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A naive user seeking introductory information on a topic may perceive a domain as it is shown by the search results in a database; however, inconsistencies in indexing can misrepresent the full picture of the domain by including irrelevant documents or omitting relevant ones, sometimes inexplicably. A bibliometric analysis was conducted on the domain of ethics in knowledge organization in the World of Science (WoS) and Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA) databases to discern how it is being presented by search results in those databases and to attempt to determine why inconsistencies occurred.
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Knowl. Org. 42(2015)No.5
D. Martínez-Ávila, J. A. Chaves Guimarães, F. Assis Pinho, M. J. Fox. The Representation of Ethics and Knowledge Organization ...
269
The Representation of Ethics and
Knowledge Organization in
the WoS and LISTA Databases
Daniel Martínez-Ávila*, José Augusto Chaves Guimarães**,
Fabio Assis Pinho***, Melodie J. Fox****
*Department of Information Science, São Paulo State University – UNESP,
Av. Hygino Muzzi Filho, 737, Marília (17525-900) – São Paulo – Brazil,
<dmartinezavila@marilia.unesp.br>
**Department of Information Science, São Paulo State University – UNESP,
Av. Hygino Muzzi Filho, 737, Marília (17525-900) – São Paulo – Brazil,
<guima@marilia.unesp.br>
***Department of Information Science, Federal University of Pernambuco –
UFPE, Av. da Arquitetura s/n – Recife (50740-550) – Pernambuco – Brazil,
<fabiopinho@ufpe.br>
****School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, NQBB,
3rd Floor, 2025 E Newport, Milwaukee, WI 53211, U.S.A.,
<melodie.fox@gmail.com>
Daniel Martínez-Ávila holds a PhD from University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain. He is an assistant professor at
São Paulo State University (UNESP), Marilia, Brazil. He also collaborates with the Institute for Gender Studies
(IEG) at University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain.
José Augusto Chaves Guimarães is a professor at the Graduate School of Information Science, São Paulo State
University-UNESP (Marília-Brazil). His research and teaching interests are epistemology of knowledge organi-
zation, knowledge organization ethics, archival knowledge organization, and domain analysis.
Fabio Assis Pinho is an associate professor in the Department of Information Science at the Federal Universi-
ty of Pernambuco, Recife-PE, Brazil. He received his master's in information science in 2006, and his PhD in
information science in 2010, both from the São Paulo State University, Marília-SP, Brazil. His research interests
lie in the broad area of knowledge organization and representation, specially the ethical issues in knowledge
organization. His bibliographical production is registered at http://lattes.cnpq.br/4220711855480007.
Melodie J. Fox holds a PhD in information studies, focusing on knowledge organization, with a minor in gen-
der studies, from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s iSchool, the School of Information Studies, where
she was also a member of the KOrg Knowledge Organization Research Group. She also holds an MLIS, also
from UWM and an MA in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She currently serves as Reviews
Editor for Knowledge Organization. Her research interests include the social consequences of classification, ethics
in knowledge organization, epistemology, ontology (in the philosophical sense) and gender studies.
Martínez-Ávila, Daniel, Chaves Guimarães, José Augusto, Assis Pinho, Fabio, Fox, Melodie J. The Represen-
tation of Ethics and Knowledge Organization in the WoS and LISTA Databases. Knowledge Organization.
42(5), 269-275. 33 references.
Knowl. Org. 42(2015)No.5
D. Martínez-Ávila, J. A. Chaves Guimarães, F. Assis Pinho, M. J. Fox. The Representation of Ethics and Knowledge Organization ...
270
Abstract: A naïve user seeking introductory information on a topic may perceive a domain as it is shown by the search results in a databa-
se; however, inconsistencies in indexing can misrepresent the full picture of the domain by including irrelevant documents or omitting re-
levant ones, sometimes inexplicably. A bibliometric analysis was conducted on the domain of ethics in knowledge organization in the
World of Science (WoS) and Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA) databases to discern how it is being presented
by search results in those databases and to attempt to determine why inconsistencies occurred.
