William W. Hood

The literature of bibliometrics, scientometrics, and informetrics

Since Vassily V. Nalimov coined the term ‘scientometrics’ in the 1960s, this term has grown in popularity and is used to describe the study of science: growth, structure, interrelationships and productivity. Scientometrics is related to and has overlapping interests with bibliometrics and informetrics. The terms bibliometrics, scientometrics, and informetrics refer to component fields related to the study of the dynamics of disciplines as reflected in the production of their literature. Areas of study range from charting changes in the output of a scholarly field through time and across countries, to the library collection problem of maintaining control of the output, and to the low publication productivity of most researchers. These terms are used to describe similar and overlapping methodologies. The origins and historical survey of the development of each of these terms are presented. Profiles of the usage of each of these terms over time are presented, using an appropriate subject category of databases on the DIALOG information service. Various definitions of each of the terms are provided from an examination of the literature. The size of the overall literature of these fields is determined and the growth and stabilisation of both the dissertation and non-dissertation literature are shown. A listing of the top journals in the three fields are given, as well as a list of the major reviews and bibliographies that have been published over the years.

Informetric studies using databases: Opportunities and challenges

Since their arrival in the 1960s, electronic databases have been an invaluable tool for informetricians. Databases and their delivery mechanism have provided both the source of raw data, as well as the analytical tools for many informetric studies. In particular, the citation databases produced by the Institute for Scientific Information have been the key source of data for a whole range of citation-based research. However, there are also many problems and challenges associated with the use of online databases. Most of the problems arise because databases are designed primarily for information retrieval purposes, and informetric studies represent only a secondary use of the systems. The sorts of problems encountered by informetricians include: errors or inconsistency in the data itself; problems with the coverage, overlap and changeability of the databases; as well as problems and limitations in the tools provided by the database hosts such as DIALOG. For some informetric studies, the only viable solution to these problems is to download the data and perform offline correction and data analysis.

The scatter of documents over databases in different subject domains: how many databases are needed?

The distribution of bibliographic records in on-line bibliographic databases is examined using 14 different search topics. These topics were searched using the DIALOG database host, and using as many suitable databases as possible. The presence of duplicate records in the searches was taken into consideration in the analysis, and the problem with lexical ambiguity in at least one search topic is discussed. The study answers questions such as how many databases are needed in a multifile search for particular topics, and what coverage will be achieved using a certain number of databases. The distribution of the percentages of records retrieved over a number of databases for 13 of the 14 search topics roughly fell into three groups: (1) high concentration of records in one database with about 80% coverage in five to eight databases; (2) moderate concentration in one database with about 80% coverage in seven to 10 databases; and (3) low concentration in one database with about 80% coverage in 16 to 19 databases. The study does conform with earlier results, but shows that the number of databases needed for searches with varying complexities of search strategies, is much more topic dependent than previous studies would indicate.

Overlap in bibliographic databases

Bibliographic databases contain surrogates to a particular subset of the complete set of literature; some databases are very narrow in their scope, while others are multidisciplinary. These databases overlap in their coverage of the literature to a greater or lesser extent. The topic of Fuzzy Set Theory is examined to determine the overlap of coverage in the databases that index this topic. It was found that about 63% of records in the data set are unique to only one database, and the remaining 37% are duplicated in from two to 12 different databases. The overlap distribution is found to conform to a Lotka-type plot. The records with maximum overlap are identified; however, further work is needed to determine the significance of the high level of overlap in these records. The unique records are plotted using a Bradford-type form of data presentation and are found to conform (visually) to a hyperbolic distribution. The extent and causes of intra-database duplication (records duplicated in the one database) are also examined. Finally, the overlap in the top databases in the dataset were examined, and a high correlation was found between overlapping records, and overlapping DIALOG OneSearch categories.

OPHTHALMOLOGY AND OPTICS: AN INFORMETRIC STUDY OF AUSTRALIA'S CONTRIBUTION TO FIELDS IN THE VISION SCIENCE DOMAIN, 1991-95

The paper provides data from a first exploration of the literature of Vision Science as seen bibliometrically through the ISIs three citation indexes, SCI, SSCI, & AHCI. The main focus of analysis is on the major fields of Ophthalmology and Optics (SC=OPTICS and SC=OPHTHALMOLOGY) with a focus on Australias contribution to those literatures. Australias publication frequency vis-á-vis the world, its collaboration with authors from other nations, and the journals in which Australians most frequently publish are shown. Comparison of productivity is made for countries of similar scientific stature, or of language and Commonwealth status.

Indexing terms in the LISA database on CD-ROM

Abstract This paper summarizes the findings of a recent study on the indexing practices used in the Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) database. The indexing terms (DE), the date each record was added to the file (DA), the Accession Number (AN), and the Classification Code (CC) of each record were extracted from the complete CD-ROM database. Adjustments to standardize the DE terms were made, and the adjusted data set was analyzed for average number of headings per record per DA year, the rank frequency and rank size distribution of DE classes, and the frequency distribution of the number of DEs per record per DA. The results show that a large number of headings are used once or twice over the whole database. The years in which DE terms first appeared was analyzed. A comparison of the use of a particular Classification Code with the DE terms in each record was also undertaken. There was a strong but not total match between the CCs and DEs used. Some attention is given to the chain indexing procedure used by LISA to account for the pattern of DE usage. The concluding section looks at scope for further research on LISA and other databases.

THE DISTRIBUTION OF BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORDS IN DATABASES USING DIFFERENT COUNTING METHODS FOR DUPLICATE RECORDS

Knowing how records on a particular topic are distributed over databases is useful for both practical and theoretical reasons; however little work in this area appears to have been done. This paper examines the distribution of records on the topic of “Fuzzy Set Theory” in over 100 bibliographic databases and determines whether the distribution of records over databases is similar to the traditional Bradford hyperbolic distribution of records over journals. Different methods for counting duplicate records between and within databases have been developed. A comparison of the various distributions based on these counting methods is presented; and the distributions are compared to results of earlier studies. The results also give an indication of the number of databases necessary to search for coverage of a literature to specified percentages using the different counting techniques developed in this study.

Analysis of the fuzzy set literature using phrases

The topic of fuzzy set theory was examined using the occurrence of phrases in bibliographic records. Records containing the word fuzzy, were downloaded from over 100 databases, and from these records, phrases were extracted surrounding the word fuzzy. A methodology was developed to trim this list of phrases to a list of high frequency phrases relevant to fuzzy set theory. This list of phrases was in turn used to extract records from the original downloaded set, which were (algorithmically) relevant to fuzzy set theory. This set of records was then analysed to show the development of the topic of fuzzy set theory, the distribution of the fuzzy phrases over time and the frequency distribution of the fuzzy phrases. In addition, the field of the bibliographic record in which the phrase occurred was examined, as well as the first appearance of a particular fuzzy phrase.

The relationship of records in multiple databases to their usage or citedness

Papers in journals are indexed in bibliographic databases in varying degrees of overlap. The question has been raised as to whether papers that appear in multiple databases (highly overlapping) are in any way more significant (such as being more highly cited) than papers that are indexed in few databases. This paper uses a dataset from fuzzy set theory to compare low overlap papers with high overlap ones, and finds that more highly overlapping papers are in fact more highly cited.