How to define a scientific term

such as “A Work” 

American Society for Information Science and TechnologyAnnual Meeting, November 12-17, 2004, Providence, Rhode Island,

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 3:30-5pmSession: Interdisciplinary Concepts of the “Work”

Entity   

By Birger Hjørland

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Overview of Presentation

1. Defining terms & developing theories

2. Works as entities in LIS

3. Bibliometrics

4. Modeling work-producing processes5. Conclusion

References

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1. Defining terms & developing theories

Smiraglia, possibly more that anybody else, has contributed to the scholarly literature about the concept of “A Work” (e.g., Smiraglia, 2001, 2002).

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1. Defining terms & developing theories

This way of doing scholarly work is in line with, among others, Buckland (1997, 1998) who has contributed to our concept of “a document” and my own conceptual analysis of core concepts in Library and Information Science (LIS), such as, for example, “information” (Capurro & Hjørland, 2001) and “subject” (Hjørland, 1992, 1997, 2001).

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1. Defining terms & developing theories

The principle of the hermeneutic circle tells us that you cannot understand a whole unless you already understand the parts and that you cannot understand the parts unless you have an understanding of the whole which these parts are contributing to.

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1. Defining terms & developing theories

In the case of conceptual analysis in LIS the implication is that you have to work with the understanding of single concepts such as “document”, “information” and “work” while at the same time considering the understanding of LIS as a whole.

Such concepts form part of a developing theory of LIS (or perhaps of a number of conflicting views or “paradigms”).

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1. Defining terms & developing theories

The purpose of knowledge, meanings and concepts is, according to pragmatic philosophy, to contribute to human action. The nature of such concepts is thus depending on what kind of actions they are meant to serve.

Different views in LIS thus tend to use different terms and to understand them differently.

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1. Defining terms & developing theories

The concept of “a work” has, in particular, been investigated by the library profession in relation to so-called “descriptive cataloging”, while it has been relatively ignored by the online community and information science part of LIS.

(There may still be different subcultures or “paradigms” within LIS which tend to ignore each other!).

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1. Defining terms & developing theories

In the documentation/information science tradition usually only documents are represented in databases, not the works which they represent.

It is a problem, for example, that a database such as PsycINFO has indexed many more or less accidental editions of Sigmund Freud’s books and it is difficult to overview the works of Freud. Here the notion of the collocation of a work would be helpful.

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1. Defining terms & developing theories

Another important example is the citation databases. If one wish to examine where a given work has been cited (doing a kind of reception analysis), it is a problem that there is no collocation of references to a specific work (cited reference). The searcher has to identify all the different documents (e.g. editions of a book, versions of a paper) and search them individually. In some cases this is almost impossible.

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1. Defining terms & developing theories

It should be mentioned, however, that scholars ideally tend to use and quote scholarly editions. For this reason high-level scholarship has a kind of built-in collocation in their citing practices.

This fact cannot, however, substitute the need for the collocating of works in abstract and citation databases. Such databases normally do not have the beauty of carefully edited collections (but have, of course, other qualities).

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1. Defining terms & developing theories

One thing is, however, to conclude that the online community has ignored the concept of “a work”.

Another question is whether the concept of “a work” in itself needs to be changed when used in this environment? (Or whether it needs to be changed for other reasons?). How do we investigate that issue?

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1. Defining terms & developing theories

One of my inspirations has been the Hegelian distinction between “abstract” and “concrete”. Whereas the positivist understanding of the concrete is what we can identify with our senses, the Hegelian notion of the concrete is what can be understood in itself.

For positivists a single man is concrete, while society is something abstract. For Hegel, it is the opposite:

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1. Defining terms & developing theories

The single man is an abstraction because he cannot be understood in isolation from society.

Similarly with documents and works. In the Hegelian understanding (and in mine) a single document or a single work cannot be understood (or described or indexed) in abstraction from the domains or discourses of which it is a product and to which it has given potential to contribute.

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1. Defining terms & developing theories

This kind of understanding searches for criteria for the description and indexing of documents outside the documents themselves, in the discourses and domains.

This is in line with Smiraglia’s (2001, p. 132) conclusion: “In particular, scholars should follow Vellucci’s path and examine specific disciplinary literatures and document-types for more predictive characteristics”.