Received: 17 July 2015; Accepted 17 July 2015
Keywords: knowledge organization, ethics, information, databasesWoS, LISTA
1.0 Introduction
Ethics in knowledge organization (KO) has become a
growing concern in both practice and research. Examples
from practice can be found in the American Library As-
sociation’s Code of Ethics (2008), the 2012 International
Federation of Library Assocations and Institutions Code
of Ethics for Librarians and other Information Workers, and in
archival codes of ethics and principles from around the
world (Rego et al. 2014). The two conferences and pro-
ceedings on ethics in knowledge organization in 2009 and
2012 are further indications of academic interest and
scholarly activity on the topic. These contributions gener-
ated a research stream of bibliographic publications that
should be readily available for access through databases
such as the Web of Science (WoS). As a legacy for future
research and expansion of the subdomain of ethics in
KO, scholars and practitioners interested in getting intro-
duced into the tradition will access these databases and be
influenced by the perception of the domain as presented
by search results.
As a systematized re-creation of a research process,
bibliometric studies can reveal snapshots of the percep-
tion of a domain’s research patterns and also warn of po-
tential ethical problems of the silencing or misrepresenta-
tion of the knowledge in that particular domain. This pa-
per describes and analyzes the results of our bibliometric
analysis studying the representation of ethics and KO in
WoS and Library, Information Science & Technology
Abstracts (LISTA) databases. The motivation of the
study is to re-create how an average or naïve user might
perceive the topic of knowledge organization and ethics
through the search results in these two common research
tools. We aim to highlight how the omissions and insuffi-
ciencies of these databases provide an incomplete picture
when superficially researching these topics.
2.0 Methodology
The use of bibliometrics and/or citation analysis to study
the conformation of a domain, especially KO, has been re-
commended and used by Hjørland (2002, 2012, 2013a),
Smiraglia (2008, 2011, 2013, 2014), Guimarães et al. (2012),
Graf and Smiraglia (2014), and Beak et al. (2013a; 2013b).
As Hjørland (2002, 436) puts it, “it is empirical and based
on detailed analysis of connections between individual do-
cuments.” The retrieved documents and omissions reveal-
ed by the databases, i.e. the system’s side, is one focus of
our research, with content analysis, i.e. the user’s side, on
the other. This method has been previously used in do-
main-analytical studies (e.g. Guimarães et al. 2012; Gui-
marães et al. 2014). The combination of bibliometric
analysis, along with a specific type of content analysis and
discourse analysis has also been used, for instance, by
Mayor and Robinson (2014).
WoS was selected for its role as an important and pres-
tigious resource, and sometimes the first and only tool, for
research and the evaluation of science. Thus, the represen-
tation of the domain (ethics and KO) is shaped by the high
standards for indexing and organization of the domain as
an ontological representation (or misrepresentation). Sev-
eral studies have pointed out the problems of online bib-
liographic products for bibliometric/informetric studies
(e.g., Hood and Wilson, 2003), and more specifically for
the WoS in aspects such as impact factor (Lange 2001), in-
stitutional affiliations (García-Zorita et al. 2006), time (de-
lay) of indexing (Falagas et al. 2008), language biases in the
coverage of the Science Citation Index (van Leeuwen et al.
2001), and journal coverage (The PLoS Medicine Editors
2006), especially regarding bias towards the country of ori-
gin of the journals (e.g., Paris et al. 1998; Rey-Rocha et al.
1999; Andersen 2000; Fernández-Cano and Bueno 2002;
Sidiropoulos and Manolopoulos 2005).
To complement WoS, and to overcome some of the
most important limitations (e.g. the omission of Cataloging
& Classification Quarterly, the journal that published the
proceedings of the first conference on ethics in knowl-
edge organization), we also analyzed LISTA, thus side-
stepping some deliberate omissions of materials on ethics
and knowledge organization due to criteria such as cover-
age quotas and inclusion of unrelated disciplines (dis-
cussed below). In addition, LISTA allows searching all
text, a feature that is not available in the WoS (it only al-
lows searching the Title, Abstract, Author Keywords, and
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Keywords Plus® fields). Other prestigious databases such
as Scopus were also discarded for different reasons. Al-
though it is said that Scopus is “unbiased” (Scopus 2015)
and offers an overall wider journal range than WoS, it has
also been pointed out that it is limited to more recent ar-
ticles compared to WoS, whose indexed and archived re-
cords go back to 1900 (Falagas et al. 2008, 338-9). In this
vein, we thought that the inclusion of LISTA would be
sufficient, a priori, to overcome some of the specific cov-
erage problems in WoS, as well as these two databases
seem to be the first common options for many research-
ers in our area.
