Julian Warner

A critical review of the application of citation studies to the Research Assessment Exercises

The Research Assessment Exercises (RAE) conducted in the UK have attractedvarious types of published response. These include citation analyses and a review of the public reception of the RAE 1996, which included a brief critique of the citation studies. This paper develops the critique. Largely unexplored issues in the theory or assumptions of bibliometrics, e.g. the level of citation which corresponds to a quantum of research quality, are found to emerge in the studies. A weak, and unsatisfactorily treated, correlation between citation aggregates and research quality for individual entities is revealed. The proposal to replace informed peer review by citation analysis is regarded as highly unrealistic. Productive uses for citation analysis in research evaluation are suggested. A historically rare instance of correlation between rankings derived from citation aggregates and from real world peer review has been revealed by the studies. The future value of citation analysis could be to inform, but not to determine, judgements of research quality. A combination of methods is advocated for future studies of the RAEs. Information science must attend to considerations of value, as well as using established techniques, if it is to avoid marginalisation.

W(h)ither Information Science

Library and information studies (LIS) is giving signs of being in crisis as a discipline. To date, institutional transformations have tended to be perceived in local terms but can be more convincingly regarded as products of a quasi-global crisis, mediated by local developments. Such a crisis demands explanation, particularly in view of the diffusion of the information society concept. One explanation is found in the historical development of LIS since 1945 and the concurrent growth of other disciplines with interests in information. The spread of modern information technologies in use and of intermediary functions has also weakened the exclusivity of LISs claim to its established domains. A failure of communication with educational funders, which can be connected to theoretical impoverishment within LIS, is detected. Continuing possibilities for an expansive LIS, fully situated in relation to contiguous disciplines, still exist.

Writing and literary work in copyright: a binational and historical analysis

Copyright would seem to be an appropriate subject for the discipline of social epistemology envisaged by Shera. Social epistemology was to be concerned with the intellectual processes of society as a whole, rather than primarily of the individual. This study traces the development of significant terms in United Kingdom and United States copyright: of writing, with some indications of contrasts with speech, and of a literary work or other artifact representing skill or labor in which intellectual property can inhere. This analysis is undertaken with a dual intention: first, and most importantly, to support the thesis that writing and the faculty for intellectual labor are unifying principle for documents and computers; and, second, to place the assimilation of computer programs to copyright protection in its historical context. The incorporation of computer programs to copyright protection, along with other written products of intellectual labor, can be read to imply, but does not state, that writing constitutes a unifying principles for documents and computers. Yet, if the insight offered by this categorization is pursued, it can yield a description of the development of computing from pre‐existing information technologies of greater explanatory power than the otherwise predominant analogies between the computer and human brain or mind.

What should we understand by information technology (and some hints at other issues)

Information science has been convincingly characterised as a response to developments in information and communications technologies and as part of the gestalt of the computer. Despite this, it has had a limited understanding of information technology and has repressed or disguised its origins. Its understanding of itself and its potential for contribution to other discourses has thereby been restricted. The paper develops an understanding of information technology. The idea that the computer as a machine is concerned with the transformation of information, not material or energy, is extended to other information technologies. Technology is regarded as a radical human construction, in a position derived from Marx and mediated by economics. On these bases, an understanding of information technology as a form of knowledge concerned with the transformation of signals from one form or medium into another is proposed. Invention, innovation, and diffusion are distinguished as stages in the development of technologies. For modern information technologies, the history of copyright can provide indicators for innovation and diffusion. The mid‐ to late 19th century, in the United States and between the United States and Europe, is identified as the critical period for diffusion. An explanation for this is proposed in terms of the dynamism of the period, its hospitality to innovation, and in the United States continental expansion and developing links with Europe.

