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    Lights and Shadows on Galaxies Understanding

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    With this book we neither aimed at tracing a history, even concise, of extragalactic astronomy nor at summarizing the vast panorama of scientific successes in this field of astrophysics. Our wish was to stimulate some distinguished researchers, via interviews in specific fields of extragalactic studies, at expressing their own convictions and perplexities about the progresses achieved in our understanding of galaxies across one century of research, if necessary emphasizing the scientific problems that still remain open. After about fifty interviews, we try in this chapter to delineate a picture underlying the facts and the views emerged from the presentations. The US of the second decade of XXth century has been the cradle where a bunch of scientists triggered a debate about the nature of spiral nebulæ, and put into discussion the size of The Galaxy set by Jacobus Kapteyn. The new research field, extragalactic astronomy, very soon reached the rank of a mature scientific branch of astrophysics “on the shoulder of giants” of the caliber of Hubble, Zwicky and Baade. However, it was only after WWII that the growth of extragalactic astronomy was overwhelming thanks to big investments in US and later on, for the worse economic conditions, also in some European countries and in Japan. In the last decade of the XXth century extragalactic astronomy assumed the today physiognomy of highly developed science branch in most of the advanced and emerging economies. The national level institutions and observing facilities characterizing the 1960-1980s decades boosted huge international collaborations and consortia, with hundreds of researchers involved with ground based telescopes located in the best observing sites. Space facilities with a complete wavelength coverage bypassed the limitations imposed by the Earth atmosphere providing a panchromatic view of galaxies. We refer to this as the Big Science era of extragalactic astronomy

    From the realm of the nebulae to populations of galaxies: dialogues on a century of research

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    In order to outline possible future directions in galaxy research, this book wants to be a short stopover, a moment of self-reflection of the past century of achievements in this area. Since the pioneering years of galaxy research in the early 20th century, the research on galaxies has seen a relentless advance directly connected to the parallel exponential growth of new technologies. Through a series of interviews with distinguished astronomers the editors provide a snapshot of the achievements obtained in understanding galaxies. While many initial questions about their nature have been addressed, many are still open and require new efforts to achieve a solution. The discussions may reveal paradigms worthwhile revisiting. With the help of some of those scientists who have contributed to it, the editors sketch the history of this scientific journey and ask them for inspirations for future directions of galaxy research

    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
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