A hierarchical typology of scholarly information units: based on a deduction-verification study
| Published date | 20 September 2019 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-04-2019-0068 |
| Date | 20 September 2019 |
| Pages | 354-372 |
| Author | Liangzhi Yu,Zhenjia Fan,Anyi Li |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
A hierarchical typology of
scholarly information units: based
on a deduction-verification study
Liangzhi Yu, Zhenjia Fan and Anyi Li
Department of Information Resource Management, Business School,
Nankai University, Tianjin, China
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to lay a theoretical foundation for identifying operational information
units for library and information professional activities in the context of scholarly communication.
Design/methodology/approach –The study adopts a deduction-verification approach to formulate a
typology of units for scholarly information. It first deduces possible units from an existing conceptualization
of information, which defines information as the combined product of data and meaning, and then tests the
usefulness of these units via two empirical investigations, one with a group of scholarly papers and the other
with a sample of scholarly information users.
Findings –The results show that, on defining an information unit as a piece of information that is complete
in both data and meaning, to such an extent that it remains meaningful to its target audience when retrieved
and displayed independently in a database, it is then possible to formulate a hierarchical typology of units for
scholarly information. The typology proposed in this study consists of three levels, which in turn, consists of
1, 5 and 44 units, respectively.
Research limitations/implications –The result of this study has theoretical implications on both the
philosophical and conceptual levels: on the philosophical level, it hinges on, and reinforces the objective view
of information; on the conceptual level, it challenges the conceptualization of work by IFLA’s Functional
Requirements for Bibliographic Records and Library Reference Model but endorses that by Library of
Congress’s BIBFRAME 2.0 model.
Practical implications –It calls for reconsideration of existing operational units in a variety of library and
information activities.
Originality/value –The study strengthens the conceptual foundation of operational information units and
brings to light the primacy of “one work”as an information unit and the possibility for it to be supplemented
by smaller units.
Keywords Information science and documentation, Concept analysis, Information concept,
Information unit, Scholarly information, Theory of LIS
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
A classical definition of information science defines it as a discipline “that investigates the
properties and behavior of information, the forces governing the flow of information, and
the means of processing information for optimum accessibility and usability”(Borko, 1968,
p. 3); The same definition further characterizes the discipline as “concerned with that body
of knowledge relating to the origination, collection, organization, storage, retrieval,
interpretation, transmission, transformation and utilization of information.”As far as the
discipline’s role with information is concerned, two features of this definition stand out and
still hold true for today’s library and information science (LIS). First, it states that the
ultimate objective of the discipline is to ensure the greatest accessibility of information;
second, it emphasizes that, to do so, the information profession performs a wide range of
activities on information. Clearly, many of these activities are physical or quasi-physical
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 76 No. 1, 2020
pp. 354-372
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-04-2019-0068
Received 24 April 2019
Revised 31 July 2019
Accepted 4 August 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
The authors would like to thank the reviewers of this paper for their extremely enlightening comments
and helpful suggestions. The authors would also like to thank Professor Shiyan Ou of Nanjing
University, China for reading an earlier version of this paper critically and for providing suggestions
for its revision.
354
JD
76,1
operations that presuppose a certain degree of concrete tangibility of information and the
possibility of dividing information into discrete operational units. This inevitably raises
the question of what is meant by “a unit of information”in LIS.
Although it is not rare for LIS literature to employ the term “information unit”and its
synonyms (e.g. Hauck et al., 2001; Pinto, 2003; Zhai and Lafferty, 2006; Yi, 2008; Shah,
2014), this literature provides very few explicit explications regarding what the term
denotes and how boundaries between information units can be divided. Most studies use
the term as if its meaning were self-evident; only a few (e.g. Zhang et al., 2010; Zhang, 2012)
attempt formal definitions and/or empirical enumerations of possible units. While these
studies will be reviewed in detail in the next section, their limitations must be noted briefly
here. A major weakness shared by most studies is that they have rarely based their
definitions of an information unit on a thorough exposition of the concept of information
itself. As a great number of scholars within and beyond LIS (e.g. Buckland, 1991; Capurro
and Hjørland, 2003; Floridi, 2010; Raber, 2003; Zins, 2007) have noted, “information”is one
of the most problematic concepts in LIS, referring to many different things (e.g. physical
things, process, knowledge, structure, differences, meaningful data, etc.) by different
people in different contexts. Without an explicit exposition of the information concept, it is
easy, if not inevitable, for inquiries about information units to get lost among the term’s
many different denotations. This is perhaps one of the reasons why existing proposals of
information units often include items of completely different things (e.g. a document, a
text, a concept, an idea, etc.).
In the absence of a solid conceptual basis for choosing operational units, library
and information activities tend to adopt whatever operational units convenient to
specific contexts. Library operations (e.g. collection development, cataloguing, circulation,
etc.), for instance, rely very much on physical documentary units (a book, a journal issue,
etc.); indexing and abstracting services on items within a physical unit (e.g. articles within
a journal issue); internet searches on web pages; natural language processing on
rhetorical, structural or statistical elements of texts. What remains unknown is whether
any of these makes the best unit for the activity concerned, and what alternatives there
might be.
This paper continues existing LIS efforts to define possible units of scholarly
information, with a special view to strengthening the conceptual foundation for
identifying operational units. It does so by addressing the following questions: What is
meant by information units as opposed to documentary units and conceptual units? What
is meant by “a unit of information in scholarly communication”? Does a hierarchy or
typology exists among different units of scholarly information? In addressing these
questions, this study takes for granted the following assumptions: first, information, albeit
generallyregardedasuncountable,ispossibletobeoperatedoninunits,asLIS
professional activities have always presupposed; second, to dissect information into units,
we must know first and foremost what information is; third, the proposed units need to
demonstrate detachability from other parts of information in at least some professional
contexts; and fourth, proposals of possible units need to be consonant with the views of
users, for unless the proposed units are used by the user in his/her information search and
access, they have little value for the mission of LIS. Based on these assumptions, this
paper adopts a deduction-verification approach to dissecting scholarly information. It first
dissects scholarly information into possible units based on a conceptual analysis of
information; it then tests the detachability of these units with a small group of scholarly
papers; it further tests the usefulness of these units with a questionnaire survey of
scholarly information users.
Devised in this way, this study aligns itself with ongoing research that examines
information units as a theoretical issue (e.g. Dousa, 2010, 2013, 2014; Zhang, 2012); it differs
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Typology of
scholarly
information
units
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