Descriptive Scope

Construction Management is a research field with a clear focus. Construction is an industry sector, so research centres on activity within that sector. Management is part of the social sciences, and research in this field draws on many of them, including economics, law and sociology. In practice, the field is defined by what researchers actually study. It is often described as the application of social science to the construction sector, although this is not the whole story.

Applied research is empirical research. This means that, in any particular piece of research, the phenomenon under study is linked to specific activity in or around construction. A study may focus on one or more types of phenomena:

• object
• process
• role
• location
• individual

Other facets help define any piece of empirical research. A paper or thesis would reasonably be expected to use or develop concepts from the literature and to characterize the relationships between them through a theoretical framing. The research design would explain which empirical techniques are used, and why they were chosen, and which analytical techniques process the data. Other facets, such as results and conclusions, are part of the paper, but a metadata catalogue holds only the titles, abstracts and keywords. In any case, the words used in results and conclusions tend to be closely tied to the specific context of the study, while the metadata tends to use terms that describe broader issues and is therefore more suitable for indexing.

Not every valuable paper is empirical research. A position paper, a conceptual piece or a focused practical paper may set out to do only some of this, and do it well. The five facets describe the full apparatus of empirical research. They are not a standard that every paper should meet.

Descriptive Scope works alongside the other two classifications in the catalogue. Subjects define the academic lens or subject area that an index terms is associated with. Topics identify the issue in focus for that term. Descriptive Scope says which of the five research facets the index term matches.

Each index term in the taxonomy is categorized as characteristic of one of the five facets: Phenomenon, Concept, Theoretical framing, Empirical technique, Analytical technique. By inspecting the index terms allocated to a record, we can show which facets are represented by at least one index term. Each of the letters in "PCTEA" appears only if the record carries at least one index term from that facet, and a number in front shows how many of the facets are present. If all are present, the descriptive scope reads "5 PCTEA". If there are none of the words that are usually used for concepts and none for empirical techniques, it reads "3 PTA". The letters are a label, not an order. A record with fewer letters is not ranked below one with more.

This is a quick indication of how fully the title and abstract describe an empirical study. It only works if the taxonomy holds the right index terms and they are categorized correctly. So an incomplete scope is not a fault in the paper. It is the result of matching words in the against our list, and a gap can mean more than one thing:

• Most often, it reflects a focused piece of writing. A position paper that develops a concept and builds theory without testing is complete on its own terms, and a record reading "3 PCT" identifies that focus.
• Sometimes it means our list has a gap. For example, a well-theorized paper on the spread of disease in buildings might match no theory term, because its theory is voiced in a vocabulary this corpus does not yet hold. That kind of blank highlights a (perhaps deliberate) gap in our list, not in the paper.
• Similarly, such a gap may point the other way, to a paper sitting at the edge of the field. Appearing in one of the journals we follow does not make a paper a management contribution. These journals also carry technology and engineering papers that make no management claim. A sparse match signals a paper about buildings is not necessarily focused on social sciences like management.

The indicator cannot tell these apart. Indexing simply matches words against a list. Ascertaining which of these three explanations applies is a job for a person looking at the paper. We regularly browse the records with incomplete descriptive scopes for exactly this reason, and it is useful work. It turns up well-made position papers and focused practical pieces, it shows where the index terms need extending, and now and then it highlights a record that belongs outside the field. Thus, the low PCTEA scores are among the more interesting records, rather than the weakest.

What do you think of this indicator? Could it be helpful? The categorization of the index terms is open to debate, and so is the way we use them. If your paper matches no term under a facet you believe it addresses, that may be a term we should add, or a term we should move to a different facet. Tell us, and we will look at it.

All comments and suggestions will be gratefully received.