期刊名称：Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science
出版年度：2012
卷号：38
期号：6
出版社：American Society for Information Science and Technology
摘要：Bibliometric methods are at the heart of library and information science (LIS). It is one of the few – if not the only – method that arose from LIS scholars and that uses one of their main objects – documents and their characteristics – as its unit of analysis. First created by librarians in the mid-19th century to manage collections and used by statisticians such as Lotka in the 1920s, bibliometric methods were democratized in the mid-20th century with the founding by Eugene Garfield of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and the creation of its various citation indexes [1]. Bibliometrics can be defined as the quantitative analysis of the characteristics of documents (articles, conference proceedings and so forth) published by researchers. Although it can theoretically be applied to the measurement of any type of literature – novels, newspapers and scientific journals – it is generally used for the measurement of science and technology and thus applied to scientific documents [2]. As a consequence, terms such as scientometrics or informetrics are often used as synonyms. One of the basic premises of bibliometrics is that new knowledge is incorporated in the scientific literature and that we can understand this process by measuring the characteristics of this literature and measuring certain attributes of knowledge production such as its main producers (authors, institutions, countries), research topics (words, journals) and diffusion and integration patterns (citations).
