Web of Knowledge
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This section describes the construction of a personal information web on the subject of open citation linking. For each of the ten articles included in my web, I describe how it fits into the structure and explain why it is there.
A Web of Knowledge (WOK) citation search for "open citation linking" returned but one result, Harnod and Carr's "Integrating, navigating, and analyzing open Eprint archives through open citation linking (the OpCit project)." This is curious, as citation linking is an area of active interest in digital library research and one would expect more. My concerns are validated by an immediate visit to LexisNexis which returned 125 hits from the past six months. When a Library Literature search turns up Hitchcock and Brody's 2002 paper with a title that matches my WOK search exactly, "Open citation linking: the way forward," I know this WOK hunt is in trouble.
A little more investigation reveals that WOK includes D-lib references when they are citations in a paper, but they do not index D-lib. For instance, a cited reference search for "Lagoze C", includes nineteen citations to his work appearing in D-lib, but none of these articles are included in WOK. So we plunge in, leery but optimistic.
1 The initial WOK search for "open citation linking" does deliver Harnod and Carr's paper (2000) discussing OpCit, an open citation project working in Eprint archives, so off we go. WOK show that Harnad and Carr cited fifty five references in their article, and that four subsequently published articles have referenced it. This forward-in-time linking, of course, is the very powerful hook that makes citation databases so appealing. Since open citation work is contemporary and the OpCit paper is three years old, we want to explore the more recent literature, rather than examine what he cited. The four citations were:
Tough choices! We are drawn immediately to Christine Borgmans's work for her eminent good sense and readability, but the OAI /OAI-MHP article is pretty tempting as well. Thelwall's articles also sound interesting, but unlikely to lead to open citation linking.
2 Decision time! Borgman's "Scholarly communication and bibliometrics" gets the nod. (2002) Her article cites a whopping 220 other papers, a rich lode for our future personal web. She may not be part of the open link movement but the paper might take us somewhere useful. In her book, "From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure" she talks about the print versions of the ISI citation databases; perhaps she's gotten hip to online citations in the intervening years.
3 In a data structure surprise, our linear search turns into a binary tree as we add Rusch-Feja's article "The Open Archives Initiative.." to our list. (2002) If we can find a way to link to Carl Lagoze and Herbert von Stempol we will probably find some open citation articles. I'll add the first OAI hit I find and assume the trip to Cornell will be a quick one. Brrr!
4 Following from #3, we find many links that might take us towards open citation linking. OpCit grew out of OAI, and a variety of Carl Lagoze's and Herbert Van de Sompel's articles are cited in this paper. So close, yet so far away! In World of Knowledge, there are many citations you can see but not follow; if the journal is not indexed by WOK, they are dead ends in the citation trail. Of the thirty six references Rusch-Feja cited, only six are linked in WOK; the rest remain an unfulfilled temptation. WOK has failed me as a research tool. none of the working links merit inclusion as #4 on my list.
Returning reluctantly to Borgman's "is cited by" brings us closer to the present day with search papers published in 2003; one, called "Visualizing knowledge domains" probably should have been read before I wrote the Amazon Similarity Explorer! However, Cronin and Shaw (2002) claim a spot in my personal list for their article, "Identity-creators and image-makers: Using citation analysis and thick description to put authors in their place," selected because it sounded like a description of what Web of Knowledge was doing. Using a citation tool to do research in citations, it is appropriate to have some recursion in our references. None of the articles have anything to do with open citation linking.
5 Cronin and Shaw leads us to many interesting papers. Moravcsik's "CITATION CONTEXT CLASSIFICATION OF A CITATION CLASSIC CONCERNING CITATION CONTEXT CLASSIFICATION" almost clears the cut on alliterative association alone, but another paper going back in time from Shaw, White's "Authors as citers over time," grabs slot by describing differing citation patterns followed by authors: some cite widely, many cite and re-cite the same core works.(2000) Hmm, this paper sounds like this assignment; an ever tightening spiral of self-reference. In the citation game, recursion wins over alliteration.
6 "Authors as citers over time" has many interesting citations both forward and backward . However, they do not seem to be related to open citation linking, our original search topic, and the subject about which we are trying to construct a personal web of knowledge. Going backwards, the linked articles are mostly quite old, predating the whole notion of open citation databases. An attempted WOK diversion ("Find related Records") fails to provide anything sounding even vaguely like our target discipline. Going forwards, we have but six citations to choose from; finally I decide our sixth addition to our personal web, "Scholarly publishing in the Internet age: a citation analysis of computer science literature" by Goodrum, McCain, Lawrence, and Giles.(2001)
"Scholarly publishing" is an interesting look at the computer science literature. It adds value to our personal web by discussing both commercial and web citation. There is hope after all! This article has 7 links forward in time; five of them are sole or joint citations to articles written by Thelwall, again! Thelwall's main research areas seem to various aspects of the analysis of links on academic and journal websites. One catches my eye because I read it last week in the library, and it mentioned Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive and the Wayback Engine, so "Scholarly use of the Web: What are the key inducers of links to journal Web sites?" by Vaughan and Thelwall get the nod for the next link. (2003)
7 "Scholarly use of the Web " was published quite recently (January 2003) and WOK has no forward links from it. However, Thelwall cited forty five articles in it and some of them are beauties! Bjorneborn and Ingwersen get the "Best new academic discipline" award for "Perspectives of webometrics" in which they discuss areas for research about the World Wide Web. We happily scan "The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine" by Brin and Page; yup, that's Google. Cronin's article "Bibliometrics and beyond" pays homage to Eugene Garfield, who invented what became WOK. There are many other Thelwall and Vaughn articles cited. However, none of them have anything to do with open citations.
8 Well, if you've actually made it this far, I have a confession to make. I'm cheating. I really wanted to end up at Hitchcock and Brody's paper. I went searching through WOK trying to find a way. Forward linking, backward linking, looking for a link, a thread, anything. In frustration I dumped WOK and went to LibLit, ProQuest, and WorldCat. I found another interesting article in D-Lib Magazine, written by a manager at ISI (Atkins, 1999) that describes the implementation of their citation service. Her description nicely melded with the flowchart in "Modern Information Retrieval" describing how information retrieval worked. (Baeza-Yates & Ribeiro-Neto, 1999) Her article, "The ISI® Web of Science® - Links and Electronic Journals How links work today in the Web of Science, and the challenges posed by electronic journals" gets spot number eight in my personal web. In a subtle irony, she has no citations in her paper. However, our #2, Borgman's grand networker with 220 citations, includes Atkin's paper, so it is legitimately part of our WOK web, even if it got their through surreptitious means.
Alas, this article is not included in WOK, so I cannot use it as a bridge to Hitchcock's open citation article. However, reviewing the citations I see in LibLit, if we back up to number 8, Brin and Page show up in the reference list of Hitchcock and Brody's article. Wonderful irony: even in the case of a poorly populated citation database, Google comes to the rescue!
9 Brin and Page's paper, "The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine" gets the number number nine spot. This is, of course, their description of Google. I know their paper was cited by the open citation paper; the question is whether WOK knows it or not.
10 Sigh. WOK doesn't list Hitchcock's "Open citation linking: the way forward." as a paper citing the Google creator's work. Knowing I must pick something, I'll select Thelwall's "Commercial Web sites: lost in cyberspace?" purely for the irony of a title describing a futile search through a commercial citation database looking for literature on open citation linking.
And that completes the search phase of our intellectual web construction in WOK. Despite our best efforts, we have found only one paper on the research topic wished to investigate. All of the other links to this topic were dead, since the journals in which this research is published are not included in WOK. Cross references among the articles is covered in the next section.