Scientometric Indicators and Webometrics and the Poly Representation Principle Information Retrieval

This book contains the text of three lectures from the 28th Sarada Ranganathan Endowment Lectures, held in Bangalore in December 2010. The lectures were delivered by Dr. Peter Ingwersen, Professor at the Danish School of Library and Information Science, Copenhagen. The first lecture on scientometric indicators presented two fundamental models of scientific communication: the classic one - mainly providing access to document records in library catalogues and bibliographic databases - and the digitized one - relying on open access and diversified document access potentials. The lecture contextualizes, characterizes, and exemplifies the concept of 'scientometrics.' The second lecture on the range of webometrics provided insights into the history of webometrics in context of other research evaluation methods. The lecture exemplified selected cases, both from traditional webometric analyses and new ones based on scientific dataset usage and comparisons of link and download/reading patterns for newspapers. The third lecture on poly-representation provides an integrated and explicitly cognitive framework for understanding the process involved in information retrieval. The lecture outlined the principle of poly-representation with a focus on the kinds of representations involved. The potentials, strengths, and problems of applying the principle are discussed in the light of recent studies. The challenges and opportunities for future research are identified along a poly-representation continuum.