Empowering open science with reflexive and spatialised indicators

Juste Raimbault (1, 2) , Pierre-Olivier Chasset (1, 3) , Clémentine Cottineau (4) , Hadrien Commenges (1) , Denise Pumain (1) , Christine Kosmopoulos (1) , Arnaud Banos (5)

1 GC (UMR_8504) - Géographie-cités
2 ISC-PIF - Institut des Systèmes Complexes - Paris Ile-de-France
3 LISER - Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research
4 CMH - Centre Maurice Halbwachs
5 IDEES - Identité et Différenciation de l’Espace, de l’Environnement et des Sociétés

Bibliometrics have become commonplace and widely used by authors and journals to monitor, to evaluate and to identify their readership in an ever-increasingly publishing scientific world. This contribution introduces a multi-method corpus analysis tool, specifically conceived for scientific corpuses with spatialised content. We propose a dedicated interactive application that integrates three strategies for building semantic networks, using keywords (self-declared themes), citations (areas of research using the papers) and full-texts (themes derived from the words used in writing). The networks can be studied with respect to their temporal evolution as well as to their spatial expressions, by considering the countries studied in the papers under inquiry. The tool is applied as a proof-of-concept on the papers published in the online open access geography journal Cybergeo since its creation in 1996. Finally, we compare the three methods and conclude that their complementarity can help go beyond simple statistics to better understand the epistemological evolution of a scientific community and the readership target of the journal. Our tool can be applied by any journal on its own corpus, fostering thus open science and reflexivity.

Mots clés: geography of science; bibliometrics; open science; networks; epistemology

Domaines: Géographie; Réseaux sociaux et d'information [cs.SI]; Sciences de l'information et de la communication; Linguistique; Méthodes et statistiques

Juste Raimbault, Pierre-Olivier Chasset, Clémentine Cottineau, Hadrien Commenges, Denise Pumain, et al.. Empowering open science with reflexive and spatialised indicators. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 2019, 48 (2), pp.239980831987081. ⟨10.1177/2399808319870816⟩. ⟨halshs-02274632⟩