Scientific collaboration pt 1

I guess I get overly excited when I see something that might apply a science studies / sociology of science approach to LIS, because I thought this was going to be a great session. It WAS awfully good.

Henry Small noted that collaboration does not necessarily mean coauthorhsip, and then he mentioned a bunch of methods for studying it (notably Sociology of Science type methods), but then all he talked about was coauthorship and cocitation. (And he measured that coauthorship has been on the rise for 20 years--including a doubling of mega-authorship (gt 500 authors) in the past few years.)

Ji-Hong Park and Jian Qin have measured that Open Access is not well covered in citation indexes and have attempted to analyze the methodologies and level of collaboration used in the LIS literature about OA.