Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Semantics of Scientific Success: A Citation Analysis of the Semantic Structure and Bases of Success in Science

博士论文研究：科学成功的语义：语义结构和科学成功基础的引文分析

• 批准号: 0723351
• 负责人: William Durham
• 金额: $ 0.79万
• 依托单位: Stanford University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2007-08-01 至 2008-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0723351&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Semantics; Scientific

The following is a proposal for a project in Semantic Citation Analysis--an approach to science citation research promising novel insight into the organization and transmission of scientific knowledge by incorporating psycholinguistic and neo- Darwinian theory. The goal of the project is to establish a new method for modeling cultural differentiation and transformation using textual data drawn from the published abstracts of a major science citation index. Using a computational procedure called Latent Semantic Analysis, the meaning of science articles' abstracts will be quantitatively represented, allowing their semantic similarity to other articles in the index to be analyzed and graphically illustrated using multi-dimensional scaling. Doing so will allow scientific fields to be evaluated as discrete cultural groups within science on the basis of their latent semantic similarities. The result will be a schematic illustration of the structure of science on the basis of actual scientific work produced. Analyses based on this procedure will then be able to delineate the structure and overlap of the sciences. Intellectual merit. In addition to the valuable insight into the differentiated structure of science that this approach will afford, the project's intellectual merit stems from the answers it promises to longstanding questions in the area of cultural transmission as exemplified by scientific citation. In particular, it will use variables derived from the Latent Semantic Analysis to test the fundamental tenets of Evolutionary Culture Theory, a promising multi-disciplinary movement whose development has been impeded by a lack of concrete research. This paucity has stemmed not from lack of interest in the theory but rather a vexing yet inexorable problem with operationalizing it--namely the difficulty in finding suitable units of analysis and analytical tool. The proposal represents one solution to these problems derived from the culmination of a long line of thinking about scientific progress in terms of evolutionary mechanisms and population biology. In doing so, it will test the hypothesis that cultural transmission is an evolutionary process amenable to a population thinking approach; and reveal the degree to which scientific success is a function of population variables describing the density and diversity of semantic space occupied by articles and their paradigmatic themes. Because the approach can be integrated into current network citation research and is extensible to other domains and fields, it has the potential to evolve into a distributed, progressive research program.Broader Impacts. With regard to the broader impacts of the project, there are two notable practical applications of the proposed research. First, representing science as a differentiated cultural system can help inform university and grant administrators by revealing the latent semantic structure of scientific space. At present, scientific work is categorized explicitly and funded on the basis of assumptions regarding the distribution of scientific research--assumptions that may be erroneous or outdated. Using Latent Semantic Analysis to examine the actual distribution of scientific resources on the basis of semantic content can overcome these limitations and allow administrators to properly allocate scientific resources and structure academic programs. Second, it can also aid multi-disciplinary research by offering the prototype for a semantic search capability, overcoming current limitations in scientific document searches, which search on the basis of the lexical terms; using Latent Semantic Analysis would enable searching on the basis of semantics, regardless of a lexical match. This will be especially useful to scientists working in multi-disciplinary areas, where terminological differences across fields may impede access to information, but it can also increase the public's access to information by lowering terminological specificity needed to find scientific documents.

以下是对语义引文分析项目的建议——这是一种科学引文研究方法，通过结合心理语言学和新达尔文理论，有望对科学知识的组织和传播产生新的见解。该项目的目标是建立一种新的方法，利用从主要科学引文索引的已发表摘要中提取的文本数据来建模文化分化和转化。使用一种称为潜在语义分析的计算程序，科学文章摘要的含义将被定量表示，允许它们与索引中其他文章的语义相似性进行分析，并使用多维尺度图形化说明。这样做将允许科学领域根据其潜在的语义相似性被评估为科学内部的离散文化群体。其结果将是在实际科学工作的基础上对科学结构的示意图。基于这一程序的分析将能够描绘出科学的结构和重叠。知识价值。除了这种方法将提供的对科学的差异化结构的宝贵见解之外，该项目的智力价值源于它承诺回答文化传播领域长期存在的问题，如科学引用所例证的那样。特别是，它将使用来自潜在语义分析的变量来测试进化文化理论的基本原则，这是一个有前途的多学科运动，其发展受到缺乏具体研究的阻碍。这种缺乏并非源于对该理论缺乏兴趣，而是源于一个令人烦恼但又不可避免的问题，即难以找到合适的分析单元和分析工具。这个提议代表了这些问题的一个解决方案，它源于对进化机制和种群生物学方面的科学进步的长期思考的高潮。在这样做的过程中，它将检验文化传播是一个适合人口思维方法的进化过程的假设；揭示科学成功的程度是描述文章及其聚合主题所占据的语义空间密度和多样性的人口变量的函数。由于该方法可以集成到当前的网络引文研究中，并且可以扩展到其他领域和领域，因此它有可能演变成一个分布式的、渐进的研究项目。更广泛的影响。关于该项目更广泛的影响，提出的研究有两个值得注意的实际应用。首先，通过揭示科学空间的潜在语义结构，将科学表现为一种差异化的文化系统，有助于告知大学和资助管理者。目前，科学工作是根据科学研究分布的假设进行明确分类和资助的——这些假设可能是错误的或过时的。利用潜在语义分析在语义内容的基础上考察科学资源的实际分布，可以克服这些限制，使管理者能够合理地配置科学资源和构建学术项目。其次，它还可以通过提供语义搜索功能的原型来帮助多学科研究，克服目前科学文献搜索基于词汇术语的限制；使用潜在语义分析可以在语义的基础上进行搜索，而不考虑词汇匹配。这对于在多学科领域工作的科学家来说尤其有用，在这些领域，不同领域的术语差异可能会阻碍信息的获取，但是它也可以通过降低查找科学文献所需的术语特异性来增加公众对信息的获取。