Aware that many ethical works in KO do not actually
use the word “ethics” in them, or that the term may not
appear in the main fields used in the indexing process, we
also searched for related terms that might come to the
mind of the users or indexers such as “moral” and in-
cluded spelling variants and near-synonyms such as “in-
formation organization,” “knowledge organisation,” and
“information organisation.” For the WoS (all databases),
the retrieval profile was:
TOPIC: (ethic* OR moral*) AND TOPIC: (“in-
formation organization” OR “knowledge organiza-
tion” OR “information organisation” OR “knowl-
edge organisation”)
Timespan: All years.
Search language=Auto
In LISTA, the retrieval profile was: (“knowledge organi-
zation” OR “information organization” OR “knowledge
organisation” OR “information organisation”) AND
(ethic* OR moral*). We searched both databases on Feb-
ruary 2nd 2015, covering all the years and articles indexed
by the databases. The choice of these databases and
terms, purposively excluding other more KO-oriented re-
sources such as the ISKO proceedings, which are not in-
dexed, was meant to re-create the results a non-special-
ized/general researcher would get as a first contact with
the topics by only using these common databases.
3.0 Results
We retrieved 24 references from the WoS and 39 refer-
ences from LISTA that were indexed or responded to a
search on knowledge organization and ethics by both.
This makes 53 references in total, excluding 10 overlap-
ping references. On the other hand, a relatively high
number of unique references (14 and 29) were retrieved
from each database, which means that not all papers re-
sponding to those retrieval profiles have been unani-
mously indexed by both databases. Although both pro-
files are not technically equivalent, they both are meant to
represent the same information need according to the
possibilities of the databases.
Figure 1 shows the frequency of publications per year
for each database and the total results. In the totals, two
Figure 1: Frequencies of publications per year
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D. Martínez-Ávila, J. A. Chaves Guimarães, F. Assis Pinho, M. J. Fox. The Representation of Ethics and Knowledge Organization ...
272
Source Freq %
Knowledge Organization 10 41,67
11th International ISKO Conference, Rome,
Italy, Feb 23-26, 2010 2 8,33
International Journal of Medical Informatics 2 8,33
Community Development Journal 1 4,17
8th UICEE Annual Conference on Enginee-
ring Education, Kingston, Jamaica, Feb 07-
11, 2005
1 4,17
9th World Multi-Conference on Systemics,
Cybernetics and Informatics, Orlando, FL, Jul
10-13, 2005
1 4,17
International Classification 1 4,17
Journal of Documentation 1 4,17
Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Educa-
tion and Practice 1 4,17
Library Quarterly 1 4,17
Life Science Journal-Acta Zhengzhou University
Overseas Edition 1 4,17
Systemic Practice and Action Research 1 4,17
The Journal of Korean Association of Computer
Education 1 4,17
Total 24 100
Table 1: Frequencies and percentages of sources retrieved from
the WoS
peaks of publications occur in 2009 and 2012 (coinciding
with the conference proceedings on ethics in knowledge
organization). However, the 2009 peak only occurs in LI-
STA, since the proceedings of the 2009 conference were
published in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, which is
not indexed by WoS. Of these proceedings, 4 articles were
included, while 2 articles were omitted even by LISTA. As
for the 2012 proceedings, published in Knowledge Organiza-
tion, which is indexed by both databases, only 3 papers were
retrieved from both, 5 were retrieved exclusively from LI-
STA, and 5 articles were omitted by both databases.
Nearly all of the 53 papers are written in English, with
one paper exclusively retrieved from the WoS in Korean,
and one paper in Spanish and one in Portuguese exclusi-
vely retrieved from LISTA. Although this might be inter-
preted as geographic bias, several authors from Brazil,
Spain and other countries author papers in English. The
most productive authors, according to this picture, are Jo-
sé Augusto Guimarães and Joseph Tennis (2 papers each)
for the WoS results, and Donald Hawkins (2 papers) for
the LISTA results. Every other author in both databases
only appears in one paper. The total list of results also
presents these three authors (Guimarães, Hawkins, and
Tennis) with only two papers and a long tail of authors
with only one paper. The co-authorship index for the
WoS is 1.67 (40 authors / 24 documents), for LISTA is
Source Freq %
Knowledge Organization 17 43,59
Information & Organization 6 15,38
Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 4 10,26
Journal of Documentation 3 7,69
Information Today 2 5,13
Scire 2 5,13
Education for Information 1 2,56
Indexer 1 2,56
Information Studies 1 2,56
Journal of Information Ethics 1 2,56
Library Quarterly 1 2,56
Total 39 100
Table 2: Frequencies and percentages of sources retrieved from
LISTA
1.54 (60 authors / 39 documents), and for the total 1.58
(84 authors / 53 documents).
