College and Research Libraries Africanist review Transition. Appearing under the same rubric is a short col- umn-"What Do Editors Really Want?"-in which acquisitions editors answer queries about the kinds of manu- scripts they are seeking in specified fields. Anyone living under the illusion that authors-not editors-set the pub- lishing agenda will be reminded other- wise by reading this column. Academic librarians should be pleased to read-if not contribute to-the regular column "Research File: Documents in Search of Scholars." Here we find the treasures of our collections-at Michi- gan State University, the New York Pub- lic Library, the Library of Congress, Radcliffe College, the International Insti- tute of Social History (Amsterdam), and the Franklin Furnace Archive (Manhat- tan)-begging for scholarly investiga- tion. Enterprising graduate students would be well-advised to package "doc- uments in search of scholars" with "what editors really want" for a sure-fire dissertation/monograph success. Until the April issue, this little maga- zine devoted 20 to 30 percent of its pages to a regular line called "Jobtracks," trac- ing the migratory paths of junior faculty to their first positions or of seasoned fac- ulty to senior positions . Academics will no doubt lovingly run their fingers down the long columns of names in search of that lost classmate, colleague, or mentor-now found-at last, pro- moted to tenure at Emory. In April, through a font and spacing change, "Jobtracks" was reduced to just over six pages in length. With a circulation of 15,000, Lingua franca apparently followed Abbeville's advice and thought first of its audience. Its modest institutional price, $35, suits its desk-top publishing quality and newsy content. Worthy of our support, yes, but also worthy of our vision. As Lingua franca matures-and let us hope it does-academic librarians should help to make their agenda an integral part of its mission. Right now, the mag- azine is walking a fine line between class clown and class act: its reputation hangs in the balance. A case in point is the Book Reviews 481 "Field Notes" insert in the April 1991 issue, "Rad Librarians Track the Zeit- geist," in which the travails of Hennepin County Library's cataloger Sanford Ber- man to establish new Library of Con- gress subject headings are listed. Lingua franca reprints a selection of sixteen new headings from among the 400 initiated by Berman. It lists another thirty-most of which, like "Cat furniture," are largely irrelevant to academics-from among the thousands of unique head- ings in use at Hennepin County Library alone. Excluded are more serious and surprising examples such as "Marxism" (use: "Communism" or "Socialism") or "Family planning" (use: "Birth con- trol''). Lingua franca misleads its readers by prefacing the second list with: "Here are some of the cultural phenomena that the library caught up with during the past year. Look for them soon at your local library." Only if your local library happens to be Hennepin County Library, they might have added. More disturb- ing, howeyer, is that Lingua franca" went for the quick laugh and overlooked the more important-and academically rel- evant-questions: How are new subject headings introduced and adopted by the Library of Congress? How do they re- flect cultural changes? Lingua franca might have investigated recent changes resulting from German unification, for example. And there would have been plenty of room for humor. If it can avoid a decline into terminal cuteness, Lingua franca will be of interest to graduate students, faculty, academic librarians and publishers, and consum- ers and critics of higher education.- Martha L. Brogan, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Scholarly Communication and Bibliometrics. Borgman, Christine L., ed. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1990. 393p. $38 (ISBN 0-803903879-9). LC 90-8745. Christine Borgman, who teaches in the library school and in the Communica- tions Studies program at UCLA, has compiled eight articles from a special issue of Communications Research (October 1989) and eight new essays into a com- 482 College & Research Libraries prehensive examination of bibliometric methodology and theory. The book is organized into four sections: theory and perspective, bibliometric re- search methods, empirical studies, and conclusions. The strength of the work is found in the three chapters that com- prise the section on theory and perspec- tive. Belver Griffith opens the volume by introducing Robert Merton's concepts of communication as a social process, Thomas Kuhn's ideas of science as a di- alectic procedure, and Derek deSolla Price's pioneering work in measuring scholarly production. Sydney Pierce follows with an inter- esting chapter on the issues associated with developing a "unified body of ex- planatory theory in bibliometrics." Pierce maintains that resistance to inter- disciplinary communication prohibits theory building. While self-contained disciplines "may build stronger research traditions," he argues, interdisciplinary communication and the resulting dis- semination of research results would provide the opportunity to synthesize information on similar topics from dis- persed disciplines. The third chapter, by Leah Lievrouw, discusses the differences between social structures and social processes and their relationship to the study of scholarly communication. Lievrouw contends that bibliometrics cu.rrently studies the structural products of scholarly commu- nication in order to understand the pro- cesses. The "invisible college," for example, is "widely accepted as a model of scholarly communication," but is typ- ically examined through measuring doc- uments and professional memberships. Interviewing and other fieldwork meth- ods are recommended for a better under- standing of the communication processes that emerge as structural products. Although these three chapters provide brief introductions to the important soci- ology of science issues surrounding scholarly communication, it would have been useful to include an essay from the broader perspective of sociology of knowledge. Specifically, a more detailed treatment of the influence of research September 1991 paradigms on scholarly communication and the consequences for bibliometric studies would enhance the work. In ad- dition, greater discussion of the restrictions that paradigms place on interdisciplinary studies, an issue raised by Pierce, would be appropriate. In the second section, methodologies ofbibliometric studies are examined, ap- plying the theoretical material intro- duced in the first section. The contents include a defense of co-citation analysis by Howard White and an intriguing essay on predictive research by Don Swanson, "identifying literatures that are logically but not yet bibliometrically related." Swanson claims that by recognizing lit- eratures that are not presently linked through citations yet share logical argu- ments on related topics, information sci- entists can continue to manage the increasing growth of specialized, frag- mented knowledge. He proposes that bibliometrics can be used to identify not only knowledge that has been linked through citations, but also that which has not, thus allowing the integration of implicitly related, previously unlinked information. Empirical studies that have been con- ducted using bibliometric techniques are reported in the third section, demonstrat- ing the application of bibliometric meth- odologies and illustrating how they serve to measure scholarly communication. These descriptions are varied and useful for any- one contemplating a bibliometric study. In the concluding chapter, William Paisley succinctly presents the history of bibliometrics, then systematically com- pares bibliometrics to complementary research methods, including content analysis, social indicators research, so- ciometries, and unobtrusive measures. Finally, Paisley builds upon Borgman's introduction by presenting "further ele- ments of a model of bibliometric re- search." In this section, he outlines the possibility of introducing new types of variables and statistical analysis, and new research questions related to the de- mographics of scholarly communication (e.g., patterns of team research, number of active authors by discipline). l Scholarly Communication and Bibliometrics is a cohesive work which presents a thor- ough overview of bibliometric research. It is further unified by a single collective bibliography, a detailed subject index, and a combined author and cited works index. The primary value of this work is that it serves both as a general text on Book Reviews 483 bibliometric studies and as a treatise on the sociology of science as it relates to scholarly communication. This book makes an important contribution to an emerging body of knowledge and, as a text for researchers, should have a major impact.-Jeffrey N. Gatten, Kent State Uni- versity, Kent, Ohio. 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