Introduction

If information science has a unique research area and approach, it would be bibliometrics. Bibliometrics is the measurement of some aspect of a literature or of written communication in a subject or subject cluster. Bibliometric means measuring or counting publication or communication attributes, usually using statistics. For example, we might look at the references at the end of a published article in American Political Science Review and count the references including how often the authors used periodicals versus books or older material versus newer material.

Typically

We may define a literature in regard to:

• Author productivity, collaboration, affiliation, visibility and use including which authors cite which other authors
• Publisher type and visibility over time
• Bibliographic history, including birth, changes and death or the number of articles and pages over time
• Container types which are most used and how that changes over time
• Publication place or national contribution
• Language, including translation from and to as well as the relationship between publication place and language
• Subject, including level of treatment, topics, methodologies used, and subject dispersion
• Cost per line, per page, per article or chapter
• Circulation or impact
• Coverage by secondary publications, including overlap, coverage, accuracy, and time lag
• Relationships between each of the above.

Data

Data may be obtained from bibliographies of any description or they may be assembled from bits and pieces of published bibliographies. Bibliographies may be selective or comprehensive. Secondary information about citation sources may be taken from directories, as in birth and death dates for periodical publications. Machine-readable databases offer many advantages by eliminating the need for data collection. For example, ISI databases have been available to scholars. WorldCat offers much useful information about both bibliographic attributes and also about holdings which is often used as an impact measure.

Remember GIGO or Garbage In, Garbage out. The quality of research is clearly a function of the quality of the data collected. You must be concerned with the quality of the bibliographic data.

Subject access can be a problem if classification schemes or subject descriptors are vague or unreliable. For example, to what degree does the LC class number found in WorldCat validly represent the subject content?

Applications

Besides the joy of discover and building generalizable findings, bibliographic research has immediate application, particularly in bibliographic control and collection development. The growth and death of a subject literature, for example, and how quickly the new literature was "controlled" by secondary publications are useful for those concerned with intellectual access issues. Subject dispersion is of particular importance to academic research library systems with departmental libraries. Weeding is easier when you know the degree to which older literature is used [cited]. Frequently cited items are likely to be part of the core collection and need to be preserved. Faculty may be tenured and/or granted advancement to a new rank based upon how frequently their published work is cited [scary thought].

Concerns

The relationship between citation and use is not always clear. An item may be used and not cited. An item my be cited and not be used [or perhaps be used and not found useful]. Informal communication is often an important part of the research process, but is often not cited. Too, because of the notable time lag in both publication and indexing or abstracting, bibliometric research is notably retrospective.

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