A Bibliometric Study of Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdis-cipline

Introduction The fields of Informing Science (IS) were defined in 1999, by Eli Cohen in his seminal article as "The fields that comprise the discipline of Informing Science provide their clientele with information in a form, format, and schedule that maximizes its effectiveness" (Cohen, 1999). In a decade this discipline has contributed greatly to bring together researchers working in IS from many disciplines, including Management Information System (MIS), education, library science, and computer science (Gill & Bhattacherjee, 2007). The publishing activity of the Informing Science Institute (ISI) has been increasing enormously since the first issue of Informing Science: the International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline (InformSciJ) in 1997. ISI has under-taken the publication of seven additional journals and more of twenty books. Two annual international conferences are also managed by ISI (Gill & Cohen, 2009). InformSciJ has the mission to be the principal channel for sharing knowledge in the fields that comprise the discipline of Informing Science (Gill, 2009). The term transdiscipline in InformSciJ's title is a relatively new term according to Choi and Pak's (2006). The authors found the first definitions of "transdiscipline" in on line literature published in 1979 (Gossman, 1979) and in peer-reviewed publications published in 1992 (Rosenfield, 1992). The Charter of Transdisciplinarity was adopted at First World Congress of Trandisciplinarity, Convento da Arrabida, Portugal, November 2-6, 1994. ("Charter of transdisciplinarity," 1994) What is a transdiscipline? Terms like multidisciplinary, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity describe activities that involve multiple disciplines. Let's get a closer look to some definitions by first taking some examples from health and social sciences: * Multidisciplinary: Working with several disciplines * Interdisciplinary: Working between several disciplines * Transdisciplinary: Working across and beyond several disciplines. Members from different disciplines working together using a shared conceptual framework (Rosenfield, 1992). This usage of the term was introduced by Jean Piaget in 1970. (Nicolescu, 2002) In others words, transdisciplinarity is a specific form of interdisciplinarity in which boundaries between and beyond disciplines are transcended and knowledge and perspectives from different scientific disciplines, as well as non-scientific sources, are integrated (Flinterman, Teclemariam-Mesbah, Broerse, & Bunders, 2001) The authors that have published in ISI publications come from a wide and varied multidisciplinary community. Having such publications allows information to reach a large number of consumers such as academic researchers (Cohen, 2009; Murphy, 2011). Those consumers, academic researchers, use ISI journals articles and cite them in different disciplines. The aim of this study is to observe the evolution of the Informing Science transdiscipline by analyzing the citations to papers from its flagship journal. Our study is based on bibliometric citation analysis. The term bibliometric refers to a branch of library and information science that provides quantitative characterization of scientific activity. The technique used in this paper is known as citation analysis that is based on the postulate that scientist cite documents they consider to be important to their research (Garfield, 1955, 1997). A "citation" is quantifiable item in bibliometrics. This unit of analysis is the referencing of a document by a more recently published document. The document making the citation is the "citing" document, and the one receiving the citation is the "cited" document. (Borner, Chen, & Boyack, 2003). The methodological approach to characterize interdisciplinary research using citation analysis has been a research method for the last decades (Chubin, Porter, & Rossini, 1984). …