The document discusses various metrics used in information science, originating from the Latin and Greek terms for measurement. It categorizes metrics into classical, neo-classical, and modern types, including bibliometrics and scientometrics, while highlighting their historical development and applications. The document also examines specific metrics for assessing the impact of research outputs, such as author metrics and altmetrics.

1. METRIC FIELDS in
INFORMATION SCIENCE
Wakat, Gladys K.
MLIS 1

2. METRIC
• originated from the Latin word metricus "metrical“, Greek metrikos "of or for
meter, metrical" and French word métrique “measurement”,
• a measure for something or any mean of deriving quantitative measurement
or approximation.
• This word envelops number of subject domains, e.g. general relativity under
physics, networking, mathematics, software analysis, etc. --- STATISTICS

3. STATISTICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Earliest name given to identify the studies involving applications
of quantitative techniques to library and information work
• First used by Cole and Eales in 1917 and Hulme in 1922.
• Derived from the words “Statistics” and “bibliography” which
broadly connotes application of quantitative methods in library
science.

4. Three classes of metrics on the basis of
respective time of inception (Dutta, 2014)
Classical Metrics
• Librametrics
• Bibliometrics
• Scientometrics
• Informetrics
Neo-classical Metrics
• Cybermetrics
• Webometrics
Modern Metrics
• Wikimetrics
• Open source metrics
• Journal Metrics
• Author Metrics
• Article-level metrics
• Altometrics

5. CLASSICAL METRICS
•Librametrics
•Bibliometrics
•Scientometrics
•Informetrics
• The earliest metrics in the
Information Science

6. LIBRAMETICS or LIBRAMETRY
• proposed by Ranganathan in 1948 as the application of mathematical and
statistical techniques to library problems (Sengupta, 1992)
• “These include analyses of book circulation … , of library collection overlap
… , of library acquisitions … , of fines policy … , and of shelf allocation …
– frequently using optimization techniques from operations research.”
Wilson (2001)

7. BIBLIOMETRICS
• The coining of the term ‘bibliometrics’ is frequently credited to Pritchard
(1969b), who proposed the term ‘bibliometrics’ to replace the little used and
somewhat ambiguous term of ‘statistical bibliography’.
• Wilson (1995) indicates that this term has a French precedent. The use of the
French equivalent of the term, ‘bibliometrie’, by Paul Otlet (1934) in his
Traitée de Documentation. Le livre sur le Livre
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

8. BIBLIOMETRICS
• An early definition by Pritchard (1969b, pp. 348-349): “to shed light
on the processes of written communication and of the nature and
course of development of a discipline (in so far as this is displayed
through written communication), by means of counting and
analyzing the various facets of written communication … the
application of mathematics and statistical methods to books and
other media of communication ...”.

9. Bibliometrics (defined)
• Hertzel described it as “the science of recorded discourse,
which uses specific methodologies, mathematical and
scientific, in its research, is a controlled study of
communication. It is the body of a literature, a bibliography
quantitatively or numerically or statistically analyzed – a
statistical bibliography; a bibliography in which measurements
are used to document and explain the regularity of
communication phenomenon.”

10. CLASSES OF BIBLIOMETRICS
DESCRIPTIVE
• studies concern
geographic distribution or
temporal distribution of
productivity count.
EVALUATIVE
• includes references or
citations that are known
as literature usage count

11. SCIENTOMETRICS
• the concept of bibliometrics in East Europe in the early seventies
• in 1969, Vassily V. Nalimov & Z. M. Mulchenko23 coined the
Russian equivalent of the term ‘scientometrics’ (‘naukometriya’)
• The term had gained wide recognition by the foundation in 1978
of the journal Scientometrics by Tibor Braun in Hungary.
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

12. SCIENTOMETRICS
• this term is mainly used for the study of all aspects of the literature of
science and technology.
• involves quantitative studies of scientific activities, including among others,
publication, and so overlaps bibliometrics to some extent.

13. SCOPE of Scientometrics
Science can be measured from a number of points of view like (Rajan and Sen, 1986)
• the production of graduates, post-graduates or Ph.Ds of science;
• the establishment of research institutions,
• the institutions of study and teaching of science;
• the deployment of scientific manpower, brain drain;
• expenditure of R & D;
• founding of the media of scientific communication, e.g. primary and secondary
scientific periodicals;
• scientific literature and scientific information system, services and products.

14. Main subjects of Scientometrics
Main subjects of scientometrics are
• individual scientific documents,
• authors,
• scientific institutions,
• academic journals, and
• regional aspects of science.

