INSPEC Database Research Articles

Journal co-citation analysis of semiconductor literature

The purpose of this study is to map semiconductor literature using journal co-citation analysis. The journal sample was gathered from the INSPEC database from 1978 to 1997. In the co-citation analysis, the data compiled were counts of the number of times two journal titles were jointly cited in later publications. It is assumed that the more two journals are cited together, the closer the relationship between them. The journal set used was the 30 most productive journals in the field of semiconductors. Counts of co-citations to the set of semiconductor journals were retrieved from SciSearch database, accessed through Dialog. Cluster analysis and multi-dimensional scaling were employed to create two-dimensional maps of journal relationships in the cross-citation networks. The following results were obtained through this co-citation study: The 30 journals fall fairly clearly into three clusters. The major cluster of journals, containing 17 titles, is in the subject of physics. The second cluster, consisting of 9 journals, includes journals primarily on material science. The remaining cluster represents research areas in the discipline of electrical and electronic engineering. All co-cited journals share similar co-citation profiles, reflected in high positive Pearson correlation. Two hundred and ninety-six pairs (68%) correlate at greater than 0.70. This shows that there is strong relationship between semiconductor journals. Five individual journals in five paired sets with co-citation frequency over 100,000 times include Physical Review B, Condensed Matter; Physical Review Letters; Applied Physics Letters; Journal of Applied Physics; and Solid State Communications.

Foreword

This issue of References to Contemporary Papers on Acoustics contains material which has been downloaded from the Dialog Corporation (www.dialog.com) and made available from the INSPEC database (Institution of Electrical Engineers, London, United Kingdom). The INSPEC accession number is included with each reference so that users of this publication who also have computer access to their database may call up the reference directly to read the abstract and additional reference material which is available.

Investigating trends in acoustics research from 1970-1999.

Text data mining is a burgeoning field in which new information is extracted from existing text databases. Computational methods are used to compare relationships between database elements to yield new information about the existing data. Text data mining software was used to determine research trends in acoustics for the years 1970, 1980, 1990, and 1999. Trends were indicated by the number of published articles in the categories of acoustics using the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) as the article source. Research was classified using a method based on the Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS). Research was further subdivided into world regions, including North and South America, Eastern and Western Europe, Asia, Africa, Middle East, and Australia/New Zealand. In order to gauge the use of JASA as an indicator of international acoustics research, three subjects, underwater sound, nonlinear acoustics, and bioacoustics, were further tracked in 1999, using all journals in the INSPEC database. Research trends indicated a shift in emphasis of certain areas, notably underwater sound, audition, and speech. JASA also showed steady growth, with increasing participation by non-US authors, from about 20% in 1970 to nearly 50% in 1999.

Searching scientific databases for guides to experiment and theory

Based on information derived from bibliographic titles in the INSPEC database, this report identifies trends in experimental and theoretical materials research. It considers three specific questions: which chemical elements in the given literature are most widely studied by experiment and simulation; how did the experiment and theory of these materials change from 1989 to 1999; and can we observe any trends from such work?.

Interactive query expansion: A user-based evaluation in a relevance feedback environment

A user-centered investigation of interactive query expansion within the context of a relevance feedback system is presented in this article. Data were collected from 25 searches using the INSPEC database. The data collection mechanisms included questionnaires, transaction logs, and relevance evaluations. The results discuss issues that relate to query expansion, retrieval effectiveness, the correspondence of the on-line-to-off-line relevance judgments, and the selection of terms for query expansion by users (interactive query expansion). The main conclusions drawn from the results of the study are that: (1) one-third of the terms presented to users in a list of candidate terms for query expansion was identified by the users as potentially useful for query expansion. (2) These terms were mainly judged as either variant expressions (synonyms) or alternative (related) terms to the initial query terms. However, a substantial portion of the selected terms were identified as representing new ideas. (3) The relationships identified between the five best terms selected by the users for query expansion and the initial query terms were that: (a) 34% of the query expansion terms have no relationship or other type of correspondence with a query term; (b) 66% of the remaining query expansion terms have a relationship to the query terms. These relationships were: narrower term (46%), broader term (3%), related term (17%). (4) The results provide evidence for the effectiveness of interactive query expansion. The initial search produced on average three highly relevant documents; the query expansion search produced on average nine further highly relevant documents. The conclusions highlight the need for more research on: interactive query expansion, the comparative evaluation of automatic vs. interactive query expansion, the study of weighted Web-based or Web-accessible retrieval systems in operational environments, and for user studies in searching ranked retrieval systems in general.

