Current Theory in Library and Information Science

Citation

Revill, D. (2003), "Current Theory in Library and Information Science", New Library World, Vol. 104 No. 1/2, pp. 67-68. https://doi.org/10.1108/03074800310458304

The first part of this volume concentrates on “concepts, meanings and definitions” (p. 310). McGrath, in his introduction, discusses what theory is, its various meanings and interpretations from, inter alia, sets of rules, through opinions and hypotheses to “laws”’. The best known of Library and Information Science’s (LIS) “laws”, that of Bradford’s law of scatter, following Lotka and Zipf, does not feature strongly in this collection.

McGrath states that these papers “are far more than factual. All are attempts to extract or impose meaning from highly‐complex phenomena from the universe of information, its processing and use” (p. 310 [my emphasis]). The second group of papers describe original research. “These papers bear little resemblance to each other and all are unique. They are all difficult and require careful reading to recognize their relevance to LIS …” (p. 310).

McGrath’s own paper: “Explanation and prediction: building a unified theory of librarianship, concept and review”, argues that theory has to be explanatory and predictive and should be capable of being integrated into a grand unified theory. He makes a plea that researchers should unambiguously identify their independent and dependent variables, together with their units of analysis. He also points out that where analyses include notions like “per capita” as components of variables then any significant relationships discovered could quite easily be the result of this colinearity – a fault of which many researchers appear to be unaware.

Richard P. Smiraglia, charts: “The progress of theory in knowledge organization” from the rules of Cutter, Panizzi and Dewey to the use of Lotka’s law in analysing the structure of databases. Judit Bar‐Ilan and Bluma C. Peritz survey the use of bibliometric and informetric methods applied to the study of the Internet. They point out that incoming links to a Web page can be regarded as citations and are therefore subject to the same kinds of analysis. William W. Hood and Concepcion S. Wilson review the literature on the use of fuzzy set theory (FST) in LIS. FST is applied where data is not discrete but continuous and more or less appropriate as, for example, in the idea of “relevance”. Unfortunately, in this reviewer’s opinion, the two examples of its practical application – in journal binding decisions and tattle‐taping are relatively trivial when judged against the effort required. Lynne McKechnie and Karen E. Pettigrew survey the use of theories in LIS research by analysing 1,160 articles in six LIS journals, published between 1993 and 1998. Ronald Rousseau turns to journal evaluation and provides an overview of quality indicators. He includes electronic journals and mentions the “slash dot” and “catchy phrase” effects. There is an interesting discussion of bias in ISI’s databases. Manfred Bonitz has found that the Matthew Effect can be seen in the ranking of countries in terms of research outputs and not just as applying to authors and journals – i.e. that a few countries attract higher than expected citations while the majority lose citations.

The next two articles are concerned with co‐authorship patterns, using data from Science Citation Index (a common source for this volume). That by Hildrun Kretschmer, manages to unite and link Gestalt theory with yin and yang, Niels Bohr and Piaget, and produce 3‐D representations of it into the bargain. So much for requiring careful and patient reading! Perhaps a case of imposing meaning?

“Towards research performance in the humanities”, an article from Belgium, shows an attempted use of bibliometric indicators to rank individuals’ research output as reflected in their publications. The whole is wonderfully complicated by the need to control for several languages – Dutch/Flemish, French and English. There are some nice observations on how participants tried to inflate their published output and how to combat this tendency. Some of the results could be accused of being artificially produced, as journal quality was measured by applying simple weightings as nominated by scholars. Any weightings expressed as integers are open to the suspicion that a “1” ought really to be anything from “0.5” to “1.49” and even “1.9”! They are judgements, not true measurements, and result in ordinalm not equal interval data, thus limiting the statistical techniques one can legitimately use on them. Still, the article is only arguing that these rankings “provide a sound basis for a thorough discussion …” (p. 511). The procedures outlined for calculating bibliometric indicators for use in research quality evaluations would be useful to anyone engaged in this activity (p. 515).

Tsai’s paper: “A theory of information genetics …”, proposes a “model to elaborate on the origin of information generating” (p. 521). While Kretschmer’s paper is difficult, this one is well nigh incomprehensible. It uses Mobius strips “twisting‐bonding” and “clip‐joints” as information generation analogues within a “fuzzy commonality model”. The reader is invited to make a Mobius strip and cut it into two equal halves. Tsai does not say how his model is affected if one cuts a Mobius strip one‐third way into its width – something different happens. I cannot agree that “This behavior of endless loops of twisting‐bonding and subdividing helps the observer comprehend the concepts of system development and generating processes” (p. 528). It did not work for me. Apparently the “overall goal is to find out what the information generating force is” (p. 522). It would need someone like Stafford Beer to truly appreciate it. Somewhat flippantly it crossed my mind that only feng‐shui was lacking. You may have better luck with it.

The final paper, by Peter Vinkler, “The institutionalisation of scientific information …” looks at the growth of literature – a popular theme since De Solla Price’s “Little science, big science”.

McGrath had originally envisaged a volume of essays covering broader aspects of LIS: “What has been achieved is a collection of worthy papers, an international representation, albeit of narrower scope” (p. 316). Readers may conclude that a unified theory of librarianship, or libraries or information, is unlikely. The volume does make you think, though. The effort may or may not be rewarding.