Bibliometrics & Publication Indicators

Bibliometrics is a subfield of information science that deals with the quantitative analysis of scholarly publications. It examines, for example, publication counts, citations, authorships, and collaborations. The aim of bibliometrics is to make research performance, scholarly communication, and development trends visible and comparable. Commonly used bibliometric indicators include the Journal Impact Factor for journals or the h-index for individuals. Bibliometric analyses are used, among other things, in science studies and research evaluation.

Benefits and Methodological Limitations of Bibliometrics

The benefits of being familiar with bibliometric indicators include:

• Increasing the visibility and impact of your research.
• Well-founded presentation of scholarly performance in applications.
• Identification of suitable journals for publication.
• Identification of potential cooperation partners and possible research topics.
• Analysis and preparation of data for funding applications. The specific data required depend on the guidelines of the respective funding organization. TUM ForTE – Office for Research and Innovation supports you with questions relating to funding applications and third-party funding

The methodological limitations of bibliometric indicators include:

• They do not replace qualitative evaluations.
• The need for careful and purpose-driven selection of bibliometric methods. For example, the Impact Factor, which relates to journals, should not be used to make statements about individual researchers.
• Influence or manipulation through discipline-specific citation practices.

Further information on the limitations of bibliometrics: Hicks, D. et al. (2015): The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics. Nature 520 (7548), 429-431, http://www.nature.com/news/bibliometrics-the-leiden-manifesto-for-research-metrics-1.17351 and The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment: http://www.ascb.org/dora/.

Author-level metrics, such as the h-index, and journal-level metrics, such as the impact factor or CiteScore, are standard tools that are used in bibliometric analyses. Other approaches, for example, altmetrics and analyzing activity in professional academic networks, play different roles in evaluating the impact of scientific work within a discipline.

Author-Level Metrics

Publication and citation counts have traditionally been used to measure the research impact of an author’s work. Various author-level metrics based on citation analysis have been developed in recent years.

The most widely used is the h-index, which measures the productivity and impact of an author’s work. It states that “h” number of publications have been cited at least “h” times. Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, Google Scholar Citations, and other databases can be used to calculate the h-index; however, because each database uses a different data source, the calculated h-index values will vary across databases. Further, the h-index will also vary with the date of calculation.

Other metrics, such as the g-index, Google Scholar’s i10 index and the hI,annual index have been developed to address some of the criticisms of the h-index.

Journal-Level Metrics

Journal-level metrics attempt to measure the reputation of individual journals. The most widely known and oldest of these indicators is the impact factor, which is used to rank the journals included in the Web of Science database. The impact factor, is a comparison of the number of citations and the number of articles recently published within a journal. Impact factors are available through the fee-based database Journal Citation Reports. A comparable indicator for Scopus is CiteScore, which is freely accessible via the database.

Altmetrics

Altmetrics, alternative metrics, are measures of online activity, gathered from social media or other online tools. Examples of these alternative metrics range from the number of downloads or views an article receives to the number of times it has been bookmarked in Mendeley or mentioned on social media. These metrics, which can be used for authors, institutions, journals, or articles, are in beta and still being developed, though you can see an example of how the Public Library of Science (PLoS) is teaming up with the company Altmetric to use this type of information.