The most frequent sources retrieved from the WoS (see
Table 1) are ISKO sources: Knowledge Organization (10 pa-
pers), and the International ISKO Conference Proceedings
of 2010, Rome (2 papers). Only the recent international
ISKO Conference Proceedings are being indexed by the
WoS, while the old ones and the different regional ISKO
chapters’ proceedings are still omitted (none appear in LI-
STA). The most frequent sources retrieved from LISTA
are in Table 2. Although Knowledge Organization is indexed
by both databases, LISTA retrieves 7 more papers overall,
while only 8 papers are retrieved from both databases. LI-
STA also retrieves 2 extra Journal of Documentation articles,
in spite of being indexed by both databases. Some of these
more frequent sources retrieved from LISTA, such as Cata-
loging & Classification Quarterly and Scire, are knowledge or-
ganization specific journals that are not indexed by the
WoS. Overall, the most frequent sources in the “whole pic-
ture” (see Table 3) are Knowledge Organization, Information &
Organization, Cataloging & Classification Quarterly and Journal
of Documentation.
Of the 13 sources retrieved from the WoS, only 3
sources are also indexed by LISTA (Knowledge Organization,
Journal of Documentation, and Library Quarterly) and thus in-
clude papers (12) that should be potentially retrievable
from both databases. On the other hand, of the 11 sources
retrieved from LISTA, 4 sources are also indexed by the
WoS, i.e., the three aforementioned overlapping sources
plus Information and Organization (although the 3 earliest
papers published in 2006 and 2002 are not indexed). This
makes 24 out of 39 papers retrieved from LISTA that are
potentially retrievable from both databases. The sum of
the papers potentially retrievable from both data-
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Source Freq %
Knowledge Organization 19 35,85
Information & Organization 6 11,32
Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 4 7,55
Journal of Documentation 3 5,66
11th International ISKO Conference, Rome,
Italy, Feb 23-26, 2010 2 3,77
Information Today 2 3,77
International Journal of Medical Informatics 2 3,77
Scire 2 3,77
Community Development Journal 1 1,89
8th UICEE Annual Conference on Enginee-
ring Education, Kingston, Jamaica, Feb 07-11,
2005
1 1,89
9th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cy-
bernetics and Informatics, Orlando, FL, Jul 10-
13, 2005
1 1,89
Education for Information 1 1,89
Indexer 1 1,89
Information Studies 1 1,89
International Classification 1 1,89
Journal of Information Ethics 1 1,89
Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Educati-
on and Practice 1 1,89
Library Quarterly 1 1,89
Life Science Journal-Acta Zhengzhou University Over-
seas Edition 1 1,89
Systemic Practice And Action Research 1 1,89
The Journal of Korean Association of Computer Edu-
cation 1 1,89
Total 53 100
Table 3: Frequencies and percentages of total sources
bases is 26 out of 53; however, as pointed out before, on-
ly 10 overlapping references result, with 16 references
omitted by one of the databases (in addition to the refer-
ences that might be omitted by both databases).
Two references omitted by LISTA are papers publish-
ed in the same issue of Knowledge Organization. No logical
reason for the omission of these articles based on the re-
trieval profile could be found, since both articles are in-
cluded in the database and other articles from the same
journal with similar characteristics were retrieved. In fact,
one presents the terms “ethics” and “knowledge organi-
zation” in the abstract and text and “ethics,” “values,”
and “morality” in its title, and the other presents the ex-
pression “ethical knowledge organization” in the abstract
and text too.
The references omitted only by WoS are 14. Nine of
these references were published in Knowledge Organization.