15. Examples of results in Scientometrics
• the re-mapping of the epistemological structure of science based, for
instance, on co-citation, ”bibliographic coupling” techniques or co-word
techniques
• Construction of a sophisticated models of scientific growth, obsolescence,
citation processes, etc.

16. INFORMETRICS
• comes from the German term ‘informetrie’ and was first proposed in 1979
by Nacke to cover that part of information science dealing with the
measurement of information phenomena and the application of
mathematical methods to the discipline’s problems, to bibliometrics and parts
of information retrieval theory, and perhaps more widely
• bibliometrics and scientometrics—are considered to be sub-fields within
informetrics (Brookes, 1988).

17. Informetrics (defined)
• Informetrics is the quantitative study of information
production, storage, retrieval, dissemination, and utilization.
• Informetric research investigates the existence of empirical
regularities in these activities and attempts to develop
mathematical models, and ultimately theories, to better
understand information processes.

18. Major areas of study :
a) Classic bibliometric’ laws’ - These traditional areas of study deal with: Author
productivity (Lotka, 1926), examining the publication contributions of
authors to a given discipline; Journal productivity (Bradford, 1934), examining
the concentration of articles in a subject area within a set of scholarly
journals, and; Word usage (Zipf, 1949) examining the frequency of
occurrence of words within texts.
b) Citation and co-citation analysis - This area looks at citing patterns of authors
and publications or how authors are cocited within articles, to determine
strengths of relationships among authors, literatures or disciplines.

19. Major areas of study :
c) Scientific indicators - Studies examine the productivity of scientific
output within disciplines or nations.
d) Information growth and obsolescence – This area investigates how literatures
within subject areas grow over time.
e) Document/information resource usage – This area looks at how information
resources are used over time.

20. NEO-CLASSICAL METRICS
•Cybermetrics
•Webometrics
•Evolved in the
1990s

21. CYBERMETRICS
• a frequently used term for internet and online
communication, which was coined by Norbert Wiener in
1948 in the context of "the scientific study of control
and communication in the animal and the machine."

22. The scope of Cybermetrics
• Creation of new websites in cyberspace - Some of them are dynamic undergoing
changes quite often, some stable changing very little or not at all, and a few are
vanishing sometimes without any prior notice. Many are enjoying long life and some
short.
• Different periodicals on the same subject differ in quality, in the same way different
web sites on the same topic differ in quality.
• Mechanisms to rank the websites, to calculate Web Impact Factors and to study
cited sites.
Sen, 2004

23. WEBOMETRICS
Information science related definition of webometrics as
• “the study of the quantitative aspects of the construction and use of
information sources, structures and terminologies on the world wide Web
drawing on bibliometric and informetric approaches” (Björneborn and
Ingwersen, 2001).
• as entirely emcompassed by bibliometrics, because web documents in their
various forms such as text, multimedia are all recorded information stored
on the web servers.

24. Four main areas of webometric research
• (1)Web page content analysis,
• (2)Web link structure analysis,
• (3)Web usage analysis,(eg., exploiting log files of users’
searching and browsing behaviour),
• (4) Web terminology analysis (including search engine
performance)”
(Thelwall,Vaughan and Björneborn, 2004 )

25. Output of Webometrics
• the ranking of world universities based on their web sites
and online impact (Aguillo et al , 2006).
• ‘link analysis, web citation analysis, search engine
evaluation and purely descriptive studies of the web
together with the recent addition of the web analysis of
web 2.0 phenomena’. (Telwall, 2008)

26. MODERN METRICS
• Wikimetrics
• Open source metrics
• Journal Metrics
• Author Metrics
• Article-level metrics
• Altometrics
• evolved in 21st century

27. WIKIMETRICS
WIKIPEDIA
• Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January
15, 2001 and the name given to it was a portmanteau of wiki (the
name of a type of collaborative website, from the Hawaiian word
for "quick") and encyclopedia.
• February 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia is
ranked fifth globally among all websites stating

28. WIKIMETRICS
• an amalgamation of wiki and metrics.
• facilitates data analysis of Wiki pages, establishing
standardized metrics across the movement and improved
workflow between data stakeholders
• a webtool (formerly known as UserMetrics) designed to
simplify the measurement of on-site user activity based on a
set of standardized metrics.

29. OPEN SOURCE METRICS
• a measure of some property of a piece of software or its
specifications.
• The goal is obtaining objective, reproducible and quantifiable
measurements, which may have numerous valuable applications in
schedule and budget planning, cost estimation, quality assurance
testing, software debugging, software performance optimization,
and optimal personnel task assignments.

30. FLOSSMetrics project
• FLOSSMetrics stands for Free/Libre Open Source Software Metrics.
• The main objective of FLOSSMETRICS is to construct, publish and analyse
a large scale database with information and metrics about libre software
development coming from several thousands of software projects, using
existing methodologies, and tools already developed.

