1. Bibliometrics: an overview
Claudia Cavicchi
Biblioteca Clinica F. Bianchi
claudia.cavicchi@unibo.it

2. Article metrics
Author metrics
Journal metrics
New metrics
Bibliometrics: an overview
Journal of citation reports
SNIP (Scopus )
Scimago (Scopus)
Web of Science
Google Scholar
Scopus
Web of Science
Scopus
Google Scholar
Impactstory
Social bookmarking
Social networks
Agenda

3. Why bibliometrics
Carrying out research and communicating the results go hand in hand.
Why bibliometrics

4. Why bibliometrics
XX century :birth of new media for communication
communication +
exchange of ideas =
advancement of knowledge .

5. Knowledge production, acquisition and management are a source of wealth.
Why bibliometrics

6. Why bibliometrics

7. Governements detect areas of excellence in order to distribute the funds in the best way.
International competitiveness
Why bibliometrics

8. Why bibliometrics
Universities must evaluate their performance.

9. Research performance helps to inform strategic decisions about what areas of research to support or build
Why bibliometrics

10. How much research is conducted?
What is its impact?
How many of the faculty members’ articles are published in first-class journals ?
Is that number of publications increasing or decreasing?
Why bibliometrics

11. Why bibliometrics
bibliometrics
Peer review
Which instruments?

12. Why bibliometrics: Peer review
Peer review is the evaluation of creative work or performance by other people (reviewers) in the same field in order to maintain or enhance the quality of the work or performance in that field.

13. Single-blind
Author's name is known to the auditor while reviewer’s name remains unknown to the author. It is the most widespread formula but also the most subject to criticism for its subjectivity.
Double-blind
Author’s name and the reviewer’s name are both kept secret.
This method should ensure an independent assessment .
However it is very easy to locate the author of a particular work…..
Why bibliometrics: Peer review

14. Subjectivity
Conflict of interest
Insufficient expertise
Favoritism
Why bibliometrics: Peer review cons

15. Why bibliometrics: (open)peer review

16. Why bibliometrics: (open)peer review

17. « the application of statistical and mathematical methods arranged to define the processes of written communication and the nature and development of scientific disciplines counting techniques and analysis of such communication»
Pritchard A, Statistical bibliography of bibliometrics, Journal of documentation 1969;29(4):348-349
What’s bibliometrics

18. What’s bibliometrics
Bibliometrics doesn’t measure
the quality of researcher work
but only citations to the work.

19. Bibliometric data help assess research performance
Why bibliometrics

20. Why bibliometrics objective’ method (rather than relying solely on qualitative measures such as peer-review) fast cost effective (data is easily produced) transparent and easy to understand

21. Why bibliometrics: Citations tracking

22. Who is citing recognizes the inheritance received from predecessors.
Why bibliometrics
Citations number becomes an indicator of paper impact inside a scientific community

23. •Find out how many times a paper has been cited
•Search backwards and forwards in time to see how ideas develop
•Find the most highly cited papers in your field
•Identify key researchers and institutions by their citation counts
•See who has influenced particular research
• Identify leading researchers in a particular field
• Identify emerging areas of research
• Identify competitors and potential collaborators
• Assess the impact of an individuals’ or group of individuals’ research output
Why bibliometrics: Citations tracking

24. Bibliometric : Indicators
Primary
•Number of publications
•Number of citations received
•Number of web page access
•Number of paper downloads
Secondary
•Impact factor
•Immediacy Index
•Cited Half Life
•Citation Index
•H- Index

25. Bibliometrics Indicators : Impact factor
“...I propose a bibliographic system for science literature that can eliminate the uncritical citation of fraudulent, incomplete, or obsolete data by making it possible for the conscientious scholar to be aware of criticisms”. Garfield E. Citation Indexes for Science. Science 1955 July 15;122(3159):108-111.
1960 Institute for Scientific Information
1964 Science Citation Index
1972 Social Science Citation Index

