lazykoblog   occasional musings about knowledge organization

The 11th International ISKO Conference was held in Rome in February 2010.

An analysis of the Proceedings will appear in my editorial in Knowledge Organization v. 38 no. 3 (May 2011).

The spreadsheet of papers and references I used for the analysis is here: Rome_11th ISKO_References

This marvelous conference took place in Mexico City in August of 2007. It was announced as the First International Symposium on Knowledge Organization, Library Science, and Terminology, and was held at UNAM’s Centro- Universitario de Investigaciones Bibliotecologicas.

The proceedings became available recently, and an analysis appears in my editorial in Knowledge Organization vol. 38 no. 1 (2011): 3-8.

The original Excel data file is here: Mexico City Simposio 2007

No, not the noun people misuse as a verb …. I’m talking about “impact factor.” Our journal Knowledge Organization has an impact factor of .55; the five-year impact factor is .61. This is pretty low for a scientific journal, which means there is a job to be done by the domain if we want our journal to be taken more seriously.

Impact factor measures (among other things) the degree to which the articles we publish have direct cited influence on future research; or, put another way, it measures citations in our journal to articles cited in earlier volumes in our journal.

If you are writing for any scientific journal it is important to situate your writing in the journal’s domain, and that means if you are writing for KO you ought to be citing KO and Advances in KO (ISKO Proceedings).

Just saying ….

Refereeing is about community. We use peer-review as a gate-keeping device. But too often these days that seems to mean slamming the gate shut instead of standing at the gate with a welcome kit.

Too many referees for journal articles, conference papers, etc., are playing AMERICAN IDOL with the role. You know what, your job is not to refuse everything egotistically. Your job even is not to refuse things that you think are flawed.

Your job is to tell people who have legitimate contributions how to make them fit into the domain. Because ultimately our collective job is to secure and promote the domain. If you refuse every abstract or manuscript you see you will shut the door so firmly the domain will die.

So the next time you are tempted to say “NO NO NEVER” to a proposal, stop to think how you would feel if you were the author. What will you have learned from that response? Never to come back, likely.

Now, I have had recently an instance of reviewing the same text for a journal and a couple of conferences. That’s a no-no. Don’t submit the same thing in multiple venues. And if you can’t think of a second way of phrasing your point, it probably isn’t worth making it twice.

But aside from that, the rest of us need to get focused on how to build our domain. Saying “that is not KO” is not helpful. Saying “this is interesting but it needs to cite X and Y ” is helpful.