Types of Bibliometrics

Bibliometrics offers a powerful set of methods and measures for studying the structure and process of scholarly communication. Citation analysis, the best known of bibliometric approaches, has become more sophisticated, and the advent of networked information technologies has led to quantitative and qualitative advances in other bibliometric methods. Bibliometrics is the application of mathematical and statistical methods to publications (from biblos: book and metron: measurement). Bibliometrics is often used to assess scientific research through quantitative studies on research publications. Bibliometric assessments are based on the assumption that most scientific discoveries and research results eventually are published in international scientific journals where they can be read and cited by other researchers. The number of citations to a journal article can be considered to reflect the article’s impact on the scientific community. Applied bibliometrics, as it is used today, analyzes the number of scientific articles published by a selected number of authors, citations to these articles and connections between articles.