Re: citations as indicators of quality

I get your point about fringe areas, and appreciate the 
information about your experience at Princeton. But I remain

concerned about non-fringe examples likes the ones I gave 
concerning the methodological differences such as
Continental vs. 
analytic in philosophy and the cross-over areas like
political 
philosophy spanning philosophy and political science (which
is 
itself complicated further because it interacts with the 
difference between Continental and analytic). I don't think
these 
are trivial cases that can readily be ignored by defenders
of 
citation analysis.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press

David Goodman wrote:
>There are natural clusters.  It's always possible to
find fringe
>cases where the rules don't really hold, or cases on
the
>boundary. That does not affect the basic validity of
citation
>analysis, any more than such problems affect the
validity of
>other scientific approaches. . There are always small
>differences, and I can discuss at some length whether,
for
>example, Journal of Biological Chemistry and
Biochemistry (ACS)
>are in separate microclusters. But the same basic
citation
>patterns hold in both of them.
>
>When I collected at Princeton, I purchased for the
biology
>library everything about intelligent design having any
reference
>to the ordinary scientific literature, on the grounds
that the
>biologists need to know about it. There is actually not
all that
>much cross-citation: the ID people cite a very small
part of the
>biology literature, and only to attack it. (And the
biologists n
>turn cite a very small part of the fundamentalist
religious
>material) That pattern pretty much holds in the only
fringe and
>pseudo sciences--they don't really talk to theregular
sciences
>and vice versa.
>
>And there are good examples of work done on ostensibly
the same
>subject where there are isolated
literatures--psychoanalysis vs.
>the rest of psychiatry & psychology is a good
example--one I used
>for teaching. Medline covers both, but there are very
few cross
>citations
>
>David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
>dgoodmanprinceton.edu