Showing posts with label Bibliometrics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bibliometrics. Show all posts

Thursday, February 14, 2019

It's a Dog's World in the Lab

James Gorman. “It’s a Dog’s World in the Lab: When it Comes to Research, Scientists Favor Canines Over Cats by a Large Margin.” New York Times, December 30, 2018 p.F14 [Originally Published Feb. 26]

And now the numbers: A search of Pub Med, a database that include most biomedical journals, yielded 139,858 results for cats and 2,850,000 for dogs.  These are sample searches, of course, and don't say much about the kind of research that was undertaken. As for journalism, my searches on the news database Nexis for dogs and cats kept returning more than 3,000 hits, which my screen warned my would take a long time to retrieve.  So I settled for searches of “dog genome” and “cat genome.” The result, 20 for dogs, 6 for cats.  The dog genome was sequenced before the cat genome.      I would caution against concluding anything based on this haphazard browsing other than the results do back up the researchers’ sense that there’s more research on dogs. 
COMMENT

      Journal databases provide a quick and dirty estimate of the relative number of scientific studies.  The researcher used Pub Med for scholarly journals and Nexis for news, two databases that most librarians would be familiar with. One assumes that the author was a savvy enough searcher to realize that the letters "CAT" and "DOG" don't always mean felines and canines.

   The author does not actually say whether these databases were from a library or not.  Pub Med is a service of the National Library of Medicine, though, so it's technically a library regardless. Nexis is an expensive subscription so a library is the most likely point of access.

     When people search online databases they often miss the fact that they are a library service.  Scholars at universities sometimes claim that they never use the library because they can find all the articles they need online.  These researchers don't realize that the library has paid for their access or that convenient links to articles from Google Scholar are thanks to library software that integrates database subscriptions into the search.

A more formal version of this kind of citation analysis is frequently used in bibliometric studies to trace the development of scholarship-- say the use of the word "Sustainability" after the publication of the Brundtland Report, [1] or the rise of the word "Anthopocene" as a metaphor for human influence on the Earth. [2]
   
   [1] Schubert, András, and István Láng. "The literature aftermath of the Brundtland report ‘Our Common Future’. A scientometric study based on citations in science and social science journals." Environment, Development and Sustainability 7, no. 1 (2005): 1-8.


[2] Belli, Simone. "Mapping a Controversy of our Time: The Anthropocene." inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 225-248.


Brondizio, Eduardo S., Karen O’brien, Xuemei Bai, Frank Biermann, Will Steffen, Frans Berkhout, Christophe Cudennec et al. "Re-conceptualizing the Anthropocene: A call for collaboration." Global Environmental Change 39 (2016): 318-327.