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1. Defining terms & developing theories

The conflict between a positivist and a Hegelian understanding may be generalized as a way to explore any concept, including the concept of “a work”.

The traditions within LIS which ignore the concept of a work tend to be the most positivist ones. Even then we may ask: What would be the difference between a positivist and a non-positivist understanding of “a work”?

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1. Defining terms & developing theories

The positivist understanding of “a work” tends to emphasize qualities that may be determined by sensory inspection (such as the same sequences of words), while non-positivist approaches tend to emphasize non-sensory qualities, such as “same idea”. The pragmatic philosophy would consider functional criteria: When is it fruitful to regard two texts as versions of the same work?

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1. Defining terms & developing theories

It follows from the pragmatic philosophy that one should ask: For whom is it relevant or important to consider different texts as versions of the same work? (There is thus not the same universality in the pragmatic way of understanding concepts as is in the positivist way).

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1. Defining terms & developing theories

In a public library, for example, one might regard an illustrated book as one work, while in an art library the illustrations and the text could be regarded as separate works.

Again we are led to Smiraglia’s conclusion: “In particular scholars should . . . examine specific disciplinary literatures”.

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2. Works as entities in LIS

The concept of “a work” is not only a concept in the library tradition (as opposed to the information scientific tradition), it is also a concept much more related to the humanities than to the sciences (and to books rather than articles).

The following figure (from Tillett, 2001) shows a valuable (functional) way of determining the concept of “a work” in the library tradition:

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2. Works as entities in LIS

Some groupings, e.g. whales are mammals not fish, are generally (but not universally) more fruitful than other groupings (A possible exception is books for children).

Many such fruitful groupings are discovered by science or they are otherwise constructed by human beings. They are not just ‘given’ (neither inborn in the human mind nor given by logical deduction), but they are mostly documented in the literature.

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2. Works as entities in LIS

Based on, among others, bibliometrical studies, I will try to illuminate how the concept of “a work” may differ in scientific literatures.

It is well known that scientists are much more team-workers compared to humanists and that the single papers tend to be just fragments in relation to a collective work.

Derek J. de Solla Price characterizes the research fronts in science in the following way:

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3. Bibliometrics

"New papers use the other half of their references to connect back to the relatively small number of highly interconnected recent papers. In a particular field each recent paper is connected to all its neighbors by many lines of citation. A convenient image of the pattern is to be found in knitting. Each stitch is strongly attached to the previous row and to its neighbors..." (Price, 1969/1972).

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3. Bibliometrics

Such "knitting" is, according to Price, typical of the sciences, but not of the humanities or technology. The "knitting model" tells us that the individual researcher works with information that is produced almost simultaneously by his colleagues.

However, many papers are never cited and may not contribute to any collective work at all:

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3. Bibliometrics

Schwartz (1997) „Large-scale uncitedness refers to the remarkable proportion of articles that do not receive a single citation within five years of publication”

This publication reports a case study of library and information science where the rate of uncitedness is 72 percent.

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3. Bibliometrics

Seglen (1992) writes: “as part of a continuous probability distribution even uncited articles have a definite probability of contributing to scientific progress.”

The case seems to be that even uncited papers may represent “a work” but that the majority of papers do not in practice represent “a work” important enough to collocate. This is a tendency in the research culture encouraging the production of “least publishable units”.

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3. Bibliometrics

There are cases in which authors publish slightly modified papers in different journals. Should such papers be collocated as one work in the indexing process?

I think not because it is the role of journal editors to ensure that only original papers are published in the first place. Experienced users rely on quality journals, and the indexers cannot normally correct the editors’ job.

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3. Bibliometrics

Probably only important papers should be considered worthy of being collocated as works. The case might be that some citations function as “concept symbols” (Small, 1978).

This concept might further help indicate the nature of “a work” in scientific literatures.

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4. Modeling work-producing processes

In scientific fields a given work is often presented at conferences, published in journals, presented in review articles, cited in other papers, etc. All those activities and types of documents may be modeled. One important example of such a model is the UNISIST model (cf., UNISIST, 1971; Fjordback Søndergaard, Andersen & Hjørland, 2003).

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4.

PRODUCERS

USERS

PRIMARY SOURCES

-selection -production -distribution

SECONDARY SOURCES

-Analysis & storage -dissemination

TERTIARY SERVICES

-evolution -compression -consolidation

Information sources

(formal)

Taiks-lectures Conferences, etc.

