Comparison of Rules in Bibliographic and Web Networks

Abstract

The emergence of the Internet and the Web have led to changes in the process of scholarly publishing and communication. In particular, the way that scientists and scholars search for and find information in patterns of national and international collaboration has changed. The development of information and library sciences together with science studies will, among other things, be fashioned by the development of quantitative studies conducted in this field (The way from librametry to webometrics).

The EU has recently financed a new project (WISER) to further investigate the potential of creating new indicators of the Web for use in science and technology policy making. The study of collaboration in e-science is one focus of this project, including questions that examine the extent to which collaboration structures visible in the Web follow similar rules to collaboration networks measured by traditional bibliometric data.

There are three specific key objectives:

•To develop methods or webometric indicators for measurement of Web visibility of collaboration networks •To collect general rules in bibliographic collaboration structures that are suitable for testing in Web networks •To compare bibliographic collaboration networks and networks visible in the Web

There are few general rules in bibliographic co-authorship networks available from the literature. A new approach is proposed by the author: Distribution of co-author couples in journals: “Continuation” of Lotka´s law on the 3rd dimension.