Bibliometrics and Its Application

1. CONCEPT OF
BIBLIOMETRICS
By: Saurabh Kaushik
Dept. LIS
Roll No- 6553

2. Introduction
 It is the statistical analysis of bibliographic data commonly focused on citation
analysis of research output and publications.
 Bibliometrics is statistical analysis of written publication such as books or articles.
 Bibliometric methods are frequently used in the field of library and information
science, including Scientometrics.
 It is used to provide quantitative analysis of academic literature.
 Citation analysis is commonly used Bibliometric method which is based on
constructing the citation graph.
 Many research field use Bibliometric method to explore the impact of their field.
 It can be stated as how many times research output and publications are being
cited.

3. Definition of Bibliometrics
 Bibliometrics is basically divided into two words
—Biblio means ‘Books’
—Metrics means ‘Measurement’
 According to Hawkins(1977) defined Bibliometrics as “the application of quantitative
analysis in the bibliographic references of the body of the literature.
 The British Standard Institution(1976) describe the same Bibliometrics as the application
of mathematical and statistical method in the study of the use of documents and
statistical method in the study of the use of documents and publication patterns.
 Alan Prichard, 1969 defined it as the application of mathematics and statistical methods
to books and other media of communication.
 According to Wikipedia “Bibliometrics is a statistical analysis of written publication such
as books or articles or other publications”.

4. Use of Bibliometrics
It could help in number of activities including
 Demonstration the importance and impact of your own research.
 Identify area of research strength and weakness.
 Identifying the top researchers in subject area.
 To identify the authorship trends in documents in various subjects.
 To identify the usefulness of retrospective and current awareness services.
 To identify past, present and as well as forecast future publishing trends.
 To identify core periodical in different disciplines(through the application of
Bradford's law of scattering and citation analysis).

5. Continued…
 To formulate collection development and management policy.
 To study obsolence and dispersion of scientific literature.
 To study about the productivity of the institutions/ individual and the disciplines.
 To develop norms for standardization.
 To formulate stacking and weeding policies.
 To initiate effective multilevel network system.

6. Scope of Bibliometrics
Scope of Bibliometrics
DESCRIPTIVE STUDIES EVALUATION STUDIES
Productive Count
Which attempts to study the body
of the literature by counting its
contributing countries, author,
journal, year of publications and
other disciplines.
Literature Usage Count
Which attempts to study the use of
a body of literature by using citation
analysis.

7. Key points to remember when conducting Bibliometric analysis
 Always compare like with like.
 Don’t rely on the single Bibliometric tool.
 Be aware that some disciplines rely less in publishing.

8. Main Bibliometric Tools
 Scival- subscription based research performance assessment tool which uses data
from scopus.
 Scopus- subscription based citation database of peer reviewed literature.
 Web of Science- subscription based citation database of more than 12,000 journals
and over 160,000 conference proceedings.
 Journal Citation Reports- Journal Citation Reports is a subscription based resource
which allows you to evaluate and compare journals using citation data from over
11,000 journals.

9. Main Metrics
 Scholarly outputs- total number of outputs published. It measures productivity
rather than impact.
 Citation counts- measures number of citation received
 Field weight cited impact- the ratio of citation received
 Outputs in top percentile- percentage of outputs in the top most cited publication
 H-Index- measures productivity and impact of research output.
 Journal Impact factor- Importance of a particular journal
 Scimago Journal Rank- alternative to impact factor, it places higher value to
citations from more prestigious journals.
 Scopus SNIP- it normalizes for citation rate subject differences. It is a ratio of journal
citation count per paper and citation potential in its subject field.

10. Limitations of Bibliometrics
 Citation patterns can differ greatly between disciplines.
 Paper may be cited in negative rather than positive way, yet the citation would still be
counted.
 It do not cover all research area.
 It is more formula oriented.
 It does not include informal publications and communications. Therefore, the scientific
development can not be predicted properly.
 Bibliometric references which are taken for citation analysis study, are not always
standardized. It cause problem while ranking the author on the basis of the frequency of
getting their citations.
 For example- the author S.R.Ranganathan has been cited variously as Siyali Ramamitra
Ranganathan, S. Ranganathan, S.R.Ranganathan. This may cause scattering of citations
of same person works.

11. Advantages of Bibliometrics
 Growth of literature.
 Growth of knowledge.
 It is straightforward method, since based on the simple counting.
 On the first sight they are objective and unbiased.

13. Thank you