Document (#31948)

Editor

McGrath, W.E.

Title

Current theory in library and information science

Issue

[Themenheft].

Source

Library trends. 50(2002) no.3, S.309-574

Year

2002

Footnote

Rez. in JASIST 54(2003) no.4, S.358-359 (D.O. Case): "Having recently written a chapter an theories applied in information-seeking research (Case, 2002), I was eager to read this issue of Library Trends devoted to "Current Theory." Once in hand I found the individual articles in the issue to be of widely varying quality, and the scope to be disappointingly narrow. A more accurate title might be "Some Articles about Theory, with Even More an Bibliometrics." Eight of the thirteen articles (not counting the Editor's brief introduction) are about quantifying the growth, quality and/or authorship of literature (mostly in the sciences, with one example from the humanities). Social and psychological theories are hardly mentioned-even though one of the articles claims that nearly half of all theory invoked in LIS emanates from the social sciences. The editor, SUNY Professor Emeritus William E. McGrath, claims that the first six articles are about theory, while the rest are original research that applies theory to some problem-a characterization that I find odd. Reading his Introduction provides some clues to the curious composition of this issue. McGrath states that only in "physics and other exact sciences" are definitions of theory "well understood" (p. 309)-a view I think most psychologists and sociologists would content-and restricts his own definition of theory to "an explanation for a quantifiable phenomenon" (p. 310). In his own chapter in the issue, "Explanation and Prediction," McGrath makes it clear that he holds out hope for a "unified theory of librarianship" that would resemble those regarding "fundamental forces in physics and astronomy." However, isn't it wishful thinking to hope for a physics-like theory to emerge from particular practices (e.g., citation) and settings (e.g., libraries) when broad generalizations do not easily accrue from observation of more basic human behaviors? Perhaps this is where the emphasis an documents, rather than people, entered into the choice of material for "Current Theory." Artifacts of human behavior, such as documents, are more amenable to prediction in ways that allow for the development of theorywitness Zipf's Principle of Least Effort, the Bradford Distribution, Lotka's Law, etc. I imagine that McGrath would say that "librarianship," at least, is more about materials than people. McGrath's own contribution to this issue emphasizes measures of libraries, books and journals. By citing exemplar studies, he makes it clear that much has been done to advance measurement of library operations, and he eloquently argues for an overarching view of the various library functions and their measures. But, we have all heard similar arguments before; other disciplines, in earlier times, have made the argument that a solid foundation of empirical observation had been laid down, which would lead inevitably to a grand theory of "X." McGrath admits that "some may say the vision [of a unified theory] is naive" (p. 367), but concludes that "It remains for researchers to tie the various level together more formally . . . in constructing a comprehensive unified theory of librarianship."
However, for well over a century, major libraries in developed nations have been engaging in sophisticated measure of their operations, and thoughtful scholars have been involved along the way; if no "unified theory" has emerged thus far, why would it happen in the near future? What if "libraries" are a historicallydetermined conglomeration of distinct functions, some of which are much less important than others? It is telling that McGrath cites as many studies an brittle paper as he does investigations of reference services among his constellation of measurable services, even while acknowledging that the latter (as an aspect of "circulation") is more "essential." If one were to include in a unified theory similar phenomena outside of libraries-e.g., what happens in bookstores and WWW searches-it can be seen how difficult a coordinated explanation might become. Ultimately the value of McGrath's chapter is not in convincing the reader that a unified theory might emerge, but rather in highlighting the best in recent studies that examine library operations, identifying robust conclusions, and arguing for the necessity of clarifying and coordinating common variables and units of analysis. McGrath's article is one that would be useful for a general course in LIS methodology, and certainly for more specific lectures an the evaluation of libraries. Fra going to focus most of my comments an the remaining articles about theory, rather than the others that offer empirical results about the growth or quality of literature. I'll describe the latter only briefly. The best way to approach this issue is by first reading McKechnie and Pettigrew's thorough survey of the "Use of Theory in LIS research." Earlier results of their extensive content analysis of 1, 160 LIS articles have been published in other journals before, but is especially pertinent here. These authors find that only a third of LIS literature makes overt reference to theory, and that both usage and type of theory are correlated with the specific domain of the research (e.g., historical treatments versus user studies versus information retrieval). Lynne McKechnie and Karen Pettigrew identify four general sources of theory: LIS, the Humanities, Social Sciences and Sciences. This approach makes it obvious that the predominant source of theory is the social sciences (45%), followed by LIS (30%), the sciences (19%) and the humanities (5%) - despite a predominance (almost 60%) of articles with science-related content. The authors discuss interdisciplinarity at some length, noting the great many non-LIS authors and theories which appear in the LIS literature, and the tendency for native LIS theories to go uncited outside of the discipline. Two other articles emphasize the ways in which theory has evolved. The more general of three two is Jack Glazier and Robert Grover's update of their classic 1986 Taxonomy of Theory in LIS. This article describes an elaborated version, called the "Circuits of Theory," offering definitions of a hierarchy of terms ranging from "world view" through "paradigm," "grand theory" and (ultimately) "symbols." Glazier & Grover's one-paragraph example of how theory was applied in their study of city managers is much too brief and is at odds with the emphasis an quantitative indicators of literature found in the rest of the volume. The second article about the evolution of theory, Richard Smiraglia's "The progress of theory in knowledge organization," restricts itself to the history of thinking about cataloging and indexing. Smiraglia traces the development of theory from a pragmatic concern with "what works," to a reliance an empirical tests, to an emerging flirtation with historicist approaches to knowledge.