Two do not include the terms “ethic*” or “moral*” as
used this study, but rather their authors’ names include
the string “moral” (Raquel del Moral and Miguel A. Mo-
rales-Arroyo respectively), thus the omission seems to be
justified; one includes the terms “ethics” and “knowledge
organization” in the abstract so it should be retrieved;
however that particular issue of the journal does not
seem to be indexed; one is indexed by WoS and includes
the term “knowledge organization” and the roots
“ethic*” and “moral*,” however most of these appear in
the text with only “ethical” is in the abstract, thus making
it irretrievable from WoS; the rest of the Knowledge Organi-
zation references are all part of the special issue for the
2nd Milwaukee Conference on Ethics in Information Organization
so they are assumed to be related in spite of not being re-
trieved. One includes the term “ethical” in the abstract
and text, and “ethics” in the title, but “information or-
ganization” only in the text; one includes the terms “eth-
ics” in the title, abstract and text, but “information or-
ganization” only in the text; one includes the terms “eth-
ics” in the title, abstract and text, but no version of
“knowledge organization;” one includes “ethics” or
“ethical” in the title, abstract and text, but no version of
“knowledge organization;” and one includes the term
“ethical” in the abstract and text, but “knowledge organi-
zation” only in the text. All these references would have
been retrieved if the name of the source was considered
(being published in a journal called Knowledge Organization
should imply a connection with knowledge organization);
however, WoS, contrary to LISTA, does not consider this
criterion. Thus, WoS omitted all references published in
Information & Organization (even when they are included in
the database). However, although one included the term
“morale,” another included the term “ethics,” and yet an-
other included the terms “ethically” and “morally” in the
abstract, none of the papers include any version of the
phrase “knowledge organization.” The second part of
the query in LISTA seems to match the title of the jour-
nal and thus these omissions by the WoS might be justi-
fied. Similarly, the omission of the references that were
published in the Journal of Documentation present the terms
“moral” or “ethics” in the abstract, but no version of
“knowledge organization” outside the body of the text,
thus making the retrieval from WoS impossible according
to the profile.
It seems hard, if not impossible, to determine all the
works that are being omitted from both databases. This
aspect is more problematic when working in an unstruc-
tured space such as the World Wide Web, but even when
working with databases the burden is not only in the que-
ry/retrieval profile but also in the representation of the
records and the features/decisions of the databases to
match those queries. In this vein, we consider that our re-
Knowl. Org. 42(2015)No.5
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trieval profiles seem to be plausible and even acceptable
for a user initiating into the topic through these databases
(given the technical possibilities of the databases). The si-
lenced references might never be guessed without help of
experts or other specialized tools (and some of them
would be really relevant).
Finally we analyzed a sample of additional omissions,
beginning with rest of the papers from the two confer-
ences on ethics in knowledge organization: in one the
term “ethical” is included in the abstract, but no version
of “knowledge organization;” three include the terms
“ethical” and “knowledge-organization” or ”knowledge
organization” in the text, but not in the title, abstract or
keywords; two do not include the strings “ethic” or
“moral;” and one only includes the term “ethical” in the
text, and no version of “knowledge organization.” Other
examples of papers on ethics and knowledge organization
that are omitted include papers that are indexed by both
databases but do not include all the required terms in the
title, abstract or keywords; and two more that both include
in the title the terms “ethical” and “knowledge representa-
tion and organization,” but probably are not retrieved be-
cause the words “knowledge” and “organization” are
separated in the string (despite a similar meaning). An-
other omitted paper presents the terms “ethical” and
“knowledge organization” in its title, but because it is pub-
lished in the ISKO international conference proceedings
of 2002 it is not indexed by the WoS and LISTA (only the
latest international ISKO conference proceedings are be-
ing indexed by the WoS, beginning with 2012). Finally,
books are omitted because they are not usually indexed by
academic databases such WoS and LISTA. It should be
noted that all of the omitted papers described here are in-
dexed by the Knowledge Organization Literature database.
4.0 Conclusions
Many of the problems in the perception of “knowledge
organization” and “ethics” through common generalist
databases such as the WoS and LISTA seem to be rooted
in indexing and retrieval problems. In 1997, Frederick C.
Thorne noted, “it is of critical importance whether any
specific journal or paper is systematically included in re-
search reviews and abstract journals if it is to receive
wide notice at all. Many authors do not read original
sources systematically, but depend on reviews and ab-
stracts. In the past, significant journals and articles have
not been included in reviews and abstract journals either
due to error or deliberate omission” (1159). More re-
cently, authors have pointed out bias and subjectivity in
algorithms and systems such as Google (e.g. Segev 2009;
Hjørland 2013b). Similarly, algorithms, options, and deci-
sions in databases also affect the way users perceive a
domain. Omissions based on indexing policies (such as
coverage and format) and other omissions (such as the
misrepresentation of contents) can affect the perception
of the concepts and scientific configuration of sensitive
topics such as “knowledge organization” and “ethics.” To
overcome these problems, some more specific databases,
covering a wider range of materials, and maintained by
international experts in the field (such as the Knowledge
Organization Literature database) seem to be a good re-
source for the research initiation in specialized topics.
