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96&lt;b&gt;Applications for Bibliometric Research&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;
97&lt;b&gt;in the Emerging Digital Libraries&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;
98Sally Jo Cunningham&lt;br&gt;
99Department of Computer Science&lt;br&gt;
100University of Waikato&lt;br&gt;
101Hamilton, New Zealand&lt;br&gt;
102email: [email protected]&lt;br&gt;
103&lt;b&gt;Abstract:&lt;/b&gt; Large numbers of research documents have recently become available on&lt;br&gt;
104the Internet through “digital libraries”, and these collections are seeing high levels of&lt;br&gt;
105use by their related research communities. A secondary use for these document&lt;br&gt;
106repositories and indexes is as a platform for bibliometric research. We examine the&lt;br&gt;
107extent to which the new digital libraries support conventional bibliometric analysis, and&lt;br&gt;
108discuss shortcomings in their current forms. Interestingly, these electronic text&lt;br&gt;
109archives also provide opportunities for new types of studies: generally the full text of&lt;br&gt;
110documents are available for analysis, giving a finer grain of insight than abstract-only&lt;br&gt;
111online databases; these repositories often contain technical reports or pre-prints, the&lt;br&gt;
112“grey literature” that has been previously unavailable for analysis; and document&lt;br&gt;
113“usage” can be measured directly by recording user accesses, rather than studied&lt;br&gt;
114indirectly through document references.&lt;br&gt;
115&lt;b&gt;1. Introduction&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;
116In recent years a number of &amp;quot;digital libraries&amp;quot; have become available through the&lt;br&gt;
117Internet. While the technology promises in the future to support large, heterogenous&lt;br&gt;
118collections, at present the most widely used of the academically-focussed digital&lt;br&gt;
119libraries are generally repositories of one or two types of document (typically technical&lt;br&gt;
120reports, journal articles, pre-prints, or conference proceedings), grouped by discipline.&lt;br&gt;
121&lt;hr&gt;
122</Content>
123</Section>
124<Section>
125 <Description>
126 <Metadata name="Title">2</Metadata>
127 </Description>
128 <Content>&lt;br /&gt;
129A distinguishing characteristic of these digital libraries is that the full text of documents&lt;br&gt;
130are often available for retrieval, as well as bibliographic records.The sciences are&lt;br&gt;
131represented much more heavily in the present crop of digital libraries than the social&lt;br&gt;
132sciences, arts, or humanities. They are maintained by professional societies,&lt;br&gt;
133universities, research laboratories, and even private individuals. Access is generally&lt;br&gt;
134free, both to search and to download documents.&lt;br&gt;
135The emergence of these subject-specific digital libraries is particularly important&lt;br&gt;
136given the pattern of access to materials presently employed by research scientists.&lt;br&gt;
137Informal exchanges of preprints, reprints, and photocopies of papers passed on by&lt;br&gt;
138colleagues currently are major venues for the transmission of scientific information&lt;br&gt;
139between researchers in the sciences. In one study, the dependence on these sources&lt;br&gt;
140ranges from 12% (for chemistry) to 39% (for mathematics) of all papers cited in&lt;br&gt;
141researchers' own publications [11]. A qualitative study of study of how computer&lt;br&gt;
142scientists locate and retrieve documents (computing is one of the domains considered&lt;br&gt;
143later in this paper) indicates that for that field, technical reports and research documents&lt;br&gt;
144found in various locations on the Internet are a preferred source of information [6].&lt;br&gt;
145Many of the digital library systems discussed in this paper are repositories for just this&lt;br&gt;
146type of literature. The documents tend to be of high quality: primarily technical&lt;br&gt;
147reports or working papers from research institutions (both academic and commercial),&lt;br&gt;
148as well as advance copies of work accepted for publication in conventional paper&lt;br&gt;
149journals. Moreover, these digital libraries are also coming to include refereed work&lt;br&gt;
150published digitally (in electronic journals). Anecdotal evidence suggests that in their&lt;br&gt;
151fields, these digital libraries are coming to be the resource of choice for locating cutting&lt;br&gt;
152edge work.&lt;br&gt;
153For specialized subjects such as high energy physics, this dependence on&lt;br&gt;
154informal or extra-library dissemination can be much higher. Ginsparg ([9], [10])&lt;br&gt;
155reports that fields in physics have traditionally relied heavily on preprint exchanges, and&lt;br&gt;
156the digital repositories of physics preprints begun in 1991 (the PHYSICS E-PRINT&lt;br&gt;
157ARCHIVES) have to a large extent supplanted conventional publishing and physical&lt;br&gt;
158&lt;hr&gt;
159</Content>
160</Section>
161<Section>
162 <Description>
163 <Metadata name="Title">3</Metadata>
164 </Description>
165 <Content>&lt;br /&gt;
