1,720,960 research outputs found

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The 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

    Variations on the Author

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    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship

    Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis

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    We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis

    The Ethics of Naming and the Perils of Masking in Ethnography

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    Colin Jerolmack is an associate professor of sociology and environmental studies at NYU. He is currently writing a book about how shale gas extraction ("fracking") impacts rural community life.Ethnographers routinely employ pseudonyms and even mask the sites (e.g., street corner, neighborhood, city) of their research. This is usually justified as an ethical necessity, to protect our participants. In this talk, drawing from a paper I am co-authoring with Alexandra Murphy (Michigan), I challenge this justification and spell out some of the ways that masking can potentially harm research participants and impede social science research. Regarding ethics, I show, on the one hand, how masking often fails to provide the guaranteed degree of identity protection and, on the other hand, how research participants may have a very different understanding of what the researcher owes them that has little to do with whether or not they are named (e.g., portraying them as a human, not just a social type). Regarding scientific integrity, I argue that masking reifies ethnographic authority, invokes a pseudo-generalizability that downplays the particularities of the case (e.g., "Middletown"), and inhibits replicability (or "revisits"), falsifiability, or comparison. I conclude by arguing that masking is a convention, not an ethical or IRB necessity, and while I concede that there are many cases in which masking is the ethical choice, I contend that we should no longer consider it the default option

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

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    We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods

    Animal archeology: Domestic pigeons and the nature-culture dialectic

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    This paper historically traces the purposive domestication of pigeons in order to examine the dialectical relationship between nature and culture. It is demonstrated that each instance of the domestication of the pigeon for a new function (i.e., food, messenger) also entailed the construction of a role of the bird in human society, replete with symbolic representations and moral valuations. Yet it is also argued that, though animals are repositories for social meaning, and culture is literally inscribed into the physical structure of domesticated animals, such meanings are patterned and constrained according to the biological features of the animal itself. The ubiquitous and unwanted “street pigeon” now found around the globe is the descendent of escaped domestic pigeons, occupying the unique and ambiguous category of “feral”- neither truly wild nor domestic. Ironically, the very traits that were once so desirous and that were naturally selected for are now what make the feral pigeon so hard to get rid of and so loathsome. 
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