1. BIBLIOMETRICS
Prepared by
Syed Aamir Abbas
&
Muhammad Shakeel
MPhil Students
Semester-I (2012-14)
Minhaj University, Lahore.

2. Introduction:
Before the term “Bibliometrics” was proposed by Alan pritchard
(1969), the term “statistical bibliography” was
in some use.
According to Alan Pritchard (1969), it was
Hulme (1923) who initiated the term “statistical bibliography”.
Genesis of Bibliometrics

3. Bibliometric Techniques
There are different kinds of bibliometric techniques.
1. Citation analysis
2. Citation Indexing
3. Self Citation and Co-authorship
4. Publication Counts
5. Direct Citatinos
6. Bibliographic Coupling
7. Co-Citation Coupling

4. 1.Citation analysis
The nature of this embedding is specified by the use of foot-notes and / or reference
lists. Citation analysis is that area of bibliometrics which deals with the study of
these relationships.
Citation analysis uses citations in scholarly works to establish links. Many different
links can be ascertained, such as links between authors, between scholarly
works, between journals, between fields, or even between countries.

5. 2. Citation Indexing
A citation index keeps track of which articles in scientific journals cite with other
articles. In Academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication
intended to further the progress of science, usually by reporting new research.

6. 3. References and Citations
Distinguish between the notations
Reference
&
Citation
If paper A contains a bibliographic note using and describing paper B, than A
contains a reference to B and B has a citation from A.
Hence, reference is a backward looking concept, while citation is a forward looking
one.

7. 4. Self-citation and Co-authorship
A citation index keeps track of which articles in scientific journals cite with other
articles. In academic publishing, a scientific journal is usually by reporting new Self
Publication Counts
1. Direct Citatinos
2. Bibliographic Coupling
3. Co-Citation Coupling

8. 5. Publication counts
The simplest technique of bibliometrics is counting the total number of publication
of a scientist or a group of them having publications.
6. Direct Citation
The direct citation count is the easiest technique to determine the number of citations
received by a given document or set of documents over a period of time from a
particular set of citing documents over a period of time from a particular set of citing
documents, where from citation data for analysis was taken.

9. 7. Bibliographic Coupling
The term “bibliographic coupling” was coined by M. M. Kessler, he defined a unity
of coupling between two papers as an item of reference used by these two papers.
The two papers are then said to be bibliographic coupled.
7. Co-citation Coupling
Co-citation coupling is a method used to establish a subject similarity between two
documents. Two documents are said to be co-cited when they both appear in the
reference list of a third document.

10. Difference between
Bibliographic Coupling and Co-citation Coupling
Bibliographic coupling focuses on Co-citation focuses on references which
groups of papers which cite a source document. Frequentl ycome in pair.
Bibliographic is said to be retrospective Co-citation is called “prospective
coupling coupling

11. Foundations of Bibliometrics
1- The Empirical Foundations of Bibliometrics: The Science Citation
Index
2- The Philosophical Foundations of Bibliometrics: Bernal,
Merton, Price, Garfield, and Small
3- The Mathematical Foundations of Bibliometrics.

12. Foundations of Bibliometrics
1- The Empirical Foundations of Bibliometrics:
The Science Citation Index.
The Science Citation Index (SCI), conceived by Eugene Garfield, the
founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia.
Measuring, in terms of citation frequencies, the cognitive impact of
individual documents, journals, and authors (the bibliographic citation
as a tool for research quality control).
Indexes are a basic component of manual or computerized information
retrieval, because in most systems the user queries do not match
directly the collection of documents, but rather an index previously
prepared by manual or automatic operations.

13. Foundations of Bibliometrics
2- The Philosophical Foundations of Bibliometrics: Bernal,
Merton, Price, Garfield, and Small
Bernal, a professor of physics at the Birkbeck College of London since
1937, is a leading figure in the history of science in every possible sense:
as an actor, given his pioneering contributions to X-ray crystallography
and molecular biology, and as a director teaching historians of sciences
how to study and write about science in its social context.
Merton, a professor of sociology at Columbia University, divulged a small set
of norms supposedly placed at the core of the universal ethos of
science, that is, the complex of prescriptions, prohibitions, and values
governing the prevalent (nondeviant) behavior of scientists at all times and
everywhere.

14. Foundations of Bibliometrics
2- The Philosophical Foundations of Bibliometrics: Bernal,
Merton, Price, Garfield, and Small
EUGENE GARFIELD
Garfield’s 1955 article “Citation Indexes for Science” was a turning point in
the way information scientists conceptualized the role of bibliographic
citations in the knowledge production process.
Henry Small 1970s,
A member of the research team at ISI, further developed Garfield’s insights
into the ability of citations to mimic the transfer and uptake of ideas typical
of more codified forms of language.
He advocated the basic cognitive function of bibliographic citations on the
ground that, apart from individual reasons to cite, each reference
incorporates an idea or concept accounting for the citer’s resolution to
invoke it in a specific context.