166paper mailing of technical reports. By providing ready access to information sources&lt;br&gt;
167that are already preferentially utilized by scientists, the digital libraries show potential to&lt;br&gt;
168increase access to information that until recently was expensive or difficult to acquire in&lt;br&gt;
169paper form. Indeed, in some fields (most notably physics) this process has already&lt;br&gt;
170begun, as researchers in less developed countries report access to ongoing research&lt;br&gt;
171through the Internet repositories that their local libraries could not afford to acquire&lt;br&gt;
172through conventional journal subscriptions ([9], [10]).&lt;br&gt;
173The primary use for new bibliographic resources is, of course, for the contents&lt;br&gt;
174of the documents involved. A secondary use for emerging resources is as a basis for&lt;br&gt;
175bibliometric analysis of the subject field. With the conventionally published scientific&lt;br&gt;
176literature, the sheer difficulty of accumulating statistics discouraged bibliometric&lt;br&gt;
177research until the advent of large bibliographic databases in the 1960's. Computerized&lt;br&gt;
178bibliographic databases sparked a significant increase in the number of large-scale&lt;br&gt;
179bibliographic studies, as significant portions of the collection and analysis of data could&lt;br&gt;
180be automated ([12], [13]). The availability of CD-ROM versions of bibliographic&lt;br&gt;
181databases has been of particular importance, since they provide a cheaper alternative to&lt;br&gt;
182the online commercial databases [3].&lt;br&gt;
183These computerized bibliographic resources have drawbacks, however. The&lt;br&gt;
184greatest is that the full text of documents are rarely available, and even abstracts are not&lt;br&gt;
185always present. This obviously limits the types of bibliometric research that can be&lt;br&gt;
186conducted &lt;i&gt;solely&lt;/i&gt; through these databases. In addition, these databases are generally&lt;br&gt;
187limited to formally published documents (those appearing in selected books, journals,&lt;br&gt;
188and conference proceedings). The &amp;quot;grey literature&amp;quot; of technical reports, pre-prints, and&lt;br&gt;
189other works not formally published are largely ignored, and it is this absence of easy&lt;br&gt;
190access to these documents that has hampered the analysis of these important forms of&lt;br&gt;
191scientific communication.&lt;br&gt;
192The digital libraries currently in existence complement the online and CD-ROM&lt;br&gt;
193bibliographic databases. They are best suited for examinations of the &amp;quot;physical&amp;quot;&lt;br&gt;
194characteristics of documents (for example, document length), analysis based on&lt;br&gt;
195&lt;hr&gt;
196</Content>
197</Section>
198<Section>
199 <Description>
200 <Metadata name="Title">4</Metadata>
201 </Description>
202 <Content>&lt;br /&gt;
203bibliographic information that can be automatically extracted from the document text or&lt;br&gt;
204the sometimes unevenly formatted bibliographic records (such as obsolescence&lt;br&gt;
205studies), and usage studies (geographic or institutional origin of users, date/time of&lt;br&gt;
206access, individual patterns of document retrieval, etc.). Because references are present&lt;br&gt;
207in the document file but not identified by field, co-citation and bibliographic coupling&lt;br&gt;
208research is not well-supported, and conducting these studies requires considerable&lt;br&gt;
209effort on the part of the researcher.&lt;br&gt;
210The variety of bibliographic repositories in the available digital libraries in itself&lt;br&gt;
211has great potential in conducting bibliometric research. Sigogneau et al [15] present a&lt;br&gt;
212case study illustrating the ways in which the strengths of different databases can be&lt;br&gt;
213played off each other; they conduct a fine-grained analysis of the emergence of research&lt;br&gt;
214fronts in molecular and cellular biology, and demonstrate that the observations gleaned&lt;br&gt;
215from two complementary bibliographic databases provide greater insight into their&lt;br&gt;
216problem. Similarly, it appears that the types of bibliographic data that can be gleaned&lt;br&gt;
217from the relatively unstructured digital libraries can be profitably combined with data&lt;br&gt;
218from online databases, CD-ROMS, and other more conventional bibliographic&lt;br&gt;
219resources.&lt;br&gt;
220This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses the types of indexing&lt;br&gt;
221and searching available with current digital libraries; Section 3 gives examples of&lt;br&gt;
222conventional bibliometric techniques applied to Internet-accessible archives; Section 4&lt;br&gt;
223discusses opportunities to directly measure usage of documents and to detect&lt;br&gt;
224information-seeking patterns in researchers; and Section 5 presents our conclusions.&lt;br&gt;
225&lt;b&gt;2. Indexing and searching in current digital libraries&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;
226At present, the types of indexing fields for most academically-oriented digital&lt;br&gt;
227library systems are limited. Many schemes index on user-supplied document&lt;br&gt;
