Informetrics

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Informetrics is the study of quantitative aspects of information, [1] it is an extension and evolution of traditional bibliometrics and scientometrics. Informetrics uses bibliometrics and scientometrics methods to study mainly the problems of literature information management and evaluation of science and technology. [2] Informetrics is an independent discipline that uses quantitative methods from mathematics and statistics to study the process, phenomena, and law of informetrics. [3] Informetrics has gained more attention as it is a common scientific method for academic evaluation, research hotspots in discipline, and trend analysis.

Contents

Informetrics includes the production, dissemination, and use of all forms of information, regardless of its form or origin. Informetrics encompasses the following fields: [4] [5]

Origin and Development

The term informetrics (French: Informetrie) was coined by German scholars Otto Nacke in 1979, [6] [7] and came from the German word 'informetrie’. The corresponding English terminology soon appeared in the subsequent literature.

In September 1980, Professor Otto Nacke introduced the term 'informetrics' at the first seminar on Informetrics in Frankfurt, Germany. [8] Later, Committee on Informetrics has established through The International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID). [9]

In 1987, informetrics started to be officially recognized by the international information community and several foreign information scientists. [2]

In 1988, at First International Conference on Bibliometrics and Theoretical Aspects of Information Retrieval, Brooks suggested bibliometrics and scientometrics can be included in the field of informetrics. [10]

In 1990, Leo Egghe and Ronald Rousseau proposed the formation of the discipline of informetrics: statistical bibliography (1923) to bibliometrics and scientometrics (1969) and then to informetrics (1979). [11]

In 1993, the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) was founded at the International Conference on Bibliometrics, Informetrics and Scientometrics in Berlin, and the first one was held in Belgium and organized by Leo Egghe and Ronald Rousseau. [12] The society was formally incorporated in 1994 in the Netherlands [12] and plays a significant role in the development of informetrics.

The ISSI aims to promote the "exchange and communication of professional information in the fields of scientometrics and informetrics, including improve standards, theory and practice, as well as promote research, education and training". [12] In addition, to "engage in relevant public conversation and policy discussions". [12]

In the western world, 20th century's Informetrics is mostly based on Lotka's law, named after Alfred J. Lotka, Zipf's law, named after George Kingsley Zipf, Bradford's law named after Samuel C. Bradford and on the work of Derek J. de Solla Price, Gerard Salton, Leo Egghe, Ronald Rousseau, Tibor Braun, Olle Persson, Peter Ingwersen, Manfred Bonitz, and Eugene Garfield. [13] [14] [15]

Difference Between Informetrics, Bibliometrics and Scientometrics

Three metrics terms overlap with each other 3 metric terms.png
Three metrics terms overlap with each other

Since the 1960s, three similar terms have emerged in the fields of library science, philology and science of science, they are bibliometrics, scientometrics and informetrics, representing three very similar quantitative sub-disciplines.[ citation needed ] The three metrics terms can be confusing and often misused. Informetrics and bibliometrics interpenetrate each other but have different aspects in research object, research scope, and measuring unit. Informetrics and scientometrics are very different in their research purpose and research object, as well as the research scope and application.

Bibliometrics is categorised under the field of library science, it uses mathematical and statistical methods to describe, evaluate, and predict the current status and trends of science and technology. Also to study the "distribution structure, quantitative relationship, change law and quantitative management of literature information, quantitative relationships, patterns and quantitative management of literature and information". [16] The term was first used by Alan Pritchard in 1969 in his paper Statistical Bibliography or Bibliometrics?. [17]

Scientometrics is a branch of science that quantitatively evaluates and predicts the process and management of scientific activities in order to reveal their development patterns and trends.[ citation needed ] The definition of scientometrics was described by Derek De Solla Price in his book Science to Science [18] as the “quantitative study of science, communication in science, and science policy”. [19]

The most prominent connection between the three metrics terms is in their research objects. Since all three disciplines use literature information as their research object, therefore, they have some similarities and overlaps in their research methods and fields. Moreover, they all use mathematical methods as the basic research methods and they all apply the three basic laws, Bradford's law, Lotka's law and Zipf's law. [20] [21]

