Knowledge, learning, and innovation are vital elements in facilitating economic development and growth. Technological change, which is a synonym for generating knowledge, the diffusion thereof, and subsequent application in the marketplace in the form of novel products and processes, i.e. innovations, has a strong effect on the collective wealth of regions and nations. Knowledge spillovers, which are unintended knowledge flows that take place among spatial (geography) and sectoral (industry) units of observation, provide a rationale for diverging growth rates among spatial units, well beyond what might be explained by variations in jurisdictional factor endowments, and thus are of particular interest in this context. Measuring and quantifying the creation and diffusion of knowledge has proven to be a challenging endeavor. One way to capture technical and economically valuable knowledge is by means of patent and patent citation analysis. Following this approach, and utilizing a novel patent database that has been specifically developed for this purpose, the present dissertation investigates the spatio-sectoral patterns of knowledge spillovers in the Canadian economy over the time period 1983 to 2007. The employed research methodology addresses existing limitations in this stream of research, and contributes to the continuing debate regarding the significance of sectoral specialization versus diversity, and local versus non-local knowledge spillovers as the main driver of knowledge formation processes leading to innovation at the sub-regional scale. The findings indicate that knowledge spillovers are localized, and furthermore, that this localization effect has increased over time for both spillovers within a particular industry, as well as between industry sectors. The analysis of micro-geographic industry specific spatio-sectoral knowledge formation processes, and the inquiry into local sectoral knowledge spillover patterns, outlines how regional evolutionary technology trajectories potentially shape the rate and direction of technological change, and consequently influence economic growth, at a particular place.

Knowledge, learning, and innovation are vital elements in facilitating economic development and growth. Technological change, which is a synonym for generating knowledge, the diffusion thereof, and subsequent application in the marketplace in the form of novel products and processes, i.e. innovations, has a strong effect on the collective wealth of regions and nations. Knowledge spillovers, which are unintended knowledge flows that take place among spatial (geography) and sectoral (industry) units of observation, provide a rationale for diverging growth rates among spatial units, well beyond what might be explained by variations in jurisdictional factor endowments, and thus are of particular interest in this context. Measuring and quantifying the creation and diffusion of knowledge has proven to be a challenging endeavor. One way to capture technical and economically valuable knowledge is by means of patent and patent citation analysis. Following this approach, and utilizing a novel patent database that has been specifically developed for this purpose, the present dissertation investigates the spatio-sectoral patterns of knowledge spillovers in the Canadian economy over the time period 1983 to 2007. The employed research methodology addresses existing limitations in this stream of research, and contributes to the continuing debate regarding the significance of sectoral specialization versus diversity, and local versus non-local knowledge spillovers as the main driver of knowledge formation processes leading to innovation at the sub-regional scale. The findings indicate that knowledge spillovers are localized, and furthermore, that this localization effect has increased over time for both spillovers within a particular industry, as well as between industry sectors. The analysis of micro-geographic industry specific spatio-sectoral knowledge formation processes, and the inquiry into local sectoral knowledge spillover patterns, outlines how regional evolutionary technology trajectories potentially shape the rate and direction of technological change, and consequently influence economic growth, at a particular place.

This study investigates the impact that Latvian exile literature has had on research in Latvia between 1992 and 2006. Latvian exile literature refers to the publications that were authored and published by Latvians who emigrated to Western countries after World War II and were issued between 1945 and 1991. Mixed methods research was conducted, incorporating citation analysis, questionnaires and interviews. Nine subject fields from the social sciences, arts and humanities were examined: philosophy and psychology, religion and theology, political science, education, folklore and ethnography, the arts, linguistics, literature, history. For the citation analysis, 33,866 citations from 1241 publications were collected. In the survey, 79 questionnaires were received from Latvian researchers and 31 questionnaires from the librarians working in Latvian academic, special and the main regional libraries. After the data analyses of citations and questionnaires were conducted, the results were presented to 15 researchers in Latvia (experts in their subject fields) for their assessment and comments. The overall results show that Latvian exile literature has had the greatest impact on research in folklore, history and literature. Exile impact was observed through both exile publications and communication with exile people. It appears that in other disciplines exile literature has had little or no impact. The reasons for this are thought to be: the lack of exile publications that could make an impact, and the irrelevance of existing publications to research in Latvia. In general, exile academic publications have been the most influential on research. The citation results also demonstrate the impact that restrictions of the soviet period (1945-1991) had on the research in Latvia, particularly through the double obsolescence of citations in all subject fields.

The Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) citation databases have been used for decades as a starting point and often as the only tools for locating citations and/or conducting citation analyses. ISI databases (or Web of Science [WoS]), however, may no longer be sufficient because new databases and tools that allow citation searching are now available. Using citations to the work of 25 library and information science faculty members as a case study, this paper examines the effects of using Scopus and Google Scholar (GS) on the citation counts and rankings of scholars as measured by WoS. Overall, more than 10,000 citing and purportedly citing documents were examined. Results show that Scopus significantly alters the relative ranking of those scholars that appear in the middle of the rankings and that GS stands out in its coverage of conference proceedings as well as international, non-English language journals. The use of Scopus and GS, in addition to WoS, helps reveal a more accurate and comprehensive picture of the scholarly impact of authors. WoS data took about 100 hours of collecting and processing time, Scopus consumed 200 hours, and GS a grueling 3,000 hours.

The aim of the Science Foresight Project was to design and assess a simple, objective and cost-effective technique to gather information about emerging short and long-term research developments, primarily in the physical and engineering sciences. International experts were objectively chosen using co-citation patterns in scientific and technical literature, and were invited to submit their predictions about emerging developments in their research fields. They were questioned about how the effects of various factors and driving forces might affect their predictions. The cost and time required to administer the questionnaire and collect the responses was minimised through the use of Internet and Web based technologies. A simple process was used to report the predictions; short excerpts from each prediction were used as the summary and each prediction was classified into one of ten categories of emerging developments. Authors from 114 papers (23.7%) responded, identifying a total of 190 short-term and 111 long-term predicted emerging developments. Expert responses were received from an international group of senior researchers between the ages of 36 and 55, mostly engaged in basic research in academic institutions. Some experts described specific emerging developments, some discussed broad emerging trends in their field and others described both. Emerging development categories such as Atomic & Stellar Matter, Biology & Biosphere, Biomedical & Clinical, Computers & Robotics and Genomics & Proteomics were closely aligned with conventional science areas while other categories such as Mathematical & Computational and Nano Science & Technology contained predictions from almost every area of science. The technique developed and applied here appears to constitute an efficient means of surveying the international research community in order to gain insights into common patterns that evolve from their collective research activities. Dynamically monitoring emerging research developments on a continuous basis could provide valuable information to policy makers, planners and researchers.

This study evaluates the data sources and research methods used in earlier studies to rank the research productivity of Library and Information Science (LIS) faculty and schools. In doing so, the study identifies both tools and methods that generate more accurate publication count rankings as well as databases that should be taken into consideration when conducting comprehensive searches in the literature for research and curricular needs. With a list of 2,625 items published between 1982 and 2002 by 68 faculty members of 18 American Library Associationâ (ALA-) accredited LIS schools, hundreds of databases were searched. Results show that there are only 10 databases that provide significant coverage of the LIS indexed literature. Results also show that restricting the data sources to one, two, or even three databases leads to inaccurate rankings and erroneous conclusions. Because no database provides comprehensive coverage of the LIS literature, researchers must rely on a wide range of disciplinary and multidisciplinary databases for ranking and other research purposes. The study answers such questions as the following: Is the Association of Library and Information Science Educationâ s (ALISEâ s) directory of members a reliable tool to identify a complete list of faculty members at LIS schools? How many and which databases are needed in a multifile search to arrive at accurate publication count rankings? What coverage will be achieved using a certain number of databases? Which research areas are well covered by which databases? What alternative methods and tools are available to supplement gaps among databases? Did coverage performance of databases change over time? What counting method should be used when determining what and how many items each LIS faculty and school has published? The authors recommend advanced analysis of research productivity to provide a more detailed assessment of research productivity of authors and programs.

The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to the methodology at the intersection of relational and evaluative bibliometrics. Experimental investigations are presented that address the question of how we can most successfully produce estimates of the subject similarity between documents. The results from these investigations are then explored in the context of citation-based research evaluations in an effort to enhance existing citation normalization methods that are used to enable comparisons of subject-disparate documents with respect to their relative impact or perceived utility. This thesis also suggests and explores an approach for revealing the uncertainty and stability (or lack thereof) coupled with different kinds of citation indicators.This suggestion is motivated by the specific nature of the bibliographic data and the data collection process utilized in citation-based evaluation studies. The results of these investigations suggest that similarity-detection methods that take a global view of the problem of identifying similar documents are more successful in solving the problem than conventional methods that are more local in scope. These results are important for all applications that require subject similarity estimates between documents. Here these insights are specifically adopted in an effort to create a novel citation normalization approach that – compared to current best practice – is more in tune with the idea of controlling for subject matter when thematically different documents are assessed with respect to impact or perceived utility. The normalization approach is flexible with respect to the size of the normalization baseline and enables a fuzzy partition of the scientific literature. It is shown that this approach is more successful than currently applied normalization approaches in reducing the variability in the observed citation distribution that stems from the variability in the articles’ addressed subject matter. In addition, the suggested approach can enhance the interpretability of normalized citation counts. Finally, the proposed method for assessing the stability of citation indicators stresses that small alterations that could be artifacts from the data collection and preparation steps can have a significant influence on the picture that is painted by the citationindicator. Therefore, providing stability intervals around derived indicators prevents unfounded conclusions that otherwise could have unwanted policy implications. Together, the new normalization approach and the method for assessing the stability of citation indicators have the potential to enable fairer bibliometric evaluative exercises and more cautious interpretations of citation indicators.