228descriptions, abstracts, or similar document surrogates (for example, the PHYSICS E-&lt;br&gt;
229PRINT ARCHIVE [10], a collection of physics pre-prints and technical reports). As will&lt;br&gt;
230&lt;hr&gt;
231</Content>
232</Section>
233<Section>
234 <Description>
235 <Metadata name="Title">5</Metadata>
236 </Description>
237 <Content>&lt;br /&gt;
238be discussed below, the quality of this user-provided data can be highly variable, and&lt;br&gt;
239may unfavorably impact the usefulness of the index for searching. Alternatively, a&lt;br&gt;
240designated site librarian may maintain a catalog (eg, the WATERS [14] system, now&lt;br&gt;
241subsumed by NCSTRL (http://www.ncstrl.org/), both primarily collections of&lt;br&gt;
242computer science technical reports); in this case the quality of the bibliographic&lt;br&gt;
243information may be expedited to be higher, but fewer sites will be likely to support&lt;br&gt;
244such a librarian and therefore fewer documents are likely to be included in the digital&lt;br&gt;
245library. In a “harvesting” system such as the computer science technical report&lt;br&gt;
246collections supported by HARVEST [2] or the NEW ZEALAND DIGITAL LIBRARY&lt;br&gt;
247computer science technical report collection ([16], [17]), documents are indexed from&lt;br&gt;
248passive repositories (that may not even be aware that their documents are being&lt;br&gt;
249included in the digital library). Harvesting systems therefore cannot rely on the&lt;br&gt;
250presence of bibliographic data of any sort.&lt;br&gt;
251Because of the relative paucity of high-quality bibliographic data available to&lt;br&gt;
252many of the current academically- or research-focussed digital library collections, their&lt;br&gt;
253search interfaces tend to be more primitive than those ordinarily found in online&lt;br&gt;
254bibliographic databases or library catalogs. Systems such as NCSTRL can support&lt;br&gt;
255author, title, and subject searching, but this more sophisticated search functionality&lt;br&gt;
256comes at the expense of requiring participating repositories to use specific software. As&lt;br&gt;
257a consequence, these latter systems may provide access to a small number of sites than&lt;br&gt;
258harvesting systems. Harvesters may access a broader range of providers, but at the&lt;br&gt;
259penalty of being limited to unfielded, keyword searches over the raw text of the&lt;br&gt;
260document or document surrogate.&lt;br&gt;
261Specifically, the indexing in existing digital libraries has a variety of shortcomings for&lt;br&gt;
262bibliometric applications:&lt;br&gt;
263•&lt;br&gt;
264&lt;i&gt;lack of fielded indexing:&lt;/i&gt; As noted above, some large and widely used digital&lt;br&gt;
265libraries (such as the computer science technical report collection of the NEW&lt;br&gt;
266ZEALAND DIGITAL LIBRARY) may lack formal cataloging entirely, and rely on&lt;br&gt;
267&lt;hr&gt;
268</Content>
269</Section>
270<Section>
271 <Description>
272 <Metadata name="Title">6</Metadata>
273 </Description>
274 <Content>&lt;br /&gt;
275keyword searching over the raw document text. Obviously this makes field-&lt;br&gt;
276dependent analysis more difficult (for example, locating documents produced by&lt;br&gt;
277specific authors), and in the worst case my require a manual examination of all&lt;br&gt;
278files in the collection in order to reliably identify a desired document subset.&lt;br&gt;
279However, keyword search techniques that approximate fielded searching results&lt;br&gt;
280may suffice: for example in the NEW ZEALAND DIGITAL LIBRARY computer&lt;br&gt;
281science technical report collection, limiting the keyword search for “Johnson”&lt;br&gt;
282to a search of first pages only is likely to retrieve documents written by Johnson&lt;br&gt;
283(since for the majority of computer science technical reports, the first page&lt;br&gt;
284contains little more than author, title, date, and institution details).&lt;br&gt;
285A more principled approach to extracting bibliographic information is embodied&lt;br&gt;
286in the CiteSeer tool [1]. This software parses raw, unfielded academic&lt;br&gt;
287documents and attempts to identify such indexing information as author, title,&lt;br&gt;
288reference list, etc. Obviously such a tool cannot attain 100% accuracy over a&lt;br&gt;
289heterogenous document collection, but in practice it appears useful in that it can&lt;br&gt;
290make a good first pass in processing a set of documents, providing an initial set&lt;br&gt;
291of parsed documents for analysis. The remaining (presumably much smaller) set&lt;br&gt;
292of unparsable documents can then be dealt with manually.&lt;br&gt;
293•&lt;br&gt;
294&lt;i&gt;lack of consistency in field formatting:&lt;/i&gt; Current digital libraries usually acquire&lt;br&gt;
295bibliographic information from either the authors of submitted articles or&lt;br&gt;
296automatic extraction routines (retrieving bibliographic details from catalog files&lt;br&gt;
297that may or may not be in a given document site, and that may or may not be in&lt;br&gt;
298an easily parsable form). Neither of these methods produce records with&lt;br&gt;
299standard formatting, which causes problems with automated bibliometric&lt;br&gt;