(informal)

(published)

PUBLISHERS EDITORS

Letters to editors Preprints, etc.

Books Journals

(Unpublished)

Thesis Reports

(tabular)

ABSTRACTING & INDEXING

SERVICES

LIBRARIES

INFORMATION CENTERS

DATA CENTERS

Quantified Surveys

Abstract & Index Journals

Special Bibliographies Transactions, etc.

Reviews Syntheses, etc.

Catalogs, Guides Referral Services, etc.

Figure 1. The flow of scientific and technical information (UNISIST 1971, p. 26)

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4. Modeling work-producing processes

The UNISIST model may supplement Tillett’s model (2001) in important ways. It may illuminate how versions of a work are disseminated and related to activities in the research processes as well as to division of labor. It may also be used as a way to explore how different domains differ (e.g., that conference proceedings tend to be regarded as works in some domains such as computer science, but not in other domains where they are rather considered fragments.

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5. Conclusion

In this presentation I have tried to say something about how to define scientific terms in general as well as something about the specific term “a work”.

The way we define terms depends on our philosophical assumptions. I have illustrated differences between positivist and non-positivist ways of defining terms and advocated a pragmatic way of understanding terms, concepts and knowledge.

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5. Conclusion

I have also indicated that different subcultures within LIS tend to use different terms and concepts, but have tried to demonstrate that we may gain a more coherent and satisfactory state of our field if we try to overcome the barriers between those subcultures.

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References

Buckland, M. (1997). What is a document? Journal of the American Society of Information Science 48(9), 804-809.Buckland, M. (1998). What is a digital document? Document Numérique (Paris) 2(2), 221-230. http://sims.berkeley.edu/~buckland/digdoc.html Capurro, R & Hjørland, B. (2003). The Concept of Information. Annual Review of Information Science & Technology, Vol. 37, Chapter 8, pp. 343-411.

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References

Fjordback Søndergaard, T.; Andersen, J. & Hjørland, B. (2003). Documents and the communication of scientific and scholarly information. Revising and updating the UNISIST model. Journal of Documentation, 59(3), 278-320.

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References

•Hjørland, B. (1992). The concept of "subject" in Information Science. Journal of Documentation, vol. 48, no. 2, 172-200.•Hjørland, B. (1997): Information Seeking and Subject Representation. An Activity-theoretical approach to Information Science. Westport & London: Greenwood Press.•Hjørland, B. (2001). Towards a theory of aboutness, subject, topicality, theme, domain, field, content. . . and relevance. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 52(9):774–778.

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References

•Peirce, Charles Sanders (1905). What pragmaticism is. The Monist, 15, 161-181.•Price, Derek J. de Solla (1969): Science and Technology: Distinctions and Interrelationships. (IN: Factors in the Transfer of Technology. Ed. by W. Gruber & G. Marquis. MIT Press. Reprinted in: Sociology of Science. Selected Readings. Ed. by Barry Barnes. Middlesex: Penguin; pp. 166-180).•Schwartz, C. A. (1997). The rise and fall of uncitedness. College & Research Libraries, 58(1), 19-29. •Seglen, P. O. (1992). The skewness of science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 43(9), 628-638.

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References

•Small, H. G. (1978). Cited documents as concept symbols. Social Studies of Science, 8, 327-340.•Smiraglia, R. P. (2001). The nature of “A Work”. Implications for the Organization of Knowledge. Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. •Smiraglia, R. P. (Ed.). (2002). Works as entities for information retrieval. Binghamton, N.Y.: The Haworth Information Press. (Also published as Cataloging & classification quarterly, vol. 33:3/4, 2002).

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References

•Thomé, H. (2003). Werk. IN: Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft. Hsg. Von Jan-Dirk Müller. Band I-III (Vol. 3, pp. 832-834). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.•Tillett, B. B. (2001). Bibliographic relationships. IN: Relationships in the organization of knowledge. Ed. by Carol A. Bean & Rebecca Green. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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References

•Unisist (1971), Study Report on the feasibility of a World Science Information System. By the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and the International Council of Scientific Unions. Paris, Unesco. •Wilson, P. [1987]. (1989). The second objective. IN: The conceptual foundations of descriptive cataloging. Ed. by Elaine Svenonius. San Diego: Academis Press, Inc.