Hammarfelt, B. 2012. Following the Footnotes: A Bibliometric Analysis of Citation Patterns in Literary Studies. Department of ALM. Skrifter utgivna av Institutionen för ABM vid Uppsala universitet 5. 193 pp. Uppsala. ISBN 978-91-506-2279-9. This thesis provides an in-depth study of the possibilities of applying bibliometric methods to the research field of literary studies. The four articles that constitute the backbone of this thesis focus on different aspects of references and citations in literary studies: from the use of references in the text to citation patterns among 34 literature journals. The analysis covers both an Anglo-Saxon context as well as research in Swedish literary studies, and the materials used include Web of Science data, references in the Swedish literature journal TFL (Tidskrift för Litteraturvetenskap) and applications to the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet). A study is also made of the influence of one single publication—Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations—and its impact in literary studies and in wider academia. The results from the four articles are elaborated upon using a theoretical framework that focuses on differences in the social and intellectual organization of research fields. According to these theories literary studies can be described as a fragmented, heterogenic, interdisciplinary and ‘rural’ field with a diverse audience. The fragmented and rural organization of the field is reflected in low citation frequencies as well as in the difficulties in discerning research specialities in co-citation mappings, while the analysis of the intellectual base (highly cited authors) is an example of the heterogenic and interdisciplinary character of the field, as it includes authors from many fields across the humanities and the social sciences. The thesis emphasizes that bibliometric studies of research fields in the humanities need to incorporate non-English and non-journal publications in order to produce valid and fair results. Moreover, bibliometric methods must be modified in accordance with the organization of research in a particular field, and differences in referencing practices and citation patterns ought to be considered. Consequently, it is advised that bibliometric measures for evaluating research in these fields should, if used at all, be applied with great caution. / <p>© Björn Hammarfelt 2012</p>

O objetivo desta pesquisa é analisar as citações utilizadas na elaboração das teses defendidas de 1999 até 2007 no Programa de Pós-Graduação em Administração da Escola de Administração da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, e, a partir das análises, obter indicadores de apoio à tomada de decisão no desenvolvimento de coleções da biblioteca. Para tal, analisam-se a tipologia dos materiais bibliográficos utilizados, a idade da literatura, os títulos de periódicos citados e a preferência do idioma dos materiais consultados. As informações obtidas permitirão otimizar a alocação de recursos para investimento em material informacional, traçar diretrizes para o armazenamento retrospectivo da coleção, determinar a composição da coleção-núcleo de periódicos, avaliar em quais idiomas devem ser selecionados os materiais bibliográficos em futuras aquisições, bem como preparar possíveis cortes na coleção devido a eventuais reduções no orçamento da biblioteca. / The aim of this research is analyze dissertations citations patterns uphold between 1999 and 2007 in the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Administração of Escola de Administração at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, and built up indicators to support library`s collection development decision-making. In doing so, we analyzed the kind of bibliographic materials used, his age, the main journals, and the references language. The result allows optimize resources` allocation and investment in informational material, establish retrospective collection storage guidelines, determining the core collection journals composition, indicate what language bibliographical materials should be selected in future acquisitions, and prepare for collection cuts due to possible library budget reductions.

O objetivo desta pesquisa é analisar as citações utilizadas na elaboração das teses defendidas de 1999 até 2007 no Programa de Pós-Graduação em Administração da Escola de Administração da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, e, a partir das análises, obter indicadores de apoio à tomada de decisão no desenvolvimento de coleções da biblioteca. Para tal, analisam-se a tipologia dos materiais bibliográficos utilizados, a idade da literatura, os títulos de periódicos citados e a preferência do idioma dos materiais consultados. As informações obtidas permitirão otimizar a alocação de recursos para investimento em material informacional, traçar diretrizes para o armazenamento retrospectivo da coleção, determinar a composição da coleção-núcleo de periódicos, avaliar em quais idiomas devem ser selecionados os materiais bibliográficos em futuras aquisições, bem como preparar possíveis cortes na coleção devido a eventuais reduções no orçamento da biblioteca. / The aim of this research is analyze dissertations citations patterns uphold between 1999 and 2007 in the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Administração of Escola de Administração at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, and built up indicators to support library`s collection development decision-making. In doing so, we analyzed the kind of bibliographic materials used, his age, the main journals, and the references language. The result allows optimize resources` allocation and investment in informational material, establish retrospective collection storage guidelines, determining the core collection journals composition, indicate what language bibliographical materials should be selected in future acquisitions, and prepare for collection cuts due to possible library budget reductions.