300analysis. Consider the following examples selected from entries in the hep-th&lt;br&gt;
301(high energy physics) collection of the PHYSICS E-PRINT ARCHIVES:&lt;br&gt;
302&lt;hr&gt;
303</Content>
304</Section>
305<Section>
306 <Description>
307 <Metadata name="Title">7</Metadata>
308 </Description>
309 <Content>&lt;br /&gt;
310(i)&lt;br&gt;
311Authors: A. Yu. Alekseev, V. Schomerus&lt;br&gt;
312(ii)&lt;br&gt;
313Authors: Adel Bilal and Ian. I. Kogan&lt;br&gt;
314(iii)&lt;br&gt;
315Authors: Paul S. Aspinwall and David R. Morrison (with an appendix &lt;br&gt;
316by Mark Gross)&lt;br&gt;
317(iv)&lt;br&gt;
318Authors: A. H. Chamseddine and Herbi Dreiner (ETH-Zurich)&lt;br&gt;
319In this case, typical for existing digital libraries, there is no standardized format&lt;br&gt;
320for authors' names (here, appearing with full names, initials plus last name, and&lt;br&gt;
321a mixture of the two); no standard convention for separating author names&lt;br&gt;
322(here, either a comma or &amp;quot;and&amp;quot; are used); and parenthetical information can&lt;br&gt;
323include a variety of information such as the name of an associate author or the&lt;br&gt;
324institutional affiliations of an author. Manual processing or specially crafted&lt;br&gt;
325software would be required to reformat these fields for analysis.&lt;br&gt;
326•&lt;br&gt;
327&lt;i&gt;duplicate entries: &lt;/i&gt; Digital libraries that draw documents from a variety of sources&lt;br&gt;
328may inadvertently contain duplicate items. Unfortunately, the irregular&lt;br&gt;
329formatting of the bibliographic information makes it difficult to automatically&lt;br&gt;
330detect these duplicates.&lt;br&gt;
331•&lt;br&gt;
332&lt;i&gt;implicit field tagging:&lt;/i&gt; In some repositories, items are not explicitly tagged with&lt;br&gt;
333certain types of information – most commonly the document's date of&lt;br&gt;
334publication or production. Instead, the date is implicit in the document's title&lt;br&gt;
335(eg, its numeration in a technical report series) or in the location of the document&lt;br&gt;
336in the file structure of the repository (eg, separate directories exist for each&lt;br&gt;
337year). A second common piece of implicit data is the authors’ institutional&lt;br&gt;
338affiliations. This may be contained in the document itself (typically on a cover&lt;br&gt;
339page), or may be implicit in the document’s location (for example, a&lt;br&gt;
340corporation’s technical reports are stored in its ftp repository). Again, in these&lt;br&gt;
341&lt;hr&gt;
342</Content>
343</Section>
344<Section>
345 <Description>
346 <Metadata name="Title">8</Metadata>
347 </Description>
348 <Content>&lt;br /&gt;
349cases special processing is required to append this field information to a&lt;br&gt;
350document record for bibliometric analysis. &lt;br&gt;
351•&lt;br&gt;
352&lt;i&gt;extraction of document text:&lt;/i&gt; Few of the documents stored in the research-&lt;br&gt;
353oriented digital libraries discussed in this paper are straight ascii text; instead,&lt;br&gt;
354documents may appear in a variety of file formats, such as LaTeX, PostScript,&lt;br&gt;
355PDF, etc. If the contents of the documents are to be automatically processed&lt;br&gt;
356(for example, to count the words in a document, or to extract reference&lt;br&gt;
357publication dates for an obsolescence study), then the text must be extracted.&lt;br&gt;
358Utilities are available to convert most common document formats to ascii.&lt;br&gt;
359It is likely that many of these problems will be addressed as the Internet-based&lt;br&gt;
360document indexing systems mature. Even minor changes can greatly increase the&lt;br&gt;
361useability of a bibliographic database for bibliometric research. For example, the&lt;br&gt;
362addition of an explicit date tag to many online databases in 1975 sparked new&lt;br&gt;
363applications in time series research [3].&lt;br&gt;
364&lt;b&gt;3. Opportunities for applications of bibliometric techniques&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;
365One type of bibliometric research concentrates on quantifying fundamental,&lt;br&gt;
366structural details about a subject literature: how many items are published, how many&lt;br&gt;
367authors are publishing, over what time period documents are likely to be used, etc.&lt;br&gt;
368More complex studies analyze the relationships between documents, such as how&lt;br&gt;
369documents cluster into subjects. The following examples give a flavour of the&lt;br&gt;
370bibliometric research that is possible using the emerging digital libraries:&lt;br&gt;
371&lt;i&gt;examining the “physical” characteristics of archived documents&lt;/i&gt;&lt;br&gt;
372One relatively straightforward type of bibliometric study characterizes the&lt;br&gt;
373formats of different literatures. For example, Figure 1 presents a the range of the size&lt;br&gt;
374&lt;hr&gt;
375</Content>
376</Section>
377<Section>
378 <Description>
379 <Metadata name="Title">9</Metadata>
380 </Description>
381 <Content>&lt;br /&gt;
382of computer science technical reports as measured by their length in pages. Of the&lt;br&gt;
38345,720 documents in the CSTR collection as of April 1998, nearly 1600 did not contain&lt;br&gt;