Distinctions between the three metrics terms

The distinction between the three metrics terms can tell from their research object and research purpose. The research of bibliometrics focuses on the analysis of "scientific output in the form of articles, publications, citations, and others". [22] Scientometrics is to measure the basic characteristics and laws of scientific activities. [23] Where informetrics is to investigate information sources and information distribution process. [24]

Concept and System Structure

Purpose of Informetrics Research

Subject structure of informetrics Subject-structure-of-informetrics.jpg
Subject structure of informetrics

The main purpose of informetrics is to use its theocratical research to solve the methodological issues in the research process, and to discover and reveal the basic laws of information distribution through the study of information process and phenomenon. In this way, makes information management more scientific and provides a quantitative basis for information services and information management decisions.

For informetrics, it is necessary to bring quantitative analysis methods to further reveal the structure of information units and the "quantitative change law of literature information”. [2] Further to this, to improve the scientific accuracy of information science from a theoretical point of view. At the same time, to better solve the basic contradictions in the information service, overcome the information crisis, and make the information management work more effective to serve science and technology, economic and social development.

Quantitative analysis of bibliographic data was pioneered by Robert K. Merton in an article called Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth Century England and originally published by Merton in 1938. [25]

The Significance of Informetrics Research

The significance of informetrics research is to summarize various empirical laws from the theoretical point of view, at the same time test and modify the various empirical laws in the new information unit conditions, and explore its new applicability, therefore, the scientific nature of information science can be improved, but also to provide theoretical guidance for practical work.

The Objects of Informetrics Research

The object of informetrics is broader than the field of bibliometrics and scientometrics, including "messages, data, events, objects, text, and documents”. [2] Informetrics is often used to inform policies and decisions across a broad range of fields, such as economy, politics, technology and social spheres that "influence the flow and use patterns of information". [26] Tague-Sutcliffe describes the following uses of informetrics: [27]

Basic Laws

In the field of informetrics research, there are many outstanding contributors in the discipline with a solid knowledge of quantitative research methods. In the early 20th century, several scientists contributed empirical applications that have become the three basic laws of informetrics, Bradford's law, Lotka's law, and Zipf's law, which promote the development of informetrics. [3]

Bradford's Law

The British documentalist and librarian Samuel C. Bradford first discovered the law of concentration and scattering of literature, and in 1934, it has been described as Bradford's law of scattering. It reveals the law of concentration and scattering of scientific papers in journals in a quantitative way, which is the most basic law and an important part of bibliometrics, as well as informetrics and its research still has important irreplaceable theoretical value and practical significance. Bradford found a pattern in the distribution of disciplinary literature among journals, papers from one discipline often appear in journals of another discipline. Eventually, there is a pattern for a large number of papers in a given discipline to be concentrated in a certain number of journals, while the others are scattered in a large number of other related journals. He ranked journals by the number of papers published in a particular discipline, "in their descending order of productivity", [28] then can dividing articles into three different zones, first is the nuclear zone with high productivity; "the second zone moderately productive zone; and the third as the low productive zone". [28] In summary, Bradford's law described the relationship between the number of journals and papers.

Lotka's Law

Lotka's law is an empirical law describing the productivity of science, also known as the inverse square law, pioneered by the American statistician Alfred J. Lotka in 1926. It reveals scientific productivity and the quantitative relationship between authors and papers. [29] Lotka's law is mainly used to predict the number of authors and papers in a specific discipline, to grasp the trend of the growth of literature, thus, facilitating scientific management of literature information.

