John Joseph Guilbeau Papers - Accession 188

John Joseph Guilbeau was a Professor of French at Winthrop College (1965-1978). The John Joseph Guilbeau Papers consist of correspondence, speeches, unpublished research papers and manuscript of articles concerning Guilbeau’s interest and research in the French language and folklore, particularly in Louisiana (1956-1973): his service on the corporation visiting committee of the department of modern languages at MIT (1973-1977): his association with the South Central Modern Language Association (1958-1965); and his tenure as a professor in the Winthrop Modern and Classical languages department (1965- 1978).

Robert Philips Lane Papers - Accession 108

The Robert Philips Lane Papers consist of lecture notes, term papers, examinations, class rolls, seating charts, speech notes and papers relating to Dr. Lane’s career as an English professor at Winthrop. Comprising a significant portion of the collection are research notes, writings, research papers, and other notes on literary figures and genres while Dr. Robert Philip Lane was a student at Thayer Academy, Harvard University, and the University of North Carolina.

Kate Evans Cathcart Lindsey Papers - Accession 198

Kate Evans Cathcart Lindsey (1898-1975) was a Winthrop graduate (Class of 1919) and a former president of the Greenville, SC Chapter of the Winthrop Alumni Association. The Kate Evans Cathcart Lindsey Papers consist of a scrapbook and a diary relating to Mrs. Lindsey’s college days at Winthrop, as well as, correspondence and newspaper clippings pertaining to her role as the Greenville Alumni Association President. Correspondents include James P. Kinard and Shelton Phelps. The collection is a great source for information concerning student life at Winthrop (1915-1919) and of collegiate life during World War I.

Christine South Gee Papers - Accession 10

The Christine South Gee Papers include family histories; biographical data; annual reports of home demonstration work in South Carolina (1920-1922) compiled by Mrs. Gee; speeches; magazine articles (1935-1963); newspaper clippings (1934-1968); photographs (1903-1954) and certificates of awards. The collection primarily pertains to Mrs. Gee’s work as South Carolina State Home Demonstration Agent (1918-1923); her role in the formation of the South Carolina Extension Homemakers’ Council (1921), formerly the South Carolina Council of Farm Women; her activities as president of the South Carolina Council for the Common Good (1943-1945); her study of development in programs for adult education and rural women; and her historical interest in South Carolina statesmen and political leaders. Family histories include information on the Puckett, Smith, Martin, Hudgens, McNeese, Rodgers, and Saxon families.

Marguerite Tolbert Papers - Accession 203

Marguerite Tolbert (1893-1982) was a Winthrop alumna (class of 1914), club woman, and administrator with the Opportunity School in Columbia, South Carolina. The Marguerite Tolbert Papers consist of correspondence, manuscripts, galley proofs, biographical sketches, newspaper clippings, and other records relating to the publication of the book, South Carolina’s Distinguished Women of Laurens County. Miss Tolbert served as coordinator for the book project. Also included is an unpublished manuscript written by Clara Yarborough concerning the terms of office of seven former South Carolina governors. Miss Yarborough served as secretary under these governors.

Using complex networks concepts to assess approaches for citations in scientific papers

The number of citations received by authors in scientific journals has become a major parameter to assess individual researchers and the journals themselves through the impact factor. A fair assessment therefore requires that the criteria for selecting references in a given manuscript should be unbiased with regard to the authors or journals cited. In this paper, we assess approaches for citations considering two recommendations for authors to follow while preparing a manuscript: (i) consider similarity of contents with the topics investigated, lest related work should be reproduced or ignored; (ii) perform a systematic search over the network of citations including seminal or very related papers. We use formalisms of complex networks for two datasets of papers from the arXiv and the Web of Science repositories to show that neither of these two criteria is fulfilled in practice. By representing the texts as complex networks we estimated a similarity index between pieces of texts and found that the list of references did not contain the most similar papers in the dataset. This was quantified by calculating a consistency index, whose maximum value is one if the references in a given paper are the most similar in the dataset. For the areas of "complex networks" and "graphenes", the consistency index was only 0.11-0.23 and 0.10-0.25, respectively. To simulate a systematic search in the citation network, we employed a traditional random walk search (i.e. diffusion) and a random walk whose probabilities of transition are proportional to the number of the ingoing edges of the neighbours. The frequency of visits to the nodes (papers) in the network had a very small correlation with either the actual list of references in the papers or with the number of downloads from the arXiv repository. Therefore, apparently the authors and users of the repository did not follow the criterion related to a systematic search over the network of citations. Based on these results, we propose an approach that we believe is fairer for evaluating and complementing citations of a given author, effectively leading to a virtual scientometry.