384page divisions in their files (and hence are excluded from analysis). Note that the&lt;br&gt;
385number of pages in the shorter documents (&amp;lt;50 pages) falls into an approximately&lt;br&gt;
386normal distribution (slightly skewed to the left), while presumably the longer&lt;br&gt;
387documents represent Masters’ and Doctoral theses. A surprising number of documents&lt;br&gt;
388are very short (between one and 5 pages); these may represent the type of condensed&lt;br&gt;
389results frequently found in the “technical notes”, “short papers”, and “poster sessions”&lt;br&gt;
390of computing conferences and journals. The average number of pages per document,&lt;br&gt;
39127.5, appears to be slightly longer than the common upper bound for a computing&lt;br&gt;
392journal article, although this observation must be confirmed by a similar study of the&lt;br&gt;
393lengths of formally published computing articles.&lt;br&gt;
394This type of analysis is of particular interest for technical reports, since they&lt;br&gt;
395have not been studied in the same detail as formally published papers. A comparison of&lt;br&gt;
396the physical characteristics of the formal and informal literature could provide&lt;br&gt;
397supporting evidence for common beliefs about the relationship between the two types&lt;br&gt;
398of documents. For example, do publishing constraints force journal and proceedings&lt;br&gt;
399articles to be shorter than technical reports, and therefore presumably omit technical&lt;br&gt;
400details of findings? Do technical reports contain more/less extensive reference sections?&lt;br&gt;
401If reference sections of technical reports are longer than those of published articles, then&lt;br&gt;
402citation links are being ommitted in published works; if technical reports contain fewer&lt;br&gt;
403references, then this may confirm earlier indications that computer scientists tend to&lt;br&gt;
404“research first” and do literature surveys later [6].&lt;br&gt;
405Figure 1. Range of sizes of CS technical reports, measured by number of pages&lt;br&gt;
406&lt;i&gt;obsolescence studies.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;br&gt;
407A document is considered obsolete when it is no longer referenced by the&lt;br&gt;
408current literature. Typically, documents receive their greatest number and frequency of&lt;br&gt;
409&lt;hr&gt;
410</Content>
411</Section>
412<Section>
413 <Description>
414 <Metadata name="Title">10</Metadata>
415 </Description>
416 <Content>&lt;br /&gt;
417citations immediately after publication, and the frequency of citation falls rapidly as time&lt;br&gt;
418passes. One technique for estimating the obsolescence rate of a body of literature– the&lt;br&gt;
419&lt;i&gt;synchronous&lt;/i&gt; method – is to find the median date in the references of the documents.&lt;br&gt;
420This median date is subtracted from the year of publication for the documents, yielding&lt;br&gt;
421the &lt;i&gt;median citation age&lt;/i&gt;. As would be expected, this median varies between the&lt;br&gt;
422disciplines. Typically the social sciences and arts have a higher median citation age&lt;br&gt;
423than the “hard” sciences and engineering, indicating that documents obsolesce more&lt;br&gt;
424quickly for the latter fields.&lt;br&gt;
425As noted in Section 2, references are not generally explicitly tagged in existing&lt;br&gt;
426digital repositories. However, reference dates can usually be extracted from the&lt;br&gt;
427document text by first locating the reference section (usually delimited by a &amp;quot;references&amp;quot;&lt;br&gt;
428or &amp;quot;bibliography&amp;quot; section heading), and then extracting all numbers in the appropriate&lt;br&gt;
429ranges for dates for the field under study.&lt;br&gt;
430To illustrate this process, 188 technical reports were sampled from Internet-&lt;br&gt;
431accessible repositories1 and used as source documents for a synchronous obsolescence&lt;br&gt;
432study. Conveniently, the repositories chosen organize technical reports into sub-&lt;br&gt;
433directories by their date of publication. The reference dates for each technical report&lt;br&gt;
434were automatically extracted by software that scanned the document’s file for numbers&lt;br&gt;
435of the form 19XX, since previous studies indicate that few if any computing reports&lt;br&gt;
436reference documents published in previous centuries [5]. Table 1 presents the median&lt;br&gt;
437citation age calculated for these documents, broken down by repository and the year of&lt;br&gt;
438publication for the source documents from which the reference dates were extracted:&lt;br&gt;
439Table 1. Median citation ages for technical report repositories&lt;br&gt;
440The median citation age ranges between 2 and 4 years, which is consistent with&lt;br&gt;
441previous examinations of computing and information systems literature ([5], [4]).&lt;br&gt;
442When graphed, the distribution of reference dates show the exponential curve typically&lt;br&gt;
443found in obsolescence studies, including the final droop due to an “immediacy effect”&lt;br&gt;
444&lt;hr&gt;
445</Content>
446</Section>
447<Section>
448 <Description>
449 <Metadata name="Title">11</Metadata>
450 </Description>
451 <Content>&lt;br /&gt;