26. •“Journal Impact factor” (JIF) is a measurement applied to journals.
•It is based on the citation index database Web of Science.
•It represents the average citation count of the articles published in the journal.
•The JIF published annually in Journal Citation Reports®.
•The JIF is a journal-level metric designed for one purpose—to compare the citation impact of one journal with other journals.
Bibliometrics Indicators : Impact factor

27. Bibliometrics indicators : Impact factor
Impact factor 2010 for « My favourite Journal» =
Number of citations received during 2010 referred to articles published in 2009 and 2008: 20000
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Number of articles published in 2009 and in 2008: 5000
20.000
Impact factor 2010 = 4
5.000

28. Initiated by the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) together with a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals in december 2012 the need to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, in funding, appointment, and promotion considerations; the need to assess research on its own merits rather than on the basis of the journal in which the research is published; the need to capitalize on the opportunities provided by online publication (such as relaxing unnecessary limits on the number of words, figures, and references in articles, and exploring new indicators of significance and impact).
Bibliometrics indicators: Impact factor

29. Bibliometrics where? Journal of citations reports
Compares and evaluates 10,600 journals in science technology and social sciences.
Two editions availables
-Science editions
-Social sciences edition
JCR was first produced in 1975 by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI), now Thomson Reuters.

30. Bibliometrics where? Journal of citations reports

31. Bibliometrics indicators:Journal of citation reports
•Citing half life
The citing half-life is the median age of articles cited by the journal in the JCR year.
•Cited half life
The median age of the articles that were cited in the JCR year.
It measures the duration of relevance of articles in a given journal.
•Immediacy index
the average number of times an article is cited in the year it is published.
It measures how quickly articles in a given journal have an impact on the discipline
It could be useful for researchers who want to publish in a journal from which they may be quickly cited.
•5-years journal IF
the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in the JCR year. Useful because in some fields it takes longer than two years for citations to appear.

32. Bibliometrics indicators: Impact factor
•Easy to calculate
•English centred
•No Transparency
•Citation Window
•Easy to mislead
•Subject differences
•Negative citations
•Citations cartels

33. H index
Article 1
25
Article 2
20
Article 3
18
Article 4
12
Article 5
10
Article 6
5
Bibliometric indicators: H index
The h-index was created by Jorge Hirsch in 2005.
an h-index of 5 means that an author (or institution or journal) has 5 publications to its name each of which has been cited at least 5 times.

34. H index:
It considers both productivity and impact of a scientist.
It’s very comprehensible
It’s easy to compute
It ignores citations in excess
It doesn’t distinguish the articles written by a single author from those written by a group of researchers
it only includes citation to journal articles (not to books, book chapters, working papers, reports, conference papers, etc.);
It penalizes researchers with a short career
It is discipline dependent

35. H Index where: databases

36. Web of Science® is a citation databases hosted by Web of Knowledge platform
It covers over 12,000 of the highest impact journals worldwide, including Open Access journals and over 150,000 conference proceedings.
It has a retrospective coverage in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities, with coverage to 1900.
Bibliometrics where? Web of Science

37. H index where:Web of Science

38. H index where: Web of Science

40. H index where: Scopus
Scopus is a bibliographic database containing abstracts and citations for academic journal articles. It covers nearly 21,000 titles from over 5,000 publishers, of which 20,000 are peer-reviewed journals in the scientific, technical, medical, and social sciences (including arts and humanities). It is owned by Elsevier and is available by subscription

41. H index where: Scopus
www.scopus.com

42. H index where: Scopus

43. H index where: Google Scholar
Freely accessible web search engine, part of Google, that indexes scientific publications from all disciplines, across the web
www.scholar.google.com

44. H index where: Google Scholar
•https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/77344
http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm
Google Scholar presents the list of publications and citations but can’t calculate automatically the h index.
Therefore there are a variety of sites and programs “googlescholar- based” and are generally free.

