In this BBL, Gustaf Nelhans from the the University of Borås will present his work on "Citation Network as a Genealogy of Scholarly Research.”

Building on ideas already introduced in 1965 about the network structure of citations (De Solla Price) and the notion of algorithmic historiography (Garfield), I will explore different graph-based methods and tools for empirical studies of the history of science. By combining qualitative and quantitative methods for visually exploring bibliographic data, I will show how these techniques can be used both in the discovery phase when starting research on a new topic as well as at the justification phase of illustrating or possibly strengthening claims made by more text-based analyses. I will also present some work-in-progress on ‘references-in context’, where we explore the surrounding text around references. Here we combine text-based machine learning and data mining techniques such as topic modelling and word embedding with established scientometric methods to construct a richer set of data to work with.

 Dr. Gustaf Nelhans is a Senior Lecturer at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science (SSLIS) at the University of Borås, Sweden and visiting fellow at the University of Southern Denmark library. His research generally focuses on the performativity of scientometric indicators from science and technology studies (STS) perspective, as well as on the theory, methodology and research policy aspects of the scholarly publication in scientific practice. Presently his focus of interest is directed towards evaluation of societal relevance such as professional impact, i.e., citation performance in clinical guidelines.