines. Resting on the firm mathematical foundation of combinatorial representations, the Interdisciplinary Engineering Knowledge Genome unifies many engineering disciplines, providing a basis for transforming knowledge between them, supporting new educational practices, promoting inventions, aiding design, and bootstrapping new discoveries in engineering and science. Given the formal underlying combinatorial representations, these merits could be automated. This paper elucidates this new concept and demonstrates its value and power in engineering design.     

Citation and co-citation analysis to identify core and emerging knowledge in electronic commerce research

The purpose of this paper is to explore the core and emerging knowledge of electronic commerce (e-commerce) research. Data was collected from the top six e-commerce journals from 2006–2010. A total of 1,064 electronic commerce related articles and 33,173 references were identified. There were 48 high value research articles identified using a citation and co-citation analysis. Using statistical analysis including factor analysis, multidimensional scaling, and cluster analysis, we identified five research areas: trust, technology acceptance and technology application, e-commerce task-related application, e-markets, and identity and evaluation. We also identified emerging core knowledge, information systems success. The findings of this study provide core knowledge and directions for researchers and practitioners interested in the electronic commerce field.     

Scientometrics for management of science: collaboration and knowledge structures and complexities in an interdisciplinary research project

Scientometrics - Scientific research has been facing the problem of increase in size and complexity. Hence, the utilization of scientometric methodology for management of science has been expected...     

Citation bias in medical journals

Multivariate statistical analysis of the citation profiles of urology and related journals (i.e. the relative extent to which each journal cites itself and other journals within a set) has highlighted hidden correlations. We reveal the existence of a ‘transatlantic’ rift in citation practice and of a confined discipline-oriented world which interfaces weakly with many other disciplines. We also interpret the results of our analyses in terms of basic and clinical research and examine whether there is a time-related selectivity in citation. Taken together, our results call for a serious appraisal of present-day research trends and of their evaluation. The open question is how to create a terrain that will foster original, possibly interdisciplinary, research in developed nations whilst maintaining cultural individuality.     

Citation networks in information science

The method of co-citation analysis is used to build citation networks in information science. As data base the first 13 volumes (1961–1973) of the leading Soviet journal in the field (Nauchno-tekhnicheskaya Informatsiya) were used. The results reveal the topical structure of information science, the communities of authors and the names of single leading scientists. The evaluation of scientists' work is based on two measures: productivity (with or without co-authorship) and popularity (popularity of authors and popularity of papers).     

Citation patterns in scientific revolutions

The method of classifying citations according to the context in the citing paper, previously developed by the authors, is applied to the study of scientific revolutions. In particular, the BCS theory of superconductivity ind the non-conservation of parity are investigated. The results can be easily interpreted in terms of the characteristic features of these discoveries. It is suggested that these two examples represent two different types of “paradigm” changes, thus prompting a considerable refinement of the usual dichotomous picture of “normal”vs. “breakthrough” science.     

Shaping the interdisciplinary knowledge network of China: a network analysis based on citation data from 1981 to 2010

This study builds the interdisciplinary knowledge network of China, which is used to catch the knowledge exchange structure of disciplines, and investigates the evolution process from 1981 to 2010. A network analysis was performed to examine the special structure and we compare state of the networks in different periods to determine how the network has got such properties. The dataset are get from the reference relationship in literature on important Chinese academic journals from 1980 to 2010. The analytical results reveal the hidden network structure of interdisciplinary knowledge flows in China and demonstrate that the network is highly connected and has a homogeneous link structure and heterogeneous weight distribution. Through comparing of the network in three periods, that is 1981–1990, 1991–2000 and 2001–2010, we find that the special evolution process, which is limited by the number of nodes, play an important influence on interdisciplinary knowledge flows.     

Exploring the direction and diversity of interdisciplinary knowledge diffusion: A case study of professor Zeyuan Liu's scientific publications

Scientometrics - Inspired by the concept of “potential energy” in physics, we propose a new indicator to measure the “direction” of interdisciplinary knowledge diffusion...     

