Pioneers are those who, in some way, lead their peers to new destinations. In the evolution of a domain, the pioneers might very well be those who have followed a theoretical principle in some particularly ardent manner, thus leading the rest of the domain toward an evolving research front. The present paper is an attempt to use the tools of domain analysis to diachronically analyze the domain of knowledge organization as it is evolving in North America. That is we use bibliometric tools to identify the axes that define North American knowledge organization and its scientists, who are its pioneers. The evolution of a North American chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) marks a growth in coherence of a long active research area. An interesting research question is: what are the characteristics of North American scholarship in knowledge organization? Author co-citation analysis of North American authors whose work appeared in the journal Knowledge Organization is contrasted with author co-citation analysis of authors from outside North America. North American leaders are clearly identified, and some themesâ such as knowledge organization onlineâ that are emergent topics in North America are identified.

The paper Fundamental methodologies and tools for the employment of webometric analyses defines the most important rules to keep in mind before performing webometric analyses. The paper deals with the two basic elements, that constitutes the foundation for webometric analyses: the documents being analysed, and the tools that are applied for the data collection. The concepts of a citation theory and a link theory are discussed through a study of the current litterature. Different methodologies for uncovering motivations for making references in scientific articles are reviewed and discussed. A methodology for uncovering motivations for making links on webpages is proposed and applied on six researchers' websites at the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Denmark, and on all the institutes at the same institution and at selected institutes at The Technical University of Denmark. The paper further contains a review on the linktopology of the Internet and the current status for the tools available for data collection. Finally, alternative possible tools for applying webometric analyses are proposed. The alternative tools are the Researchindex invented by Lawrence and Giles (Lawrence, Bollacker & Giles, 1999b; Giles, Bollacker & Lawrence, 1998), Kleinberg's HITS algorithm employed in the Clever search engine (The Clever Project, n.d.; Kleinberg, 1998), Proposals for possible extensions to the HTTP protocol to facilitate the collection and navigation of backlink information in the world wide web made by Chakrabarti, Gibson and McCurley (Chakrabarti, Gibson & McCurley, 1999c) and finally Link Agent, a program we have developed for this paper. The program makes it possible to uncover the reciprocal linking webpages, that exist in relation to the outgoing links from a chosen webpage. Keywords: Informetrics, Webometrics, Citation theory, Link theory, Motivations for links, Motivations for references, Search engines, Webometric tools

Using data from SCI 1998, we have analysed international collaboration in science in 11 Asian countries. Papers resulting from collaboration among these countries and with G7, European Union, OECD and selected Latin American and African countries were classified under subject categories to characterize each countryâ s total and collaborated scientific literature output. Japan (16.4% of internationally collaborated papers), India (17.6%) and Taiwan (16.3%) recorded an internationalization index less than 30 whereas China (28.5%), South Korea (24.6%) and Hong Kong (36.2%) recorded an internationalization index greater than 40. India, China and South Korea have collaborated more in physics, whereas the other eight countries have collaborated more in life sciences. In almost all fields and for virtually all Asian countries, USA is the most preferred collaborating partner. All G7 countries collaborate more with China, which is emerging as a leader in regional collaboration, than with India.

The status of Information Systems (IS) as a discipline has been widely debated as a body of knowledge that offers a number of concepts, methods and techniques to understand and improve the roles of information communication systems and technologies in organizations. Current state of this debate as reported in academic journals signals an imperative to ground some of the perspectives in relation to what IS professionals use in practice in different cultural and geographical contexts. This paper aims to contribute to the debate by tracing the unfolding of information systems as a body of knowledge using the ideas of Abbott on disciplines. We use three different stages of a discipline's development: differentiation, conflict and absorption and map them using a citation and co-citation analyses of two main IS journals (EJIS and MISQ) in the period between 1995 and 2008. Our results indicate that dominant ideas and models to investigate IS phenomena emerged over time are behavioural based and study IS adoption/acceptance/rejection in organisations, many of which are predictive and thus lending themselves usable for positivistic quantitative and qualitative research. There are however stable varieties within IS building on interpretivism and constructivism that we need to recognise and reignite in order to ensure that this field continues moving forward, in particular in studying current and future processes of innovation and diffusion of technology worldwide. (author's abstract)

Bibliometry; Citation analysis; Vectorials Spaces Model (VSM); Multidimensional Scaling (MDS); Mapping of Science; Contemporany History / The spatial perfomance of the relationships there are among researchers in Contemporany History of Jaén for 1990-1995 through their behaviour in citing process is the objetive of this work. Through reference analysis bases on Vectorial Spaces Model (VSM) and displayed in a graphic thanks to Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) are obtained results about research fronts, who lead them, who made up them, and the "disciple/master" relationships there are among researchers.

This study investigates the Web Impact Factors (WIFs) for Iranian universities and introduces a new system of measurement. Counts of links to the web sites of Iranian universities were calculated from the output of AltaVista search engine. The WIFs for Iranian universities were calculated by dividing link page counts by the number of pages found in AltaVista for each university at a given point in time. These WIFs were then compared, to study the impact, visibility, and influence of Iranian university web sites. Overall, Iranian university web sites have a low inlink WIF. While specific features of sites may affect an institution's Web Impact Factor, there is a significant correlation between the proportion of English-language pages at an institution's site and the institution's backlink counts. This indicates that for linguistic reasons, Iranian (Persian-language) web sites may not attract the attention they deserve from the World Wide Web. This raises the possibility that information may be ignored due to linguistic and geographic barriers, and this should be taken into account in the development of the global Web.

