Frozen Footprints
📝 Abstract
Bibliometrics has the ambitious goal of measuring science. To this end, it exploits the way science is disseminated trough scientific publications and the resulting citation network of scientific papers. We survey the main historical contributions to the field, the most interesting bibliometric indicators, and the most popular bibliometric data sources. Moreover, we discuss distributions commonly used to model bibliometric phenomena and give an overview of methods to build bibliometric maps of science.
💡 Analysis
Bibliometrics has the ambitious goal of measuring science. To this end, it exploits the way science is disseminated trough scientific publications and the resulting citation network of scientific papers. We survey the main historical contributions to the field, the most interesting bibliometric indicators, and the most popular bibliometric data sources. Moreover, we discuss distributions commonly used to model bibliometric phenomena and give an overview of methods to build bibliometric maps of science.
📄 Content
arXiv:0811.4603v2 [cs.DL] 17 Jul 2009 Frozen Footprints Massimo Franceschet Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Udine Via delle Scienze 206 – 33100 Udine, Italy massimo.franceschet@dimi.uniud.it Abstract. Bibliometrics has the ambitious goal of measuring science. To this end, it exploits the way science is disseminated trough scientific publications and the resulting citation network of scientific papers. We survey the main historical contributions to the field, the most interesting bibliometric indicators, and the most popular bibliometric data sources. Moreover, we discuss distributions commonly used to model bibliometric phenomena and give an overview of methods to build bibliometric maps of science. 1 Introduction Bibliometrics is a research method used in library and information science. It uses quantitative analysis and statistics in order to: – determine the influence of single scholars or groups of them (e.g., research groups, institutions, countries) and that of single papers or groups of them (e.g., journals or entire research fields); – describe the relationships between authors, publications, journals, or re- search fields. Bibliometrics has become a standard tool of science policy and research man- agement in the last decades. Academic institutions increasingly rely on biblio- metric analysis for making decisions regarding hiring, promotion, tenure, and funding of scholars; authors, librarians, and publishers may use citation indica- tors to evaluate journals and to select those of high impact; editors may choose reviewers on the basis of their bibliometric scores on a particular subject of in- terest; worldwide college and university rankings, e.g., THE-QS1 and ARWU2, which are partially based on bibliometric criteria, are often consulted by prospec- tive students and their parents in the college and university admissions process. Today, bibliometrics is one of the rare truly interdisciplinary research fields, with important links with history of science, sociology, law, economics, management, theology, mathematics, statistics, physics, and computer science. Citation analysts retrieve production and citation data from bibliometric data sources and compute performance indicators to measure the quality of 1 http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/ 2 http://www.arwu.org/ research of an actor. The bibliographic databases of the Institute for Scientific Information, today Thomson-Reuters, have been used for decades as a starting point and often as the only tools for locating citations and conducting citation analysis. Fierce competitors of the databases provided by Thomson-Reuters are Elsevier’s Scopus and the freely accessible Google Scholar. Actors under evaluation are typically individual scholars and journals, but bibliometric units can be composed of homogeneous groups of scholars or groups of journals at different levels of aggregation. Bibliometric criteria that charac- terize research quality are productivity, impact (or popularity), and prestige. Typically bibliometric indicators capture separately some of these criteria, hence the need of using in the evaluation process several orthogonal metrics capturing different aspects of research performance. The outline of this manuscript is as follows. We first briefly review the main historical contributions to the field in Section 2. In Section 3 we discuss the controversial role of citations in bibliometrics. Section 4 surveys the most in- teresting bibliometric indicators both at the individual and at the journal level, while Section 5 is devoted to the comparison of the most popular bibliometric data sources. Section 6 investigates the probability distributions that underlie most phenomena in bibliometrics. In Section 7 we delve into the realm of biblio- metric maps of science. Finally, Section 8 contains some of the best quotations about bibliometrics. 2 Historical remarks Bibliometric studies started long time ago. A remarkable early piece of work is Histoire des sciences et des savants depuis deux si`ecles. The author, Alphonse de Candolle, describes the scientific strength of nations and tries to find envi- ronmental factors for the scientific success of a nation [1]. Derek John de Solla Price (1922 – 1983), an historian of science and infor- mation scientist born from Philip Price, a tailor, and Fanny de Solla, a singer, is credited as the father of bibliometrics. In his book Little Science, Big Science, he analyzed the recent system of science communication and laid the foundation of modern research evaluation techniques [2]. The term bibliometrics is introduced by Pritchard in 1969 [3]. Pritchard explains the term bibliometrics as: the application of mathematical and statistical methods to books and other media of communication At the same time, Nalimov and Mulchenko defined scientometrics as: the application of those quantitative methods which are dealing with the analysis of science viewed as an information process According
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