Scholarly communication as a socioecological system

Among Belver C. Griffith's many contributions to disciplinary communication is the idea that science and scholarship at large constitute a social system to be investigated empirically. This paper reports findings of an author co-citation analysis of the field of human behavioral ecology that expands Griffith's concept of the social system of scientific communication to fit a socioecological framework. Cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling techniques are used to characterize the research specialty at large and portray five respondents' individual resource maps. The techniques reveal co-citation relationships among authors whose work they had referenced in recent articles. Survey data on searching and handling behaviors for an aggregated sample of 180 cited references are correlated with core-periphery zones of the individual maps. Findings that types of socially mediated communication and distinctive information foraging behaviors correlate with different zones of a bibliographic microhabitat support an interpretation that active specialty members conform to foraging efficiency principles as predicted by prey-choice models from optimal foraging theory.