Transcript Bibliometrics: the black art of citation rankings Roger Mills Head of Science Liaison and Specialist Services Bodleian Libraries June 2010 These slides are available on http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/services/training/wiser.

Bibliometrics: the black
art of citation rankings
Roger Mills
Head of Science Liaison and Specialist Services
Bodleian Libraries
June 2010
These slides are available on
http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/services/training/wiser
Overview of Session
• What are bibliometrics?
• How are they calculated?
• How can I use them?
• How will they be used in the REF?
Why bother?
• Because we have to!
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/research/ref/pilot/ref.pdf
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/research/
ref/resources/REFguide.pdf
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/research/
ref/resources/REFguide.pdf
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/research/ref/Biblio/
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2009/09_39/
http://www.springerlink.com/content/v111750n14086384/fulltext.pdf
http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~palmquis/courses/biblio.html
http://www.slideshare.net/guest633b30/bibliometrics-and-scientometrics-1065282
Citation indexing
• Invented in 1961 by Eugene Garfield at the Institute for
Scientific Information (ISI)
• Scientific abstracting/indexing services began in nineteenth
century, recording author/title/publisher/source etc for
articles and indexing them
• Garfield added details of all references quoted in the article
and indexed them too, publishing results as Science
Citation Index (SCI) – originally only in printed form
• Allowed for many new ways of linking articles
so
• For an article you’ve read:
• Find earlier articles that one was based on
• Find later articles which quoted it
• Find related articles which quote some of the same
references as this one
• So you can trace the progress of ideas backwards,
sideways and, uniquely, forwards in time
• And generate statistics on how influential those ideas /
authors / journals have been
Computers save time
• Science Citation Index – now supplemented by Social
Science Citation Index and Arts and Humanities Citation
Index – online as Web of Science
• Delivered along with Journal Citation Reports on the
platform Web of Knowledge.
• Built-in analysis tools available to all users
• For REF, universities may have access to raw data and
specially-developed analysis tools
Analysis tools
• Who is citing?
• Which journals are citing?
• What is the relation between frequency of publication and
frequency of citation?
• The h-index
• Citation maps
• Impact factors
Impact Factors - Journal Citation Reports (JCR)
• For Sciences and Social Sciences (not humanities)
• A measure of the frequency with which the "average
article" in a journal has been cited in a particular year. The
impact factor will help you evaluate a journal's relative
importance, especially when you compare it to others in the
same field
• From within a record you can click on Journal Citation
Reports to view the impact factor of the journal
• Or you can view and compare impact factors of all journals
within your subject area
Other services offering citation searching - SCOPUS
• Sciences and Social Sciences
• Results include journal articles and web pages
• Each reference to a paper shows the number of times an
article has been cited
Citation searching in Google Scholar
• References include ‘cited by’ data based on articles known
to Google Scholar
• Entries ranked by number of cites
• Not possible to save sets or analyse
• Still useful for tracking research
So which database will be used for REF?
• Initial plan to use Web of Science only
• Pilot used WoS and Scopus
• WoS data handled by Symplectic, subcontractor for
Evidence; Scopus by Hefce
• Pilot showed need for ‘normalization’
• Final decision not yet made
• In our example:
• WoS finds1294 citations to 581 articles
• Scopus finds 1314 citations to 553 articles
• GS finds 927 citations to 1020 articles
What is truth….