arXiv subjects

Loet Leydesdorff

Publications and source records attributed to Loet Leydesdorff.

At least 235 records · Page 13Linked to original sources

arXiv2009

Communication and Knowledge: How is the knowledge base of an economy constructed?

The competitive advantages in a knowledge-based economy can no longer be attributed to single nodes in the network. Political economies are increasingly reshaped by knowledge-based developments that upset market equilibria and institutional arrangements. The network coordinates the subdynamics of (i) wealth production, (ii) organized novelty production, and (iii) private appropriation versus public control. The interaction terms generate a complex dynamics which cannot be expected to contain central coordination. However, the knowledge infrastructure of systems of innovations can be measured, for example, in terms of university-industry-government relations. The mutual information in these three dimensions indicates the globalization of the knowledge base. Patent statistics and data from the Internet are compared in terms of this indicator.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2009

Science shops: A kaleidoscope of science-society collaborations in Europe

The science-shop model was initiated in the Netherlands in the 1970s. During the 1980s, the model spread throughout Europe, but without much coordination. The crucial idea behind the science shops involves a working relationship between knowledge-producing institutions like universities and citizen groups that need answers to relevant questions. More recently, the European Commission has funded a number of projects for taking stock of the results of science shops. Twenty-one in-depth case studies by seven science shops across Europe enable us to draw some conclusions about the variety of experiences in terms of differences among disciplines, nations, and formats of the historical institutionalization. The functions of science shops in the mediation of normative concerns with analytical perspectives can further be specified.

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arXiv2009

Are the contributions of China and Korea upsetting the world system of science?

Institutions and their aggregates are not the right units of analysis for developing a science policy with cognitive goals in view. Institutions, however, can be compared in terms of their performance with reference to their previous stages. King's (2004) 'The scientific impact of nations' has provided the data for this comparison. Evaluation of the data from this perspective along the time axis leads to completely different and hitherto overlooked conclusions: a new dynamic can be revealed which points to a group of emerging nations. These nations do not increase their contributions marginally, but their national science systems grow endogenously. In addition to publications, their citation rates keep pace with the exponential growth patterns, albeit with a delay. The center of gravity of the world system of science may be changing accordingly.

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arXiv2009

The Triple Helix Model and the study of Knowledge Based Inovation Systems

This paper examines the changing nature of knowledge-based innovation systems in light of the dynamic interconnections between the university, industry and government. Industries have to assess in what way and to what extent they decide to internalize R&D functions. Universities position themselves in markets, both regionally and globally. Governments make informed trade-offs between investments in industrial policies, S&T policies, andor delicate and balanced interventions at the structural level. Such policies can be expected to be successful insofar as one can anticipate andor follow trends according to the dynamics of the new technologies in their different phases. The evolutionary perspective in economics can be complemented with a turn towards reflexivity in sociology in order to obtain a richer understanding of how the overlay of communications in university-industry-government relations reshapes the systems of innovations that are currently subjects of debate, policy-making, and scientific study.

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arXiv2009

Similarity Measures, Author Cocitation Analysis, and Information Theory

The use of Pearson's correlation coefficient in Author Cocitation Analysis was compared with Salton's cosine measure in a number of recent contributions. Unlike the Pearson correlation, the cosine is insensitive to the number of zeros. However, one has the option of applying a logarithmic transformation in correlation analysis. Information calculus is based on both the logarithmic transformation and provides a non-parametric statistics. Using this methodology one can cluster a document set in a precise way and express the differences in terms of bits of information. The algorithm is explained and used on the data set which was made the subject of this discussion.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2009

Evaluation of research and evolution of science indicators

Whereas the research program of the measurement of scientific communications emerged in a context where the delineations among academia, government, and industry were institutionalized, the systemic development of these relations during the second half of the 20th century has changed the system of reference for the evaluation of research. In a knowledge-based economy science fulfills functions that change the definitions of what is considered research and globalization has changed the relevance of national systems of reference. Science, of course, has been internationally oriented from its very beginning, but the entrainment of the research process in these global developments is reflected in the research evaluation and the scientometric measurement. In other words, the systems under study have become more complex. A complex dynamics can analytically be decomposed in several subdynamics. The evolving systems and subsystems communicate in different dimensions and the evaluation has become part of the codification of these communications.

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arXiv2009

Network Structure, Self-Organization and the Growth of International Collaboration in Science

Using data from co-authorships at the international level in all fields of science in 1990 and 2000, and within six case studies at the sub-field level in 2000, different explanations for the growth of international collaboration in science and technology are explored. We find that few of the explanations within the literature can be supported by a detailed review of the data. To enable further exploration of the role of recognition and rewards as ordering mechanisms within the system, we apply new tools emerging from network science. These enquiries shows that the growth of international co-authorships can be attributed to self-organizing phenomenon based on preferential attachment (searching for recognition and reward) within networks of co-authors. The co-authorship links can be considered as a complex network with sub-dynamics involving features of both competition and cooperation. The analysis suggests that the growth of international collaboration is more likely to emerge from dynamics at the sub-field level operating in all fields of science, albeit under institutional constraints. Implications for the management of global scientific collaborations are explored.

