Bibliometrics

BIBLIOMETRICS

Prepared bySyed Aamir Abbas

&Muhammad Shakeel

MPhil StudentsSemester-I (2012-14)

Minhaj University, Lahore.

Introduction:

Before the term “Bibliometrics” was proposed by Alan pritchard (1969), the term “statistical bibliography” wasin some use.

According to Alan Pritchard (1969), it wasHulme (1923) who initiated the term “statistical bibliography”.

Genesis of Bibliometrics

Bibliometric Techniques

There are different kinds of bibliometric techniques.

1. Citation analysis2. Citation Indexing3. Self Citation and Co-authorship4. Publication Counts5. Direct Citatinos6. Bibliographic Coupling7. Co-Citation Coupling

1.Citation analysis

The nature of this embedding is specified by the use of foot-notes and / or reference lists. Citation analysis is that area of bibliometrics which deals with the study of these relationships.

Citation analysis uses citations in scholarly works to establish links. Many different links can be ascertained, such as links between authors, between scholarly works, between journals, between fields, or even between countries.

2. Citation Indexing

A citation index keeps track of which articles in scientific journals cite with other articles. In Academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication intended to further the progress of science, usually by reporting new research.

3. References and Citations

Distinguish between the notationsReference&CitationIf paper A contains a bibliographic note using and describing paper B, than A contains a reference to B and B has a citation from A.

Hence, reference is a backward looking concept, while citation is a forward looking one.

4. Self-citation and Co-authorship

A citation index keeps track of which articles in scientific journals cite with other articles. In academic publishing, a scientific journal is usually by reporting new Self Publication Counts1. Direct Citatinos2. Bibliographic Coupling3. Co-Citation Coupling

5. Publication counts

The simplest technique of bibliometrics is counting the total number of publication of a scientist or a group of them having publications.

6. Direct Citation

The direct citation count is the easiest technique to determine the number of citations received by a given document or set of documents over a period of time from a particular set of citing documents over a period of time from a particular set of citing documents, where from citation data for analysis was taken.

7. Bibliographic Coupling

The term “bibliographic coupling” was coined by M. M. Kessler, he defined a unity of coupling between two papers as an item of reference used by these two papers. The two papers are then said to be bibliographic coupled.

7. Co-citation Coupling

Co-citation coupling is a method used to establish a subject similarity between two documents. Two documents are said to be co-cited when they both appear in the reference list of a third document.

Difference betweenBibliographic Coupling and Co-citation Coupling

Bibliographic coupling focuses on Co-citation focuses on references which groups of papers which cite a source document. Frequentl ycome in pair.

Bibliographic is said to be retrospective Co-citation is called “prospective coupling coupling

Foundations of Bibliometrics

1- The Empirical Foundations of Bibliometrics: The Science Citation Index

2- The Philosophical Foundations of Bibliometrics: Bernal, Merton, Price, Garfield, and Small

3- The Mathematical Foundations of Bibliometrics.

Foundations of Bibliometrics

1- The Empirical Foundations of Bibliometrics: The Science Citation Index.

The Science Citation Index (SCI), conceived by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia.

Measuring, in terms of citation frequencies, the cognitive impact ofindividual documents, journals, and authors (the bibliographic citationas a tool for research quality control).

Indexes are a basic component of manual or computerized informationretrieval, because in most systems the user queries do not match directly the collection of documents, but rather an index previously prepared by manual or automatic operations.

Foundations of Bibliometrics

2- The Philosophical Foundations of Bibliometrics: Bernal, Merton, Price, Garfield, and Small

Bernal, a professor of physics at the Birkbeck College of London since1937, is a leading figure in the history of science in every possible sense:as an actor, given his pioneering contributions to X-ray crystallographyand molecular biology, and as a director teaching historians of scienceshow to study and write about science in its social context.

Merton, a professor of sociology at Columbia University, divulged a small set of norms supposedly placed at the core of the universal ethos of science, that is, the complex of prescriptions, prohibitions, and values governing the prevalent (nondeviant) behavior of scientists at all times and everywhere.

Foundations of Bibliometrics2- The Philosophical Foundations of Bibliometrics: Bernal,

Merton, Price, Garfield, and Small

EUGENE GARFIELD

Garfield’s 1955 article “Citation Indexes for Science” was a turning point in the way information scientists conceptualized the role of bibliographic citations in the knowledge production process.

