Histcite

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HistCite is a software package used for bibliometric analysis and information visualization. It was developed by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information and the inventor of important information retrieval tools such as Current Contents and the Science Citation Index . [1]

Contents

Purpose

The main purpose of the software is to make it easier for individuals to perform bibliometric analysis and visualization tasks. Bibliometric analysis is the use of the bibliographic information (titles, authors, dates, author addresses, references, etc.) that describe published items to measure and otherwise study various aspects of a specific field of scholarly endeavor. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]

Some typical questions asked by bibliometricians that can be answered by HistCite analysis are:

  1. How much literature has been published in this field? When and in what countries has it been published? What countries are the major contributors to this field? What are the languages most frequently used by the items published in this field?
  2. What journals cover the literature of the field? Which are the most important?
  3. Who are the key authors in this field? What institutions do these authors represent?
  4. Which articles are the most important?
  5. How have the various contributors to the field influenced each other?

The answers to such questions are valuable to researchers, librarians, and administrators.

Information visualization is the transformation of non-numerical data into a graphic format. Visualization helps various researchers and scholars understand large collections of information. Although there are numerous uses for information visualization, HistCite performs one specific application: it converts bibliographies into diagrams called historiographs.

A historiograph is a time-based network diagram of the papers in a bibliography and their citation relationships to each other. Historiographs are based on the citation relationships between the papers in a bibliography. In a historiograph, each paper in the bibliography is represented by a symbol selected by the user. The symbols are arranged over a timeline of the publication dates of the papers. By changing the time frame of the analysis, the resulting historiograph can form a snapshot of a specific period or an in-depth look at the total history of a subject. Once a historiograph is created for a bibliography, it is easier to see and understand the subject's key publication events, their chronology, and their relative influence.

Applications

A wide variety of professionals who need to analyze the published literature use HistCite for analysis, for example: researchers, historians, journal editors, librarians and patent lawyers.

Operation

In order to perform its functions, HistCite must import a bibliography from another source. Once the bibliography is imported, basic point-and-click commands initiate the various analyses and visualizations.

HistCite is currently set up to import bibliographies created by searches of the Web of Science database offered by Thomson-Reuters Scientific. Bibliographies from other sources can be manually entered into HistCite.

The bibliography the user feeds to HistCite represents the literature of the subject area as it is defined by that user's unique perspective. Thus, the analyses and visualizations produced by HistCite from that bibliography are one-of-a-kind.

HistCite operates on Windows computers with Internet Explorer.

Related Research Articles

Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an information need. The information need can be specified in the form of a search query. In the case of document retrieval, queries can be based on full-text or other content-based indexing. Information retrieval is the science of searching for information in a document, searching for documents themselves, and also searching for the metadata that describes data, and for databases of texts, images or sounds.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Citation</span> Reference to a source

A citation is a reference to a source. More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of acknowledging the relevance of the works of others to the topic of discussion at the spot where the citation appears.

CiteSeerX is a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers, primarily in the fields of computer and information science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scientific citation</span>

Scientific citation is providing detailed reference in a scientific publication, typically a paper or book, to previous published communications which have a bearing on the subject of the new publication. The purpose of citations in original work is to allow readers of the paper to refer to cited work to assist them in judging the new work, source background information vital for future development, and acknowledge the contributions of earlier workers. Citations in, say, a review paper bring together many sources, often recent, in one place.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Citation index</span> Index of citations between publications

A citation index is a kind of bibliographic index, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. A form of citation index is first found in 12th-century Hebrew religious literature. Legal citation indexes are found in the 18th century and were made popular by citators such as Shepard's Citations (1873). In 1961, Eugene Garfield's Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) introduced the first citation index for papers published in academic journals, first the Science Citation Index (SCI), and later the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). American Chemical Society converted its printed Chemical Abstract Service into internet-accessible SciFinder in 2008. The first automated citation indexing was done by CiteSeer in 1997 and was patented. Other sources for such data include Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, Elsevier's Scopus, and the National Institutes of Health's iCite.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bibliometrics</span> Statistical analysis of written publications

Bibliometrics is the application of statistical methods to the study of bibliographic data, especially in scientific and library and information science contexts, and is closely associated with scientometrics to the point that both fields largely overlap.

Scientometrics is a subfield of informetrics that studies quantitative aspects of scholarly literature. Major research issues include the measurement of the impact of research papers and academic journals, the understanding of scientific citations, and the use of such measurements in policy and management contexts. In practice there is a significant overlap between scientometrics and other scientific fields such as information systems, information science, science of science policy, sociology of science, and metascience. Critics have argued that overreliance on scientometrics has created a system of perverse incentives, producing a publish or perish environment that leads to low-quality research.

Citation analysis is the examination of the frequency, patterns, and graphs of citations in documents. It uses the directed graph of citations — links from one document to another document — to reveal properties of the documents. A typical aim would be to identify the most important documents in a collection. A classic example is that of the citations between academic articles and books. For another example, judges of law support their judgements by referring back to judgements made in earlier cases. An additional example is provided by patents which contain prior art, citation of earlier patents relevant to the current claim. The digitization of patent data and increasing computing power have led to a community of practice that uses these citation data to measure innovation attributes, trace knowledge flows, and map innovation networks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eugene Garfield</span> American linguist and businessman (1925–2017)

Eugene Eli Garfield was an American linguist and businessman, one of the founders of bibliometrics and scientometrics. He helped to create Current Contents, Science Citation Index (SCI), Journal Citation Reports, and Index Chemicus, among others, and founded the magazine The Scientist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Informetrics</span> Study of the quantitative aspects of information

Informetrics is the study of quantitative aspects of information, it is an extension and evolution of traditional bibliometrics and scientometrics. Informetrics uses bibliometrics and scientometrics methods to study mainly the problems of literature information management and evaluation of science and technology. Informetrics is an independent discipline that uses quantitative methods from mathematics and statistics to study the process, phenomena, and law of informetrics. Informetrics has gained more attention as it is a common scientific method for academic evaluation, research hotspots in discipline, and trend analysis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Shneiderman</span> American computer scientist

Ben Shneiderman is an American computer scientist, a Distinguished University Professor in the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the founding director (1983-2000) of the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab. He conducted fundamental research in the field of human–computer interaction, developing new ideas, methods, and tools such as the direct manipulation interface, and his eight rules of design.