45. H index where: Google Scholar
Mycitations profile in Google Scholar
•publication data can be manually edited
•missing publications can be added
•publications can be merged and duplications removed
•It is possible to sign up for notification of new citations to your publications
•New publications will be added automatically to the profile

46. Web of Science
oSubscription required
oAdvanced citation searching
oCitation data available from 1990
oSubscription required
oConference papers, books, chapter, dissertations excluded
oLimited coverage of non English language titles
oSubscription required
oAdvanced citation searching and analysis features
oBetter coverage of Social Science titles
oIncludes conference proceedings
oSubscription required
oBooks, chapters dissertations excludeed
oCitation data for papers published from 1996.
oFree
oCovers non English titles
oCovers all type of publications
oNo quality control,
oDoes not cover all journals
oCovers non scholarly content
oAuthor’s search
H Index where: databases
Source: http://www.ndlr.ie/myri/

47. Bibliometrics : Eigenfactor
“A measure of the overall value provided by all of the given articles published in a journal in a year “
Developed by Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom - University of Washington
The Eigenfactor™ ranks journals in a manner similar to that used by Google for ranking the importance of Web sites in a search
The theory behind Eigenfactor Metrics is that a single citation from a high-quality journal may hold more value than multiple citations from more peripheral publications: a journal is influential if it is cited by other influential journals.
The Article Influence score for a journal is the journal Eigenfactor score divided by the number of articles published by the journal over the five-year target period
References from one article in a journal to another article from the same journal are removed, :Eigenfactor Scores are not influenced by journal self-citation

48. Bibliometrics : SNIP
Created by Professor Henk Moed at CTWS, University of Leiden,
SNIP measures contextual citation impact
by weighting citations based on the total
number of citations in a subject field.
Unlike journal impact factor, SNIP corrects
differences in citation practices between
scientific fields, thereby allowing for more
accurate between-field comparisons
of citation impact.
Uses Scopus data
Source Normalised Impact per Paper

49. •It measures current average prestige per paper
•It’s freely available on the web
•SCImago website uses journal/citation data from Scopus
•formula: citation time window is 3 years (instead of 2)
•Strong correlation to JIF
Bibliometrics : Scimago Journal Rank

50. Bibliometrics :Alternative Metrics/Alt-Metrics
Article downloads (from publisher sites)
Article mentions in blogs, media
Articles mentions on Facebook, Twitter
Bookmarks/recommendations made to an article

51. Bibliometrics :Alternative Metrics/Alt-Metrics

52. Bibliometrics :Alternative Metrics/Impactstory

53. It is essential to keep distinguishing
between scientific scholarly and societal impact
Social media mentions should not be used to measure
the contribution to scientific progress
Bibliometrics :Alternative Metrics

54. Conclusions
Compare Like with Like
Don’t rely on a single tool

55. Metrics can improve research assessement.
No single number is going to give the complete picture.
Conclusions

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•Brubeck. R.A. 2008. Worshiping false idols: the impact factor dilemma. Journal of Child Neurology, 23(4), pp.365-367.
•Ketefian, S. and Freda, M.C. 2009. Impact factors and citation counts: A state of disquiet. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 46(6), pp.751-752.
•Bar-Ilan J. Informetrics at the beginning of the 21st century--A review. Journal of Informetrics. 2008 Gen;2(1):1-52.
•Bakkalbasi N, Bauer K, Glover J, Wang L. Three options for citation tracking: Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science. Biomed Digit Libr. 2006;3:7.
•Sevinc A. Web of science: a unique method of cited reference searching. J Natl Med Assoc. 2004Lug;96(7):980-983.
•Falagas ME, Pitsouni EI, Malietzis GA, Pappas G. Comparison of PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar: strengths and weaknesses. FASEB J. 2008 Feb;22(2):338-342.
•Kulkarni AV, Aziz B, Shams I, Busse JW. Comparisons of citations in Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar for articles published in general medical journals. JAMA. 2009 Set 9;302(10):1092- 1096.
•Seglen PO,Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research BMJ. 1997 Feb 15;314(7079):498-502.
Basic Bibliography