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Bibliometrics As a Research Field

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Bibliometrics As a Research Field BIBLIOMETRICS AS A RESEARCH FIELD A course on theory and application of bibliometric indicators W. GLÄNZEL COURSE HANDOUTS 2003 2 CONTENT General Introduction ....................................................................................................5 1. Historical remarks..................................................................................................6 1.1 The origin of the name ‘Bibliometrics’ .................................................................. 6 1.2 The pioneers in bibliometrics................................................................................. 6 1.3 Bibliometrics since deSolla Price .......................................................................... 8 1.4 The three “components” of present-day bibliometrics .......................................... 9 2. The elements of bibliometric research and their mathematical background .......11 2.1 Basic concepts of elements, units and measures of bibliometric research .......... 12 2.2 Data sources of bibliometric research................................................................. 13 2.3 Minimum bibliographic description for paper identification .............................. 16 2.4 Mathematical models and the “distributional” approach................................... 17 2.4.1 Historical sketch of mathematical methods used in bibliometrics....................... 17 2.4.2 Basic postulates and the “axiomatic approach” to bibliometrics ....................... 20 2.4.3 Deterministic models of productivity and citation processes............................... 23 2.4.4 The stochastic approach to bibliometrics ........................................................... 28 3. Indicators of publication activity.........................................................................36 3.1 Counting schemes and main levels of aggregation.............................................. 36 3.2 Problems of subject assignment........................................................................... 38 3.3 Statistics on scientific productivity: Frequency distributions vs. rank statistics................................................................................................. 40 3.4 Factors influencing publication activity, subject characteristics in publication activity........................................................................................... 45 3.5 Publication profiles of institutional and national research activity..................... 48 3.5.1 Publication profiles by discipline......................................................................... 49 3.5.2 Publication profiles by sectors............................................................................. 51 3.5.3 Publication profiles by funding............................................................................ 51 3.5.4 Characterising research dynamics of institutions, regions or countries ............. 52 4. Indicators of citation impact ................................................................................53 4.1. The notion of citations in information science and bibliometrics........................ 53 4.2 The role of self-citations....................................................................................... 56 4.3 Factors influencing citation impact ..................................................................... 60 4.4 Journal citation measures: the Impact Factor..................................................... 63 4.5 Relative citation indicators .................................................................................. 66 5. Indicators of scientific collaboration ...................................................................73 5.1 Co-authorship as a measure of scientific collaboration ...................................... 73 5.2 Indicators of co-operativity and co-publication networks ................................... 76 6. Indicators and advanced data-analytical methods ...............................................81 6.1 Bibliometric transaction matrices ....................................................................... 81 6.2 Bibliographic coupling and co-citation analysis ................................................. 83 6.3 Co-word, Co-heading and Co-author Clustering Techniques............................. 85 6.4 Techniques of Matrix Analysis............................................................................. 86 3 7. The borderland of bibliometric research..............................................................89 7.1. Linkage between science and technology ............................................................ 89 7.2. New horizons: bibliometric methods in webometrics .......................................... 91 8. Introduction to bibliometric technology .............................................................93 8.1 Outlines of cleaning-up and computerised data processing of bibliographic data................................................................................................ 93 8.2 Bibliometric sortware .......................................................................................... 97 References.................................................................................................................103 APPENDIX: List of recommended readings............................................................111 4 GENERAL INTRODUCTION Bibliometrics has become a standard tool of science policy and research management in the last decades. All significant compilations of science indicators heavily rely on publication and citation statistics and other, more sophisticated bibliometric techniques. Examples for such compilations are: − National Science Board − Observatoire des Sciences et des Techniques − European Report on S&T Indicators − Het Nederlands Observatorium van Wetenschap en Technologie: Wetenschaps- en Technologie-Indicatoren − Vlaams Indicatorenboek In addition, many extensive bibliometric studies of important science fields appeared during the last two decades. Aim of these studies was to measure national research performance in the international context or to describe the development of a science field with the help of bibliometric means (for instance, Braun et al., 1987). It is a common misbelief that bibliometrics is nothing else but publication and citation based gauging of scientific performance or compiling of cleaned-up bibliographies on research domains extended by citation data. In fact, scientometrics is a multifaceted endeavour encompassing subareas such as structural, dynamic, evaluative and predictive scientometrics. Structural scientometrics came up with results like the re-mapping of the epistemological structure of science based, for instance, on co-citation, ”bibliographic coupling” techniques or co-word techniques. Dynamic scientometrics constructed sophisticated models of scientific growth, obsolescence, citation processes, etc. These models are not only of theoretical interest but can also be usefully applied in evaluation and prediction. Beyond policy relevant applications of bibliometric results, there are recently important applications in the context of studying the linkage between science and technology, or applications to related fields such as library and information science and most recently also Webometrics. Examples for the latter ones are the large ongoing projects EICSTES (European Indicators, Cyberspace and the Science-Technology- Economy System) and WISER (Web indicators for scientific, technology and innovation research). Today, bibliometrics is one of the rare truly interdisciplinary research fields to extend to almost all scientific fields. Bibliometric methodology comprises components from mathematics, social sciences, natural sciences, engineering and even life sciences. The following pages will provide a systematic description of the research structure of the field and a detailed overview of the state-of-the-art in bibliometric methodology. 5 1. HISTORICAL REMARKS 1.1 The origin of the name ‘Bibliometrics’ The terms bibliometrics and scientometrics were almost simultaneously introduced by Pritchard and by Nalimov and Mulchenko in 1969. While Pritchard explained the term bibliometrics as “the application of mathematical and statistical methods to books and other media of communication”, 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 to these interpretations the speciality scientometrics is restricted to the measurement of science communication, whereas bibliometrics is designed to deal with more general information processes. The anyhow fuzzy borderlines between the two specialities almost vanished during the last three decades, and nowadays both terms are used almost as synonyms. Instead, the field informetrics took the place of the originally broader speciality bibliometrics. The term informetrics was adopted by VINITI (Gorkova, 1988) and stands for a more general subfield of information science dealing with mathematical- statistical analysis of communication processes in science. In contrast to the original definition of bibliometrics, informetrics also deals with electronic media and thus includes topics such as the statistical analysis of the (scientific) text and hypertext systems, library circulations, information measures in electronic libraries, models for Information Production Processes and quantitative aspects of information
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