Katherine W. McCain, PhD
 College of Information Science & Technology
 Drexel University
 3141 Chestnut Street
 Philadelphia, PA 19104

 Phone: 215 895-2486
Fax: 215 895-2494
 e-mail: Kate.McCain@ischool.drexel.edu

Relatively current CV

iSchool At Drexel University

Education
Current Course Responsibilities:
Research Interests:

Scholarly Communication and Bibliometrics.
My main focus over the past 25 years or so has been in looking at various aspects of scholarly fields--how they are organized, intellectually; how they emerge, develop, and decline; how scholars communicate about their research, etc. My approach is quantitative and graphical. Like my predecessors and colleagues in IST (Belver Griffith, Howard White, Xia Lin, Chaomei Chen), I am a bibliometrician. I use publication and citation data from the Institute for Scientific Information and other sources and analyse these data using a range of multivariate analytic methods--factor analysis, cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling, Pathfinder network analysis -- that allow me to study the patterns in the data and display them graphicallly. Basically, I'm a natural historian who, instead of turning over rocks or scraping tires at docks (something I did for several years in my MS work), digs into very large data sets to seek the underlying structure that can tell us about how scholarly fields are organized in terms of subject areas, research themes and trends, and key players. Since I also interview scholars in the areas I study, you could also say that I'm an entomologist who talks to the ants.

Selected Papers:
I've also explored other aspects of communication in the sciences -- primarily the norms and behaviors surrounding the sharing of research-related information (research materials, data sets, laboratory protocols, etc.).

Selected Papers
 Other Research Interests:

Doctoral Students whose dissertations I've chaired :
Other Stuff

 OUTSIDE INTERESTS