WEBINAR: Analyzing A Scholarly Literature Using Bibliometrics

 

This talk will show how the tools of bibliometrics and network analysis can be used to analyze the structure of scholarly literature. The focus will be on phenomenology, the philosophical study of consciousness, which originated in the late 19th century and has developed into a complex landscape of overlapping and sometimes competing schools of thought. To study this structure, a citation graph was created in which nodes correspond to authors and links between nodes correspond to citations. Clusters in the network correspond to authors who cite each other more than they cite authors in other clusters. The way the field is organized according to the citation graph can be compared with the way it is organized according to its practitioners (i.e. according to published accounts of the structure of the field). Methods will be outlined that can be applied to other scholarly literature. The benefits and risks of this type of research will also be discussed.

 

Jeff Yoshimi is an Associate Professor and founding faculty member in the Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences at UC Merced. He has broad research interests in phenomenology, philosophy of cognitive science, neural networks, and visualization of complex processes.