Henry Small 1970s,

A member of the research team at ISI, further developed Garfield’s insights into the ability of citations to mimic the transfer and uptake of ideas typical of more codified forms of language. He advocated the basic cognitive function of bibliographic citations on theground that, apart from individual reasons to cite, each reference incorporates an idea or concept accounting for the citer’s resolution to invoke it in a specific context.

Bibliometric Laws

– Seek to describe the working of science by mathematical means. Generally that a few entities account for the many citations.

• Bradford’s Law of Scattering• Lotka’s Law• Zipf’s Law

Bradford’s Law of Scattering

– How literature in a subject in distributed in journals.• “If scientific journals are arranged in order of decreasing productivity

of articles on a given subject, they may be divided into a nucleus of periodicals more particularly devoted to the subject and several other groups of zones containing the same number of articles as the nucleus.”– 9 journals had 429 articles, the next 59 had 499, the last 258 had

404.

– Bradford discovered this regularity of calculating the number of titles in each of the three groups: 9 titles, 9x5 titles, 9x5x5 titles.

– Can be influenced by sample size, area of specialization and journal policies.

Brookes on Bradford’s Formula

– “The index terms assigned to documents also follow a Bradford distribution because those terms most frequently assigned become less and less specific and therefore increasingly ineffective in retrieval.”

Bradford’s Formula Itself

– Bradford’s Formula makes it possible to estimate how many of the most productive sources would yield any specified fraction p of the total number of items. The formula is:

• R(n) = N log n/s (1 <_ n <_ N)– where R(n) = cumulative total of items contributed by the

sources of rank 1 to n.– N = total number of contributing sources– s = a constant characteristic of the literature– then– R(N) = N log N/s – is the total number of items contributed by N sources.

More Bradford’s Law

– Citations originally counted year by year can be expressed as the geometric sequence:

– R, Ra, Ra2, Ra3, Ra4, ..., Rat-1

• where R = presumed number of citations during the first year, some of which do not immediately emerge in publication. But as a<1, the sum of the sequence converges to the finite limit R/(1-a).

Lotka’s Law

– An inverse square law that for every 100 authors contributing on article, 25 will contribute 2, 11 will contribute 3 and 6 will contribute 4.

– formula is- 1:n2.– Voos found 1:n3.5 for Info Science (1974).

– What are other similar analysis tasks you could use Lotka’s law for?

– Are users, browsers, bloggers like authors?

Zipf’s Law

• The distribution which applied to word frequency in a text states that the nth ranking word will appear k/n times, where k is a constant for that text.

– It is easier to choose and use familiar words, therefore probabilities of occurrence of familiar words is higher. rf=C rank, frequency,

– This can be applied by counting all of the words in a document (minus some words in a stop list - common words (the, therefore...)) with the most frequent occurrences representing the subject matter of the document. Could also use relative frequency (more often than expected) instead of absolute frequency.

Wyllys on Zipf’s Law

– Surprisingly constrained relationship between rank and frequency in natural language.

– Zipf said the fundamental reason for human behavior : the striving to minimize effort.

– Mandelbrot - further refinement of Zipf’s law: (r+m)Bf=c where r is the rank of a word, f is its frequency, m, B and c are constants dependent on the corpus. m has the greatest effect when r is small.

Uses of Bibliometric Studies

Historically bibliometric methods have been used to trace relationships amongst academic journal citations.

The bibliometric research uses various methods of citation analysis in order to establish relationships between authors or their work.

i) Measuring the scattering of articles on a subject in various periodicals (Bradford).

ii) Measuring the productivity of an author based on the number of published articles. (Lotka).

iii) Ranking of words in a text based on frequency of occurrence of words.

iv) Productivity count of literature.

v) To identify the peers, social change and the core journal, etc.

vi) Indexing and Thesaurus;

vii) Research;

viii) Formulating search strategies in case of automated system;

ix) Comparative assessment of the secondary services;

x) Bibliographic control;

xi) Preparation of retrospective bibliographic and

xii) Library Management.

Uses of Bibliometric Studies

The Bibliometric studies are used in

Refernece Introduction to Informetrics: quantitative methods in library, documentation and

information science / by Leo Egghe and Ronlad Rousseau.- New York: Elsvier, 1990.

Bibliometrics and citation analysis : from the Science citation index to cybermetrics / Nicola De Bellis.- Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009.

http://www.netugc.com/librametric-bibliometric-scientometrics-informetrics