Integrating Scientonomy with Scientometrics
Karen Yan

Recently, professor Karen Yan had the privilege to publish a new article with Meng-Li Tsai (National Ilan University, Taiwan) and Tsung-Ren Huang (National Taiwan University, Taiwan) in the edited book Scientonomy: The Challenges of Constructing a Theory of Scientific Change. Congrats to Karen! For more information on the book featuring Karen’s article, please click here.

Abstract

Scientonomy is the field that aims to develop a descriptive theory of the actual process of scientific change (Barseghyan, 2015). Scientometrics is the field that aims to employ statistical methods to investigate the quantitative features of scientific research, especially the impact of scientific articles and the significance of scientific citations (Leydesdorff & Milojević, 2013). In this paper, we aim to illustrate how to methodologically integrate scientonomy with scientometrics to investigate both qualitative and quantitative changes of a scientific community. We will use a case study to achieve our aim. The case study is about a scientific community studying a physiological phenomenon called heart-rate variability. Moreover, we will argue that this methodological integration outperforms cases in which researchers only employ the resources from one of the two fields.