Clément Arsenault

Exploring the interdisciplinary evolution of a discipline: the case of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

This study explores interdisciplinarity evolution of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (BMB) over a one-hundred-year period on several fronts, namely: change in interdisciplinarity, identification of core disciplines, disciplinary emergence, and potential discipline detection, in order to assess the evolution of interdisciplinarity over time. Science overlay maps and a StreamGraph were used to visualize interdisciplinary evolution. Our study confirms that interdisciplinarity evolves mainly from neighbouring fields to distant cognitive areas and provides evidence of an increasing tendency of BMB researchers to cite literature from other disciplines. Additionally, from our results, we can see that the top potential interdisciplinary relations belong to distant disciplines of BMB; their share of references is small, but is increasing markedly. On the whole, these results confirm the dynamic nature of interdisciplinary relations, and suggest that current scientific problems are increasingly addressed using knowledge from a wide variety of disciplines.

Are top-cited papers more interdisciplinary?

Over the last decade, the relationship between interdisciplinarity and scientific impact has been the focus of many bibliometric papers, with diverging results. This paper aims at contributing to this body of research, by analyzing the level of interdisciplinarity, compiled with the Simpson Index, of the top 1% most highly cited papers and of papers with lower citation percentile ranks. Results shows that the top 1% most cited papers exhibit higher levels of interdisciplinarity than papers in other citation rank classes and that this relationship is observed in more than 90% of NSF specialties. This suggests that interdisciplinary research plays a more important role in generating high impact knowledge.

Web Information Seeking and Retrieval in Digital Library Contexts: Towards an Intelligent Agent Solution.

This paper discusses the role of intelligent agents in facilitating the seeking and retrieval of information in Web‐based library environments. An overview is presented on agents and their current application in library domains to produce a generic agent‐based model for libraries to follow. The model suggests that Web‐based information seeking and retrieval in library contexts could be enhanced through a collaborating network of interface and information agents. Recent research results offer insights on the design of interface agents to support Web‐based browsing and searching. These are applied to the model in terms of the functionality required to facilitate information seeking and retrieval behaviour across library collections. Implications on library policy and digital collections surrounding the use of agents are also discussed.

Word division in the transcription of Chinese script in the title fields of bibliographic records

ABSTRACT Recently, the Library of Congress adopted the pinyin Romanization system for transcribing Chinese data in its bibliographic records. In its canonical form, pinyin aggregates Chinese “words” into single linguistic units, but pinyin entries could be constructed following either a monosyllabic or a polysyllabic pattern. Although the former is easier and less costly to implement, the latter method is potentially more beneficial for end-users, as it reduces ambiguity, and generates a much larger variety of indexable terms. The current study investigates if following the polysyllabic method improves retrieval efficiency and effectiveness in item-specific searching within online bibliographic databases. Analysis of the results revealed that aggregation of monosyllables does improve efficiency significantly (p < .05), especially during keyword searches, while effectiveness remains mainly unaffected.

Analysis of Work-to-Work Bibliographic Relationships through FRBR: A Canadian Perspective

The purpose of this study is to investigate the characteristics of Canadian publications by analyzing their bibliographic relationships based on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) model. The study indicates frequencies of occurrence of work-to-work bibliographic relationships for manifestations published in 2009 and cataloged in the AMICUS online catalog. The results show that approximately 4.4% of the 2009 bibliographic records in the AMICUS catalog exhibit a work-to-work bibliographic relationship.

Interdisciplinarity patterns of highly‐cited papers: A cross‐disciplinary analysis

This study analyzes the level of interdisciplinarity and interspecialty of highly cited papers. We distinguish research referring to different disciplines (referred to as “interdisciplinarity”) and research referring to different specialties of the same discipline (referred to as “interspecialty”). The results indicate that: (1) interspecialty research, has a greater impact on science development than intradisciplinary (or intraspecialty) research for most specialties and disciplines; (2) interdisciplinary research plays a more important role in Natural Sciences and Engineering than in Social Sciences and Humanities; and (3) interdisciplinary research is becoming more important in science either at the specialty or discipline level.

Translating RDA into French

This article reports on a joint translation project (France and Canada) of the Resource Description and Access (RDA) standard into French. We describe how the translation committee worked, explain the methodology, and present the measures taken to ensure that all contributing parties be satisfied with the end result. The article discusses problems that arose when dealing with translating specific instructions and examples that needed to be adapted (or changed) to the French context. Other sections report on technical and managerial challenges encountered. We conclude with “lessons learned” that will hopefully help others embarking on such a project.

First-level LIS education and training: A comparison between South Africa and Canada

This paper presents a comparison of first-level LIS education and training between South Africa and Canada, and based on this comparative description, qualitative identification of similarities and differences are made to highlight strengths and weaknesses in each case. The paper concludes that while similarities exist, the differences stem largely from the different social contexts in which this education is located. Notwithstanding this, there are lessons to be learnt from the endeavors of each of these countries.

Aggregation consistency and frequency of Chinese words and characters

Purpose – Aims to measure syllable aggregation consistency of Romanized Chinese data in the title fields of bibliographic records. Also aims to verify if the term frequency distributions satisfy conventional bibliometric laws.Design/methodology/approach – Uses Coopers interindexer formula to evaluate aggregation consistency within and between two sets of Chinese bibliographic data. Compares the term frequency distributions of polysyllabic words and monosyllabic characters (for vernacular and Romanized data) with the Lotka and the generalised Zipf theoretical distributions. The fits are tested with the Kolmogorov‐Smirnov test.Findings – Finds high internal aggregation consistency within each data set but some aggregation discrepancy between sets. Shows that word (polysyllabic) distributions satisfy Lotkas law but that character (monosyllabic) distributions do not abide by the law.Research limitations/implications – The findings are limited to only two sets of bibliographic data (for aggregation consisten...

Dolmen: A Linked Open Data Model to Enhance Museum Object Descriptions

This paper presents the DOLMEN project (Linked Open Data: Museums and Digital Environment), offering to develop a linked open data model that will allow Canadian museums to disseminate the rich and sophisticated content emanating from their various databases and to, in turn, make their cultural and heritage collections more accessible to future generations. The rationale, specific objectives, proposed methodology and expected benefits are briefly presented and explained.