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    An Introduction to Bibliometrics: New Development and Trends
    An Introduction to Bibliometrics: New Development and Trends
    An Introduction to Bibliometrics: New Development and Trends
    Ebook143 pages1 hour

    An Introduction to Bibliometrics: New Development and Trends

    By Rafael Ball

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    About this ebook

    An Introduction to Bibliometrics: New Development and Trends provides a comprehensible, readable and easy to read introduction to bibliometrics. Importantly, the book surveys the latest developments of bibliometrics (such as altmetrics, etc.) and how the field is likely to change over the next decade. In the literature, bibliometrics is generally discussed from one of two perspectives: (1) Purely mathematical/statistical or (2) Its sociological implications. Both approaches are very far from how most users want to apply bibliometrics. This book fills that need by providing tactics on how bibliometrics can be applied to their sphere of scientific activity.

    • Provides readers with an understanding of bibliometric indicators, including their background and significance, classification in quantitative performance, and an evaluation of science and research
    • Includes an overview of the most important indicators, their areas of application, and where and when they should and should not be used
    • Discusses future trends in the quantitative performance evaluation of scientific research
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherElsevier Science
    Release dateSep 18, 2017
    ISBN9780081021514
    An Introduction to Bibliometrics: New Development and Trends
    Author

    Rafael Ball

    Rafael Ball has been Director of ETH-Library Zuerich , Switzerland, since March 2015. He holds doctorates in biology and science history and studied biology, Slavonic studies and philosophy at the Universities of Mainz, Warsaw and Moscow. He completed a two-year postgraduate qualification as a scientific librarian in 1996 and was head of Central Library in the Research Center Juelich, Germany from 1996 to 2008. Ball was Director of the University Library of Regensburg from 2008 to 2015. He has written and edited numerous publications, and is a dedicated speaker and a lecturer at various universities. His main work and research interests are the library of the future, science communication and scientometrics and the role of the printed book in the digital age

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    • 4/5
      VERY READABLE, RECOMMENDABLE BOOK, ESPECIALLY FOR THOSE NEW TO THE FIELD.

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    An Introduction to Bibliometrics - Rafael Ball

    India

    Chapter 1

    Preface

    Abstract

    Bibliometrics emerged to support librarians in their daily work, and this was the concept behind the first bibliometric analysis. However, as a method to evaluate the scientific achievements of people and institutions, bibliometrics became a child of mass-produced science, which emerged after the Second World War. Now, bibliometrics’ core theme is the quantification of scientific output, gauging the performance of institutions and people, with all the uncertainties involved in evaluating such things. Today the availability of free Internet, and the development of scientific communication and social networks simultaneously necessitate rethinking the measurement and determination of scientific output. Additionally, knowledge and evaluation of the respective publication cultures is required.

    Keywords

    History of scientometrics; Publication cultures; Introduction to bibliometrics Preface

    In 2016, bibliometrics turned one hundred years old. It is not a new invention by the media company, Thomson Reuters (now Onex and Baring Asia), which generates a vast turnover with its various databases, such as the Science Citation Index, and makes a fortune. Nor was it invented by the media group Elsevier, the Science Citation Index's only serious competitor, which inundates universities with a whole series of science evaluation products today.

    Instead, bibliometrics emerged from the idea of supporting librarians in their daily work, selecting literature, and optimising holdings management. This was the underlying concept behind the first bibliometric analyses and also the approach adopted by the American chemist, Eugene Garfield, who began to evaluate papers systematically in the 1950s based on the literature used and cited.

    In the first half of the twentieth century, questions regarding the type and frequency of scientific publications, and how science works and publications come about were therefore not exactly important issues and even less the subject of quantitative study methods for scientific output, like bibliometrics today.

    In any case, the output from scientists during this period was completely immaterial. Good professors had many students, received a sizeable amount of so-called student funding and, at least in Germany, lived off incomes that were among the highest in society [1]. In the early twentieth century, the director of a major bank earned around a third less than a university professor.

    At this time, and against the aforementioned backdrop, the written research output in the form of books and papers or talks was not really relevant. Only those who had something to say were heard: They wrote books, gave talks and published scientific papers in journals, which were slowly beginning to catch on.

    Those who didn't, however, did not have a problem and, above all, did not have to fear any repercussions. In those days, target agreements on a minimum number of scientific publications per year, as has long been commonplace at many medical and scientific institutes, were unimaginable.

    As a method to evaluate the scientific achievements of people and institutions, bibliometrics therefore also became a child of mass-produced science, which emerged after the Second World War. As the number of scientists, the fragmentation of the disciplines and therefore also the demand for specialised publication organs, journals, book series and conferences skyrocketed, the number of publishing houses and especially publications also increased. And so, it was merely a question of time before there was a need to record and evaluate the written output of scientists and their institutions.

    First of all, bibliometrics measures the number of papers published by an individual, for instance. This is the easy part as it does not yet require any suppositions and still yields direct information, such as that a scientist has published 200 papers and five books in his or her career. Attempting to gauge the quality and significance of the articles and books, however, is a much trickier business. Here, bibliometrics opted for a simple route that is still applied in practice to this day: A publication is all the more important the more it is perceived. To quantify this perception, bibliometrists chose citation as the indicator: A publication that is cited frequently in other publications is an important publication, a publication that is cited rarely or not at all less so.

    Once a paper is published, other scientists cite it and the entire process is measured and written down. The almost endless variation of the indicators currently discussed in bibliometric literature, which has become so extensive that it is virtually impossible to overlook, does not alter the fact that the original principle has remained the same to this day. The fundamental assumption of bibliometrics essentially means that an article is all the more important the more frequently it is cited.

    Anyone who fails to follow this basic assumption cannot use bibliometrics; Anyone who justifiably rejects this basic assumption will not be able to generate any insights from bibliometrics.

    Moreover, comprehensive databases (which used to be published as printed directories) that record the respective citations are needed so they can be evaluated. As mentioned earlier, Eugene Garfield started the systematic evaluation of papers back in the 1950s and this has blossomed into a vast collection of data, upon which the majority of bibliometric analyses are

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