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Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Critical review of two books by Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul and India: A Portrait
Full text linkThis submission for the PhD by Research Publications consists of two published books by Patrick
French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul (2008) and India: A
Portrait (2011). The portfolio is accompanied by a critical review summarising the aims, objectives,
methodology, results and conclusions of the books, and showing how they form a coherent body of
work and contribute significantly to the expansion of knowledge.
The World Is What It Is (2008) is a biography of Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul, positioning him
within a Caribbean and early postcolonial literary lineage, despite his ancestral connections to India
and his “stateless” claims as a world novelist. India: A Portrait (2011) is a study of Indian politics,
economics and society since 1947, told mainly through the stories of individuals from different
sections of society, and using historical background to analyse rapid recent social change in the
period after economic “liberalization”.
The trajectory of the two publications is built around a conviction that individual experience can
illuminate a larger period or civilization, and that our ideas of the unfamiliar, whether in the past or
in different societies, can often be poorly grounded in the way people perceive themselves. In each
case, the books challenge existing notions and use evidence based on detailed research and
interviews in the field. In the case of The World Is What It Is, almost none of the archival material
used had previously been studied, and in India: A Portrait, subjective one-to-one interviews were
supplemented by new original data. For example, a survey was undertaken to determine what
proportion of MPs in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, were hereditary: this involved
double-sourcing information on the family background of all 545 Indian MPs – and revealed that
nepotism was more deeply embedded than had previously been realised.
Both books come out of a vision developed during two-and-a-half decades of research into colonial
and postcolonial history. The guiding motivation has been to communicate a distinct historical view
of the period before and after the end of the global British empire, in particular in South Asia and
among its diaspora
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