Scientometrics
Fatemeh Ahmadinasab; meysam javanbakht
Abstract
Background and Objectives: Words are the most important units of languages, means of communicating concepts, ideas, feelings, without words, we cannot talk about the objects, phenomena and concepts of the external and internal world. Words are the basic tools of thought, because they play a crucial role ...
Read More
Background and Objectives: Words are the most important units of languages, means of communicating concepts, ideas, feelings, without words, we cannot talk about the objects, phenomena and concepts of the external and internal world. Words are the basic tools of thought, because they play a crucial role in the process of thinking. To think about the world and its phenomena, it is necessary to classify them based on similarities and differences. This classification is a kind of information organization represented in word formation. Along with the introduction and transfer of knowledge, technologies and new equipment’s into Iran, new scientific concepts and terminology enter into Persian. These scientific concepts and terminology will increase the number of borrowed words, direct or indirect; Indirect borrowed words are equivalents that may be appropriate or inappropriate for Persian. If the appropriate equivalents are made by the specialists of the area and in cooperation with linguists, they will more easily be accepted by the scientific society. But unfortunately, the problem is that these equivalents are sometimes made by non-specialists who are unfamiliar with linguistic problems, and therefore these new terms are not always appropriate.Methodology: In order to study Persian technical terms of the field, first, the main sources, books and articles were identified and examined by the quantitative content analysis method. The second stage of the research is descriptive and is carried out by studying and analyzing the rules of term coinage based on the Guidelines and Principles of Word formation by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature. The corpus of the study is comprised of all the papers and books in the field, compiled in the fourth edition of the Bibliography of scientometrics by Hamid Reza Jamali Mahmouei, as well as the most recent papers and books published in the field. In this research, sampling has been applied and those books and articles have been selected for review which focus on the basics and concepts. The reason is that in these sources more terms and concepts could be found. Finally, 5 books and 60 articles were studied. Overall, 605 terms were extracted. 180 terms out of these 605 terms were mentioned in only one of the sources, and since they were not found in other sources of research, there was no possibility of determining the degree of uniformity and consistency in the equivalents. However, it was possible that in other sources, different equivalents were used instead. Findings and results of the research largely reflect the present status of the technical terms of this field of knowledge. The statistical method used in this research is descriptive statistics.Findings: According to the statistics, 18% of the technical terms have more than one Persian equivalents, that is, one out of almost every six English terms in scientometrics. A closer look at the terms suggests that in some equivalents, in particular, the translation of proper names into Persian or, in other words, the transliteration of proper names has led into several different forms. However, some equivalents have been made through lexical borrowing, although they are phonetically and phonologically Persianized.The linguistic origins of improper equivalents are as follows:Using phrases instead of compound formsUsing prepositional phrases (PP)Not paying attention to the rule “the shortest form is the optimal form” in word formationIgnoring the vital role of affixes (Persian prefixes and suffixes) in forming Persian equivalentsNot paying attention to the important role of linguistic context and linguistic type on equivalent- finding.Not paying enough attention to the fine semantic differences and delicacies of technical terms and their Persian equivalents.Discussion: According to the findings, in the field of scientometrics, as in other disciplines, inconsistency, turbulence and sometimes linguistic mistakes are seen in equivalents. The factors of these inconsistencies are categorized in 6 categories as the lack of attention to the number of lexical components of the term, using ill-formed structures, using phrasal groups, paying no attention to the lexical category of the components of the technical terms, choosing long terms, using no affixation, lack of attention to the context and genre and neglecting differences and semantic delicacies of words.Another finding is less synonymy and polysemy in scientometrics, in comparison to the fields like linguistics. Perhaps the reason lies in the fact that scientometrics is a newly-introduced academic field and naturally less Persian texts are created. Undoubtedly, it is expected that by an increase in the number of researchers in the area and authoring more Persian texts in this field, an increase in the number of inconsistencies, synonyms and homonyms will be observed. It is necessary to mention that in recent years, in Iran, a special attention has been paying to Farsi as the language of science on the basis of macro language policies. In this regard, various linguistic and non-linguistic strategies are approved to develop Persian standard technical terms. In this regard, the approval of a scientific department in Persian Academy of Language and Literature is necessary to supervise and approve the equivalents. In addition, producing and using standard bilingual dictionaries and frequently dictionaries also increase the uniformity of equivalences and hence the transparency of Persian texts in scientometrics.
faemeh ahmadinasab
Abstract
Background and Objectives: Abstract is a compact that introduces an academic paper with the least possible words. The number of people who read the abstracts is much broader than those who read the full text of articles. Most readers usually decide upon going through the full text of the article after ...