There is only one article in the issue that claims to offer a theory of the scope that discussed by McGrath, and I am sorry that it appears in this issue. Bor-Sheng Tsai's "Theory of Information Genetics" is an almost incomprehensible combination of four different "models" wich names like "Möbius Twist" and "Clipping-Jointing." Tsai starts by posing the question "What is it that makes the `UNIVERSAL' information generating, representation, and transfer happen?" From this ungrammatical beginning, things get rapidly worse. Tsai makes side trips into the history of defining information, offers three-dimensional plots of citation data, a formula for "bonding relationships," hypothetical data an food consumption, sample pages from a web-based "experts directory" and dozens of citations from works which are peripheral to the discussion. The various sections of the article seem to have little to do with one another. I can't believe that the University of Illinois would publish something so poorly-edited. Now I will turn to the dominant, "bibliometric" articles in this issue, in order of their appearance: Judit Bar-Ilan and Bluma Peritz write about "Informetric Theories and Methods for Exploring the Internet." Theirs is a survey of research an patterns of electronic publication, including different ways of sampling, collecting and analyzing data an the Web. Their contribution to the "theory" theme lies in noting that some existing bibliometric laws apply to the Web. William Hood and Concepción Wilson's article, "Solving Problems ... Using Fuzzy Set Theory," demonstrates the widespread applicability of this mathematical tool for library-related problems, such as making decisions about the binding of documents, or improving document retrieval. Ronald Rosseau's piece an "Journal Evaluation" discusses the strength and weaknesses of various indicators for determining impact factors and rankings for journals. His is an exceptionally well-written article that has everything to do with measurement but almost nothing to do with theory, to my way of thinking. "The Matthew Effect for Countries" is the topic of Manfred Bonitz's paper an citations to scientific publications, analyzed by nation of origin. His research indicates that publications from certain countries-such as Switzerland, Denmark, the USA and the UK-receive more than the expected number of citations; correspondingly, some rather large countries like China receive much fewer than might be expected. Bonitz provides an extensive discussion of how the "MEC" measure came about, and what it ments-relating it to efficiency in scientific research. A bonus is his detour into the origins of the Matthew Effect in the Bible, and the subsequent popularization of the name by the sociologist Robert Merton. Wolfgang Glänzel's "Coauthorship patterns and trends in the sciences (1980-1998)" is, as the title implies, another citation analysis. He compares the number of authors an papers in three fields-Biomedical research, Chemistry and Mathematics - at sixyear intervals. Among other conclusions, Glänzel notes that the percentage of publications with four or more authors has been growing in all three fields, and that multiauthored papers are more likely to be cited.
Coauthorship is also the topic in Hildrun Kretschmer's article an the origins and uses of "Gestalt Theory." The explanation of the theory is fascinating but the application of it, involving threedimensional graphics depicting coauthorship in physics and medicine, seems somewhat distant from Gestalt Theory and the importance of the results is hard to appreciate. Henk Moed, Marc Luwel, and A.J. Nederhof apply bibliometrics to the evaluation of research performance in the humanities, specifically, Flemish professors of law. Their attempts to classify and measure research output appear rather specific to the population they studied, with little contribution to a more general bibliometric theory. The final contribution is by Peter Vinkler. He offers a comprehensive model of the growth and institutionalization of scientific information. Since it could be viewed as an overview of the concerns of scientometrics, Vinkler's article might best be read before some of the others described above. To conclude, this issue of Library Trends has a schizophrenic quality about it. "Theory" is defined broadly in those initial articles "about" theory (especially in those by McKechnie and Pettigrew, and by Glazier and Grover), but most of the remainder of the pieces consider theory narrowly in the context of bibliometric analysis. This is unfortunate an two counts. First, while bibliometric investigations have uncovered fascinating and useful statistical regularities in the growth, authorship and citation of literature, they are often short an the sort of explanation that we would expect from a well-developed theory. That is, why do the statistical distributions (of publications, citations, etc.) appear as they do? Second, information science studies people at least as much as it does documents. Appropriately, then, most of our theory comes from the social sciences (as the McKechnie and Pettigrew article convincingly demonstrates). However, this source of theory is virtually ignored in the issue of Library Trends an "current theory." What a shame."

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