Communicating knowledge in the real world

The author describes the issues that he believes should be at the forefront of IEE members' minds as the IEE enters a new millennium. The emphasis is on the importance of knowledge and its growth. He discusses the INSPEC database, the IEE's Continuing Professional Development programme which is based on the identification and dissemination of information and knowledge in both established and emerging technologies. The author stresses the importance of communicating the knowledge gained to others.

A process for mining science & technology documents databases, illustrated for the case of "knowledge discovery and data mining"

This paper presents a process of mining research & development abstract databases to profile current status and to project potential developments for target technologies, The process is called “technology opportunities analysis.” This article steps through the process using a sample data set of abstracts from the INSPEC database on the topic o “knowledge discovery and data mining.” The paper offers a set of specific indicators suitable for mining such databases to understand innovation prospects. In illustrating the uses of such indicators, it offers some insights into the status of knowledge discovery research

Interactive graphical queries for bibliographic search

This article presents Islands, an interactive graphical interface for construction, modification, and management of queries during a search session on a bibliographic database. The Islands interface is compared to the Dialog Interface on a search of the INSPEC database.

Mapping a research area at the micro level using co-word analysis

The present study investigates the use of co-word analysis method to understand the micro structure of a research speciality. This study is done in the area of Condensed Matter Physics (CMP) taking two time-periods, 1990 and 1995. Based on concurrent set of journals occurring in the subject heading list of CMP in these two time-periods, a database is created after downloading articles present in these journals from the INSPEC database. Using words extracted from the titles from the created database, suitable co-word pairs are constructed. These words, and co-word pairs are explored further to understand their linkages with each other through network analysis methods. Dynamics, within the CMP across 1990 and 1995, are investigated through the comparison of the words, co-word pairs and structurally equivalent blocks. The results are projected using multi-dimensional scaling. The important conclusions of this study are discussed.

Performance issues in distributed shared-nothing information-retrieval systems

Many information-retrieval systems provides access to abstracts. For example, Stanford University, through its FOLIO system, provides access to the INSPEC database of abstracts of the literature on physics, computer science, electrical engineering, etc. In this article, this database is studied by using a trace-driven simulation. It focuses on a physical-index design that accommodates truncations, inverted-index caching, and database scaling in a distributed shared-nothing system. All three issues are shown to have a strong effect on response time and throughput. Database scaling is explored in two ways. One way assumes an “optimal” configuration for a single host and then linearly scales the database by duplicating the host architecture as needed. The second way determines the optimal number of hosts given a fixed database size.

A parallel computing approach to creating engineering concept spaces for semantic retrieval: the Illinois Digital Library Initiative project

This research presents preliminary results generated from the semantic retrieval research component of the Illinois Digital Library Initiative (DLI) project. Using a variation of the automatic thesaurus generation techniques, to which we refer to as the concept space approach, we aimed to create graphs of domain-specific concepts (terms) and their weighted co-occurrence relationships for all major engineering domains. Merging these concept spaces and providing traversal paths across different concept spaces could potentially help alleviate the vocabulary (difference) problem evident in large-scale information retrieval. In order to address the scalability issue related to large-scale information retrieval and analysis for the current Illinois DLI project, we conducted experiments using the concept space approach on parallel supercomputers. Our test collection included computer science and electrical engineering abstracts extracted from the INSPEC database. The concept space approach called for extensive textual and statistical analysis (a form of knowledge discovery) based on automatic indexing and co-occurrence analysis algorithms, both previously tested in the biology domain. Initial testing results using a 512-node CM-5 and a 16-processor SGI Power Challenge were promising.

On the significance of data bases keywords for alarge scale bibliometric investigation in fundamental physics

We present an automatized bibliometric investigation applied to the field of fundamental research in physics. We briefly describe the scientific context motivating this study and the statistical method used for analyzing the data. We discuss in more detail how we adapted our investigation to the questions motivating this study, namely the identification of relevant groups working in a well defined subfield of physics. We next present the results of our investigation. We particularly focus on an analysis of Index and Free terms, as obtained from the INSPEC data base we used for performing the bibliometric investigation. We discuss the relevance of Index and Free terms by means of a separation between “Noise”, “Interesting” and “Trivial” entries. We show that Index and Free terms exhibit somewhat different behaviors when considered as distributions in terms of frequencies of occurrence in the references. We show the particular relevance of Free terms in this analysis. This may be connected to the emerging nature of the subfield of physics under consideration. This shed an interesting light on the respective importance of Index and Free terms, as entries of data bases, in particular in the case of rapidly evolving scientific domains.

