Bibliometric research methods Faculty Brown Bag IUPUI Cassidy R. Sugimoto

Overview       Vocabularly Citation analysis Citation indices Bibliometric laws Impact factor Applications

Vocabulary

     Scholarly Communications  Formal and information Scientometrics  Scientific communication Infometrics  Thinking beyond scholarly “texts” Webometrics  web Bibliometrics  Application of statistical and mathematical methods (formal channels)

Citation analysis Citing document A A references B Cited document B B is cited by A    Why do people cite? Why are some articles not cited?

What does a citation mean?

Who’s on first?

Embedded citation index from

` En mishpat

: Babylonian Talmud (1546) (Weinberg, 1997) Shepard’s Citation Index (1873) Shapiro (1992)

Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)

Scopus

GoogleScholar

Comparison

Scopus

n=7,333 (86%)

Scopus 29% (2,441) Overlap 57% (4,892) Web of Science 14% (1,216)

Web of Science

n=6,108 (71%)

Distribution of unique and overlapping citations in Scopus and Web of Science (n=8,549)

Are you a citation index?

Bibliometric research OR “Why I love good indexes”

Citation analysis Citing document A A references B Cited document B B is cited by A

Citation analysis: methods Not just articles…

Variable:PRODUCERS

Variable:PRODUCERS

Variable:ARTIFACTS

Variable:CONCEPTS

Hybrid approaches Chaomei Chen: http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~cc345/citespace/figures/terrorism1990-2003-300dpi.png

h

-index  Hirsch (2005) 

A scientist has index h if h of [his/her] N p papers have at least h citations each, and the other (N p − h) papers have at most h citations each.

Bibliometric laws  Lotka’s Law (1926) the number (of authors) making

n

contributions is about 1/

n

² of those making one; and the proportion of all contributors, that make a single contribution, is about 60 percent (60,15,7…6>10) Not statistically exact May be changing with the current model of scholarship

Bibliometric laws  Bradford’s law (1934) Journals in a field can be divided into three parts: 1) Core: relatively few # of journals producing 1/3 of all articles 2) Zone 2: same # of articles, but > # of journals 3) Zone 3: same # of articles, but > # of journals The mathematical relationship of the number of journals in the core to the first zone is a constant

n

and to the second zone the relationship is

n

². 1:

n

:

n

² Not statistically exact General power law distribution (akin to Pareto’s law in economics)

Bibliometric laws  Zipf’s Law (1935) relationship is:

r

frequency, and

k

x

f

=

k

where

r

is the rank of the word, is the constant

f

is the equals a constant that is approximately 26,500 Not statistically exact General power law probability distribution

Bibliometric laws  Other power law probability distributions  Pareto’s law (economics)  80-20 rule   Law of the vital few Principle of factor sparsity   PageRank (google) The Long Tail (markets)

Journal impact factors

As a research method…    Reliability?

Validity?

Limitations?

Applications?

        Finding and use Collection development Reference services Collection evaluation  Use studies Information retrieval algorithms Diffusion of ideas Domain areas and interdisciplinarity Mapping science

Writing your paper…