452as fewer very new documents are available for citation [7]. These types of results&lt;br&gt;
453provide confirmation that references used in computer science technical reports (the pre-&lt;br&gt;
454eminent “grey literature” of the computing field) conforms to the same patterns as&lt;br&gt;
455references found in the formally published literature.&lt;br&gt;
456&lt;i&gt;co-citation and bibliographic coupling studies&lt;/i&gt;&lt;br&gt;
457The rate at which documents cite each other (co-citation) or cite the same&lt;br&gt;
458documents (bibliographic coupling) can be used to produce &amp;quot;maps&amp;quot; of a subject&lt;br&gt;
459literature. These techniques rely on analysis of the references of documents, and these&lt;br&gt;
460references must be in a common format. While digital libraries contain full text of&lt;br&gt;
461documents, their references are not standardized, and indeed are not even tagged as&lt;br&gt;
462such. To perform these studies the references must be manually extracted and&lt;br&gt;
463processed–a tedious process that is only worthwhile for documents (such as technical&lt;br&gt;
464reports) that are not included in existing citation databases such as the Science Citation&lt;br&gt;
465Index and Social Science Citation Index.&lt;br&gt;
466&lt;i&gt;detecting cycles or regularities in the rate of production of research&lt;/i&gt;&lt;br&gt;
467Analysis of trends in the production of technical reports can give indications&lt;br&gt;
468about working conditions that affect research; for example, is more research produced&lt;br&gt;
469over the summer, when the teaching load is lighter? or is research steadily produced&lt;br&gt;
470throughout the year?&lt;br&gt;
471Figure 2. Distribution of the number of documents submitted to hep-th, 1992-1994&lt;br&gt;
472Figures 2 and 3 present statistics on document accumulation in the hep-th (high&lt;br&gt;
473energy physics) e-print server, a part of the PHYSICS E-PRINT ARCHIVE. This system&lt;br&gt;
474is one of the oldest formal pre-print archives, and has become the primary means for&lt;br&gt;
475information dissemination in its field. Examination of these figures reveals several&lt;br&gt;
476trends. Clearly the absolute number of documents deposited in the repository has&lt;br&gt;
477&lt;hr&gt;
478</Content>
479</Section>
480<Section>
481 <Description>
482 <Metadata name="Title">12</Metadata>
483 </Description>
484 <Content>&lt;br /&gt;
485tended to increase over the time period. For all three years, research production has its&lt;br&gt;
486lowest point in January and February, increases through May and June, then decreases&lt;br&gt;
487until August and September. At that point the rate of production steps up, reaching a&lt;br&gt;
488yearly peak in November and December. This pattern is less clear for 1992, which&lt;br&gt;
489might be expected as the archive was established in mid-1991.&lt;br&gt;
490Figure 3. Distribution of the percentage of documents submitted to hep-th, 1992-1994&lt;br&gt;
491&lt;b&gt;4. Analysis of usage data&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;
492The emerging Internet-based digital libraries will permit research on scientific&lt;br&gt;
493information collection and use at a much finer grain than is possible with current paper&lt;br&gt;
494libraries or online bibliographic databases. Current bibliometric or scientometric&lt;br&gt;
495research of this type must measure information use indirectly – for example, through&lt;br&gt;
496examination of the list of references appended to published articles. However, it is well&lt;br&gt;
497known that authors do not necessarily include in the reference list all documents that&lt;br&gt;
498could have been cited, and conversely that not all references listed may have been&lt;br&gt;
499actually “used” in performing the research; citation behavior can be affected by a&lt;br&gt;
500number of motivating factors (Garfield lists &lt;i&gt;15&lt;/i&gt; possible reasons in [8]).&lt;br&gt;
501Digital library transaction logs provide a powerful tool for direct analysis of&lt;br&gt;
502document “usage”: since digital libraries contain the actual document (rather than only a&lt;br&gt;
503document surrogate), the relative amount of “use” that a digital library’s clients make of&lt;br&gt;
504a given document sees can be estimated from the number of times the document file is&lt;br&gt;
505downloaded (and, presumably, the document is read). Note that file downloading is a&lt;br&gt;
506much stronger statement on the part of the user than, for example, having a&lt;br&gt;
507bibliographic record appear in the query result set for a conventional bibliographic&lt;br&gt;
508system; the user downloads only &lt;i&gt;after&lt;/i&gt; the document has been found potentially relevant&lt;br&gt;
509through examination of its document surrogate. Additionally, downloading is&lt;br&gt;
510frequently time-consuming and sometimes costly (depending on local pricing for&lt;br&gt;
511&lt;hr&gt;
512</Content>
513</Section>
514<Section>
515 <Description>
516 <Metadata name="Title">13</Metadata>
517 </Description>
518 <Content>&lt;br /&gt;
519Internet access). Downloaded documents are therefore highly likely at least to be&lt;br&gt;