15. Bibliometric Laws
– Seek to describe the working of science by
mathematical means. Generally that a few entities
account for the many citations.
• Bradford’s Law of Scattering
• Lotka’s Law
• Zipf’s Law

16. Bradford’s Law of Scattering
– How literature in a subject in distributed in journals.
• “If scientific journals are arranged in order of decreasing productivity
of articles on a given subject, they may be divided into a nucleus of
periodicals more particularly devoted to the subject and several other
groups of zones containing the same number of articles as the
nucleus.”
– 9 journals had 429 articles, the next 59 had 499, the last 258 had
404.
– Bradford discovered this regularity of calculating the
number of titles in each of the three groups: 9
titles, 9x5 titles, 9x5x5 titles.
– Can be influenced by sample size, area of specialization and
journal policies.

17. Brookes on Bradford’s Formula
– “The index terms assigned to documents also
follow a Bradford distribution because those
terms most frequently assigned become less and
less specific and therefore increasingly ineffective
in retrieval.”

18. Bradford’s Formula Itself
– Bradford’s Formula makes it possible to estimate
how many of the most productive sources would
yield any specified fraction p of the total number
of items. The formula is:
• R(n) = N log n/s (1 <_ n <_ N)
– where R(n) = cumulative total of items contributed by the
sources of rank 1 to n.
– N = total number of contributing sources
– s = a constant characteristic of the literature
– then
– R(N) = N log N/s
– is the total number of items contributed by N sources.

19. More Bradford’s Law
– Citations originally counted year by year can be
expressed as the geometric sequence:
– R, Ra, Ra2, Ra3, Ra4, ..., Rat-1
• where R = presumed number of citations during the
first year, some of which do not immediately emerge in
publication. But as a<1, the sum of the sequence
converges to the finite limit R/(1-a).

20. Lotka’s Law
– An inverse square law that for every 100 authors
contributing on article, 25 will contribute 2, 11 will
contribute 3 and 6 will contribute 4.
– formula is- 1:n2.
– Voos found 1:n3.5 for Info Science (1974).
– What are other similar analysis tasks you could
use Lotka’s law for?
– Are users, browsers, bloggers like authors?

21. Zipf’s Law
• The distribution which applied to word
frequency in a text states that the nth ranking
word will appear k/n times, where k is a
constant for that text.
– It is easier to choose and use familiar words, therefore
probabilities of occurrence of familiar words is higher. rf=C
rank, frequency,
– This can be applied by counting all of the words in a document
(minus some words in a stop list - common words
(the, therefore...)) with the most frequent occurrences
representing the subject matter of the document. Could also
use relative frequency (more often than expected) instead of
absolute frequency.

22. Wyllys on Zipf’s Law
– Surprisingly constrained relationship between
rank and frequency in natural language.
– Zipf said the fundamental reason for human
behavior : the striving to minimize effort.
– Mandelbrot - further refinement of Zipf’s law:
(r+m)Bf=c where r is the rank of a word, f is its
frequency, m, B and c are constants dependent on
the corpus. m has the greatest effect when r is
small.

23. Uses of Bibliometric Studies
Historically bibliometric methods have been used to trace relationships
amongst academic journal citations.
The bibliometric research uses various methods of citation analysis in
order to establish relationships between authors or their work.

24. i) Measuring the scattering of articles
on a subject in various periodicals
(Bradford).
ii) Measuring the productivity of an
author based on the number of
published articles. (Lotka).
iii) Ranking of words in a text based
on frequency of occurrence of words.
iv) Productivity count of literature.
v) To identify the peers, social change
and the core journal, etc.
vi) Indexing and Thesaurus;
vii) Research;
viii) Formulating search strategies in case
of automated system;
ix) Comparative assessment of the
secondary services;
x) Bibliographic control;
xi) Preparation of retrospective
bibliographic and
xii) Library Management.
Uses of Bibliometric Studies
The Bibliometric studies are used in

25. Refernece
 Introduction to Informetrics: quantitative methods in library, documentation and
information science / by Leo Egghe and Ronlad Rousseau.- New York: Elsvier, 1990.
 Bibliometrics and citation analysis : from the Science citation index to cybermetrics /
Nicola De Bellis.- Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009.
 http://www.netugc.com/librametric-bibliometric-scientometrics-informetrics