The paper investigates how Information Systems (IS) has emerged as the product of interdisciplinary discourses. The research aim in this study is to better understand diversity in IS research, and the extent to which the diversity of discourse expanded and contracted from 1995 to 2011. Methodologically, we apply a combined citations/co-citations analysis based on the eight Association for Information Systems (AIS) basket journals and the 22 subject-field classification framework provided by the Association of Business Schools (ABS). Our findings suggest that IS is in a state of continuous interaction and competition with other disciplines. General Management was reduced from a dominant position as a reference discipline in IS at the expense of a growing variety of other discourses including Business Strategy, Marketing, and Ethics and Governance among others. Over time, IS as a field moved from the periphery to a central position during its discursive formation. This supports the notion of IS as a fluid discipline dynamically embracing a diverse range of adjacent reference disciplines, whilst keeping a degree of continuing interaction with them. Understanding where IS is currently at allows us to better understand and propose fruitful avenues for its development in both academia and practice.

Supply chains have expanded rapidly over the decades, with the aim to increase productivity, lower costs and fulfil demands in emerging markets. The increasing complexity in a supply chain hinders visibility and consequently reduces one’s control over the process. Cases of disruption such as the ones faced by Ericsson and Enron, have shown that a risk event occurring at one point of the supply chain can greatly affect other members, when the disruption is not properly controlled. Supply chain management thus faces a pressing need to maintain the expected yields of the system in risk situations. To achieve that, we need to both identify potential risks and evaluate their impacts, and at the same time design risk mitigation policies to locate and relocate resources to deal with risk events. This dissertation aims to analyse how supply chain risks could be effectively managed. This is done firstly by positioning the research agenda in supply chain risk management (SCRM). Then, methods for effective management of supply chain risk are identified and analysed. In order to find these, we develop a research framework in which the supply chain system is divided into subsystems based on the operations of make, source and deliver; as well as on material, financial and information flows. Furthermore, research questions are raised in order to understand the impact of risks on supply chains, to identify the performance measures for monitoring supply chains, and to determine risk mitigation strategies for improving system performances. This dissertation includes a bibliometric analysis of relevant literature of SCRM published in recent years. Based on the co-citation analysis, we identify the changing interest in SCRM, from performance-focused individual issues in the early years to integrated system issues with management perspective in recent years. We also identify the growing importance of information issues in SCRM. However, there is a relative lack of research into risk mitigation focusing on information flows in the literature. This dissertation also develops a conceptual model for analysing supply chain risk. The adoption of tools from the established field of reliability engineering provides a systematic yet robust process for risk analysis in supply chains. We have found that the potential use of a stand-alone tool of Failure Modes and Effect Analysis (FMEA) or a hybrid application of Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), will be most appropriate in SCRM. Apart from above mentioned studies, this dissertation then includes three manuscripts respectively investigating the risk mitigation policies in SCRM. First, we suggest a dynamic pricing policy when facing supply yield risk, such as price postponement, where price is determined only after receiving the delivery information. This postponed pricing, can improve the balance between supply and demand, especially when the delivery quantity is small, demand has a low uncertainty and there is a wide range when demand is sensible to price change. In another paper, a system dynamics model is developed to investigate the dispersion of disruption on the supply chain operation as well as along the network. Based on this simulation model, policies are tested to observe their influence to the performance of the supply chain. The study results support the benefit of a dual-sourcing strategy. Furthermore, information sharing, appropriate order splitting and time to react would further improve the supply chain performance when disruption strikes. In the last paper, we study how capacity should be expanded when a new product is introduced into the market. The major risk here is due to a quick capacity expansion with large investments which could be difficult to recover. Using the Bass diffusion model to describe demand development, we study how capacity expansion, together with sales plan could affect the economics of the system. Using sales information for the forecast, delaying the sales and adding initial inventories, should create a better scheme of cash flows. This dissertation contributes in several ways to the research field of SCRM. It plots research advancements which provide further directions of research in SCRM. In conjunction with the conceptual model, simulations and mathematical modelling, we have also provided suggestions for how a better and more robust supply chain could be designed and managed. The diversified modelling approaches and risk issues should also enrich the literature and stimulate future study in SCRM.

Cette thèse propose une étude exhaustive de l'oeuvre du philosophe allemand contemporain, Peter Sloterdijk, et des débats qu'elle soulève. En tant que figure de proue d'un renouveau remarqué du courant phénoménologique, la pensée politique de l'auteur milite en faveur de l'existence d'une gauche de tradition nietzschéenne-heideggérienne. Le phénomène « Sloterdijk » comme événement littéraire n'est pas seulement appréhendé par un strict travail d'exégèse, car il est d'abord considéré comme un phénomène social et politique qui révèle l'état du champ intellectuel allemand et qui témoigne des stratégies qui s'offrent aux acteurs intellectuels en lutte pour y obtenir (conserver) une niche. Pour ce faire, l'analyse de l'oeuvre relève d'une double lecture, politique et philosophique, textuelle et sociale. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Sloterdijk Peter, Pensée politique, Philosophie, Sociologie, Théorie, Champ intellectuel, Réseau intellectuel, Bibliométrie, Allemagne, Europe.

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.