520scanned, if not read closely. The transaction logs for a digital library can provide a&lt;br&gt;
521global picture of the use of documents in the collection, since all user interactions with&lt;br&gt;
522the library can be automatically logged for analysis. By contrast, it is of course&lt;br&gt;
523impossible to track usage of print bibliographies, and very difficult to monitor usage of&lt;br&gt;
524bibliographic data available on CD-ROM across more than one or two sites.&lt;br&gt;
525Furthermore, analysis of search requests by geographic location, institution,&lt;br&gt;
526and sometimes even individual user are also possible. As an example, Table 2 presents&lt;br&gt;
527a portion of the summary of usage statistics (broken down by domain code) for queries&lt;br&gt;
528to the computer science technical collection of the NEW ZEALAND DIGITAL LIBRARY.&lt;br&gt;
529Examination of the data indicates that the heaviest use of the collection comes from&lt;br&gt;
530North America, Europe (particularly Germany and Finland), as well as the local New&lt;br&gt;
531Zealand community and nearby Australia. As expected for such a collection, a large&lt;br&gt;
532proportion of users are from educational (.edu) institutions; surprisingly, however, a&lt;br&gt;
533similar number of queries come from commercial (.com) organizations, indicating&lt;br&gt;
534perhaps that the documents are seeing use in commercial research and development&lt;br&gt;
535units.&lt;br&gt;
536Table 2. Accesses to the NEW ZEALAND DIGITAL LIBRARY CS collection by Domain&lt;br&gt;Code&lt;br&gt;
537Of course, usage levels can also be further broken down by IP number&lt;br&gt;
538(indicating institutions), and systems requiring users to register may also be able to&lt;br&gt;
539analyze usage on an individual basis. Since the query strings themselves are also&lt;br&gt;
540recorded in the transaction logs, this domain/institution/individual activity could also be&lt;br&gt;
541linked to specific subjects through the query terms. Summaries of this type could be&lt;br&gt;
542invaluable for studies of geographic diffusion and distribution of research topics.&lt;br&gt;
543Transaction log analysis can also indicate time-related patterns in the&lt;br&gt;
544information seeking behavior of digital library users. As a sample of this type of&lt;br&gt;
545analysis, Paul Ginsparg notes a seven day periodicity in the number of search requests&lt;br&gt;
546&lt;hr&gt;
547</Content>
548</Section>
549<Section>
550 <Description>
551 <Metadata name="Title">14</Metadata>
552 </Description>
553 <Content>&lt;br /&gt;
554made to the PHYSICS E-PRINT archives (Figure 4, reproduced from [9]). From this he&lt;br&gt;
555adduces that many physicists do not yet have weekend access to the Internet (an&lt;br&gt;
556alternative, slightly more cynical hypothesis is that even high energy theoretical&lt;br&gt;
557physicists take the weekend off).&lt;br&gt;
558Figure 4. Summary of search requests to the physics pre-print archives&lt;br&gt;
559&lt;b&gt;5. Conclusion&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;
560This study suggests opportunities for conducting bibliometric research on the&lt;br&gt;
561evolving digital libraries. These repositories are suitable platforms for conventional&lt;br&gt;
562bibliometric techniques (such as obsolescence studies, quantification of physical&lt;br&gt;
563characteristics of documents comprising a subject literature, time analysis, etc.). The&lt;br&gt;
564ability to directly monitor access to documents in digital libraries also enables&lt;br&gt;
565researchers to explicitly quantify document usage, as well as to implicitly measure&lt;br&gt;
566usage through citations. Additional facilities could aid in the performance of&lt;br&gt;
567bibliographic experiments, such as: improved tagging of document fields; provision of&lt;br&gt;
568utilities to strip out titles, authors, etc. from common document formats; and the ability&lt;br&gt;
569to easily eliminate duplicate entries from downloaded library subsets. Unfortunately,&lt;br&gt;
570the most useful of these additional facilities – those associated with a higher degree of&lt;br&gt;
571cataloging – run counter to the underlying philosophy of many digital libraries: to&lt;br&gt;
572avoid, if possible, manual processing and formal cataloging of documents. While&lt;br&gt;
573adherence to this principle can limit the accuracy of fielded searching (or indeed,&lt;br&gt;
574preclude it altogether), it can also avoid the cataloging bottleneck and permit digital&lt;br&gt;
575libraries to provide access to larger numbers of documents.&lt;br&gt;
576The digital libraries complement the information currently available through&lt;br&gt;
577paper, online, and CD-ROM bibliographic resources. While these latter databases&lt;br&gt;
578generally have the advantage of standardized formatting of bibliographic fields, the&lt;br&gt;
579digital libraries are freely accessible, often contain &amp;quot;grey literature&amp;quot; that is otherwise&lt;br&gt;
580&lt;hr&gt;
581</Content>
582</Section>
583<Section>
584 <Description>
585 <Metadata name="Title">15</Metadata>
586 </Description>
587 <Content>&lt;br /&gt;
588unavailable for analysis, and generally make the full text of documents available. The&lt;br&gt;
