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

Why do people cite? Why are some articles not cited? What does a citation mean?

Citing document

Cited document

B is cited by A

A B

A references B

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

Overlap57%

(4,892)

Scopus29%

(2,441)

Web of Science

14%(1,216)

Scopusn=7,333 (86%)

Web of Sciencen=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

Cited document

B is cited by A

A B

A references B

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] Np

papers have at least h citations each, and the other (Np − h) papers have at most h citations each.

Bibliometric laws

Lotka’s Law (1926)the number (of authors) making n contributions is about 1/n² 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 articles2) Zone 2: same # of articles, but > # of journals3) 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 n².

1:n:n²

Not statistically exact

General power law distribution (akin to Pareto’s law in economics)

Bibliometric laws

Zipf’s Law (1935)

Not statistically exact

General power law probability distribution

listing the words occurring within that text in order of decreasing frequency, the rank of a word on that list multiplied by its frequency will equal a constant. The equation for this relationship is: r x f = k where r is the rank of the word, f is the frequency, and k is the constant

James Joyce's Ulysses10th most frequent: 2,653 times100th most frequent: 265 times200th most frequent: 133 times

rank of the word multiplied by the frequency of the word equals a constant that is approximately 26,500

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…