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arXiv2009

Indicators for the Knowledge-based Economy: A Comparison between South Korea and The Netherlands

This paper elaborates on the Triple Helix model for measuring the emergence of a knowledge base of socio-economic systems. The 'knowledge infrastructure' is measured using multiple indicators: webometric, scientometric, and technometric. The paper employs this triangulation strategy to examine the current state of the innovation systems of South Korea and the Netherlands. These indicators are thereafter used for the evaluation of the systemness in configurations of university-industry-government relations. South Korea is becoming somewhat stronger than the Netherlands in terms of scientific and technological outputs and in terms of the knowledge-based dynamics; South Korea's portfolio is more traditional than that of the Netherlands. For example, research and patenting in the biomedical sector is underdeveloped. In terms of the Internet-economy, the Netherlands seem oriented towards global trends more than South Korea; this may be due to the high component of services in the Dutch economy.

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arXiv2009

An Indicator of Research Front Activity: Measuring Intellectual Organization as Uncertainty Reduction in Document Sets

When using scientific literature to model scholarly discourse, a research specialty can be operationalized as an evolving set of related documents. Each publication can be expected to contribute to the further development of the specialty at the research front. The specific combinations of title words and cited references in a paper can then be considered as a signature of the knowledge claim in the paper: new words and combinations of words can be expected to represent variation, while each paper is at the same time selectively positioned into the intellectual organization of a field using context-relevant references. Can the mutual information among these three dimensions--title words, cited references, and sequence numbers--be used as an indicator of the extent to which intellectual organization structures the uncertainty prevailing at a research front? The effect of the discovery of nanotubes (1991) on the previously existing field of fullerenes is used as a test case. Thereafter, this method is applied to science studies with a focus on scientometrics using various sample delineations. An emerging research front about citation analysis can be indicated.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2009

ERAnets Evaluation of Collaboration Among Participants of IST Research and their Evolution to Collaborations in the European Research Area (ERA)

This report presents the final results of a study, 'Evaluation of Networks of Collaboration in IST Research within the European Research Area' (ERAnets), conducted for the European Commission. The ERAnets project developed and applied tools and methods to evaluate the networks of collaboration in information society technologies (IST) within the European Research Area (ERA), focusing on calls 1 and 2 of the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6).

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arXiv2009

A Meta-evaluation of Scientific Research Proposals: Different Ways of Comparing Rejected to Awarded Applications

Combining different data sets with information on grant and fellowship applications submitted to two renowned funding agencies, we are able to compare their funding decisions (award and rejection) with scientometric performance indicators across two fields of science (life sciences and social sciences). The data sets involve 671 applications in social sciences and 668 applications in life sciences. In both fields, awarded applicants perform on average better than all rejected applicants. If only the most preeminent rejected applicants are considered in both fields, they score better than the awardees on citation impact. With regard to productivity we find differences between the fields: While the awardees in life sciences outperform on average the most preeminent rejected applicants, the situation is reversed in social sciences.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2009

Hyper-incursion and the Globalization of the Knowledge-Based Economy

In biological systems, the capacity of anticipation--that is, entertaining a model of the system within the system--can be considered as naturally given. Human languages enable psychological systems to construct and exchange mental models of themselves and their environments reflexively, that is, provide meaning to the events. At the level of the social system expectations can further be codified. When these codifications are functionally differentiated--like between market mechanisms and scientific research programs--the potential asynchronicity in the update among the subsystems provides room for a second anticipatory mechanism at the level of the transversal information exchange among differently codified meaning-processing subsystems. Interactions between the two different anticipatory mechanisms (the transversal one and the one along the time axis in each subsystem) may lead to co-evolutions and stabilization of expectations along trajectories. This recursive incursion on the incursive dynamics of expectations can be modeled using hyper-incursion. The knowledge-based subdynamic at the global level which thus emerges, enables historical agents to inform the reconstruction of previous states and to co-construct future states of the social system, for example, in a techno-economic co-evolution.

