Macromolecule Mass Spectrometry: Citation Mining of User Documents

Identifying research users, applications, and impact is important for research performers, managers, evaluators, and sponsors. It is important to know whether the audience reached is the audience desired. It also is useful to understand the technical characteristics of the other research, development, and applications affected by the originating research, and to understand other characteristics (e.g., names, organizations, countries) of the users affected by the research. Because of the many indirect pathways through which fundamental research can affect applications, identifying the user audience and research impacts can be very complex and time consuming. This report identifies the literature pathways through which two highly-cited papers of 2002 Chemistry Nobel Laureates, John B. Fenn and Koichi Tanaka, affected other research, technology development, and applications. It also identifies the technical and infrastructure characteristics of the user population. Citation Mining, an integration of citation bibliometrics and text mining, was applied to the more than 1600 first-generation Science Citation Index (SCI) citing papers to Fenn's 1989 Science paper on Electrospray Ionization for Mass Spectrometry, and to the more than 400 first-generation SCI citing papers to Tanaka's 1988 Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry paper on Laser Ionization Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry. Bibliometrics was performed on the citing papers to profile user characteristics, and text mining was performed on them to identify technical areas affected by the research, the relationships among these technical areas, and the relationships among the technical areas and the infrastructure (i.e., authors, journals, organizations). (3 figures, 61 refs.)