Information and redundancy in the legend of Theseus

This paper considers an instance of non‐verbal graphic communication from the legend of Theseus, in terms of information theory. The efficient cause of a failure in communication is regarded as a selection error and the formal cause as the absence of redundancy from the signals (a binary contrast between a black and a white sail) for transmission. Two considerations are then introduced. First, why should such a system of signalling have been succeeded by a graphic communication system, in alphabetic written language, so strongly marked by its redundancy? Second, why has information theory been so successful in describing systems for signal transmission but far less productive for modelling human‐to‐human communication, at the level of meaning or of the effects of messages on recipients? The legend is read historically, adopting specific insights, a method of interpretation, and a historical schema from Vico. The binary code used for the signal transmission is located as a rare but significant transitional form, mediating between heroic emblems and written language. For alphabetic written language, a link to the sounds of oral utterance replaces the connection to the mental states of the human information source and destination. It is also suggested that redundancy was deliberately introduced to counteract the effects of selection errors and noise. With regard to information theory, it is suggested that conformity with necessary conditions for signal transmission, which may include the introduction of redundancy, cannot be expected to yield insights into communication, at the level of meaning or the effects of messages.

In the Catalogue ye go for men: evaluation criteria for information retrieval systems

The contrast between the value placed on discriminatory power in discussions of indexing and classification and on the transformation of a query into a set of relevant records dominant in information retrieval research has not yet been fully explored. The value of delivering relevant records in response to a query has been assumed by information retrieval research paradigms otherwise differentiated (the cognitive and the physical). Subsidiary concepts and measures (relevance and precision and recall) have been increasingly subjected to critiques. The founding assumption of the value of delivering relevant records now needs to be questioned. An enhanced capacity for informed choice is advocated as an alternative principle for system evaluation and design. This broadly corresponds to: the exploratory capability discussed in recent information retrieval research; the value of discriminatory power in classification and indexing; Giambattista Vico‘s critique of the unproductivity of Aristotelian methods of categorisation as routes to new knowledge; and, most significantly, to ordinary discourse conceptions of the value of information retrieval systems. The criterion of enhanced choice has a liberating effect, restoring man as an artificer and enabling a continuing dialectic between theory and practice. Techniques developed in classic information retrieval research can be adapted to the new purpose. Finally, the substitution of the principle of enhanced choice exemplifies the development of a true science, in which previous paradigms are absorbed into new as special cases. Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men; As hounds, and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs, Shoughs, water‐rugs, and demi‐wolves, are clept All by the name of dogs: the valu’d file Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle, The housekeeper, the hunter, every one According to the gift which bounteous Nature Hath in him clos’d; whereby he does receive Particular addition, from the bill That writes them all alike; Shakespeare. Macbeth. c.1606.

An information view of history

An information view of history is proposed. This would include the study of information and communication technologies as products of communal human labor. The late nineteenth century United States is suggested as a critical period for innovation in modern information technologies.

Modelling the Diffusion of Specialised Knowledge

This paper reviews developments from a study of the reception of the Research Assessment Exercise 1996. Research evaluation, including the value of citation analysis and the responsibilities attaching to publication of citation analyses, is considered. The distinctions made in the communication model for analysing reception, between dissemination and diffusion and between esoteric and exoteric media and communities, are developed further. Information transfer is represented as an explicable process. Possible further developments, including the appropriate relation to disciplines with related interests in the social communication of knowledge, are anticipated.

Organs of the human brain, created by the human hand?: The social epistemology of information technology

Purpose – Information science has been conceptualized as a partly unreflexive response to developments in information and computer technology, and, most powerfully, as part of the gestalt of the computer. The computer was viewed as an historical accident in the original formulation of the gestalt. An alternative, and timely, approach to understanding, and then dissolving, the gestalt would be to address the motivating technology directly, fully recognizing it as a radical human construction. This paper aims to address the issues.Design/methodology/approach – The paper adopts a social epistemological perspective and is concerned with collective, rather than primarily individual, ways of knowing.Findings – Information technology tends to be received as objectively given, autonomously developing, and causing but not itself caused, by the language of discussions in information science. It has also been characterized as artificial, in the sense of unnatural, and sometimes as threatening. Attitudes to technolog...

Pluri, multi-, trans-meta-and interdisciplinary nature of LIS. Does it really matter?

The field of LIS is beset by recurrent debates as to its disciplinary status. For decades, the interdisciplinary nature of information science has been upheld without much proof from the ground. But if LIS is not an interdiscipline, is it then a meta-, a trans- a pluri-, a multi- or simply a discipline? The different proposals for qualifying the nature of LIS or for delineating its frontiers suggest that its fundamental nature remains unclear for its community. But is LIS alone in this dilemma and does it really matter? Does it stop the field from progressing?