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arXiv2009

The Biological Metaphor of a Second-Order Observer and the Sociological Discourse

Purpose: In the tradition of Spencer Brown's (1969) Laws of Form, observation was defined in Luhmann's (1984) social systems theory as the designation of a distinction. In the sociological design, however, the designation specifies only a category for the observation. The distinction between observation and expectation enables the sociologist to appreciate the processing of meaning in social systems. Design: The specification of "the observer" in the tradition of systems theory is analyzed in historical detail. Inconsistencies and differences in perspectives are explicated, and the specificity of human language is further specified. The processing of meaning in social systems adds another layer to the communication. Findings: Reflexivity about the different perspectives of participant observers and an external observer is fundamental to the sociological discourse. The ranges of possible observations from different perspectives can be considered as second-order observations or equivalently as the specification of an uncertainty in the observations. This specification of an uncertainty provides us with an expectation. The expectation can be provided with (one or more) values by observations. The significance of observations can be tested when the expectations are properly specified.

nlin.AO↗

arXiv2009

The Two Faces of American Power: Military and Political Communication during the Cuban Missile Crisis

Purpose: The mismatches between political discourse and military momentum in the American handling of the Cuban missile crisis are explained by using the model of the potential autopoiesis of subsystems. Under wartime conditions, the codes of political and military communications can increasingly be differentiated. Design/methodology/approach: The model of a further differentiation between political and military power is developed on the basis of a detailed description of the Cuban missile crisis. We introduce the concept of a "semi-dormant autopoiesis" for the difference in the dynamics between peacetime and wartime conditions. Findings: Several dangerous incidents during the crisis can be explained by a sociocybernetic model focusing on communication and control, but not by using an organization-theoretical approach. The further differentiation of the military as a subsystem became possible in the course of the twentieth century because of ongoing learning processes about previous wars.

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arXiv2009

The Import and Export of Cognitive Science

From its inception, a large part of the motivation for Cognitive Science has been the need for an interdisciplinary journal for the study of minds and intelligent systems. One threat to the interdisciplinarity of Cognitive Science, both the field and journal, is that it may become, or already be, too dominated by psychologists. In 2005, psychology was a keyword for 51% of submissions, followed distantly by linguistics (17%), artificial intelligence (13%), neuroscience (10%), computer science (9%), and philosophy (8%). The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) gathers data not only on how individual articles cite one another, but also on macroscopic citation patterns among journals. Journals or sets of journals can be considered as proxies for fields. As fields become established, they often create journals. By studying the patterns of citations among journals that cite and are cited by Cognitive Science, we can better: 1) appreciate the scholarly ecology surrounding the journal and the journals role within this ecology, 2) establish competitor and alternate journals, and 3) determine the natural clustering of fields related to cognitive science.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2009

Multiple Presents: How Search Engines Re-write the Past

Internet search engines function in a present which changes continuously. The search engines update their indices regularly, overwriting Web pages with newer ones, adding new pages to the index, and losing older ones. Some search engines can be used to search for information at the internet for specific periods of time. However, these 'date stamps' are not determined by the first occurrence of the pages in the Web, but by the last date at which a page was updated or a new page was added, and the search engine's crawler updated this change in the database. This has major implications for the use of search engines in scholarly research as well as theoretical implications for the conceptions of time and temporality. We examine the interplay between the different updating frequencies by using AltaVista and Google for searches at different moments of time. Both the retrieval of the results and the structure of the retrieved information erodes over time.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2009

Measuring the Globalization of Knowledge Networks

This paper presents a method of understanding the growth of global science as resulting from a mechanism of preferential attachment within networks. The paper seeks to contribute to the development of indicators of knowledge creation and transfer by presenting a theory and case study of network structures in science. It is our view that indicator development has suffered from a lack of attention to the theoretical basis for understanding the dynamics of knowledge creation. This lack has been due, in part, to the difficulty of measuring dynamic systems within social organizations. This paper attempts to fill this gap by proposing theory-based indicators of knowledge creation using network theory and analysis. The paper presents a hypothesis about the knowledge system that is explored by analyzing the growth of international collaboration in science.

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arXiv2009

Anticipation and the Non-linear Dynamics of Meaning-Processing in Social Systems

Social order does not exist as a stable phenomenon, but can be considered as "an order of reproduced expectations." When anticipations operate upon one another, they can generate a non-linear dynamics which processes meaning. Although specific meanings can be stabilized, for example in social institutions, all meaning arises from a global horizon of possible meanings. Using Luhmann's (1984) social systems theory and Rosen's (1985) theory of anticipatory systems, I submit algorithms for modeling the non-linear dynamics of meaning in social systems. First, a self-referential system can use a model of itself for the anticipation. Under the condition of functional differentiation, the social system can be expected to entertain a set of models; each model can also contain a model of the other models. Two anticipatory mechanisms are then possible: a transversal one between the models, and a longitudinal one providing the system with a variety of meanings. A system containing two anticipatory mechanisms can become hyper-incursive. Without making decisions, however, a hyper-incursive system would be overloaded with uncertainty. Under this pressure, informed decisions tend to replace the "natural preferences" of agents and a knowledge-based order can increasingly be shaped.

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