Read More
Background and Objectives: Abstract is a compact that introduces an academic paper with the least possible words. The number of people who read the abstracts is much broader than those who read the full text of articles. Most readers usually decide upon going through the full text of the article after reading the abstract. In fact, after the title, the abstract is of great importance. Unfortunately, it seems that the majority of authors and scholars - despite their care for the body of their paper - write the abstract hastily using copy and paste method. Since the abstract is brief and informatively condensed, it is necessary to observe all linguistic considerations in order to increase its readability. Cohesion is one of the factors that contributes to the improvement and readability of the text. Abstract as one of the important components of the article should represent the content of the article. But due to the length limitations, the authors find it difficult to write the abstract, because they should display the content with the least words. Most writers use copy and paste method; they get different sentences from different sections of the article, such as introduction, methodology, analysis of the results and conclusion. This method, in spite of the presentation of the article, usually reduces its readability, because of the lack of cohesive ties. This shows the importance of studying abstracts based on Halliday-Hasan cohesion theory. In this research, Persian abstracts of the ISC top journals in 7 areas were investigated based on the Halliday-Hasan cohesion theory. Also, in the present study, the possibility of adding to the linguistic guidelines of the ISO 214-1976 abstracting was examined. In research was conducted to answer the following questions: 1. How are ISC top journals of the 7 subject areas of science ranked based on the Halliday-Hasan cohesive theory? 2. What cohesive ties are used by the authors in Persian abstracts? 3. is there any possibility of adding any linguistic direction to the ISO 214-1976 abstracting Guidelines, based on cohesion theory? Methodology: Since the present study was conducted by content analysis and comparative analysis, the sampling method was collecting data based on available resources. A checklist was developed based on Halliday-Hasan cohesion theory (1976). 21 ISC top journals- 3 in every subject area of science- with the highest impact factors were selected for the study. 24 articles from the latest available issues of every journal were downloaded from its website. The abstracts were extracted and investigated by the researcher to find cohesive ties. Findings: The most frequent cohesive devices used in the abstracts of the papers of ISC top journals are respectively reference, conjunction, ellipsis and substitution. In addition, in the abstracts of basic sciences and humanities, more cohesive devices are used than in the other 5 areas. With regard to the findings, it is possible to add to the linguistic directions of the guidelines of the ISO 214-1976 abstracting not only for writing Persian abstracts, but also for writing abstracts in general. They are as follows: 1. Use conjunctions to create causal, temporal, additive… relationship between the sentences. 2. Use transparent cohesive words and avoid the ambiguous ones. 4. Use ellipsis, both for nominal and verbal to shorten sentences. 5. Take care of the position of cohesive ties and their frequency should be in proportion to the number of sentences to make abstracts more transparent and readable Discussion: Since abstracts play a key role in introducing an academic paper and can play a key role in its retrieval, the present study investigates abstracts in terms of Halliday-Hasan cohesive theory. Findings showed that in many abstracts, the lack of cohesive ties have led into semantic ambiguity and thus less readability. This finding is consistent with the findings of the Milky study (2002). Another finding was that the most frequent cohesive ties were reference and conjunction, which confirmed the findings of Hoseinzadeh (2001). This finding, of course, is not consistent with Rai Dehghi (1380), because in the latter, ellipsis was more used than reference and conjunction. In the abstracts of subject areas of science, except for agriculture, reference has been used more than conjunction. The present study showed that abstracts of quarterly journal of Biomedical Engineering, quarterly journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities and quarterly journal of Political and International Approaches have the highest number of cohesive ties. The findings showed that in the abstracts of the basic sciences and humanities, more cohesive ties were used in comparison to other five subject areas, and the field of medical sciences stands in the last position. Of course, most of the investigated abstracts of medical sciences were structured abstracts. It is likely that the abstract type had influenced the findings. Therefore, it is suggested that this issue be investigated in another study. In addition, the present study added a few linguistic directions to the guidelines for writing abstracts, based on the Halliday-Hasan cohesive theory.
