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Re: citations as indicators of quality

I get your point about fringe areas, and appreciate the information about your experience at Princeton. But I remain concerned about non-fringe examples likes the ones I gave concerning the methodological differences such as Continental vs. analytic in philosophy and the cross-over areas like political philosophy spanning philosophy and political science (which is itself complicated further because it interacts with the difference between Continental and analytic). I don't think these are trivial cases that can readily be ignored by defenders of citation analysis.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press

David Goodman wrote:
There are natural clusters.  It's always possible to find fringe
cases where the rules don't really hold, or cases on the
boundary. That does not affect the basic validity of citation
analysis, any more than such problems affect the validity of
other scientific approaches. . There are always small
differences, and I can discuss at some length whether, for
example, Journal of Biological Chemistry and Biochemistry (ACS)
are in separate microclusters. But the same basic citation
patterns hold in both of them.

When I collected at Princeton, I purchased for the biology
library everything about intelligent design having any reference
to the ordinary scientific literature, on the grounds that the
biologists need to know about it. There is actually not all that
much cross-citation: the ID people cite a very small part of the
biology literature, and only to attack it. (And the biologists n
turn cite a very small part of the fundamentalist religious
material) That pattern pretty much holds in the only fringe and
pseudo sciences--they don't really talk to theregular sciences
and vice versa.

And there are good examples of work done on ostensibly the same
subject where there are isolated literatures--psychoanalysis vs.
the rest of psychiatry & psychology is a good example--one I used
for teaching. Medline covers both, but there are very few cross
citations

David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
dgoodman@princeton.edu