lazykoblog   occasional musings about knowledge organization

ISKO 17 (2022) was held in Aalborg, Denmark from 6-8 July 2022. It was the second conference planned for Aalborg, and indeed, ISKO 16 was centered there but became a virtual conference because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The conference was titled Knowledge Organization across Disciplines, Domains, Services & Technologies and the proceedings were published by Ergon Verlag (ISKO 2022). Like earlier analyses in the “ISKO’s Bookshelf” series, the proceedings have not been indexed by either Clarivate of Scopus so the work reported here is the result of manual data-gathering. Also, like earlier volumes of ISKO proceedings, the editing is not uniform, particularly with regard to the references, which makes sorting difficult.

The proceedings contain 24 full papers, six short papers and three posters—33 contributions and therefore much less than has been typical of ISKO international conferences. We can assume this is another artifact of the pandemic, which was just beginning to ease in the summer of 2022. Only nine presentations are by a single author; all the rest are collaborative, which is a new sign of the hardening of the science of knowledge organization. Table 6 shows the countries of affiliation of the authors.

Table 6. ISKO 17 countries of affiliation of authors.

Brazil, USA and Canada predominate, and this is consistent with the series of proceedings analyzed above.

The number of references per presentation ranges from 1 to 47 with a mean of 23.75, a median of 22 and a mode of 21. This is quite different from all earlier ISKO conferences, suggesting perhaps a more humanistic bent to the conference, in opposition to the co-authorship data. Date of work cited ranged from 1548 to 2022. The mean age of work cited is 19.5 years (median 10, mode 5). This is the highest mean age of cited work (a humanistic trait) and the lowest mode (a hard science trait) (see Table 1 above).

As it pertains to “citation image,” there were 88 authors cited more than once; the top of the tier is shown in Table 7.

Table 7. ISKO 17 authors most cited.

As usual, Hjørland is cited the most. Beghtol and Smiraglia are among the usual suspects from before, and we can see that Szostak (see Table 5 above) has been moving up the list for several conferences. The other names are new to the list of most cited. So this tells us two things: first, that no matter how many scholars advance the science KO authors cannot make themselves stop citing the now very outdated work of Hjørland, and second, that the citation “image” of ISKO has changed significantly in 2022 to include a very many new scholars.

ISKO 17 is the smallest ISKO international conference with only 33 contributions. Brazil, the USA and Canada predominate among countries of author affiliation. The majority are collaborative, which points to empirical science. But, the number of references is quite large and they are quite older than typical, pointing to humanistic epistemologies. The citation image continues to be dominated by Hjørland, but there are several new names as well, indicating a shift in citation image in ISKO 17.

*Excerpted from: Smiraglia. Richard P. 2022. “ISKO’s Bookshelf 2022: Mysteries of a Pandemic, Part 1.” IKOS Bulletin 4, no.2: 54-64.