Intuitive or common sense approaches to knowledge Organization (KO)

One of the reasons for the difficulty of establishing a theoretical framework for KO may be that knowledge is often based on "intuitive criteria". According to Loet Leydesdorff is the case with the journal categories used in the citation indexed published by Institute for Scientific Information.

"The Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) itself provides a classification of journals at the level of the database that has been based on intuitive criteria (Pudovkin & Garfield, 2002)." (Leydesdorff, 2006, p. 602).

What Pudovkin & Garfield actually write was:

"One of the referees asked for a description of the procedures used by ISI in establishing journal categories for JCR. These procedures are followed by the ISI editorial group in charge of journal selection and are similar to those used for the SCI and Current Contents® journal categories. This method is heuristic in that the categories have been developed by manual methods started over 40 years ago. Once the categories were established, new journals were assigned one at a time. Each decision was based upon a visual examination of all relevant citation data. As categories grew, subdivisions were established. Among other tools used to make individual journal assignments, the Hayne-Coulson algorithm is used. The algorithm has never been published. It treats any designated group of journals as one macrojournal and produces a combined printout of cited and citing journal data." (Pudovkin & Garfield, 2002, p. ).

An official version states:

"Content classification:

The subject categories in Web of Science have been established over time by the editors responsible for the various subject areas of the database. The process of identifying subject categories and populating them with journals has been ongoing since the establishment of the Science Citation Index, the Social Sciences Citation Index and the Arts & Humanities Citation. "  http://www.jisc-adat.com/adat/adat_db_details.pl?ns_ADAT:DB=Web%20of%20Science  (retrieved 2009-01-25)

It may be added that ISI's journal categories are not beyond criticism. In the field of Library and Information Science (LIS) are included journals such as Library Journal which is not a journal about LIS but is a general journal published by a library organization. Also journals about telecommunication and Garfield's own journal the Scientist are examples of problematic inclusions regarded from a theoretical point of view.

Apparently ISI is not just depending on "intuition", but Leydesdorff's remark is useful as a conceptualization of a kind of approach to KO. An intuitive or common sense approach to KO is an approach which does not consider KO to be a problem, that may be illuminated by theoretical knowledge about KO, why practical work may not depend on research in KO. It is somewhat related to intellectual or scholarly approaches to KO which consider subject knowledge to be the only requirement.

Literature:

Leydesdorff, L. (2006). Can scientific journals be classified in terms of aggregated journal-journal citation relations using the Journal Citation Reports? Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(5),  601-613.

Pudovkin, A. I., & Garfield, E. (2002). Algorithmic procedure for finding semantically related journals. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology , 53(13), 1113-1119.

See also: Approaches to KO; Traditional approaches to KO

Birger Hjørland

Last edited: 25-01-2009

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