JCDL 2006

Chaomei Chen, Xia Lin, Howard White and Kate McCain

Abstract

The desire to identify, understand, and track the development of scientific knowledge is deeply rooted in philosophy of science, sociology of science, information science, and a wide variety of scientific disciplines. Increasingly comprehensive and widely accessible digital libraries of scientific publications are becoming essential resources of scientific communities. On the other hand, users of such digital libraries are also increasingly overwhelmed by the rapidly expanding volume of collections in their digital libraries and by the rapidly advancing scientific knowledge. Users are in need of tools that can help them augment their ability to conceive and abreast the big picture of how scientific knowledge evolves in their own fields or in a new field at a macroscopic level. The aim of this tutorial is to introduce some of the fundamental theories, methodologies, and technologies that can help users of digital libraries to better understand their collections of scientific literature. The tutorial will present the integral role of information visualization, citation analysis, and knowledge domain visualization in augmenting our understanding of scientific knowledge conveyed through digital libraries, knowledge repositories, and disciplinary archives. The tutorial will include hands-on sessions for participants to explore a number of fully operational prototypes.

Target Audience

Anyone who needs to develop a better understanding of the intellectual structure of scientific literature and/or how scientific knowledge evolves in a scientific domain. Researchers, educators, consultants, evaluators, and domain analysts.

Presenters

Chaomei Chen, Ph.D. Associate Professor, College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University
Dr. Chen’s research includes information visualization and how relevant techniques can be applied to digital libraries. He is particularly interested in mapping scientific frontiers and identifying structural and temporal patterns of the growth of scientific knowledge and how such patterns change over time. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Information Visualization (Palgrave-Macmillan) and the author of Information Visualization (Springer, 2004) and Mapping Scientific Frontiers (Springer, 2003). He is the designer and developer of the CiteSpace system, a freely available Java application for analyzing trends and changes in scientific literature. For further information, see http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~cc345. He can be reached at chaomei.chen@cis.drexel.edu

Xia Lin, Ph.D. Associate Professor, College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University
Dr. Lin received his Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1993. Since then, he has been an active member of SIGIR and digital libraries communities and has published widely in the areas of digital libraries, information visualization and information retrieval. He has developed several information visualization prototypes that can be applied to very large databases or digital libraries. For further information, see http://faculty.cis.drexel.edu/~xlin/.

Howard White, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus, College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University
Dr. White has published on bibliometrics and co-citation analysis, evaluation of reference services, expert systems for reference work, innovative online searching, social science data archives, and literature retrieval for meta-analysis and interdisciplinary studies. He is the author of Brief Tests of Collection Strength (Greenwood, 1995) and a co-author of For Information Specialists: Interpretations of Reference and Bibliographic Work with Marcia Bates and Patrick Wilson (Ablex, 1992). He is the recipient of the Research Award of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) in 1993, the best JASIS paper award with Katherine McCain for Visualizing a Discipline: An Author Co-Citation Analysis of Information Science, 1972-1995 in 1998, the ASIST’s Award of Merit – the highest honor for career achievement in 2004, and the biennial Derek de Solla Price Memorial Medal from the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics for contributions to the quantitative study of science in 2005. He also developed the AuthorMap system. For further information, see http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/HUD.Web/HUD.html

Katherine W. McCain, Ph.D. Professor, College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University
Dr. McCain’s primary research interests focus on aspects of formal and informal communication including bibliometric studies of scholarly literatures and information transfer in the biomedical sciences. Her secondary interests include evaluation of information retrieval systems and diffusion of innovation. Her major teaching areas comprise resources in science and technology, content representation, and scholarly communication. She also teaches the introductory Ph.D. course, Topics in Information Science. Her background is in the biological sciences, and her professional experience includes management of a biology library.