A bit on bibliometrics

Science Librarian

Rachel Henderson(CHE / PHA / CMP / MTH)

Rachel.Henderson@uea.ac.uk

Jane HelgesenInformation Skills Librarian

j.helgesen@uea.ac.uk

Session aims

Why do you need to know this?

Introduction to terminology

Exploring the resources

Why do you need to know this?

Scholarly communication: tracing the history and evolution of ideas from one scholar to another

Can be seen to measure the scholarly influence of articles; journals; scholars

Used with other factors in UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) to determine importance of research and award money to the institution

Garfield’s metrics

Eugene Garfield: ‘Father of citation analysis’ developed the first bibliometric index tools

Citation count

Impact factor

Immediacy Index

Citation Half-life

Citation count

Number of times cited within a give time period

Author

Journal

Does not take into account materials outside of citation database so differs depending on source

Exercise

Web of Science subject search – sort by ‘Times cited’

Impact factor

Measures ‘impact’ of a journal (not an article) within a given subject

Formula is a ratio:Number of citations to a journal in a given

year for articles occurring in previous 2 years. DIVIDED BY

number of scholarly articles published in the journal during those 2 years

So 2011 JIF = Citations in 2011 to articles published 2009-10 / articles published 2009-10

Exercise

Look at Journal Citation Reports for a journal that you use

Find via Web of Science /Additional Resources

Concerns with impact factor

Can’t be used to compare cross disciplinary due to different rates of publication & citation

2 year time frame not adequate for non-scientific disciplines (has been adjusted to 3-5 years)

Coverage of some disciplines not sufficient in the ISI databases

Reviews will cite more – journals may include more to boost impact factor

Doesn’t measure individual researcher’s impact

Is a measure of ‘impact’ a measure of quality?

Immediacy index - definition

What it’s supposed to measure: how quickly articles in a given journal have an impact on the discipline

Formula: the average number of times an article in a journal in a given year was cited in that same year

Citation half-life - definition

What it’s supposed to measure: Long-term relevance of articles in a given journal

Formula: median age of articles cited for a particular journal in a given year

Hirsch (H) index

What it’s supposed to measure: Productivity of an individual, group or institution

Formula: H value is equal to the number of papers (n) that have n or more citations

It will vary depending on the index database journal coverage

Biased against early-career researchers as won’t have had time to be so productive – but study by Hirsch suggests it’s a predictor of future quality output

H index - exercise

Scopus Author Identifier

WoS author finder

Altmetrics

Uses web stats to provide more detailed assessment of online activity – beyond citations

Use of open dataBlog/twitter mentions

http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/

References & websites

EYSENBACH, G. 2011. Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact. J Med Internet Res [Online]. Available: http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e123/.

VAN RAAN, A. F. J. 2006. Comparison of the Hirsch-index with standard bibliometric indicators and with peer judgment for 147 chemistry research groups. Scientometrics, 67, 491-502.

WILLIAMS, G. 2007. Should we ditch impact factors? BMJ, 334, 568-568.

http://www.cwts.nl/ranking/LeidenRankingWebSite.htmlhttp://www.uea.ac.uk/is/collections/researchsupport/Bibliohttp://www.ndlr.ie/myri/index.html

Thanks to Elaine Bergman who gave permission for content to be used from http://www.slideshare.net/librarian68/bibliometrics-primer

We welcome feedback on this session - did you find out what you needed to know?