Zipf's Law

Zipf's law is proposed by linguist George Kingsley Zipf in 1949, it is obtained from the statistics of natural language vocabulary. [2] It is a summary of the "literature vocabulary frequency distribution rule". [2] The frequency of different words has a certain statistical regularity. Zipf's law has significant use in the fields of library information, information resources management, science and technology management. [2]

Informetrics Education in Library and Information Science (LIS)

Informetrics study is usually offered to undergraduate and post-graduate students. Only a few universities offer informetrics as an independent course, such as China, Germany and Japan. Most Universities include informetrics in the department of library and information science. [30]

In fact, many challenges and the need for improvements have been shown in informetrics education across the world. Constant examination and adjustment in Informetrics education are needed as the rapid evolvement of information technologies in the field of LIS, for example, the emergence of webometrics/cybermetrics. [30] On the other hand, technological development has become a challenge that affects the learning environment of informetrics education, for example, the shortage of research expertise in the informetrics field, and the insufficient skills of research specialists and data collection tools. [31] [32] Moreover, most countries have limited resources in informetrics education, as some Universities only offer the course if there is a demand among students. [33]

Although many countries do not offer informetrics education, it is still important and necessary to maintain and continue further development in the field of informetrics as it is useful in science policy and management, as well as plays an essential role in the domain of research evaluation. [30] Informetrics education can provide an in-depth understanding of "information user communities and the boundaries of specific fields". [30] As science and technology are continuously innovating and developing, using the methods and applications of informetrics allows for "research monitoring and evaluation purpose in an objective way". [30] Moreover, informetrics research is benefited almost all scientific fields, [3] as it is multidisciplinary.

Future Development

With the advent of digitalization and the development of technologies, virtual libraries and online journals have become the main way for researchers and scholars to access scientific literature information, which has made the measurement and evaluation of web-based literature information more important. Webometrics/cybermetrics is the expansion of informetrics and bibliometrics, that has great theoretical significance and broad application prospects.[ citation needed ] Network and information are the relationships of inheritance and development, hence, webometrics/cybermetrics as a new sub-discipline under the field of informetrics has rapidly developed to adapt to the network environment.

Webometrics/cybermetrics is a discipline in science that integrates bibliometrics, informetrics, statistical methods, and computer technology to measure and analyze information and documents on the web, [34] which covers "quantitative aspects of both the construction side and the usage side of the Web". [35] The concept of webometrics was introduced in 1997 by T.C. Almind and P. Ingwersen [36] and became a research hotspot in 1999. In 2000, scientists began to explore the disciplinary system and theoretical framework of webometrics and conducted meaningful application research. Its research areas include link analysis, search engines and web citation analysis. [37]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bradford's law</span> Pattern of references in science journals

Bradford's law is a pattern first described by Samuel C. Bradford in 1934 that estimates the exponentially diminishing returns of searching for references in science journals. One formulation is that if journals in a field are sorted by number of articles into three groups, each with about one-third of all articles, then the number of journals in each group will be proportional to 1:n:n2. There are a number of related formulations of the principle.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Webometrics</span>

The science of webometrics tries to measure the World Wide Web to get knowledge about the number and types of hyperlinks, structure of the World Wide Web and using patterns. According to Björneborn and Ingwersen, the definition of webometrics is "the study of the quantitative aspects of the construction and use of information resources, structures and technologies on the Web drawing on bibliometric and informetric approaches." The term webometrics was first coined by Almind and Ingwersen (1997). A second definition of webometrics has also been introduced, "the study of web-based content with primarily quantitative methods for social science research goals using techniques that are not specific to one field of study", which emphasizes the development of applied methods for use in the wider social sciences. The purpose of this alternative definition was to help publicize appropriate methods outside the information-science discipline rather than to replace the original definition within information science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bibliometrics</span> Statistical analysis of written publications

Bibliometrics is the application of statistical methods to the study of bibliographic data, especially in scientific and library and information science contexts, and is closely associated with scientometrics to the point that both fields largely overlap.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Derek J. de Solla Price</span> Physicist and science historian (1922–1983)

Derek John de Solla Price was a British physicist, historian of science, and information scientist. He was known for his investigation of the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek planetary computer, and for quantitative studies on scientific publications, which led to his being described as the "Herald of scientometrics".

