Pennants for Garfield: bibliometrics and document retrieval

Abstract

Eugene Garfield’s name, like that of any prolific author, can designate both an oeuvre and a person. That duality is explored here with pennant diagrams, a decade-old technique that can structure information about both oeuvres and persons in one scatterplot. Such diagrams are not readily made now, but may have a place in recommender systems of the future. This paper recapitulates the basics of creating and understanding them. In pennants, every term in a bibliometric distribution is weighted with a version of the TF * IDF formula from information retrieval. The distributions are generated by a seed term, such as a cited author’s name or a subject phrase, and consist of terms that co-occur with the seed in a database. TF * IDF orders the terms by relevance and specificity with respect to the seed—an outcome interpretable in light of relevance theory from linguistic pragmatics. Garfield’s name appears illustratively as a seed in one pennant and as a co-cited author in five others. Another example shows works by him and others that co-occur with the phrase “Citation Analysis” in Scisearch. Pennants are richly suggestive about authors, and here they are linked to a fruitful idea of Garfield’s that appeared in his first paper.

Appendix

See Table 3.

Table 3 Papers with examples that bear on pennant analysis. As stated earlier, they do not contain pennants but explicitly or implicitly relate relevance theory to bibliometric distributions, adding examples of relative ease of processing. The first two involve terms weighted by TF * IDF; the remainder involve terms that are unweighted