An interdisciplinary course in engineering synthesis

The interdisciplinary courseSynthesis of Engineering Systems has been offered by the Engineering Design Research Center over the last 3 years. Students are exposed to two major paradigms for design synthesis: mathematical programming and knowledge-based expert systems. The former emphasizes the mathematical formulation of optimization problems that involve discrete and continuous variables for the selection of topologies and parameters in engineering systems. The latter emphasizes representations and search techniques for processing qualitative knowledge for synthesis of designs by heuristic classification and hierarchical decomposition.An integral part of the course is a term project in which the students apply both synthesis approaches to a design problem in their domain. The projects deal with different engineering problems, reflecting the disciplinary background of the students. The projects explore a number of different schemes for combining mathematical optimization and knowledge-based approaches. Some use knowledge-based techniques for preliminary screening or as critics of mathematical optimization, while others show a direct comparison between the two approaches. This paper summarizes the experience gained in the course, illustrates representative student projects, discusses major results and conclusions, and provides a perspective for future research needs and educational approaches in this area.     

Citation accuracy in environmental science journals

Citations in five leading environmental science journals were examined for accuracy. 24.41% of the 2,650 citations checked were found to contain errors. The largest category of errors was in the author field. Of the five journals Conservation Biology had the lowest percentage of citations with errors and Climatic Change had the highest. Of the citations with errors that could be checked in Web of Science, 18.18% of the errors caused a search for the cited article to fail. Citations containing electronic links had fewer errors than those without.     

The citation system: Citation networks as repeatedly focusing on difference, continuous re-evaluation, and as persistent knowledge accumulation

It can be shown that claims of a lack of theories of citation are also indicative of a grate need for a theory which links science dynamics and measurement. There is a wide gap between qualitative (science dynamics) and quantitative (measurement) approaches. To link them, the present study proposes the use of the citation system, that potentially bridges a gap between measurement and epistemology, by applying system theory to the publication system.     

Impact measures of interdisciplinary research in physics

In an evaluation of physics research programs in the Netherlands, held in 1996, assessments of research by expert panels were supplemented with bibliometric analysis. This latter analysis included the calculation of several bibliometric indicators, among which some taking journal impact measures as a baseline. Final outcomes of this evaluation provided an opportunity to re-examine the results of this assessment from the perspective of the degree of interdisciplinarity of programs involved. In this paper we discuss results of this latter analysis, in particular with respect to the relation between several citation based indicators and interdisciplinary research in Dutch physics. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Citation choice and innovation in science studies

What are the factors which render an article more likely to be cited? Using social network analysis of citations between published scholarly works, the nascent field around Social Studies of Science is examined from its incipience in 1971 until 2008. To gauge intellectual positioning, closeness centrality and orthodoxy rates are derived from bibliographic networks. Bibliographic orthodoxy is defined as the propensity of an article to cite other highly popular works. Orthodoxy and closeness centrality have differing effects on citation rates, varying across historical periods of development in the field. Effects were modest, but significant. In early time periods, articles with higher orthodoxy rates were cited more, but this effect dissipated over time. In contrast, citations associated with closeness centrality increased over time. Early SSS citation networks were smaller, less structurally cohesive and less modular than later networks. In contrast, later networks were larger, more structurally cohesive, more modular and less dense. These changes to the global SSS knowledge networks are linked to changes in the scientific reward structure ensconced in the network, particularly regarding orthodoxy and closeness centrality.     

Citation lag analysis in supply chain research

Interdisciplinary research is expected to contribute to industrial and economic development. However, due to expansion of knowledge and the fragmentation of research fields, knowledge dissemination among different research fields is rare and we need a methodology for measuring such dissemination and promoting it. In this paper, we introduce a citation lag analysis of inter- and intra-clusters extracted by citation network analysis as a new indicator to represent the speed of knowledge diffusion in subfields of a research field. A case study was performed within supply chain research to investigate knowledge integration among its subfields. Based on the analysis, we discuss knowledge structure and reciprocal influence of subfields in supply chain research. This study contributes to offering a new approach for analyzing and understanding the development of boundary spanning research.     

Citation burst prediction in a bibliometric network

Scientometrics - In the field of computer science, both journal and conference publications are considered valuable. The popularity of an author is mostly determined by the paper’s high...     

Citation increments between collaborating countries

International collaboration enhances citation impact. Collaborating with a country increments the citations received from it. But some collaborating countries provide greater increments in this sense than others, and likewise some countries receive greater increments from their partner countries than others. We observed a certain tendency for these increments to be lower in countries with greater impacts. Also, all the countries studied had higher Domestic Impacts as a result of collaborating, although this increment was less than that obtained from other countries. Finally, there were differences in the behaviour of the countries between the various scientific disciplines, with the effects being greatest in Social Sciences, followed by Engineering.