Citation impact or citation rate is a measure of how many times an academic journal article or book or author is cited by other articles, books or authors. Citation counts are interpreted as measures of the impact or influence of academic work and have given rise to the field of bibliometrics or scientometrics, specializing in the study of patterns of academic impact through citation analysis. The importance of journals can be measured by the average citation rate, the ratio of number of citations to number articles published within a given time period and in a given index, such as the journal impact factor or the citescore. It is used by academic institutions in decisions about academic tenure, promotion and hiring, and hence also used by authors in deciding which journal to publish in. Citation-like measures are also used in other fields that do ranking, such as Google's PageRank algorithm, software metrics, college and university rankings, and business performance indicators.

Bibliographic coupling, like co-citation, is a similarity measure that uses citation analysis to establish a similarity relationship between documents. Bibliographic coupling occurs when two works reference a common third work in their bibliographies. It is an indication that a probability exists that the two works treat a related subject matter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social Sciences Citation Index</span> Citation index product of Clarivate Analytics

The Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) is a commercial citation index product of Clarivate Analytics. It was originally developed by the Institute for Scientific Information from the Science Citation Index. The Social Sciences Citation Index is a multidisciplinary index which indexes over 3,400 journals across 58 social science disciplines – 1985 to present, and it has 122 million cited references – 1900 to present. It also includes a range of 3,500 selected items from some of the world's finest scientific and technical journals. It has a range of useful search functions such as 'cited reference searching', searching by author, subject, or title. Whilst the Social Sciences Citation Index provides extensive support in bibliographic analytics and research, a number of academic scholars have expressed criticisms relating to ideological bias and its English-dominant publishing nature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Web of Science</span> Online subscription index of citations

The Web of Science is a paid-access platform that provides access to multiple databases that provide reference and citation data from academic journals, conference proceedings, and other documents in various academic disciplines. Until 1997, it was originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information. It is currently owned by Clarivate, and currently contains 79 million records in the core collection and 171 million records on the platform.

ResearcherID is an identifying system for scientific authors. The system was introduced in January 2008 by Thomson Reuters Corporation.

A library and information scientist, also known as a library scholar, is a researcher or academic who specializes in the field of library and information science and often participates in scholarly writing about and related to library and information science. A library and information scientist is neither limited to any one subfield of library and information science nor any one particular type of library. These scientists come from all information-related sectors including library and book history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Citation graph</span> Directed graph describing citations in documents

A citation graph, in information science and bibliometrics, is a directed graph that describes the citations within a collection of documents.

Bibliometrix is a package for the R statistical programming language for quantitative research in scientometrics and bibliometrics.

The open science movement has expanded the uses scientific output beyond specialized academic circles.

References

  1. ↑ Retrieved 21 July 2008 from http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/ Archived 2017-04-26 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ↑ Apriliyanti, I.D., Alon, I. (2017). Bibliometric Analysis of Absorptive Capacity. International Business Review. 26(5):896-907.
  3. ↑ Ackerman E. Indicators of failed information epidemics in the scientific journal literature: a publication analysis of polywater and cold nuclear fusion. Scientometrics. 2006 Feb; 66(3):451–66.
  4. ↑ Byrne F, Chapman S. The most cited authors and papers in tobacco control. Tob Control. 2005;14:155-60.
  5. ↑ Chen C. CiteSpace II: Detecting and visualizing emerging trends and transient patterns in scientific literature. J Am Soc Inf Sci Technol [online].2005 Dec 14;57(3):359–377.
  6. ↑ Chen TT, Hsieh LC. Uncovering the latent domains of a research field: knowledge visualization revealed. Proceedings of the Conference on Information Visualization; 2006 Jul 5–7; Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society; c2006. p. 252–256.
  7. ↑ Chen TT, Su C-H. Knowledge domain visualization: main themes and evolution. Int J Innov Learn. 2007;4(5):460-70.
  8. ↑ Mann GS, Mimno D, McCallum A. Bibliometric impact measures leveraging topic analysis. Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on digital libraries; Chapel Hill, NC. New York, NY: AMC; c2006. p.65-74. Available from: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1141753.1141765
  9. ↑ Pless IB, A brief history of injury and accident prevention publications. Inj Prev. 2006;12:65-66.
  10. ↑ Willett P. A bibliometric analysis of the literature of chemoinformatics. Aslib Proc. 2008;60(1):4–17
  11. ↑ Wulf E. HistComp: bibliographic analysis and visualization of the “Biological Bulletin.” In: Anderson KL, editor. Every continent, every ocean. Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the International Association of the Aquatic and Marine Science Libraries and Information Centers (IAMSLIC); 2006 Oct 8–12; Portland, OR. Fort Pierce, FL: IAMSLIC; c2007. p. 59-68. Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/1912/2141
  12. ↑ Young AP, Library Quarterly, 1956–2004: an exploratory bibliometric analysis. Lib Q. 2006;76(1):10-18.
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