Empowering open science with reflexive and spatialised indicators

Abstract: Bibliometrics have become commonplace and widely used by authors and journals to monitor, to evaluate and to identify their readership in an ever-increasingly publishing scientific world. With this contribution, we aim to investigate the semantic proximities and evolution of the papers published in the online journal Cybergeo since its creation in 1996. We propose a dedicated interactive application that compares three strategies for building semantic networks, using keywords (self-declared themes), citations (areas of research using the papers published in Cybergeo) and full-texts (themes derived from the words used in writing). We interpret these networks and semantic proximities with respect to their temporal evolution as well as to their spatial expressions, by considering the countries studied in the papers under inquiry (Cybergeo being a journal of geography, most articles refer to a well-defined spatial envelope). Finally, we compare the three methods and conclude that their complementarity can help go beyond simple statistics to better understand the epistemological evolution of a scientific community and the readership target of the journal.