Semantometrics: Fulltext-Based Measures for Analysing Research Collaboration

Introduction The aim of this article is to demonstrate some of the possible uses of a novel set of metrics called Semantometrics in relation to the role of “bridges” in scholarly publication networks. In contrast to the existing metrics such as Bibliometrics, Altmetrics or Webometrics, which are based on measuring the number of interactions in the scholarly network, Semantometrics build on the premise that full-text is needed to understand scholarly publication networks and the value of publications. Up to date many studies of scientific citation, collaboration and coauthorship networks have focused on the concept of cross-community ties (Shi et al., 2010; Guimerà et al., 2005; Silva et al., 2014). It has been observed that in citation networks, bridging or cross-community citation patterns are characteristic for high impact papers (Shi et al., 2010). This is likely due to the fact that such patterns have the potential of linking knowledge and people from different disciplines. Likewise, in collaboration and coauthorship networks, it has been shown that newcomers in a group of collaborators can increase the impact of the group (Guimerà et al., 2005). The studies up to date have been focusing on analysing citation and collaboration networks without considering the content of the analysed publications. Our work has focused on analysing scholarly networks using semantic distance of the publications in order to gain insight into the characteristics of collaboration and communication within communities. Our hypothesis states that the information about the semantic distance of the communities will allow us to better understand the importance and the types of the cross-community ties (bridges). More specifically, in order to gain insight into the type of collaboration between authors we are currently investigating the possibility of utilising semantic distance in a coauthorship network together with the concept of research endogamy. In social sciences, endogamy is the practice or tendency of marrying within a social group. This concept can be transferred to research as collaboration with the same authors or collaboration among a group of authors. The concept of research endogamy has been previously used to evaluate conferences (Montolio et al., 2013) as well as journals and patents (Silva et al., 2014). Furthermore, in (Knoth & Herrmannova, 2014) we have introduced and tested the first Semantometric measure which we call contribution(p) and which can be used to estimate research publication contribution. Our results suggested that measuring semantic similarity of publications can be utilised to provide meaningful information about the value of a research publication, which is not captured by traditional bibliometric measures.