"The word "bibliometrics" first appeared in print in 1969 in Alan Pritchard's article "Statistical Bibliography or Bibliometrics?" in the December issue of the Journal of Documentation..." (Hertzel, 2003)
Bibliometrics is a quantitative-analytical method used in academia to measure publishing patterns. It is one of a set of evaluation methodologies – including case study analysis, peer review, economic rate-of-return analyses and surveys and consultations (among others) – used to assess research impact. Bibliometrics offers important advantages over other research evaluation methods and can be used to generate quantitative indicators of collaboration and interdisciplinarity. As sophistication of analytical tools improves, they are being used to develop more general indicators of ‘quality’ and even ‘excellence’. These analyses are supported by a range of indicators of varying complexity which have been developed over recent years. Robust bibliometric analysis requires a clear understanding of the strengths and limitations of the tools that accomplish tracking in a digital world.
Discussion
Bibliometrics is an area of research in the library and information sciences whose purpose is to trace citation patterns in scholarly fields. In the sciences, bibliometrics is also referred to as scientometrics. Put simply, bibliometrics is the quantitative analysis of bodies of literature (such as journal articles, monographs and patents) and their references: citations, and co-citations. Using quantitative analysis and statistics to discern patterns of publication in the sciences is a relatively new field. The purpose of bibliometrics is to quantify the impact of specific journals and authors relative to other journals and authors in academic and scientific disciplines. In other words, bibliometrics quantifies the impact of journal citations, authors and the journals themselves across and within subject specialties. Many researchers use the metrics of journal citations to determine author influence in a given field and to identify relationships between two or more writers/works. The most common way of doing bibliometric research is to use the Social Science Citation Index, the Science Citation Index and/or the Arts and Humanities Citation Index available using Thomson's Web of Science (WoS) or the Web of Knowledge. Even though bibliometric research can be done on Google scholar via the cited-by feature, GS is widely-criticized as having inflated citations counts. Peter Jacso calls into question its reliability for this kind of work. Bibliometric analysis of literature allows the study of the foundations of a discipline and (as a robust quantitative approach) augments the findings of more subjective literature reviews. When applied to patent data, this analysis allows the investigation of firm and inventor networks by describing the linkages that are evident in citation to other individuals, firms and technologies. Bibliometrics can be extended to illustrate the most influential citations, how they are related, how strong their relationships are, and how far removed from, or central to, other groupings they are. In other words, the relationships inherent in the intellectual structure of a field or patent space can be rendered graphically. Co-citation studies can also reveal what topics, themes, and research methods are central, or peripheral, to a field, and how they may have changed over time.
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