Presentation in Workshop ‘Bibliometric tracing of epistemic change’ at ISSI 2021 Conference (13 June 2021)

1. Epistemic distance
between publications, projects, researchers, and fields
Raf Guns (raf.guns@uantwerpen.be)
University of Antwerp, BE
Workshop ‘Bibliometric tracing of epistemic change’, ISSI 2021 Conference
13 June 2021

2. The concept of epistemic distance
 General agreement (and intuitive
understanding) that topics/subjects/fields
can be closely related or ‘far apart’
 Mostly in relative terms
 Synonyms? Dissimilarity, intellectual
distance, cognitive distance
 Nooteboom (2000): “a difference in cognitive function
… This can be a difference in domain, range, or
mapping. People could have a shared domain but a
difference of mapping: two people can make sense of
the same phenomena, but do so differently.”

3. Why?
4
 Underpins concepts like disparity (interdisciplinarity) and applications like
bibliometric mapping
 Research evaluation:
 Ensure that peer review is carried out by domain experts
 Identify success factors and avoid bias in peer review

4. Ex. 1 Distance between evaluator and research proposal
(Boudreau et al. 2016)
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 Evaluators and proposals represented
as vector of MESH terms
 Distance = cosine similarity between
vectors, expressed as percentile
(1% – 100 %)

5. Ex. 2 Distance between applicants and referees
(Wang & Sandström 2015)
6
 Author bibliographic coupling based on author-reference matrix
 Topic modelling: Author-Topic model based on titles and abstracts

6. Ex. 3 Distance between research groups and expert panels
(Rahman et al., 2016)
7
 Journal map
 Groups and panel
members represented
by their barycenter
(+ confidence region)
 Extension: based on full
journal similarity matrix

7. Ex. 4 Disparity of references (Wang et al. 2015; Yegros-Yegros
et al. 2015)
8
 Similarity matrix of Web of Science subject categories, based on co-
citation
 Distance between two categories = 1 – cosine similarity between
corresponding rows
 Disparity for publication = average distance between subject categories in
reference list
 Disparity has negative effect on impact (Yegros-Yegros et al)
 Disparity has negative effect only for short-term citations (Wang et al)

8. Some open questions
9
 Validity
 Do we measure what we intend to?
 Convergent validity of different approaches?
 Uncertainty, avoiding false precision
 Different approaches for different entities?

9. Thanks!
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raf.guns@uantwerpen.be
References
 Borgman, C. L. (1990). Bibliometrics and Scholarly Communication: Editor’s Introduction. Communication Research, 16(5), 583–599.
https://doi.org/10.1177/009365089016005002
 Boudreau, K. J., Guinan, E. C., Lakhani, K. R., & Riedl, C. (2016). Looking Across and Looking Beyond the Knowledge Frontier: Intellectual Distance, Novelty, and Resource
Allocation in Science. Management Science, 62(10), 2765–2783. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2285
 Nooteboom, B., Van Haverbeke, W., Duysters, G., Gilsing, V., & van den Oord, A. (2007). Optimal cognitive distance and absorptive capacity. Research Policy, 36(7), 1016–
1034. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2007.04.003
 Rahman, A. I. M. J., Guns, R., Leydesdorff, L., & Engels, T. C. E. (2016). Measuring the match between evaluators and evaluees: Cognitive distances between panel members
and research groups at the journal level. Scientometrics, 109(3), 1639–1663. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2132-x
 Rousseau, R., Guns, R., Rahman, A. I. M. J., & Engels, T. C. E. (2017). Measuring cognitive distance between publication portfolios. Journal of Informetrics, 11(2), 583–594.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2017.03.001
 Wang, Q., & Sandström, U. (2015). Defining the role of cognitive distance in the peer review process with an explorative study of a grant scheme in infection biology.
Research Evaluation, 24(3), 271–281. https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvv009
 Wang, J., Thijs, B., & Glänzel, W. (2015). Interdisciplinarity and Impact: Distinct Effects of Variety, Balance, and Disparity. PLOS ONE, 10(5), e0127298.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127298
 Yegros-Yegros, A., Rafols, I., & D’Este, P. (2015). Does Interdisciplinary Research Lead to Higher Citation Impact? The Different Effect of Proximal and Distal Interdisciplinarity.
PLOS ONE, 10(8), e0135095. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0135095