Abstract
During Eugene Garfield’s (EG’s) lengthy career as information scientist, he published about 1500 papers. In this study, we use the impressive oeuvre of EG to introduce a new type of bibliometric networks: keyword co-occurrences networks based on the context of citations, which are referenced in a certain paper set (here: the papers published by EG). The citation context is defined by the words which are located around a specific citation. We retrieved the citation context from Microsoft Academic. To interpret and compare the results of the new network type, we generated two further networks: co-occurrence networks which are based on title and abstract keywords from (1) EG’s papers and (2) the papers citing EG’s publications. The comparison of the three networks suggests that papers of EG and citation contexts of papers citing EG are semantically more closely related to each other than to titles and abstracts of papers citing EG. This result accords with the use of citations in research evaluation that is based on the premise that citations reflect the cognitive influence of the cited on the citing publication.
Highlights
Assessments based on bibliometric data is the cornerstone of modern research evaluation processes (Bornmann 2017)
We use the impressive oeuvre of Eugene Garfield (EG) to introduce a new type of bibliometric networks: keyword co-occurrences networks based on the context of citations, which are referenced in a certain paper set
We use the impressive oeuvre of EG to introduce a new type of bibliometric networks: keyword cooccurrence networks based on the context of citations, which are referenced in a certain paper set
Summary
Assessments based on bibliometric data is the cornerstone of modern research evaluation processes (Bornmann 2017). Research evaluation without bibliometrics seems no longer imaginable today. The foundation for this importance of bibliometrics was laid by Eugene Garfield (EG). EG conceptualized a scientific citation index designed as Shepard’s Citations—a system which tracked how US court cases cited former ones—and published this concept in Science (Garfield 1955). His invention of the index ‘‘revolutionized the world of scientific information and made him one of the most visionary figures in information science and scientometrics’’ (van Raan and Wouters 2017). With algorithmic historiography, Garfield et al (1964) developed—based on the concept of citations as recursive operations—one of the first bibliometric network types which led to the network program HistCiteTM (Leydesdorff 2010)
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