589insights gained from analysis of digital libraries will add to the store of &amp;quot;information&lt;br&gt;
590about information&amp;quot; that we have gained from older types of bibliographic repositories.&lt;br&gt;
591&lt;b&gt;References&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;
592[1] Bollacker, K.D., S. Lawrence, and C.L.Giles, CiteSeer: An Autonomous Web&lt;br&gt;
593Agent for Automatic Retrieval and Identification of Interesting Publications,&lt;br&gt;
594&lt;i&gt;Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents&lt;/i&gt;&lt;br&gt;
595(Minneapolis/St. Paul, May 9-13), 1998.&lt;br&gt;
596[2] Bowman, C.M., P.B. Danzig, U. Manber, and M.F. Schwartz, Scalable Internet&lt;br&gt;
597resource discovery: Research problems and approaches, &lt;i&gt;Communications of&lt;/i&gt;&lt;br&gt;
598&lt;i&gt;the ACM 37(8)&lt;/i&gt; (1994) 98-107.&lt;br&gt;
599[3] Burton, Hilary D. , Use of a virtual information system for bibliometric analysis,&lt;br&gt;
600&lt;i&gt;Informaton Processing &amp;amp; Management 24(1)&lt;/i&gt; (1988) 39-44.&lt;br&gt;
601[4] Cunningham, S.J., An empirical investigation of the obsolescence rate for&lt;br&gt;
602information systems literature, &lt;i&gt;Library and Information Science&lt;/i&gt;&lt;br&gt;
603&lt;i&gt;Research&lt;/i&gt;., 1996, http://library.fgcu.edu/iclc/lisrissu.htm&lt;br&gt;
604 [5] Cunningham, S.J., and D. Bocock, Obsolescence of computing literature.&lt;br&gt;
605&lt;i&gt;Scientometrics&lt;/i&gt; &lt;i&gt;34(2) &lt;/i&gt; (1995), pp. 255-262.&lt;br&gt;
606 [6] Cunningham, S.J. and Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Information searching&lt;br&gt;
607preferences and practices of computer science researchers, &lt;i&gt;Proceedings of&lt;/i&gt;&lt;br&gt;
608&lt;i&gt;OZCHI '96&lt;/i&gt; (1996) 294-299.&lt;br&gt;
609[7] de Solla Price, D.J., Citation measures of hard science, soft science, technology,&lt;br&gt;
610and nonscience. In: C.E. Nelson and D.K. Pollock (eds), &lt;i&gt;Communication&lt;/i&gt;&lt;br&gt;
611&lt;i&gt;among scientists and engineers&lt;/i&gt; (Heath Lexington, 1970).&lt;br&gt;
612[8] Garfield, E., &lt;i&gt;Citation Indexing: Its theory and application in Science, Technology&lt;/i&gt;&lt;br&gt;
613&lt;i&gt;and Humanities (&lt;/i&gt;Wiley, 1979).&lt;br&gt;
614&lt;hr&gt;
615</Content>
616</Section>
617<Section>
618 <Description>
619 <Metadata name="Title">16</Metadata>
620 </Description>
621 <Content>&lt;br /&gt;
622[9] Ginsparg, P. After dinner remarks: 14 Oct ‘94 APS meeting at LANL, 1994&lt;br&gt;
623(&amp;lt;URL: http://xxx.lanl.gov/blurb&amp;gt; ).&lt;br&gt;
624[10] Ginsparg, P., First steps towards electronic research communication, &lt;i&gt;Computers&lt;/i&gt;&lt;br&gt;
625&lt;i&gt;in Physics 8(4)&lt;/i&gt; (1994) 390-401. &lt;br&gt;
626[11] Hallmark, J., Scientists' access and retrieval of references cited in their recent&lt;br&gt;
627journal articles, &lt;i&gt; College and Research Libraries 55(3)&lt;/i&gt; (1994) 199-210.&lt;br&gt;
628[12] Hawkins, D.T. , Unconventional uses of on-line information retrieval systems:&lt;br&gt;
629on-line bibliometric studies, &lt;i&gt;Journal of the American Society for Information&lt;/i&gt;&lt;br&gt;
630&lt;i&gt;Science 28&lt;/i&gt; (1977) 13-18.&lt;br&gt;
631[13] McGhee, P.E. , P.R. Skinner, K. Roberto, N.J. Ridenour, and S.M. Larson,&lt;br&gt;
632Using online databases to study current research trends: an online bibliometric&lt;br&gt;
633study, &lt;i&gt;Library and Information Science Research 9&lt;/i&gt; (1987) 285-291.&lt;br&gt;
634[14] Maly, K., E.A. Fox, J.C. French, and A.L. Selman, Wide area technical report&lt;br&gt;
635server (&lt;i&gt;Technical Report , &lt;/i&gt; Dept. of Computer Science, Old Dominion&lt;br&gt;
636University, &lt;br&gt;
6371994. &lt;br&gt;
638Also &lt;br&gt;
639available &lt;br&gt;
640at &lt;br&gt;
641 &lt;br&gt;
642 &lt;br&gt;
643&amp;lt;URL:&lt;br&gt;
644http://www.cs.odu.edu/WATERS/WATERS-paper.ps&amp;gt; ).&lt;br&gt;
645[15] Sigogneau, M.J. , S. Bain, J.P. Courtial, and H. Feillet, Scientific innovation in&lt;br&gt;
646bibliographical databases: a comparative study of the Science Citation Index&lt;br&gt;
647and the Pascal database, &lt;i&gt;Scientometrics 22(1)&lt;/i&gt; (1991) 65-82.&lt;br&gt;
648[16] Witten, I.H., S.J. Cunningham, M. Vallabh, and T.C. Bell, A New Zealand&lt;br&gt;
649digital library for computer science research, &lt;i&gt;Proceedings of Digital Libraries&lt;/i&gt;&lt;br&gt;
650&lt;i&gt;'95&lt;/i&gt; (1995) 25-30.&lt;br&gt;
651[17] Witten, I.H., C. Nevill-Manning, and S.J. Cunningham, A public library based&lt;br&gt;
652on full-text retrieval, &lt;i&gt;Communications of the ACM&lt;/i&gt; 41(4), 1998, p. 71&lt;br&gt;
653&lt;hr&gt;
654</Content>
655</Section>
656<Section>
657 <Description>
658 <Metadata name="Title">17</Metadata>
659 </Description>
660 <Content>&lt;br /&gt;
661 &lt;br&gt;
6621Documents were randomly sampled from the DEC&lt;br&gt;
663(ftp://crl.dec.com/pub/DEC/CRL/tech-reports/), Sony&lt;br&gt;
664(ftp://ftp.csl.sony.co.jp/CSL/CSL-Papers), and Ohio (ftp://archive.cis.ohio-&lt;br&gt;
665state.edu/pub/tech-report/) technical report repositories&lt;br&gt;
666&lt;hr&gt;
667
668
669</Content>
670</Section>
671</Section>
672</Archive>
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