NEWS ROUNDUP

OCLC unveils online journal plans OCLC. chose last month's National Online Meeting in New York to unveil plans for two new online journals. In October Electronic Letters, the UK Institution of Electronic Engineer's biweekly journal of international electronics research goes online, offering users 1400–1500 articles a year as well as a link to the INSPEC database to retrieve abstracts of references cited. The following month another online journal makes its debut—the Online Journal of Knowledge Synthesis for Nursing, produced with Sigma Theta Tau.

Alerts

A new addition to the list of useful products with unlovely names is INSPEC ONDISC the result of collaboration between the UK INSPEC database producers and University Microfilms International. In Spring 1991 they will issue a CD‐ROM version of the INSPEC records as a three‐disk set covering 1989, 1990 and 1991 — the last will be updated quarterly. Each disk will include about 250,000 records from the abstracting of 4,200+ technical journals and 1,000+ conference proceedings, books and reports in the fields of Physics, Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computing interpreted widely enough to include most aspects of high‐technology. With this product University Microfilms will introduce a new version of search software with library holdings, word and phrase inverted index, and a thesaurus for precise subject definition. An included option of the searching strategy takes account of British and American spellings.

Comparison of the performance of SDI profiles on the INSPEC database, before and after the addition of searchable abstracts

A companson is made of the relevance and quality of 24 SDI profiles on the INSPEC database, before and after the introduction of searchable abstract words. It was found that there was an approximately 40% increase in both the total number of hits and the number of relevant hits, with no statistically significant changes in relevance. It is suggested that when good abstracts are wntten, indexing terms may be unnecessary.

Mapping Australian geophysics: A co-heading analysis

Descriptive capacities of a new bibliometric method, namely co-heading analysis, are investigated. The method uses the appearance and co-appearance of classification subdivisions (headings) in the document records of 1988 INSPEC database to display correspondingly the main topics of Australian geophysics and their links. The findings, in the form of inclusion maps (resulting from multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis) provide new insights into geophysics national activity and into its structure.

A methodology for writing problem structured abstracts

Document problem: How to write the abstract of a scientific document so that it can better fulfill its functions in the process of information transfer? Problem solution: This method is based on a psychological model of a problem solving process. The abstract is structured and reflects main phases of this process (i.e., the information layer of a document) as well as the manner and scope in which this process was presented in a document (i.e., the formal and structural layer of a document). The problem structured abstract (PS abstract) consists of five separate parts: Document problem, Problem solution, Testing method, Related problems and Content elements. It was shown that PS abstracts as compared with INSPEC abstracts carry more information about problem solving process. Testing method: 80 PS abstracts of scientific papers were prepared and compared with the abstracts of the same documents included in INSPEC database with respect to content and length of abstracts. Content elements: ORI THY LIM HYP IDS SOL ILU JUS IDT CRI OBJ TAB EXP GEN USP.

A New Dimension to Retrieval

AbstractSearching in online databases for specific numerical data and for chemicals by formulae has always been difficult or, at best, complex. Two new additional indexing services were introduced to the INSPEC database at the beginning of 1987 to overcome these problems: Chemical Indexing - for searching all kinds of inorganic compounds and material systems, and Numerical Data Indexing - for limiting searches to a specific value or range of values of a particular physical quantity. The literature of SN 1987A, the first supernova to be discovered in 1987, is used to demonstrate the powers of these new indexing tools and how they compliment traditional retrieval aids such as classification, descriptors, and identifiers.

Bibliographic pattern matching using the ICL Distributed Array Processor

This article discusses the use of the ICL Distributed Array Processor (DAP), a highly parallel array processor containing 4096 processing elements, for pattern-matching operations in a bibliographic retrieval system. The hardware and software features of the DAP are described, together with a pattern-matching algorithm that makes full use of the DAP's parallelism. This algorithm can be used to search for exact patterns, right-hand or left-hand truncated patterns, embedded patterns, patterns containing fixed-length (FLDC) or variable-length (VLDC) don't care characters, and patterns that specify adjacent words. Experiments with a set of 898 query patterns and 2472 titles and abstracts from the INSPEC database show that right-hand truncation searches can be carried out on the DAP about ten times faster than searches using the Aho-Corasick pattern-matching algorithm on a Prime 550 minicomputer, the relative advantage of the DAP increasing linearly with a decrease in the number of query patterns. Simulated FLDC and VLDC searches on the DAP take about two and three times as long as right-hand truncation searches, respectively. © 1988 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Online and the database producer

The development of the INSPEC Database for online appli cation is used as the basis for discussion of some of the major policy considerations. These include systems of indexing and other access points; the choice of online service provider (or providing one's own); the allocation of database costs between online services and printed products; pricing; downloading; and training. The impact of developments such as searching by end-users, electronic publishing, and full-text databases is briefly examined.