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Import-export of knowledge between scientific subject categories: The iceberg hypothesis

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Abstract

The capacity to attract citations from other disciplines — or knowledge export — has always been taken into account in evaluating the quality of scientific papers or journals. Some of the JCR’s (ISI’s Journal Citation Report) Subject Categories have a greater exporting character than others because they are less isolated. This influences the rank/JIF (ISI’s Journal Impact Factor) distribution of the category. While all the categories fit a negative power law fairly well, those with a greater External JIF give distributions with a more sharply defined peak and a longer tail — something like an iceberg. One also observes a major relationship between the rates of export and import of knowledge.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Facultad de Biblioteconomía y Documentación, Universidad de Extremadura, Campus Cartuja, 06071, Badajoz, Spain

    Vicente P. Guerrero-Bote, Felipe Zapico-Alonso, María Eugenia Espinosa-Calvo & Rocío Gómez-Crisóstomo

  2. Facultad de Biblioteconomía y Documentación, Universidad de Granada, Campus Cartuja, Granada, Spain

    Félix de Moya-Anegón

Authors
  1. Vicente P. Guerrero-Bote
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  2. Felipe Zapico-Alonso
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  3. María Eugenia Espinosa-Calvo
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  4. Rocío Gómez-Crisóstomo
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  5. Félix de Moya-Anegón
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Correspondence to Vicente P. Guerrero-Bote.

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Guerrero-Bote, V.P., Zapico-Alonso, F., Espinosa-Calvo, M.E. et al. Import-export of knowledge between scientific subject categories: The iceberg hypothesis. Scientometrics 71, 423–441 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-007-1682-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-007-1682-3

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