Browsing by Subject "scientometrics"
Now showing items 1-2 of 2
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(Helsingin yliopisto, 2020)Maps of science, or cartography of scientific fields, provide insights into the state of scientific knowledge. Analogous to geographical maps, maps of science present the fields as positions and show the paths connecting each other, which can serve as an intuitive illustration for the history of science or a hint to spot potential opportunities for collaboration. In this work, I investigate the reproducibility of a method to generate such maps. The idea of the method is to derive representations representations for the given scientific fields with topic models and then perform hierarchical clustering on these, which in the end yields a tree of scientific fields as the map. The result is found unreproducible, as my result obtained on the arXiv data set (~130k articles from arXiv Computer Science) shows an inconsistent structure from the one in the reference study. To investigate the cause of the inconsistency, I derive a second set of maps using the same method and an adjusted data set, which is constructed by re-sampling the arXiv data set to a more balanced distribution. The findings show the confounding factors in the data cannot account for the inconsistency; instead, it should be due to the stochastic nature of the unsupervised algorithm. I also improve the approach by using ensemble topic models to derive representations. It is found the method to derive maps of science can be reproducible when it uses an ensemble topic model fused from a sufficient number of base models.
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(2021)Understanding about nature of science is important topic in science education as well as in pre-service science teacher education. In science education, Nature of Science (NOS), in its different forms of educational scaffoldings, seeks to provide with students an understanding of features of scientific knowledge and science in general, how scientific knowledge changes and becomes accepted, and what factors guide scientific activities. For a science teacher, deep and broad enough picture of sciences is therefore of importance. This study attempts to show that the research field called Science of Science (SoS) can significantly support building such a panoramic picture of sciences, and through that, significantly support NOS. The SoS approaches the structure and dynamics of science quantitatively, using scientific documents (e.g., publications, reports, books and monographs and patent applications) as trails to map the landscape of sciences. It is argued here that SoS may provide material and interesting cases for NOS, and in so doing enrich NOS in a similarly significant way as history, philosophy and sociology of science (HPSS) scholarship has done thus far. This study introduces several themes based on SoS that are of relevance for NOS as they were introduced and discussed in a pre-service science teachers' course. The feedback from pre-service teachers shows that introducing SoS, with minimal additional philosophical interpretations and discussions, but simply as evidential facts and findings, sparks ideas and views that come very close to NOS themes and topics. Discussions related to nature of science, and specific educational NOS scaffoldings for it, can find a good companion in SoS; the latter providing facts and evidence of thee structure and dynamics of sciences, the former providing perspectives for interpretations.