Scientometrics is a subfield of informetrics that studies quantitative aspects of scholarly literature. Major research issues include the measurement of the impact of research papers and academic journals, the understanding of scientific citations, and the use of such measurements in policy and management contexts. In practice there is a significant overlap between scientometrics and other scientific fields such as information systems, information science, science of science policy, sociology of science, and metascience. Critics have argued that overreliance on scientometrics has created a system of perverse incentives, producing a publish or perish environment that leads to low-quality research.

Citation analysis is the examination of the frequency, patterns, and graphs of citations in documents. It uses the directed graph of citations — links from one document to another document — to reveal properties of the documents. A typical aim would be to identify the most important documents in a collection. A classic example is that of the citations between academic articles and books. For another example, judges of law support their judgements by referring back to judgements made in earlier cases. An additional example is provided by patents which contain prior art, citation of earlier patents relevant to the current claim. The digitization of patent data and increasing computing power have led to a community of practice that uses these citation data to measure innovation attributes, trace knowledge flows, and map innovation networks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lotka's law</span> An application of Zipfs law describing the frequency of publication by authors in any given field

Lotka's law, named after Alfred J. Lotka, is one of a variety of special applications of Zipf's law. It describes the frequency of publication by authors in any given field. Let X be the number of publications, be the number of authors with publications, and be a constants depending on the specific field. Lotka's law states that .

Howard D. White is a scientist in library and information science with a focus on informetrics and scientometrics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Outline of library and information science</span> Overview of and topical guide to library science

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to library and information science:

The h-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The h-index correlates with success indicators such as winning the Nobel Prize, being accepted for research fellowships and holding positions at top universities. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications. The index has more recently been applied to the productivity and impact of a scholarly journal as well as a group of scientists, such as a department or university or country. The index was suggested in 2005 by Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at UC San Diego, as a tool for determining theoretical physicists' relative quality and is sometimes called the Hirsch index or Hirsch number.

Journal ranking is widely used in academic circles in the evaluation of an academic journal's impact and quality. Journal rankings are intended to reflect the place of a journal within its field, the relative difficulty of being published in that journal, and the prestige associated with it. They have been introduced as official research evaluation tools in several countries.

An academic discipline or academic field is a subdivision of knowledge that is taught and researched at the college or university level. Disciplines are defined and recognized by the academic journals in which research is published, and the learned societies and academic departments or faculties within colleges and universities to which their practitioners belong. Academic disciplines are conventionally divided into the humanities, including language, art and cultural studies, and the scientific disciplines, such as physics, chemistry, and biology; the social sciences are sometimes considered a third category.

ResearcherID is an identifying system for scientific authors. The system was introduced in January 2008 by Thomson Reuters Corporation.

The International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics was founded in 1993 in Berlin at the International Conference on Bibliometrics, Informetrics and Scientometrics. It is an association for professionals in the field of scientometrics.

A bibliometrician is a researcher or a specialist in bibliometrics. It is near-synonymous with an informetrican, a scientometrican and a webometrician, who study webometrics.

Author-level metrics are citation metrics that measure the bibliometric impact of individual authors, researchers, academics, and scholars. Many metrics have been developed that take into account varying numbers of factors.

Bibliometrix is a package for the R statistical programming language for quantitative research in scientometrics and bibliometrics.

There are a number of approaches to ranking academic publishing groups and publishers. Rankings rely on subjective impressions by the scholarly community, on analyses of prize winners of scientific associations, discipline, a publisher's reputation, and its impact factor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ronald Rousseau</span>

Ronald Rousseau is a Belgian mathematician and information scientist. He has obtained an international reputation for his research on indicators and citation analysis in the fields of bibliometrics and scientometrics.

The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics (LM) is a list of "ten principles to guide research evaluation", published as a comment in Volume 520, Issue 7548 of Nature, on 22 April 2015. It was formulated by public policy professor Diana Hicks, scientometrics professor Paul Wouters, and their colleagues at the 19th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators, held between 3–5 September 2014 in Leiden, The Netherlands.

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