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... Adopting the same strategy used in one previous study, 40 Topic Search terms related to culture and ethics: "cultur*," "ethic*," "moral," "ethos," "sex," "gender," "homosexual*," "queer," "feminism," and "feminist" Search terms related KO: "knowledge organization," "knowledge organization," "information organization," "information organization," "classification," "taxonomy," ...
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This article aims to examine the intellectual landscape of the domain of culture and ethics in knowledge organization (KO). A domain analysis was conducted on a corpus of 206 relevant papers using bibliometric methods such as author co-citation analysis. The findings revealed a core group of influential authors consisting of Olson, Beghtol, and other influential KO researchers. The most prominent research themes that constitute this scientific community have also been investigated by reviewing some fundamental concepts and influential works in the domain.
... 42, no. 5), the discussions were concerned with: 1) taxonomy of attacks on knowledge organization: embracing austerity, advocating parasitism, disregarding quality, imputing pedantry, trivializing, vendor mystification, search technology mystification, distorting user behavior, change cudgeling and doomsaying (Gross 2015); 2) the inconsistencies in indexing and misrepresentation in databases in the field of ethics of knowledge organization (Martínez-Ávila et al. 2015); 3) censorship and awareness of potentially controversial areas in tagging of banned and challenged books (Kipp, Beak and Graf 2015); 4) the search for the children's voice in KOSs (Beak 2015); 5) the attribution of ownership, secrecy and privacy as challenges for knowledge organization in the field of traditional musics (Weissenberger 2015); 6) the analysis of bibliocentrism and other book-like considerations in Resource Description and Access (RDA) and the object-oriented Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBRoo) (Smiraglia 2015); 7) the mutual influence between culture and classification schemes demanding a working definition of culture for knowledge organization research (Lee 2015); 8) the ethical questions occurring in everyday life classifications and dietitians' points of view about the subject representation in food guides (McTavish 2015); 9) the ethical issues involved in potentially problematic scholarly practices (Oravec 2015); 10) the possibility of dialogue between the socio-cognitive approaches in knowledge organization and the Bakhtinian concepts as a starting point to an ethical and democratic attitude of the indexer/classifier in order to represent the social pluralism and the equipollence of social voices (Arboit and Guimarães 2015); 11) the ethical values of archival representation in the digital environment (McQueen 2015); 12) the ethical values in archival arrangement and description (Silva, Guimarães and Tognoli 2015); 13) the ethical commitment of cataloging practices to assess user needs (McCourry 2015); 14) the need of a code of ethics for catalogers (Shoemaker 2015); and, 15) the rhetorical elements and potential ethical issues of altgenres classification in Netflix (Lawrence 2015). ...
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Considering the need for a constant questioning on the role of the information professional, more specifically with respect to the ethical aspects of their practice, this study discusses how information science has been addressing over the past decades the ethical aspects inherent to the field of knowledge organization. In this context, we discuss the concepts of interactive epistemography and transcultural ethics of mediation by Antonio Garcia Gutiérrez, multilingualism in knowledge representation by Michèle Hudon, cultural hospitality by Clare Beghtol and the power to name by Hope Olson, in their aspects of convergence, complementarity and dialogicity.
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Knowledge organization (KO) and bibliometrics have traditionally been seen as separate subfields of library and information science, but bibliometric techniques make it possible to identify candidate terms for thesauri and to organize knowledge by relating scientific papers and authors to each other and thereby indicating kinds of relatedness and semantic distance. It is therefore important to view bibliometric techniques as a family of approaches to KO in order to illustrate their relative strengths and weaknesses. The subfield of bibliometrics concerned with citation analysis forms a distinct approach to KO which is characterized by its social, historical and dynamic nature, its close dependence on scholarly literature and its explicit kind of literary warrant. The two main methods, co-citation analysis and bibliographic coupling represent different things and thus neither can be considered superior for all purposes. The main difference between traditional knowledge organization systems (KOSs) and maps based on citation analysis is that the first group represents intellectual KOSs, whereas the second represents social KOSs. For this reason bibliometric maps cannot be expected ever to be fully equivalent to scholarly taxonomies, but they are – along with other forms of KOSs – valuable tools for assisting users’ to orient themselves to the information ecology. Like other KOSs, citation-based maps cannot be neutral but will always be based on researchers’ decisions, which tend to favor certain interests and views at the expense of others.