Re: citations as indicators of quality

[David Goodman <dgoodman@princeton.edu>]

I will make the usual defense of a subject specialist--not my 
area.  I would certainly accept that in the humanistic traditions 
citation may be used very differently.

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

----- Original Message -----
From: Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>
Date: Friday, November 30, 2007 6:50 pm
Subject: Re: citations as indicators of quality
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu

> 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