31. FLOSSMetrics main targets may be
summarized as:
To identify and evaluate sources of data and develop a comprehensive database structure, built
upon the results of CALIBRE
To integrate already available tools to extract and process such data into a complete platform
To build and maintain an updated empirical database applying extraction tools to thousands of
open source projects
To develop visualisation methods and analytical studies, especially relating to benchmarking,
identification of best practices, measuring and predicting success and failure of projects, productivity
measurement, simulation and cost/effort estimation
To disseminate the results, including data, methods and software
To provide for exploitation of the results by producing an exploitation plan, validated with the
project participants from industry especially from an SME perspective

32. JOURNAL METRICS: IMPACT FACTOR
• Impact Factor was introduced by Eugene Garfield in 1975 for those journals
indexed in Journal Citation Reports.
• The impact factor is based on the arithmetic mean number of citations per
paper, but it is commonly observed that citation counts follow a Bradford
distribution or power law distribution.

33. AUTHOR METRIC
• Author metrics essentially measures research impact of
scholarly publications by respective authors.
• The metric should emphasize the exact parameter to be
measured. As different subject areas or disciplines have
different types of publishing patterns, therefore research
impact of authors belonging to all disciplines cannot be
measured on equal standard.

34. The major author metrics
parameters are enumerated below
1. Citations: Number of times cited in the literature
2. Usage: Number of times viewed on a website (publishers); Number of times
downloaded; How often the supplemental data has been accessed
3. Captures: How often it has been bookmarked/shared (CiteULike/ Mendeley)
4. Mentions: Number of times blogged about; How many news stories; Mentions in
Wikipedia etc.; Comments on publishers website & elsewhere
5. Social Media: Facebook shares/likes; LinkedIn shares; Tweets

35. The major author metrics
parameters are enumerated below (continued)
6. h-index: A scientist has index h if h of his/her Np papers have at least h citations
each, and the other (Np-h) papers have no more than h citations each. It was
introduced in 2005 by J E Hirsch.
7. g-index: Given a set of articles ranked in decreasing order of the number of
citations that they received, the g-index is the (unique) largest number such that the top
g articles received (together) at least g2 citations. It was introduced in 2006 by Leo
Egghe.
8. i-10 index: The i10-index indicates the number of academic publications an author
has written that have at least ten citations from others. It was introduced in July 2011
by Google as part of their work on Google Scholar.

36. The major author metrics
parameters are enumerated below (continued)
9. h-core: The h-core of a publication is a set of top cited h articles from the
publication. These are the articles that the h-index is based on.
10. h-median: The h-median of a publication is the median of the citation
counts in its hcore.
11. h5-index, h5-core and h5-median: these indicators of a publication are,
respectively, the h-index, h-core and h-median of only those of its articles that
were published in the last five complete calendar years.

37. ARTICLE-LEVEL METRIC
• are metrics for measuring the usage and impact of individual research
articles.
• Article-level metrics, unlike journal or author metrics did not focus on
journals or authors but on the individual article.

38. ALTMETRIC
• new metrics proposed as an alternative to the widely used journal impact
factor and personal citation indices like the h-index, g-index or i-10 index.
• The term altmetrics was coined by Jason Priem
• Altmetric does not cover just citation counts, but also other aspects of the
impact of a work, such as how many data and knowledge bases refer to it,
article views, download, or mentions in social media and news media

39. A classification of altmetrics
• Viewed - HTML views and PDF downloads
• Discussed - journal comments, science blogs, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook
and other social media
• Saved - Mendeley, CiteULike and other social bookmarks
• Cited - citations in the scholarly literature, tracked by Web of Science,
Scopus, CrossRef and others
• Recommended - for example used by F1000Prime

40. References
• Dutta, B. (2014). The journey from librametry to altmetrics: a look back. Golden Jubilee Celebration of
Department of Library and Information Science 2014, August. Retrieved from
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282973971_The_journey_from_librametry_to_altmetrics_a_look
_back
• Hood, W. , Wilson, C. (2001). The literature of bibliometrics, scientometrics, and informetrics.
Scientometrics, 52 (1), 291-314
• Jacobs, D. (2010). Demystification of Bibliometrics, Scientometrics, Informetrics and Webometrics. 11th DIS
Annual Conference 2010, 2nd – 3rd September, Richardsbay, University of Zululand, South Africa. Retrieved
http://www.lis.uzulu.ac.za/research/conferences/2010/DIS%20conference%202010%20DJacobs.pdf
• Wolfram, D. (2000). Applications of Informetrics to Information Retrieval Research. Informing Science, 3(2)